Sat, Nov 12, 2011
Crewman On An Aircraft Shot Down On A Bombing Run Over
Yugoslavia
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO)
said earlier this week that the remains of a U.S. serviceman from
World War II have been identified and are being returned to the
family for burial with full military honors.
Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Meceslaus T. Miaskiewicz, 27, of
Salem, MA, will be buried on November 12, in his hometown. On May
18, 1944, Miaskiewicz and ten other airmen departed Tortorella Air
Field, Italy, on a mission to bomb the Ploesti Oil Refinery in
Romania, when their B-17G aircraft was shot down over Yugoslavia
– what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. Three of the crew members
were detained as Prisoners of War by German forces, and returned to
the United States at the end of the war. The rest of the crew was
presumed dead.
In 1947, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service (AGRS)
recovered the remains of what was believed to be the missing eight
crew members, who had been buried by the villagers of Stubica, near
the site of the crash. AGRS identified six of the airmen, and the
other two, thought to be Miaskiewicz and one other, were buried as
group remains in Farmingdale, N.Y.
In 2011, U.S. government officials were notified that an
archeological team from the town of Ljubuski, had disinterred the
remains of an American, whose grave had been tended by the
villagers of Stubica for more than 65 years. The Armed Forces
Regional Medical Examiner’s Office in Germany identified the
remains as Miaskiewicz.
Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial
evidence, scientists from the Armed Forces Regional Medical
Examiner’s Office for Europe used dental analysis and
mitochondrial DNA — which matched that of Miaskiewicz’s
sisters — in the identification of his sremains.
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