Three Fallen Flyers Heading Home
The Defense
POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced Wednesday three
airmen missing in action from World War II have been identified and
are being returned to their families for burial with full military
honors.
They are 2nd Lt. David J. Nelson, Chicago, IL; Tech. Sgt. Henry
F. Kortebein, Maspeth, NY; and Tech. Sgt. Blake A. Treece Jr.,
Marshall, AK, all with the US Army Air Forces. These men are to be
buried along with group remains of their aircrew at Arlington
National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
Representatives from the Army met with the next-of-kin of these
men in their hometowns on behalf of the Secretary of the Army to
explain the recovery and identification process and to coordinate
interment with military honors.
On August 8, 1944, Nelson, Kortebein and Treece departed an
allied air base in England in their B-17G Flying Fortress with six
other crewmen aboard. Their mission was to bomb enemy targets near
Caen, France. The aircraft was seen to explode and crash after
being struck by enemy flak near the village of Lonlay l'Abbaye,
south of Caen. The other six members of the crew were 1st Lt. Jack
R. Thompson; 2nd Lts. Charles Bacigalupa and Charles Sherrill; and
Sgts. Richard R. Collins, Gerald F. Gillies and Warren D.
Godsey.
The hometowns of these six are not available.
German forces and French villagers living near the crash site
recovered some of the remains of the crew and buried them nearby.
Advancing US forces found additional remains. Six of the nine
crewmen ultimately were identified, but Nelson, Kortebein and
Treece remained unaccounted for.
In August 2002, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command
(JPAC) operating in Luxembourg was informed that a local French
aircraft wreckage hunting group (Association Normande du Souvenir
Aerien 39/45) had located a crash site near Lonlay l'Abbaye. The
JPAC team surveyed the site, excavated it in July 2004 and
recovered human remains, personal effects and crew-related
materials from amid the wreckage. Also found were six unexploded
250-pound bombs.
Later that year, a French explosive ordnance disposal team
turned over a bone fragment to the US Defense Attache in Paris. It
was found by French technicians working to secure the site where
the bombs had been found.
Among other forensic identification tools, scientists from JPAC
and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used
mitochondrial DNA in the identification of the remains of the
three, matching DNA sequences from maternal relatives.