Remains identified for 2 WWII airmen
Mass. pair crashed in New Guinea
On Dec. 3, 1943, a B-24D Liberator bomber with two Army airmen from Massachusetts flew a stealth mission to destroy Japanese war vessels in the Bismarck Sea. The mission turned out to be a success. The crew found a Japanese convoy and bombed it.
But as the aircraft returned to Dobodura in Papua New Guinea, the crew ran into trouble. They had radioed the base to illuminate the landing strip. But as the plane approached the landing field, the crew radioed the base in a state of panic, asking, "Where are the landing lights?" And then the radio call went silent.
Yesterday, the plane and its crew having been missing for decades, the US Department of Defense announced it had positively identified the remains of the crewmen. The announcement came eight years after the pieces of the aircraft wreckage was discovered by three Papua New Guineans while they hunted some 10 to 15 miles from the airfield.
Among the 11-member crew was Second Lieutenant Kenneth L. Cassidy of Worcester and Second Lieutenant Ronald F. Ward of Cambridge. A burial is planned this summer at Arlington National Cemetery.
"I just wish my mom and dad were alive so they would know that he's finally coming home," said Kathleen I. Lund, the 83-year-old sister of Ward, whose voice broke with emotion during a telephone interview last evening.
Lund said she clearly remembers the day when her mother received the telegram that the 24-year-old Ward was missing in action, that the aircraft had crashed into the water. It was Dec. 17, and her mother was alone in their Cambridge home, while Lund, who was 19 at the time, was working at an aircraft parts manufacturing plant in Kendall Square.
"We all cried," Lund said. "But we got ourselves together and kept hoping, hoping, and hoping he would be found. . . . My mother and father had such high hopes he would walk through that jungle."
Then, 26 months later, she said, their hopes were dashed. Another telegram arrived informing the family that the military was going to declare Ward and the other crewmen dead because no remains of the bodies or the airplane could be found.
The remains of the airmen are among about 100 from various wars that the Defense Department identifies annually. The remains of about 78,000 soldiers who died in World War II are still missing.
"Hundreds of crash sites are scattered across the South Pacific Islands," said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Department's POW/Missing Personnel Office.
In 2000, the Defense Department first learned of the aircraft wreckage in New Guinea, but the witnesses couldn't remember the exact location of the site.
Finally, in 2004, after much investigation, the department located the plane and its aircraft date plate, ending decades of belief that the plane had gone down in the water.
Over the next three years, the department led two excavations, recovering human remains and personal artifacts such as identification tags.
Lund said the department located her brother's 1937 class ring from Cambridge Rindge Technical High School, as well as one from an Army training school. Each contained his three initials, RFW.
The notification surprised Ken Belisle, the 63-year-old son of Worcester's Cassidy. Belisle has no memories of his father because he never saw him. His parents, he said, married in August 1943, one month before his father left for the Pacific.
"Initially, my mother said he crashed at sea," said Belisle, a retired two-star Navy admiral. "We never expected to see anything."
