Airman returns 65 years later

HIGHLAND, Calif.

For two decades after her son’s bomber went down in the Pacific Ocean during World War II, Vella Stinson faithfully wrote the U.S. government twice a month to ask if his body had been found — or if anyone was looking.

The mother of six strapping boys went to her grave without the answer that has finally reached her two surviving sons 65 years later: The remains of Sgt. Robert Stinson are coming home.

Military divers recovered two pieces of leg bone from the wreckage of a B-24J Liberator bomber found at the bottom of the ocean off the coast of the island nation of Palau. DNA testing showed the femur fragments belonged to the 24-year-old flight engineer, who died in combat on Sept. 1, 1944.

Stinson’s remains arrived under U.S. Air Force escort a week ago Wednesday and were buried two days later at Riverside National Cemetery with full military honors.

An honor guard escorted his flag-draped casket, and the flag was presented to the airman’s brother, Richard Stinson, 87.

“It’s an amazing day - one I never thought I’d see,” said Richard Stinson, one of Robert’s two surviving brothers, along with Edward Stinson, 74, the Redlands Daily Facts newspaper reported on its Web site.

For Robert Stinson, the journey home was far from a sure thing.

His family knew only that his bomber had gone down in the Pacific Ocean. The government politely responded to his mother’s letters but said again and again that no new information had surfaced.

The family learned that Stinson, who joined the Air Force right out of high school, won several medals in the summer of 1944 for participating in dangerous attacks on Japanese airdromes, military installations and enemy ships. His plane was dubbed Babes in Arms.

In 1994, a nonprofit group of adventurers and scuba divers began to search for the missing bomber off the waters of Koror, Palau’s biggest island. The 15-member group, called BentProp, travels to the island nation each year for a month to search for an estimated 200 missing U.S. World War II aircraft.

Half of the wrecks scattered in the waters around the archipelago’s 300 tiny islands have missing crew members associated with them, said Daniel O’Brien, a member of the BentProp team. Stinson’s plane had 11 crew members - and there were eyewitness reports of where it went down. Eight crew members went down with the plane; three parachuted out but were captured by the Japanese and are believed to have been executed.

The group attended reunions of Stinson’s bomber squad, and the aging veterans told them where they thought they had seen the plane go down as the rest of the formation raced back to base at 200 mph. BentProp members methodically searched that area for six years but found nothing.

Then, in 2000, several members of the group doing more research stumbled upon obscure black-and-white aerial photos in the National Archives that had been taken by a crew member aboard another bomber just moments after Stinson’s plane went down. The team thought it odd that the photographer had taken shots when no bombs were falling and then realized the pictures probably were an attempt to document where the bomber crashed.

The pictures indicated a splash zone eight miles from where BentProp had been looking.

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