Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight … — Dylan Thomas

Uncertainty is among war’s lesser acknowledged horrors. To look upon a sunset and wonder if a loved one fighting abroad has survived the day is a burden beyond bearing, yet families have borne it—in some instances, for decades. 

Comes now the end of 78-years of uncertainty for the family of Technical Sergeant William F. Teaff of Steubenville, Ohio, who died at the age of 26 after being sent to a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in the hellish, penultimate year of the second world-war. 

U.S. Department of Defense officials have announced that Sergeant Teaff’s remains were positively identified after being unearthed in Lithuania by a team comprising personnel of the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing In Action (POW/MIA) Accounting Agency (DPAA) and a Lithuanian archeological organization.

Sergeant Teaff was a radio operator aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress assigned to the 351st Bombardment Squadron, 100th Heavy Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force; the Bloody Hundredth—so-called because of the high number of aircraft and crews the unit lost. 

On 06 March 1944, Sgt. Teaff’s B-17 was part of a larger mission to bomb targets in Berlin. While over the Netherlands, Luftwaffe fighters attacked the formation of which Teaff’s B-17 was part. The bomber’s navigator was killed when the aircraft was hit, but the remainder of her crew bailed out before she exploded in flight.

Reaching ground, the crew was captured by Wehrmacht forces, and several of the airmen—including Teaff—were sent to Stalag Luft 6–a prisoner of war camp in Heydekrug, Germany. 

William F. Teaff was one of only three Americans known to have died during internment in the camp. On 10 July 1944, he succumbed to diphtheria in the nearby village of Macikai, Lithuania, where he’d been sent for treatment—alas, to no avail. 

After the war, the American Graves Registration Command was unable to recover Teaff’s remains on account of post-war border shifting having landed the POW camp in Lithuania—deep within the Soviet occupation zone. Repeated efforts proved fruitless, and in 1954, Sgt. Teaff’s remains were declared non-recoverable.

In 1955, the Soviet Union destroyed the POW camp and reverted the area to farmland. In 2006–fourteen years after Lithuania became an independent nation—officials investigated the site of the former POW camp and recommended excavation. 

Another thirteen-years passed before members of a joint DPAA–Ohio Valley Archeology Inc. team traveled to Lithuania  and identified possible gravesites in which missing Americans might have been interred. In 2021, DPAA partnered with a Lithuanian archeological group and excavated the area.

Remains were unearthed and transported to a laboratory in Nebraska for analysis. Using dental remains, anthropological analysis, and material and circumstantial evidence, laboratory personnel identified Sgt. Teaff. 

Technical Sergeant William F. Teaff died a hero. Such accolades, though likely of little comfort to those who loved him, shall forever raise him up in the estimation of his countrymen, and commend him to the long memory of a grateful nation that stands ready to lay him to rest in the soil he so valiantly died defending. 

FMI: www.dpaa.mil