Lacking Second World Warfare pilot positioned after 80 years

The stays of a Second World Warfare pilot lacking since he embarked from north Africa on a mission in a bomber jet on July 1943 have been found in a painstaking forensic investigation eight a long time later.

The B-25 Mitchell bomber departed Tunisia to assault the Sciacca Aerodrome in Sicily with six crew members on board – however was struck by anti-aircraft fireplace, and crashed in a area lower than 3 kilometres from its goal.

Witnesses on the time stated one crew member had bailed out of the bomber earlier than it crashed, and the stays of co-pilot Gilbert Haldeen Myers – a 27-year-old 2nd Lieutenant from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – had been by no means recovered.

There have been no survivors, or any report of passengers being taken prisoner, and Myers was subsequently declared lacking in motion.

Regardless of a search happening close to Sciacca after the battle’s conclusion in 1947, within the intervening a long time Myers had remained one in all 72,000 American troopers whose destiny was was unknown and who could not obtain a correct full army honours burial.

That remained the case till final yr, when the US authorities’s MIA Accounting Company and 20 researchers from Bedfordshire’s Cranfield College travelled to Sicily to research – every of them assigned to scour the neighborhood close to the affect zone and display screen tonnes of soil for fragments of human stays or private results which might determine the crew members.

“This deployment was our longest but,” stated Dr David Errickson, of the Cranfield Forensic Institute.

“Throughout our operations, we systematically excavated the bottom, meticulously analyzing each piece that would presumably be bone or different proof. In difficult environments just like the excavation web site in Sicily, our crew utilised moist screening, a course of the place excavated materials is handed by water to separate and analyse human stays and artifacts.”

Final month, investigators introduced that they had positioned human stays belonging to Myers, and thru DNA evaluation within the US, he has now been accounted for.

“The restoration of 2nd Lt Myers’ stays not solely facilitates a correct full army honours burial but additionally permits the household to obtain any private results discovered. Most significantly, it brings closure for the households of these lacking or killed in motion,” stated Dr Errickson.

Myers was buried in Florida forward of Remembrance Day, on 10 November.