ShareThisMEMPHIS, Tenn. - Seventy-eight-year-old Annie Laura Jones was in fourth grade, when her family hung a star on the front window to honor her uncle, John C. Kelley. He was missing in action, after a dogfight with the Japanese during the Burma invasion in 1943.
The long search for Kelley may be ending soon.
The family learned that Kelley was taken prisoner after his plane crashed and he was eventually buried in a nearby cemetery. After the war the exhumed bodies of 39 American prisoners buried near the prison were flown back to the states -- and that plane disappeared.
Last year, an American salvage expert found the recovery plane -- and a cemetery nearby. Now U.S. government investigators are trying to positively identify those remains through DNA samples from Kelley's surviving relatives.
For decades the family has wanted closure in the case, Kelley says. A gravesite with Kelley's name awaits him at Shiloh Cemetery near Garland, Tenn. The recovery and a formal burial finally looks like a possibility, but it would be through a military process that could take two to three more years, the family says.
Kelley, a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces, was the ninth of 11 children in a farm family, says another niece, Leslie Kelley Roane of Garland, who helps run her family's farm. At 34, she is also a genealogist, piecing together the life of an uncle whom she never knew. For her, Kelley was a "grand uncle," the genealogical term for a great uncle from her father's side of the family.
From computer searches, family reunions, photographs and letters, she describes her uncle like a living relative who might have lived just down the street: "He had this amazing smile. It was infectious. He was very handsome, very outgoing, never met a stranger. He was very kind, very personable. I think it's important that we remember him as a person, not just for his service."
The details of Kelley's death and disappearance gradually emerged. Kelley was 25 when he set out on the mission to bomb occupied targets in Burma on Nov. 14, 1943. He was a bombardier on one of six B-24 planes stranded during a bombing run when they were separated from their fighter-plane escorts.
A swarm of Japanese fighter planes attacked, battling the American fliers for more than an hour. Two of the crippled B-24s tried to make crash landings, but burst into flames as they hit the ground. The Japanese then struck a gas tank on Kelley's plane. An engine went out. Pilots of the other B-24s said the stricken plane had only one of four engines left when it tried to set down in a dry riverbed.
One of its wings clipped a tree. Part of the fuselage was ripped open, and the plane cart wheeled before bursting into flames, says Roane.
Kelley and another crewman survived with serious burns, while their captain survived with a head injury and minor burns. The Japanese soon took them prisoner and put them in the Rangoon Central Jail, where Kelley survived for a month before dying of infection from his burns.
After the war, Roane says, the American Graves Registration Service exhumed the bodies of 39 American prisoners from a cemetery near the prison and was flying them back to the United States. The plane disappeared in bad weather, and its whereabouts remained a mystery for 63 years.
It was Nov. 5, 2009, when an American salvage expert found the remains of the plane based on numbers on an aircraft panel near the site. Villagers in the Indian town near the Bangladesh border said the plane "hit head-on into the rock face of a mountain," says Roane. The villagers, who had converted to Christianity, chose to bury the remains at the crash site rather than cremate them. It was "like divine intervention" that kept Kelley's homecoming in play, says Roane.
At the Indian burial site, the remains are planted over with ginger plants and surrounded by a bamboo fence, she says. What remains is for the United States to positively identify the remains through DNA matches. Roane says her family provided a DNA sample through her uncle's only living sister, an invalid whom Roane hopes will still be alive when her brother is finally laid to rest.
Jones, who now lives in Weatherford, Texas, says her extended family is determined to bring her uncle home.
Other nieces, including Susan Krall in Avon, Ohio, also are keeping the memory alive by telling the story in their own towns.
"We're scattered all over the United States, but we still get together," says Jones. "I think this (the recovery) will happen. Susan is like a dog with a bone, and they've got two congressmen helping them. I'm just hoping I'll still be around to see it happen."
(Michael Lollar is a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn.)
