Various articles:
From http://www.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123067381
World War II B-24 pilot's remains laid to rest at Arlington
by Senior Master Sgt. Matt Proietti
Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs
Air Force Link
9/10/2007 - ARLINGTON, Va. (AFPN) -- The remains of an Army Air Forces pilot who died in an aircraft crash 64 years ago in Alaska were interred Sept. 7 at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
"It's fulfilling to get the recognition he deserves," said John S. Hoskin, 82, of his late brother, 2nd Lt. Harold E. Hoskin of Houlton, Maine.
Lieutenant Hoskin, 22, was one of several crew members who died Dec. 21, 1943, when a B-24 Liberator crashed 120 miles east of Fairbanks, Alaska. His remains were identified in April following an investigation spurred on by Douglas Beckstead, the historian for Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.
Two crew members bailed out before the crash. One of them, co-pilot 2nd Lt. Leon Crane of Philadelphia, survived for 86 days in the wilderness after he stumbled upon trappers' cabins where he found food and refuge from the elements. Crew chief Master Sgt. Richard Pompeo, the second man who made it out of the bomber, was never found. His sister and nephew attended the Sept. 7 service.
Others aboard the B-24 were 1st Lt. James B. Sibert, a propeller specialist, and Staff Sgt. Ralph Wenz, a radio operator, whose bodies were later found inside the aircraft.
The B-24 left Fairbanks' Ladd Field, now part of the Army's Fort Wainwright, to test a procedure that allowed the pilot to bleed aviation gas into the hydraulic system to feather the propeller, Mr. Beckstead said.
While flying at about 20,000 feet two hours into the mission, the aircraft entered into clouds and its instruments started to act irrationally, according to a statement by Lieutenant Crane that Mr. Beckstead discovered.
It went into two spins, both of which were controlled somewhat by the pilots. When it started a third spin, Lieutenant Hoskin hit the crash alarm signal and yelled for the crew to bail out of the aircraft.
Sergeant Pompeo and Lieutenant Crane exited the aircraft through forward bomb bay doors. Lieutenant Crane later reported that he watched the sergeant drift over a ridge but never saw him again, Mr. Beckstead said.
In a meeting with Lieutenant Hoskin's survivors Sept. 6, Mr. Beckstead said he blames "ice fog" for the accident.
"You can see through it vertically, but you can't see through it horizontally," he said.
Though dressed in cold weather gear, Lieutenant Crane exited the plane without gloves or mittens into air that was 60 below zero. He waited for a week to be rescued, then started to follow the nearby Charley River, figuring the closest human might live on its shore.
Lieutenant Crane, a Philadelphia native, stumbled onto a series of cabins used by trappers and found gear and food that helped him survive. He spent half of his time in the outdoors, though, and covered 75 miles before discovering an inhabited home whose occupant took him on a dog sled and snowshoes to a settlement. A mail plane brought him back to Ladd Field in mid-March 1944.
A few days later, he accompanied search and rescue workers to the B-24 wreckage, where they located the bodies of Lieutenant Sibert and Sergeant Wenz in the rear of the fuselage. Snow covered much of the area, which hampered their efforts to find any sign of Sergeant Pompeo.
According to the initial incident report reviewed by Mr. Beckstead, Lieutenant Crane said Lieutenant Hoskin was in the radio operator's compartment preparing to bail out the last time he saw him. The search turned up no sign of Lieutenant Hoskin.
Lieutenant Hoskin was the third of four children born to George and Eva Hoskin in the northeastern Maine town of Houlton on the Canadian border. John, the youngest child and only one who remains alive, turns 83 this month.
He said he "always" misses his brother.
"We were in school together," Mr. Hoskin said. "He was a friendly brother. There was no sibling fighting or anything."
They fished and hunted. Lieutenant Hoskin earned excellent grades at Houlton High School, was a sprinter on the track team and played trumpet in the band.
Their father, George, worked in real estate, but suffered from poor health. Their mother, Eva, was a homemaker. The family tended a garden, had a cow and raised chickens to sustain themselves during the 1930s.
