The same day that Jenevieve Judd gave birth to her son, John Elliott, in October 1944, she received a crushing telegram from the U.S. military informing her that her husband had gone missing while serving in World War II.
Mr. Elliott, now 79, said that his mother had told him that she had been so affected by the news of his father’s disappearance that it made labor more difficult, possibly causing Mr. Elliott to spend the first week of his life in an oxygen tank after being born purple.
Over the years, Ms. Judd told her son extremely little about her missing husband, who remained unaccounted for until May of this year. The Defense Department said earlier this month that her husband, Staff Sgt. John A. Tarbert of the Air Force was killed at 24 after his plane was attacked while flying over Germany 80 years ago this Friday.
“I’m a low-key kind of a guy, and the excitement is just beginning to kind of swell up inside me,” Mr. Elliott said in an interview on Monday.
Mr. Elliott, who lives in Schenectady, N.Y., had been circling closer to the truth of what happened to his father since about 2012, when his own son looked online for information, inspiring Mr. Elliott to look in his attic for old, possibly related documents.
They learned that Sergeant Tarbert had been one of more than 300 men who flew from England on Sep. 27, 1944, as part of an operation known as the Kassel Mission. Sergeant Tarbert, of Port Deposit, Md., was in the 703rd Bombardment Squadron, 445th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force.
The Kassel Mission Historical Society, a nonprofit that promotes information about the mission, said on its website that more than 30 planes had taken off from Tibenham, England, and headed toward the city of Kassel, Germany, but that they went off course for reasons that are still unknown today. The airmen dropped bombs on another city, turned back and were suddenly hit from behind by German fighters.
The attack was brief, likely only a few minutes long, but devastating. Only four planes returned to England, leaving behind at least 117 dead and dozens who would become prisoners of war.
Sargeant Tarbert was a waist gunner on a B-24, the Mairzy Doats. The plane’s co-pilot, Lt. Carroll G. Snidow, survived the crash by parachuting out of the plane, and he wrote about the disastrous mission that October while he was a prisoner of war.
“There we were, in the middle of Germany in a B-24 with two holes in the right wing where the engines had been, no tail turret, radio almost out and one of our tail rudders mostly shot off,” he wrote in the account, which appears on the historical society’s website.
Six crew members of the Mairzy Doats survived, and three others, including Sargeant Tarbert, were unaccounted for.
Mr. Elliott’s mother eventually remarried, and his stepfather helped raise him.
Decades later, when Mr. Elliott was looking for more information, he found the Kassel Mission Historical Society website and contacted the group. He was told that they had been looking for him for years and encouraged him to contact the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency.
He said that in 2014 he filed a request for disinterment of remains that could belong to his father and that the application was approved the next year, but then things slowed down. “I waited, waited, waited and I just kind of lost hope,” Mr. Elliott said.
One hurdle was that the most likely set of remains, which had been found in 1951 at the plane crash site, had been sent to the North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial in Carthage, Tunisia.
The United States did not have access to disinter there until the country signed a memorandum of understanding with Tunisia in 2022.
In September 2022, the remains were exhumed and transferred to a government laboratory for examination. That same month, the agency also sent a team to investigate the Mairzy Doats crash site, and the team recovered remains to be sent to the lab, the Defense Department said.
Scientists conducted anthropological and DNA analysis to identify the remains, and in May they called Mr. Elliott to confirm that his father was now accounted for.
Mr. Elliott had also learned more about his father from the documents in his attic. Sargeant Tarbert had attended Jacob Tome Institute in Maryland and enjoyed football, journalism and art. He enlisted in June 1939 and met Ms. Judd while in the Air Corps at Fort Lowry. They were married on Nov. 4, 1943.
There will be a burial in November in Schuylerville, N.Y. “For me,” Mr. Elliott said, “it’s really just a celebration of a long-awaited homecoming.”
The post World War II Airman Identified After 79 Years appeared first on New York Times.