The story about his uncle's death in World War II that he's heard since a child has come full circle, and Bill Dietz wound up playing a larger part in it than he ever expected.
It was his DNA that helped identify the remains of Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Regis E. Dietz of Highland Park, whose plane disappeared from radar on Oct. 27, 1943, and was presumed to have crashed at sea.
"We're forever connected, yeah," said Dietz, 63, of Ambridge.
On Thursday, remains representing the entire crew, which in addition to the 28-year-old Regis Dietz included staff Sgt. Clyde L. Green, 24, of Erie, will be buried in a single casket at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.
Bill Dietz and his wife, Merri Alyce, 52, will be there.
"I have heard about it all my life from my grandmother. The last radio signal was over the ocean," he said from his home on Friday. "They thought they went down there."
His grandmother, Marie Dietz, now deceased, always thought otherwise.
"She always said they would find him on a hillside in New Guinea," said Dietz, a retired machinist and mechanic at a nuclear power plant. Dietz said to his knowledge a cousin in the area is the only other blood relative of Regis. Bill Dietz did not know his name.
Regis Dietz was the navigator when he and 11 crewmates took off from an airfield in New Guinea on a mission to gather information for an attack on a Japanese military stronghold in the South Pacific during World War II. Seven hours into their mission aboard a B-24D Liberator the crew dubbed "Shack Rat," the plane disappeared.
Bill Dietz, who served in the Army in West Berlin during the Vietnam War, is pleased with the ending of the story he helped write.
"The country is doing a good job of identifying people," he said.
It's part of a solemn promise from the country they served, said Air Force Maj. Carie Parker, a spokeswoman for the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
Although the military searched the area where Dietz's plane went down after the war, it wasn't until 2003 that a resident of the Morobe Province in New Guinea provided U.S. military personnel with an identification card that was believed to have been found at an aircraft crash site. The military was told that the site contained possible human remains.
Getting there was difficult.
On two occasions in 2004, teams from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command were turned away because of poor weather and hazardous conditions at the helicopter landing site. Another team was able to excavate the site in 2007 and found several identification tags from the crew, as well as human remains.
Using modern forensic identification tools, military scientists positively identified the crew members by matching DNA found at the site with samples from family members.
