Remains of WWII Airman Return Home to Western Pennsylvania After 74 Years

Sgt. Vernon Hamilton never should have been on the plane.

A mechanic in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, he manned some of the guns aboard a Douglas A-26B Invader while it conducted combat operations in Europe.

The handsome 19-year-old from little Monongahela, Pa., had just finished a mission on March 21, 1945 – less than two months before the end of the war – when a member of another flight crew in the 409th Bombardment Group got sick.

Hamilton, wanting to hit his quota of missions as quickly as possible so he could return home, volunteered to replace the ill soldier on a venture to bombard Nazi troops ahead of American infantrymen preparing to cross the Rhine River.

Hours later, anti-aircraft fire from a battery of 128mm guns struck Hamilton’s aircraft, which plummeted into the German countryside and, for all intents and purposes, vanished.

MOMENTOUS DISCOVERY

For years, Hamilton’s mother Dorothy left the door to her home unlocked at all hours, expecting her Vernon to walk in at any time.

She wrote letters pleading with the U.S. Army to find her son, who she believed was alive but suffering from injuries that may have affected his memory of who he was. She requested that her son’s uniform be sent home so she could clean and press it for his return – he always liked looking sharp, she told family.

Dorothy even volunteered to join search parties the Army sent to look for the plane’s wreckage, search efforts that proved fruitless.

Shelley Atkins grew up listening to her grandmother tell stories about those letters and her missing Uncle Vernon, who dropped out of Monongahela High School at age 17 and enlisted on his 18^th birthday. Now living in Lighthouse Point, Florida, with her husband Donn, Shelley got a surprise when she answered the phone recently.

“They called and said they had found my uncle’s remains,” she said.

In 2016, a German military historian who had spent years looking for the missing flight got word of a possible crash site in a field in Hülsten, Germany. A preliminary investigation turned up pieces of an aircraft.

History Flight Inc., a Florida-based nonprofit dedicated to repatriating the remains of U.S. servicemen and women who died in overseas combat, dispatched a team in November 2016 to excavate and document the site. They were under a tight deadline – the owner of the land where they needed to work was starting construction there in December. Wintry conditions didn’t help, either.

Undaunted, the team began digging, and within days they discovered evidence of a wrecked American light bomber in a 15-foot crater. Pieces of the aircraft, human remains and personal effects were