Croatian Witness Locates Navigator
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO)
announced Friday the recently located remains of a U.S. serviceman,
missing in action from World War II, were identified and returned
to his family.
First Lieutenant Archibald Kelly, U.S. Army Air Forces, was
buried at Great Lakes National Cemetery, Holly, Mich. Saturday with
full military honors. Army representative met with Kelly's
next-of-kin on behalf of the Secretary of the Army in Detroit to
explain the recovery and identification process and to coordinate
interment with military honors, according the DPMO.
Kelly, of Detroit, was the navigator of a B-24J Liberator (file
photo, below) on a bombing raid of the oil fields at Ploesti,
Romania on July 22, 1944, when it was struck by enemy anti-aircraft
fire while returning to Lecce air base in Italy and crashed in what
is now Croatia, approximately 430 miles southwest of Ploesti.
Eight of the ten crewmen on board survived and bailed out of the
aircraft before it crashed. One of the surviving crewmen saw Kelly
bail before impact, but said he struck a rocky cliff face when the
wind caught his parachute. His body was not found at that time.
In 2005, specialists from DPMO's Joint Commission Support
Directorate (JCSD) researched U.S. wartime records and interviewed
residents from Dubrovnik and a Mihanici village who had information
related to WWII aircraft losses in the area. One resident recalled
a crash in which one of the crewmen landed on a pile of rocks on
Mt. Snijeznica after his parachute failed to open and said locals
buried the individual.
Based on witness descriptions of the burial location, the team
searched the mountaintop, but was unable to locate the burial site.
Additional JCSD archival research in Croatia confirmed the earlier
information found in U.S. records.
The Dubrovnik witness refused to give up on Kelly. In June 2006,
he reported to JCSD he had continued the search and successfully
located the grave site of the American serviceman, submitting
pictures of both the site and the remains to DPMO. Then in
September, a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) team excavated
the burial site, confirming with local villagers that it was the
same site photographed by the Dubrovnik resident. The team
recovered human remains at the site.
Traditional forensic identification tools and circumstantial
evidence were used in the identification of the remains and
scientists from JPAC used dental comparisons as well.