Richard G. Salsbury was just 19 years old when his plane went down during World War II, leaving a large, never-to-be-filled hole in his family back home in Canaan.
Now, 79 years later, as reported by the Morning Sentinel, his family for the first time will have a grave to visit on Memorial Day, part of the federal government’s effort to fulfill its promise to never leave anyone behind, and to provide long-overdue closure for families who have given everything.
Tens of thousands of service members who fought in foreign conflicts remain missing, mostly from World War II. Salsbury was one of about 1,200 who have been identified since 2015 by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, whose $131 million annual budget shows the military’s commitment to finding everyone.
Salsbury’s story is like many others. A staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces, he was a gunner on a B-24 Liberator that was shot down over Romania on Aug. 1, 1943. He was awarded the Purple Heart, Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross, among other military honors, his family said.
But while the government would identify the remains of more than 280,000 missing service members in the years immediately following the war, Salsbury and his family would have to wait. He was buried along with other identified remains in a cemetery near the crash site.
Until 2015, that is, when the military contacted his family and asked for a DNA sample from his younger brother, Walter. Last September they called again, this time with news that Richard Salsbury had been found.
“It was really overwhelming,” his niece, Ann Walker told the Sentinel. “And a little bit heart-wrenching.”
It’s a feeling the military hopes to bring to more families as they identify more remains, many not as easily accessible as a European cemetery.
In March the military began excavation on a crash site in remote Thailand, where they hope to find the remains of a pilot who crashed his P-38 Lightning while on reconnaissance mission in late 1944, the New York Times reported.
They are also looking in places like the island of Biak in Indonesia, the site of fierce fighting in World War II. The remains of about 150 American service members lost on Biak have never been recovered, part of 1,900 across the entire archipelago.
They are part of more than 72,000 listed as missing in foreign conflicts, including several hundred from Maine.
Not all of them will be found. Circumstances just won’t allow it.
But it’s important that our government continue to try to bring everyone home, no matter how long it takes.
Every family who has given a piece of itself so that the rest of us can be free should at least have a grave to visit on Memorial Day.
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