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12 WWII airmen ID’d, to be buried at Arlington

The Defense Department on Thursday said that the remains of 12 airmen killed during World War II have been identified and will be buried as a group next week at Arlington National Cemetery.

The airmen were identified as:

• Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Jack E. Volz, 21, of Indianapolis

• Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Regis E. Dietz, 28, of Pittsburgh.

• Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Edward J. Lake, 25, of the Brooklyn borough of New York.

• Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Martin P. Murray, 21, of Lowell, Mass.

• Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. William J. Shryock, 23, of Gary, Ind.

• Army Air Forces Tech. Sgt. Robert S. Wren, 25, of Seattle.

• Army Air Forces Tech. Sgt. Hollis R. Smith, 22, of Cove, Ark.

• Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Berthold A. Chastain, 27, of Dalton, Ga.

• Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Clyde L. Green, 24, of Erie, Pa.

• Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Frederick E. Harris, 23, of Medford, Mass.

• Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Claude A. Ray, 24, of Coffeyville, Kan.

• Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Claude G. Tyler, 24, of Landover, Md.

Remains representing the entire crew will be buried in a single casket Aug. 4 at Arlington, DoD said.

Eight of the airmen were identified and buried as individuals during previous ceremonies. Shryock, Green and Harris were individually identified and will be interred individually at Arlington on the same day as the group interment.

The airmen were carrying out a reconnaissance mission in their B-24D Liberator on Oct. 27, 1943, departing from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea. During their mission, they were radioed to land at a friendly airstrip nearby due to poor weather conditions. The last radio transmission from the crew did not indicate their location; in the following weeks, multiple searches over land and sea areas did not locate the aircraft.

The Army Graves Registration Service conducted investigations and searches for 43 missing airmen in the area after the war, but concluded in June 1949 that the remains were unrecoverable.

A team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command received information on a crash site in Papua New Guinea in August 2003 while investigating another case. A Papua New Guinea man also turned over an identification card from one of the crew members and reported that there were possible human remains at the site of the crash.

Poor weather and hazardous conditions prevented two attempts in 2004 to visit the site. Another team successfully excavated the site from January to March 2007, finding several identification tags from the B-24D crew as well as human remains.

More than 73,000 service members from World War II are unaccounted-for, officials said.