Copied from the Patriot Guard site. This fallen soldier is being welcomed in Tucson later this month. His family is interred here so he will be laid to rest with his parents.
RIP Fair skies and tailwinds forever.
TSGT Hyman Stiglitz, 25, WWII MIA/KIA,28,December Tucson Arizona
On July 7th, 1944 while on mission behind enemy lines south of Berlin
Germany they came under attack by German fighter pilots. There were no
survivors on the flight. The plane crashed into the German countryside.
After the war, U.S. recovery crews scavenged Germany, looking for missing
air crews, but Stiglitz's crew had gone down in the Soviet sector, which
later became known as East Germany. Americans were not allowed to search for
their lost crews until after the Cold War.
In 2001 after reunification, German wreck hunters heard about the crash site
and called German authorities, who contacted the U.S. military. The
Accounting Command took over the crash site in November 2002. His remains
were taken to Hawaii for identity determination which took another 5 years.
After 63 years TSGT Hyman Stiglitz is going to be laid to rest beside his
parents and his sister.
According to the newspaper article this Unit had quite a reputaion of "hard
luck". It was known as "the hard-luck crew of the hard-luck squadron of the
hard-luck group" in the armadas of U.S. bombers flying out of eastern
England during World War II, according to his unit's Web site. Nine days
after D-Day, the crew safely landed because Stiglitz dangled on a small
catwalk in an open bomb bay 20,000 feet up and released bombs fused to
detonate that hadn't dropped as planned. Three weeks later they were all
killed.