"It was the Depression, a time of scrounging to live," Mr. Hoskin said.
Lieutenant Hoskin attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, leaving his pre-medical studies his sophomore year to enlist in the military after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
He was accepted into the air cadet program and finished undergraduate pilot training in early January 1943. Later that month, he married Mary McIntosh, also of Houlton. She was pregnant with their only child when he was killed later that year.
"(They) only had 10 months together of married life and were still very much in love, and when he was taken from her, she never got over it," said their daughter, Joann Hoskin Goldstein, 63, of Punta Gorda, Fla. "She never got over it."
After her husband was declared missing, Mrs. Hoskin returned to Maine to raise their daughter. She worked as a bookkeeper and didn't remarry until their daughter was grown.
"We lived with my (maternal) grandmother," Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said. "My mother was like the dad and worked, and my grandmother was like my mom."
The family hosted a funeral service for Lieutenant Hoskin in 1949 after the Army declared him dead.
Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said she is amazed at the turn of events.
"It's crazy. I always knew where he was in Alaska, in a plane, never to come home again," she said. "All of a sudden I hear they found his remains 63 years later."
Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said it's important that her father's remains were found and returned, but she said she will always think of him as being in Alaska.
"Part of him is there, part of him is here, part of him is always in my heart," she said.
Her mother, who remarried 24 years after she was widowed, died in 2005 at age 82 not knowing an archaeological study was about to take place. She never talked about the loss of her husband.
"I always felt that she was depriving me because she couldn't talk about it, but I gleaned things from what people said about him, so that I knew he was a good man," Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said. "She hated every war that came after (World War II) because of what she went through and what I went through. It was terrible."
In 1991, Mr. Hoskin visited Lieutenant Crane, the crash's only survivor, for an hour at his Pennsylvania home after tracking him down through the man's brother.
"Leon's phone number was unlisted," Mr. Hoskin said. "I have the feeling that he didn't want us to think he had caused the crash, which had never crossed our minds. He never talked about it even with his children."
Mr. Beckstead, visited the B-24 wreckage in 1994 when he worked at Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in east-central Alaska. The crash site is within its borders. He conducted some research into the incident and discovered parachute buckles on a subsequent visit.
He said he believed they belonged to Lieutenant Hoskin as they seemed to be in the radio operator's compartment where he was last spotted. Mr. Beckstead convinced the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii to send a team of investigators there in 2006. He assisted them in their work for 10 days in summer 2006. They found bone fragments and contacted his brother for a DNA sample. It was a match.
Mr. Hoskin said his father, who died in 1960, always held out hope that his son had survived the accident.
"He always felt like Harold was going to walk up to the house one day," Mr. Hoskin said. "We couldn't get any answers from the military, so he felt he was justified in his opinion. He really felt like he was going to knock on the door."
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From http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=131925&ac=PHnws
Lost pilot no more
A Houlton native killed in World War II will be buried 63 years after his plane crashed.
By ELBERT AULL Staff Writer September 5, 2007
Portland Press Herald
GORHAM — John Hoskin remembers what his family thought after his older brother's plane failed to return from a test flight over the Alaskan wilderness during World War II.
"We all figured he was going to walk out some day," Hoskin said.
But 2nd Lt. Harold Hoskin, an Army Air Corps pilot, never walked out of the Yukon.
A crew member did survive, however, and his incredible return set off a chain of events that concludes this week when Harold Hoskin's remains are buried at Arlington National Cemetery more than 60 years after his death.
"He's able to get the military honors he deserves," said Mary Hoskin, John's wife.
It will be the fourth time this year that military officials have used DNA analysis to identify and return the remains of a missing Mainer to the family.
The latest discovery came after a two-year investigation of a crash site in Alaska's remote Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.
What researchers found helped dust off a chapter of Hoskin family history that was incomplete and seldom-discussed after the war.
Family members said it helped give a daughter the first true glimpse of her father's character and brought an uncle closer to his niece.
Harold Hoskin was a 22-year-old Houlton native with a child on the way and dreams of becoming a doctor when he flew a B-24 bomber out of Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Dec. 21, 1943.
