On Memorial Day, the remains of 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, one of 11 crew members aboard the World War II bomber Heaven Can Wait, will be laid to rest in Livermore, California. Kelly was one of four crew members whose remains were recovered by Navy divers off the coast of New Guinea.

The crash occurred on March 11, 1944, and the remains were initially designated as non-recoverable. Seven soldiers remain missing. The ceremonies come 12 years after Kelly’s relative, Scott Althaus, began investigating the crash site.

“I’m just so grateful,” Althaus said. “It’s been an impossible journey… just should never have been able to get to this day. And here we are, 81 years later.”

Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, another crew member, was buried Saturday, May 24, with military honors in his hometown of Wappingers Falls, New York. Darrigan, the radio operator, left behind his wife and son. His grandson, Eric Schindler, attended the ceremony, where more than 200 people paid their respects.

People line the street as the procession carrying the remains of World War II U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan passes through to St. Mary’s church, Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. Darrigan was buried in his hometown after his remains were recovered from a World War II bomber that crashed into the water off the coast of Papua New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

People line the street while they wait for the procession carrying the remains of World War II U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan to pass through, Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. Darrigan was buried in his hometown after his remains were recovered from a World War II bomber that crashed into the water off the coast of Papua New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Diane Christie holds a recovered dog tag belonging to her uncle, World War II U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, Friday, May 23, 2025, in San Leandro, Calif., whose remains had been missing since being killed when the World War II B-24 bomber, Heaven Can Wait, was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the waters off the coast of Papua New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Diane Christie wears a necklace with a photograph of her uncle, World War II U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, inside Santos Robinson Mortuary, Friday, May 23, 2025, in San Leandro, Calif., whose remains had been missing since being killed when the World War II bomber nicknamed Heaven Can Wait was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the water off the coast of New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez)

Fallon Haight, 5, center, waves an American flag while waiting for the procession carrying the remains of World War II U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan to pass through, Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. Darrigan was buried in his hometown after his remains were recovered from the World War II bomber that crashed into the water off the coast of New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Memorial cards for World War II U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan sit at the entrance to St. Mary’s church, Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. Darrigan was buried in his hometown after his remains were recovered from the World War II bomber that crashed into the water off the coast of New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Guests and family including Virginia “Ginny” Pineiro, right, attend the interment for World War II U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan at the cemetery behind St. Mary’s church, Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Wappingers Falls, N.Y. Darrigan was buried in his hometown after his remains were recovered from the World War II bomber that crashed into the water off the coast of New Guinea on March 11, 1944. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa)

Darrigan’s niece, Virginia Pineiro, accepted the folded flag in honor of her late uncle.

Kelly’s remains arrived in the Bay Area on Friday, May 23. He will be buried Monday, May 26, at his family’s cemetery plot, marked by a stone etched with the image of the bomber. A procession of Veterans of Foreign Wars motorcyclists will pass Kelly’s old home and high school before he is interred.

1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, the pilot, and 2nd Lt. Donald Sheppick, the navigator, will be interred in the coming months. Sheppick will be buried near his parents in Coal Center, Pennsylvania. His niece, Deborah Wineland, believes her late father, Sheppick’s younger brother, would have wanted it that way.

Tennyson will be interred on June 27 in Wichita, Kansas, beside his wife, Jean, who died in 2017, just months before the wreckage was located.

WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — As the World War II bomber Heaven Can Wait was hit by enemy fire off the Pacific island of New Guinea on March 11, 1944, the co-pilot managed a final salute to flyers in an adjacent plane before crashing into the water.

All 11 men aboard were killed. Their remains, deep below the vast sea, were designated as non-recoverable.

Yet four crew members’ remains are beginning to return to their hometowns after a remarkable investigation by family members and a recovery mission involving elite Navy divers who descended 200 feet (61 meters) in a pressurized bell to reach the sea floor.

Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, the radio operator was buried with military honors and community support on Saturday in his hometown of Wappingers Falls, New York, more than eight decades after leaving behind his wife and baby son.

