Ohio Man Gets Dog Tags, Details On Brother's WWII Crash

For 60 years, this is what Steve Oleksyk knew about his brother: John was a first lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. He was killed in a training accident gone wrong. His body arrived home to Parma (OH) in a sealed coffin.

That's it.

Now, six decades later, Steve learned the rest of the story. He got a letter from Russell (KS), where his brother's B-17 went down. Inside the letter were recollections of the accident that left 12 aviators dead -- along with John's dog tags.

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer reports that ominous telegram from the War Department came to Stephen and Mary Oleksysk in 1944, not long after John had enlisted in the Air Corps.

"The saddest thing was having to read it to my parents, who couldn't read English," Oleksyk told the Plain-Dealer. "My gosh, it was horrible. Horrible."

It was a blow from which his father never recovered. "When my brother was killed, it just cut my dad's life right off," Oleksyk said. "He was a tough Ukrainian. He couldn't cry. So he got a heart attack 12 years later and died, at age 62."

For most of the 60 years since John died, Steve has lived a comfortable, quiet life. He never left Parma. Instead, he served in the Army during the Korean war, went to college, got a degree and spent 40-years working for LTV Steel.

But earlier this year, as the D-Day remembrance got underway in France, Steve started to wonder again. What really happened to John?

So Steve sent a letter to the newspaper in Russell, asking for information on the wartime accident. The paper printed that letter and soon, Steve's answers began to arrive.

The Plain-Dealer reports one man sent a copy of the official accident report, which cited possible engine failure in the downing of the B-17, but failed to come up with any concrete answers.

More letters arrived. They told of people in Russell who'd seen the bomber go down on the prairie and how, at the last minute, it seemed to bank away from a school that stood in its path.

The Plain-Dealer reports Karl Newacheck, now 72, wrote to Oleksyk: "I was 13 years old in my 8th grade classroom when the windows and the whole building vibrated tremendously by the roar of a low-flying plane, which suddenly ceased with a loud crashing sound."

Newacheck went to the still-smoldering crash site with his friends. There, they found souvenirs -- watches, coins and two bent-up sets of dog tags. "Sadly, on occasion we would also uncover human bones and pieces of scalp," Newacheck wrote.

Newacheck hung onto the dog tags for all of the next 60 years, until he saw Oleksyk's letter in the paper. "It was quite a surprise, and kind of a climax to wondering all these years," he told the Cleveland paper.

A house now sits on the crash site where the B-17s engines buried themselves four-feet deep into the Kansas prairie. There's talk of a memorial, according to Newacheck. But whether he does or not, he told the Plain-Dealer that he's learned more about his brother in the past few months than in the last 60 years. For him, that's peace.

FMI: www.b-17combatcrewmen.org