Tuskegee Airman MIA remains ID’d

Manhattan man’s plane lost in ’44

ALBANY — The remains of a New York pilot killed during World War II are the first of the 27 Tuskegee Airmen listed as missing in action to be identified, the Pentagon announced Thursday.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the agency charged with recovering and identifying the nation’s war dead, said the remains accounted for earlier this year are those of Lawrence Dickson of Manhattan. Dickson (photo) was killed in a crash in Europe 74 years ago next month.

Dickson was a 24-year-old captain in the 100th Fighter Squadron when he took off in his P-51 Mustang fighter plane from Italy to conduct an aerial reconnaissance mission on Dec. 23, 1944. During the return flight, Dickson’s engine failed and his plane was seen crashing along the Italy-Austria border, the Pentagon said.

Searches for the crash site were unsuccessful, and in 1949, the military declared his remains nonrecoverable.

In 2012, an American recovery team found the crash site in Austria after receiving information from a researcher. The team found wreckage matching Dickson’s type of fighter.

Excavations conducted over four weeks in the summer of 2017 by the University of New Orleans and Austria’s University of Innsbruck resulted in the recovery of human remains.

The skeletal remains were later identified as Dickson’s through DNA samples provided by his daughter, Marla Andrews, of East Orange, N.J., and another relative.

“A lot of things have to come together for something like this to work,” Andrews told The Associated Press in an interview from her home.

A South Carolina native who played guitar, Lawrence Dickson was sent to Tuskegee, Ala., for training in a newly formed black air squadron. The storied Tuskegee Airmen would shatter aviation and racial barriers during World War II.