The bombardier, 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, was to be buried Monday in Livermore, California, where he grew up in a ranching family. The remains of the pilot, 1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, and navigator, 2nd Lt. Donald Sheppick, will be interred in the coming months.

The ceremonies are happening 12 years after one of Kelly’s relatives, Scott Althaus, set out to solve the mystery of where exactly the plane went down.

“I’m just so grateful,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s been an impossible journey — just should never have been able to get to this day. And here we are, 81 years later.”

March 11, 1944: Bomber down

The Army Air Forces plane nicknamed Heaven Can Wait was a B-24 with a cartoon pin-up angel painted on its nose and a crew of 11 on its final flight.

They were on a mission to bomb Japanese targets when the plane was shot down. Other flyers on the mission were not able to spot survivors.

Their wives, parents and siblings were of a generation that tended to be tight-lipped in their grief. But the men were sorely missed.

Sheppick, 26, and Tennyson, 24, each left behind pregnant wives who would sometimes write them two or three letters a day. Darrigan, 26, also was married, and had been able to attend his son’s baptism while on leave. A photo shows him in uniform, smiling as he holds the boy.

Darrigan’s wife, Florence, remarried but quietly held on to photos of her late husband, as well as a telegram informing her of his death.

Tennyson’s wife, Jean, lived until age 96 and never remarried.

“She never stopped believing that he was going to come home,” said her grandson, Scott Jefferson.

Memorial Day 2013: The Search

As Memorial Day approached twelve years ago, Althaus asked his mother for names of relatives who died in World War II.

Althaus, a political science and communications professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, became curious while researching World War II casualties for work. His mother gave him the name of her cousin Thomas Kelly, who was 21 years old when he was reported missing in action.

Althaus recalled that as a boy, he visited Kelly’s memorial stone, which has a bomber engraved on it. He began reading up on the lost plane.

“It was a mystery that I discovered really mattered to my extended family,” he said.

With help from other relatives, he analyzed historical documents, photos and eyewitness recollections. They weighed sometimes conflicting accounts of where the plane went down. After a four-year investigation, Althaus wrote a report concluding that the bomber likely crashed off of Awar Point in what is now Papua New Guinea

The report was shared with Project Recover, a nonprofit committed to finding and repatriating missing American service members and a partner of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. A team from Project Recover, led by researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, located the debris field in 2017 after searching nearly 10 square miles (27 square kilometers) of seafloor.

The DPAA launched its deepest-ever underwater recovery mission in 2023.

A Navy dive team recovered dog tags, including Darrigan’s partially corroded tag with his the name of his wife, Florence, as an emergency contact. Kelly’s ring was recovered. The stone was gone, but the word BOMBARDIER was still legible.

And they recovered remains that underwent DNA testing. Last September, the military officially accounted for Darrigan, Kelly, Sheppick and Tennyson.

With seven men who were on the plane still unaccounted for, a future DPAA mission to the site is possible.

Memorial Day 2025: Belated Homecomings

More than 200 people honored Darrigan on Saturday, May 24, in Wappingers Falls, some waving flags from the sidewalk during the procession to the church, others saluting him at a graveside ceremony under cloudy skies.

“After 80 years, this great soldier has come home to rest,” Darrigan’s great-niece, Susan Pineiro, told mourners at his graveside.

Darrigan’s son died in 2020, but his grandson Eric Schindler attended.

Darrigan’s 85-year-old niece, Virginia Pineiro, solemnly accepted the folded flag.

Kelly’s remains arrived in the Bay Area on Friday. He was to be buried Monday at his family’s cemetery plot, right by the marker with the bomber etched on it. A procession of Veterans of Foreign Wars motorcyclists will pass by Kelly’s old home and high school before he is interred.

“I think it’s very unlikely that Tom Kelly’s memory is going to fade soon,” said Althaus, now a volunteer with Project Recover.

Sheppick will be buried in the months ahead near his parents in a cemetery in Coal Center, Pennsylvania. His niece, Deborah Wineland, said she thinks her late father, Sheppick’s younger brother, would have wanted it that way. The son Sheppick never met died of cancer while in high school.

