6 decades later, team to look for remains

By James Gonser
Advertiser Urban Honolulu Writer

The last time Myrtle Tice saw her brother was in 1943 at the baptism of her daughter at a church in Indiana.

The Navy is proposing to recover the remains of Ensign Warnke at a 1944 crash site. Photo courtesy the family

Tice, 85, lives in a retirement complex in Green Valley, Ariz., and is hoping to put her brother to rest before she dies.

"Everybody loved him. He was the favorite," Tice said Monday. "My father put up a headstone, not a government stone, in Indiana. It's waiting there with my mother and father in Westville."

This week the Navy filed a draft environmental assessment with the state to try to recover Warnke's remains after more than 60 years.

The plan is to send a crew to crash site and dig up the remains without disturbing any of the endangered plants or animals on the mountainside.

The Joint Prisoner of War/ Missing in Action Accounting Command will do the work, mandated by Congress to recover remains of missing troops of all wars since World War II whenever possible.

"I really don't know what to expect."

Warnke was 23 years old and assigned to Fighting Squad-

ron 20 that Thursday morning in 1944 when he took off from Barbers Point with seven other planes on a training mission. They were practicing dive-bombing angles on a truck at Kapaho point near what is now Marine Corps Base Hawai'i in Kane'ohe. He didn't return to base, and it was presumed that he crashed.

Two days later his plane was found in upper Halawa Valley. The only signs of him were a shoe and a small amount of human remains, which a recovery crew buried at the scene. Warnke was listed as killed in action, body not recovered.

Tice said her family was told her brother crashed into the ocean. The years went by, and in 1993 she was told that her brother's plane wreck had been found. She wrote to Sen. John McCain of Arizona asking his help to recover the remains.

McCain asked JPAC at Hickam Air Force Base to find the body. A branch of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, JPAC is the result of a merger of the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawai'i, at Hickam and the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting at Camp Smith.

Ensign Harry Warnke crashed in a Grumman F-6F Hellcat, a fighter that was used extensively by the U.S. Navy during World War II. PHawai'i Museum of Flying

"I feel very strongly that Americans should return their war dead to their families," Perry said. "JPAC has been bringing back killed and missing servicemen for more than 10 years now from the far corners of Southeast Asia. Here is a guy that died within five miles of their headquarters (at Hickam) that they never went up and got."

Army Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green, spokeswoman for the JPAC, said that recovery cases are assigned priorities and that the mission is daunting, with more than 78,000 missing service members from World War II, 8,000 from the Korean War and 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War and one from the Gulf War.

Neilson-Green said prioritization of which missions get slated for recovery is balanced against limited resources, logistical feasibility, time, weather patterns, witness availability and other factors. "All of these factors contributed to the timeline of this case," she said.

There was a breakthrough in 1999 when a witness provided information, she said, and a subsequent site visit provided correlating information making the Warnke case suitable for a recovery operation.

According to the environmental assessment, a crew of about 15 people will be sent up to the site in September to recover the remains and personal effects of the naval aviator. The work is expected to take four to six weeks.

The project would require clearing plants and the removal and sifting of soil to find remains. Two helicopter landing zones and two paths to the crash site will be cleared.

Temporary erosion control will be done and a second crew will be sent in to do more permanent erosion control, including replacing soil and replanting with native species. Precautions will be taken to prevent weeds and other invasive plants from being brought into the area.

The site is within the state's conservation district, in an area designated as critical habitat for seven species of threatened or endangered plants.

Daniel A. Martinez, historian at the USS Arizona Memorial, said there has been a cultural change in the way Americans regard the recovering of remains.

"When people come here and understand that there is possibly over 900 souls still in the USS Arizona, their question is: 'How come you haven't recovered them?' " Martinez said.

"If someone from the World War II generation is here, they fully understand that it is an honor to be buried with your shipmates. To be killed at sea and buried at sea was part of the naval tradition."

Martinez said some Pearl Harbor survivors sometimes want to be interred with their fallen comrades after they die. One such survivor was F.M. Campbell, who was a ensign on the Arizona during the attack in 1941 and was buried with his shipmates in 1996.

"He said, 'Son, ever since that day (Dec. 7), I've been living on borrowed time. My place is with my crew.' " Martinez said.

"Now that we have the time to go back and recover remains, the postiWorld War II generation puts a new value on that so that no one is left behind. We now also have the scientific means to identify people. We see a cultural change and a scientific change and both have influenced each other."

Reach James Gonser at jgonser@honoluluadvertiser.com or 535-2431.