WWII airman to be buried 68 years later - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

WWII airman to be buried 68 years later

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — She doesn’t know the color of his eyes, the sound of his voice or how he fell in love with her mother.

For years, all Charmaine Lake Wade, 67, knew of her father could fit on a scrap of yellowing telegraph paper: “I regret to inform you ... 2nd Lt. Edward J. Lake has been reported missing in action.”

Sixty-eight years after Lake disappeared in a plane crash over Papua New Guinea, his remains have been found and returned to his daughter for burial. On Saturday, Wade will attend a hero’s funeral for a father she never knew.

“Give my love to our child. I would have liked to have seen her,” Lake wrote in his last letter to Wade’s mother, the one to be sent in case he died. “Never let her forget me.”

Lake had been married to Wade’s mother in New York a little more than a year when he entered the Army Air Forces in World War II. He wrote to her every day, penning long love letters that began with, “Darling” or “My dearest one.”

Years later, Wade, of Corpus Christi, would find a stack of these letters in a lockbox her mother kept.

Her mother never talked about him.

On Oct. 27, 1943, Lake was on a reconnaissance mission over shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea in advance of an attack on the Japanese stronghold of Rabaul, New Britain.

He was 25.

The B-24D Liberator bomber called the Shack Rat was ordered to land because of bad weather.

That was the crew’s last transmission, according to the Department of Defense’s Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.

Searchers scoured land and sea but failed to find the bodies of the 12 missing crewmen. Lake was declared dead in 1944.

Wade was 3 months old when the plane crashed. By the time the American Graves Registration Service concluded Lake’s remains were unrecoverable in 1949, her mother had remarried. Wade would grow up instead calling that man father.

At first, Jerry Wade thought the call was a prank.

The man on the phone asked for his wife, Charmaine, saying he had news of her father. Searchers might have found Lake’s remains in New Guinea, he said.

The man was a genealogist working with the defense department’s agency charged with finding missing soldiers. He said he had trouble finding Lake’s relatives but tracked down Charmaine from her brother’s obituary.

From the kitchen, Jerry called out, “Charmaine, I think you ought to take this.”

“I just couldn’t imagine,” Charmaine said. “After all these years.”

In 2003, a Papua New Guinea resident handed over a military identification card to a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command team searching for another WWII era crash site, according to the command briefing.

The card belonged to Jack E. Volz, a crewman on the plane with Lake when it went down in 1943.

Command teams twice in 2004 tried to visit the site, but couldn’t because of bad weather and hazardous conditions at the helicopter landing site, the defense department said.

Searchers reached the crash site in 2005 and confirmed the wreckage was that of a B-24. Based on items found, including two more ID tags, it seemed likely searchers found the remains of the Shack Rat and crew in the crevice of a densely forested mountain.

The site was excavated from January to March 2007 and the remains taken to a command laboratory in Hawaii for identification and analysis. Among the bone fragments and teeth, searchers also found pins, engraved watches, bracelets and ID tags for many of the crew members, but not Lake.

The genealogist calling Charmaine Wade was looking for DNA.

To positively identify the remains excavated in 2007, scientists needed to match Lake’s mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the mother. His sister, Elsie Loth, was the only remaining family member who shared mitochondrial DNA with Lake.

Loth was 18 when the Army sent notice that her older brother’s plane had vanished. Family members often wondered in the years following what happened to the man they remembered as a personable guy who only wanted to do good in life, Loth said.

Decades later, Loth was in her late 80s and living in New York when Charmaine Wade gave her aunt’s name for a DNA sample.

She was mailed a DNA kit and gave a blood sample. The test came back positive.

Seven decades after her brother disappeared, Loth had closure.

“I’m happy that we finally have a place to go and acknowledge that he’s there,” she said.

As Wade readies for the funeral, she has come to the stark realization how little she knows of her biological father.

To prepare the obituary, she had to call her aunt to find out his mother’s maiden name.

“What nationality are we?” Jerry Wade overheard his wife ask Loth.

Though Wade said she’s struggling with how to mourn a father she never knew, she is thankful he has come home to be buried. His remains arrived with a military escort Tuesday in San Antonio. Wade said a bone fragment may be all that was found.

He will be given a burial with full military honors and a flyover Saturday as if he just arrived home from active duty.

“I think he’d be proud,” she said.