Pilot missing since 1944 gets a funeral
BIRMINGHAM, ALA. — Second Lt. Robert R. Keown was piloting his P-38 aircraft to an airfield after a mission in 1944 when it crashed into a mountain in Papua New Guinea. World War II ended without Keown’s family knowing what had happened to him, and the military later declared him dead.
Decades later, a villager found human remains in a swampy area near the mountain. Another resident of the Pacific island snapped a photo of the rusted wreckage of a warplane years after that.
With all those puzzle pieces finally assembled and through the help of genetic testing, remains of the Georgia native and Alabama resident are now back on U.S. soil. Relatives gathered at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., on Friday afternoon for the long-delayed funeral for Keown.
The ceremony includes a flag-draped coffin and an honor guard for Keown, who grew up near Atlanta in Lawrenceville, Georgia, before moving to the northern Alabama city of Scottsboro. He was 24 and serving in the U.S. Army Air Forces, the predecessor to today’s Air Force, when he died.
Keown’s remains arrived Thursday at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, said Justin Taylan of Pacific Wrecks, a nonprofit contractor that searches for the remains of missing service members in conjunction with the Department of Defense.
More than 400,000 Americans died in World War II, and the Pentagon says nearly 73,000 of them remain unaccounted for.
Keown was among that number until November, when DNA testing proved that skeletal remains found in Papua New Guinea were his. Keown was removed from the list of the missing, but it’s still unclear what happened in the crash.
“The pilot probably bailed out, but we don’t know,” said Taylan. “It’s impossible to say exactly how he died.”
The Pentagon said Keown was flying one of four aircraft of the 36th Fighter Squadron, 8th Fighter Group, on a mission to locate a missing B-25 bomber when the weather turned bad and the fighters headed to an auxiliary airfield on April 16, 1944. Keown was declared missing after the planes failed to return. Two other planes disappeared; their pilots remain missing.
The war ended with Keown’s whereabouts still unknown, and the Pentagon declared him dead on Feb. 7, 1946.
The loss and uncertainty over his fate were devastating to the family, said John Keown, the son of one of the pilot’s younger brothers.