Missing WWII Bomber Crew Finally Identified
The airmen will be buried with Honors 65 years after being lost in New Guinea.
April 27, 2008 — -- It's been 65 years since "The Swan," a B-24 bomber, crashed in New Guinea while returning to base after a successful bombing mission against Japanese shipping in the South Pacific.
They radioed that they were coming in for a landing, but couldn't see very well, so, they wanted the runway lit up. It was, but they never saw it, and never landed. For years, no one knew what happened to the plane and it's crew of 11. The military believed they had crashed into the sea.
Susan Lund's uncle — her mother's brother and only sibling — Ronald Ward of Cambridge, Mass., was the bombardier on the Swan. He was a last minute substitute for the plane's assigned bombardier.
Lund said that, for relatives, the "not knowing" was excruciating. "They would have had a sense of closure ... if they had had a body to bury and a funeral service ... and the ritual of death — they didn't have that, and it was hard for them to deal with that."
And while the military declared the men dead, there was nothing to bury. All the Ward family had was a photo of Ronald in his uniform.
Until now.
The Pentagon has confirmed that what local hunters found in the jungles of New Guinea eight years ago, was, in fact, the wreckage of the military plane. And they have now positively identified all the men lost so many years ago.
That brought some measure of relief for Norma Rowe. Her uncle, Albert Caruso, was one of two gunners on the Swan. Her grandmother, his mother, never knew what happened to him. "She talked to me about it a lot and, as a young girl, I could feel her, her feelings and her hurt and anguish over losing her son."
But there is a mantra in the military: "Leave no soldier behind."
Both families are grateful that the military is still looking for the missing.
Ward and Caruso's remains are among the 100 or so that the Defense Department identifies every year. There are still close to 80,000 soldiers missing from World War II alone. And when they find something, anything, it can mean a lot to those who still don't know what happened to their loved ones.
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