From the July 28th KOMO News, Seattle, Washington "Seattle man among 12 missing WWII airmen identified."
Robert S. Wren was part of the crew of a B-24D Liberator that took off from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea, October 27, 1943, on a reconnaissance mission. They were part of a larger Allied air attack on Japanese-held Rabaut, New Britain. Their mission was to go to the nearby shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea.
However, bad weather struck and the plane was radioed to land at a friendly airstrip. The plane's last radio transmission did not give its location, and that was the last the Americans ever heard of the plane.
In the following weeks, multiple searches were made for it, but nothing came of it. The Liberator and its crew were classified as unrecoverable and that was that.
Many planes during the war were lost in this area.
In 2003, a Joint POW/MIA team received word of a crash site in papua-New Guinea as they were investigating another case. A man turned in an id card from one of the crew members and told the team there were remains at the site.
Poor weather prevented attempts to get to the site and it wasn't until early 2007. DNA tests were run on the crew and it turned out that this was the missing plane. Remains representing the crew will be interred in a single casket at Arlington National Cemetery today with full military honors.
Eight of the crew members have already been buried individually while three others will be buried elsewhere today.
The list of heroes will be printed in the next entry.
Always Glad When Our War Dead Are Brought Home.
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