Ring returned to family of Second World War airman missing for 70 years

TIRANA, Albania — Sgt. John Thompson, a British Second World War special operation flight engineer, was considered missing in action for more than 70 years. Not anymore.

On Monday, his 92-yearold sister Dorothy Webster received his ring from a family in Albania together with a box of debris from his Halifax bomber. The plane, with a seven-member crew onboard, had crashed in the eastern European country on Oct. 29, 1944 whilst transporting assistance to local anti-Nazi fighters.

In 1960, Jaho Cala found Thompson’s finger with the ring at the Sinoi Mountain, 40 kilometres north of the Albanian capital Tirana. He kept the ring and hid it at his home, afraid to show it to the then-communist authorities.

Cala asked his son Xhemil to look for the family of the owner and after he died, Xhemil contacted the embassies of the U.S. and Britain — the two countries that helped liberate Albania from the Nazis a month after Thompson’s death.

After three months, the British embassy confirmed the ring was Thompson’s and told his family and the families of the other six crew members.

“Seventy years we’ve waited. We can’t believe that we’re here today celebrating this after all this time,” said Webster, who was accompanied by other family members at a ceremony at the Albanian Defence Ministry. “My father would have been thrilled to pieces with it all.”

“All these years it has been a story of loss,” said one of her sons, Alan Webster. “We now know almost everything that happened. It’s a sense of closure. We know where John is. He’s over there in the mountain.”

Alan’s brother Brian Webster said their grandparents never locked their house in Britain because they were waiting for their missing son. British authorities never told them anything about Thompson because he was part of “a secret operation in Albania,” the family said.

After the U.S. and U.K. embassies started to piece together bits of evidence surrounding the ring it emerged that the initials “Joyce & John” engraved inside it belonged to Thompson and his newly-wedded wife, Joyce.

Joyce married again after losing John and Webster family members said she had already passed away.

GENT SHKULLAKU/AFP/Getty Images Xhemil Cala, left, kisses the hand of Dorothy Webster, the sister of deceased 23-year-old British pilot Sgt. John Thompson, at the Albanian Defense Ministry in Tirana on Monday. Cala’s father found Thompson’s ring in 1960.