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.

FMI: www.jpac.pacom.mil, www.dtic.mil/dpmo