More of his remains and that of his co-pilot may be at the remote Papuan crash site, but the Air Force recovery team is confronted with the danger of an unexploded 500-pound bomb imbedded in the downed bomber’s wreckage.
BURIAL SET FOR WWII AIRMAN MISSING SINCE 1944
Associated Press
September 27, 2013
The partial remains of a World War II pilot who crashed over a Pacific Ocean island nearly 70 years ago will be buried Saturday with full military honors in Utah.
U.S. Air Force 2nd Lt. Vernal J. Bird disappeared over Papua New Guinea on a 1944 bombing run of Japanese airfields there. He was 25.
The crash site was located 12 years ago, but it wasn't until this summer that the Air Force was able to identify partial remains found there as belonging to Bird.
Those remains — only a single leg bone was recovered — arrived Wednesday inside a flag-draped casket on an airliner at Salt Lake City International Airport.
Relatives are hoping a full excavation of the crash site will yield more remains, Lorna Bird Snyder, the airman's niece, told The Associated Press.
The Air Force is moving cautiously because a 500-pound unexploded bomb is still attached to the A-20G Havoc bomber.
The remains of Bird's co-pilot, Staff Sgt. Roy Davis from New Hampshire, have not been found.
Bird had 13 siblings but only one survives, Snyder said. Elaine Bird Jack, 92, of Eugene, Ore., is in Utah for Saturday's burial at Evergreen Cemetery in Springville.
Jack provided a DNA sample that was used to identify her brother's fibula, the outer and thinner of the two long bones of a lower leg.
The crash site on a forested mountainside was discovered in 2001 by a Papuan national, who delivered the fibula along with engine identification plates of the bomber to an American recovery team.
The Air Force identified the bone as Bird's in July.
In the airman's last letter to his family, he described how he flew his light bomber barely above tree-top level, saying "we fly right in the leaves at times." It was written two days before his bomber went down March 12, 1944.
His niece spent years researching where — over the Pacific Ocean or New Guinea — his plane might have gone down. She compared boxes of the airman's letters against records of the American-Australian effort against the Japanese.
If not for Snyder's dogged efforts, the recovered bone might never have gotten a DNA comparison.
Vernal Bird was born Oct. 29, 1918, in Lindon to Walter F. and Christina Pearsson Ash Bird. He attended schools in Lindon and Pleasant Grove. The family later moved to Springville, another Utah County town, according to an obituary.
About 150 distant relatives showed up at the Salt Lake airport to witness the arrival of his casket. None of them knew the man personally; his younger sister is the only one who has a distant memory of him, Snyder said.
But relatives never forgot him, and they kept the airman's smiling portrait among family mementos.
"My parents of course loved him," Snyder said. "They instilled in us that Vernal was an honorable, brave, intelligent young man. We loved his picture."
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