Home Again
It’s been more than 60 years, but a couple of Johnnies have are coming home from Cologne, Germany.
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office has identified the remains of three U.S. servicemen, missing from World War II and will return them home for full military burial. The men are U.S. Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. John F. Lubben, of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.; Sgt. Albert A. Forgue, of North Providence, R.I.; and Sgt. Charles L. Spiegel, of Chicago, Ill.;. They will be buried on April 18 in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.
It’s fitting that the three should be buried together as they fought and flew together, died together and were buried together in the German countryside.
On Dec. 12, 1944, the men crewed an A-20J Havoc aircraft from Coullomiers, France, to bomb enemy targets near Wollseifen, Germany. The aircraft was last seen entering a steep dive near Cologne, Germany. Several searches and investigations of this area and reviews of wartime documents failed to provide information. No one knew anything about them, where the went or where they were.
In 1975, a German company clearing wartime mines and unexploded ordnance near Simmerath, Germany, reported the discovery of a grave site northeast of Simmerath where American service members were buried. U.S. officials determined they represented three individuals, but they could not make identifications at that time. The remains were buried as unidentifed fliers in the Ardennes American Military Cemetery in Neupre, Belgium.
In 2003, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) heard from a group of German citizens that had information connecting the remains as crew from the 1944 A-20J crash. Based on that information, JPAC exhumed the three unknown graves from the Ardennes American Military Cemetery in 2005.
Among dental records, other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used mitochondrial DNA in the identification of the remains.
Posted by Bryan McKenzie at 08:29 PM. Filed under: Tids and Bits •
