At last, a family can bury airman
Lost in WWII, his body returned
On July 7, 1944, US Army Air Force Technical Sergeant Hyman L. Stiglitz, 25, a radio operator from Boston, took off on a mission to bomb a German aircraft factory. Nazi fighters attacked the 1,000-plane formation from the rear. Fellow airmen saw Stiglitz's B-24J Liberator and several others veer away and crash on German soil.
His remains were not found, and over the decades that followed Stiglitz's family made peace with the idea that they would never be able to give him a proper burial. But last month, the military told Stiglitz's nephews that it had positively identified his remains and those of his eight crewmates.
"When I first told my father, he says: 'That's unbelievable,' " said Ken Stuart, 56, the son of Stiglitz's younger brother, Philip Stuart, who is 82. "It was an amazing experience that after all this time something like this would happen. It's just incredible that [military officials] have the respect for doing this."
The Defense Department also identified remains belonging to First Lieutenant David P. McMurray, the bomber pilot from Melrose; First Lieutenant Raymond Pascual of Houston; Second Lieutenant Millard C. Wells Jr., of Paris, Ky.; Technical Sergeant Leonard J. Ray of Upper Falls, Md.; Staff Sergeant Robert L. Cotey of Vergennes, Vt.; Staff Sergeant Francis E. Larrivee of Laconia, N.H.; Staff Sergeant Robert J. Flood of Neelyton, Pa.; and Staff Sergeant Walter O. Schlosser of Lake City, Mich.
The recovery and identification of the remains of the airmen was part of an effort by the Defense Department to locate 78,000 American troops still missing after World War II, said Larry Greer, a spokesman at the agency's Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office. The office has identified more than 300 remains since it was established in 1976, including two last month.
The crash site of Stiglitz's plane was discovered near the town of Westergeln in 2002, when a group of German history buffs found some personal effects, including dog tags. The group alerted US officials, and in 2003 an American military crew excavated the crash site. In 2005, the military notified the families of the crew members that the crash site had been found, and officials collected blood samples for DNA tests.
Using military records, dental records, and the DNA tests, the military identified the remains and notified the crew members' families in August and September.
The remains are typically given a military funeral, Greer said. Some families have elected to bury the airmen at Arlington National Cemetery, he said. Sergeants Ray and Flood were buried last week in Harford County, Md., and Dry Run, Pa. Relatives of McMurray declined to be interviewed.
A separate casket with remains that could not be identified will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery under one tombstone that will list the names of all nine airmen, Greer said.
Stiglitz will be buried in December in Tucson in the same plot as his parents "to symbolically reunite them," Stuart said. Members of the Stiglitz family changed their name to Stuart after the war.
"There will be a 12-gun salute and the playing of taps," said Army Major Michael Cepe, the casualty officer in Tucson who is helping plan the funeral.
Ken Stuart, who was born seven years after Stiglitz was killed, said his father rarely spoke about Stiglitz. "The only thing I do know is that he was an excellent dancer," said Stuart, who lives in San Diego. "They had assumed that he had been lost in action, and that was it." 