Tennyson will be interred on June 27 in Wichita, Kansas. He’ll be buried beside his wife, Jean, who died in 2017, just months before the wreckage was located.

“I think because she never stopped believing that he was coming back to her, that it’s only fitting she be proven right,” Jefferson said.

Sometimes you hear a story that just moves you to the point where you need to share every little detail you were given.

Last week we received an email from Chris Greenberg who wrote to us asking if we would share his grandfather’s inspiring story.

Abner Greenberg, who was originally from NYC but lived in Highland, sadly passed away back on February 3rd, 2022. At 97-years-young, Abner Greenberg lived one heck of a life.

Purple Heart After Iwo Jima

Chris wrote to us and shared that not only was his grandfather a veteran who enlisted in the Marines after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, but he was also a Purple Heart recipient. Abner Greenberg received his Purple Heart after a terrible incident in 1945, after 17 days of being deployed, where he was shot in the head while on Iwo Jima.

For 90 days, Abner Greenberg was unconscious on a hospital ship.

He sadly lost 2 friends, with one of his friends dying in his arms.

HBO Fame

In Abner’s obituary, which his grandson Chris wrote, we learned that he also made an appearance in an HBO documentary about PTSD. The doc, called Wartorn 1861-2010, was directed by Sopranos star James Gandolfini. In the documentary, Abner is filmed saying:

“How do you explain to anybody the horrors that you saw and touched and just soaked into your whole body, your brain, your mind, everything? It finally consumes you if you let it.”

PTSD Support Groups

Chris shared that later on in life, his grandfather worked closely with PTSD organizations with World War II veterans and Purple Heart recipients. Abner was also known to mentor younger veterans and back in 2014 was inducted into the New York State Senate Veterans Hall of Fame.

In 2018, Abner and his wife Marilyn moved from New York City to Highland in Ulster County where he would live out the rest of his extraordinary life. Abner is survived by his wife Marilyn, brothers Robert and Harvey, four children, ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

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The number of military funerals for veterans in New York state declined in 2017.

By New Year’s Eve, the state’s Army and Air National Guards are expected to have conducted 11,170 military funerals for veterans and service members in 2017. That is a 7 percent decline from 12,019 military funeral services in 2016.

The passing of World War II veterans and aging are the main reasons for the drop, Peter Moran, the New York Army National Guard State Military Funeral coordinator, said in a statement.

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“If you’re 18 in 1945 you are 90 years old now,” said Col. Richard Goldenberg, a public affairs officer with the New York Army National Guard.

Nelson Eddy Rivera, director of Dutchess County Veterans Services, said he was seeing similar trends.

In addition to WWII veterans “we are also starting to see some Korean War veterans,” Rivera said.

The United States entered WWII at the end of 1941. It ended in 1945 and an estimated 558,000 WWII veterans were alive as of 2017, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. That means the majority are in their 90s and late 80s.

Those buried this past year reflect a wide age range, from Joseph Nelk, 19, a New York Army National Guard specialist from Pittsford, to Lawrence Ostwald, 87, of Saratoga Springs, who served in the Army during the Korean War. Nelk died from apparent natural causes on Dec. 10 and was buried on Dec. 23; Ostwald died on Dec. 11 and was interred on Dec. 15.

The burials also include transfer ceremonies such as that of Lt. Robert Mains, a WWII pilot who died in 1945 and whose remains were returned to Long Island on Nov. 30.

The reported total only included funerals conducted by the state’s Army and Air National Guard, and not services conducted by other agencies. It does not include the burial for Corey Ingram, the Poughkeepsie sailor who died after the Aug. 21 collision of the USS John McCain, or the 15 Marines and one Navy corpsman killed when a KC-130T crashed into a Mississippi soybean field on July 10. Nine of the Marines were based at Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh.

Any military veteran who did not receive a dishonorable discharge is eligible for military honors at his or her funeral based on federal law. The ceremony needs to include the folding and presenting of a U.S. flag to the veteran’s survivors and the playing of taps.

Amy Wu: 845-451-4529, awu@poughkeepsiejournal.com, Twitter: @wu_PoJo