Republic man buried at Arlington
Three generations of relatives attended a burial service Friday at Arlington National Cemetery for a serviceman from Republic who had been missing since 1944. William Lowry, then 33, was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Corps serving as a gunner on a B-24 in the Pacific theater. On April 16, 1944, his unit went on a bombing run but never came back.
“They made a very successful bombing run that night, but on the way back, they ran into terrible storms,” said Jerome Lowry of Uniontown, the nephew of the downed airman. “Thirty-seven planes went missing that night. They called it Black Sunday. It was assumed most went down in the ocean and they’d never be found.”
Lowry said the wreckage of his uncle’s plane found in 2002 in Papua New Guinea was spread throughout a ravine. Lowry said it most likely crashed after running out of fuel.
“A month ago I didn’t know anything about my Uncle Willie except that he was missing in action. Now I know what flight number he was on and the mission he was on,” Lowry said.
The remains of all 11 crewmembers on the plane were recovered and identified. According to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), DNA samples from living relatives were used to help positively identify the remains. A joint ceremony was held at Arlington National Cemetery to bury the 11 airmen, with relatives of each of the men in attendance.
“They had a full military band there and they played ‘Taps’ and had the 21-gun salute. Three different chaplains got up and read passages from the Bible. They gave each family a flag,” Lowry said. “They have a ‘Leave no man behind’ philosophy and they went beyond that today. Sixty-three years that man was buried in the jungle, and now he’s buried at Arlington.”
Although William Lowry never married and had no children, more than two dozen relatives were on hand to honor him at his burial Friday. Jerome Lowry said 11 family members accompanied him from Pennsylvania, including children and grandchildren. His cousins and other relatives from Illinois also attended, bringing those in attendance for William Lowry to 25.
“It was an emotional thing,” Lowry said. “It definitely brought everybody together. Everyone had gone their own ways, and it’s usually just funerals that bring us together.”
Lowry said Friday’s event was an unusual funeral, since few of those in attendance had ever met the deceased. Lowry said his family had talked about his Uncle Willie for years, though, and had always speculated about what had happened to him.
“I had some articles from Time magazine about planes that were found, but there were never any remains,” Lowry said. “It’s the end of the story that had been a mystery.”
According to the JPAC, there are still more than 78,000 service members missing from World War II, with an estimated 35,000 deemed recoverable. The others were either lost at sea or entombed in sunken ships, according to the JPAC Website.
The remains of William Lowry and his crewmates were found after a man hiking through the rain forest in Papua New Guinea in 2001 found a ring that he believed had belonged to an American. The ring was brought to the attention of the U.S. Embassy and in 2002 the search for the missing aircraft was successfully completed.