Hoskin led a crew of five assigned to test the bomber's propeller systems in cold weather. An engine malfunctioned during the flight and sent the plane into a downward spiral, according to military documents.
"The thing started falling apart in the air," said John Hoskin, 83, a retired Baptist minister who lives in Gorham. The bomber crashed on a remote mountain.
Search teams could not find the wreckage for months. Then 2nd Lt. Leon Crane, one of the five crew members, returned to the base after wandering in the wilderness and living off of food stores from trapper's cabins.
Crane led searchers to the crash site, where they found the remains of two other crewmen. But they never found Harold Hoskin's body and assumed he was the last crew member to parachute from the bomber.
But Harold Hoskin never left the plane. Former National Park Historian Douglas Beckstead convinced military investigators to return to the site after he discovered several artifacts -- including parachute harness buckles -- at the largely intact crash site three years ago.
The team recovered bone fragments from the plane wreckage last summer. Beckstead contacted John Hoskin, the pilot's only remaining sibling, and asked for a DNA sample.
The results were announced in March. "It was a match," John Hoskin said.
The find rekindled John Hoskin's curiosity, which had dimmed since he and his wife tracked down Crane, the man who wandered through the Alaskan wilderness after the crash, at his Philadelphia home in the early 1990s.
Crane had little to say about the event and has since died, they said.
John Hoskin reconnected with his niece, and convinced her to look through love letters his brother sent to her mother during the war. She learned that Harold Hoskin was in a zoology laboratory at Bates College in Lewiston when he learned Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. He left college and joined the Army almost two months later, at the end of January 1942.
Harold Hoskin married his girlfriend, Mary, days after he finished pilot training a year later.
The couple eagerly awaited the birth of their first child at the time of the crash. They even settled on a name, Dick, because they expected a boy. Mary Hoskin gave birth to their daughter five months later.
In the meantime, she boxed up every letter from her husband, could not discuss his death and did not remarry for more than two decades. She died in 2004.
"Any time I ever asked her about it, she would cry," said Joann Goldstein, 63, of Punta Gorda, Fla., their daughter.
Earlier this summer, Goldstein opened the box of more than 50 letters at the urging of family members.
Two lines from the stack of notes stood out:
In a letter to his mother on his way to officer training, Harold Hoskin called World War II "the most important war we've ever had to fight."
The other, written to his wife shortly after he got his assignment in Alaska, said, "It looks as though Dick will see his proud papa, because there is no combat involved in this job."
Harold Hoskin then asked his wife if she would be ashamed of him if he never saw combat.
When asked what her mother would think of the coming burial ceremony, Goldstein said, "I think she would be honored that he's being honored."
Harold Hoskin is scheduled to be buried with full military honors Friday at Arlington National Cemetery. A remembrance ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday at the Free Baptist Church in Limington.
Staff Writer Elbert Aull can be contacted at 791-6325 or at:
eaull@pressherald.com
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From http://dailyprogress.mgblogs.com/index.php/dailyprogress/home_again/
Home Again
By Bryan McKenzie
Sep 06, 2007
It’s always interesting what lengths the Department of Defense goes through to locate, identify and return Americans killed in action. Because of those efforts, 2nd Lt. Harold E. Hoskin, U.S. Army Air Forces, is home after 64 years.
Here’s the story from the DoD: On Dec. 21, 1943, Lt. Hoskin was one of five crewmen on board a B-24D that departed Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, on a cold-weather test mission. The aircraft never returned to base and it was not located in subsequent search attempts. The following March, one of the crewmen, 1st Lt. Leon Crane, arrived at Ladd Field after spending more than two months in the Alaska wilderness. He said that the plane had crashed after it lost an engine, and Crane and another crewmember, Master Sgt. Richard L. Pompeo, parachuted from the aircraft before it crashed. Lt. Crane did not know what happened to Sgt. Pompeo after they bailed out.
In October 1944, Lt. Crane assisted a recovery team in locating the crash. They recovered the remains of two of the crewmen, 1st Lt. James B. Sibert and Staff Sgt. Ralph S. Wenz.Hoskin’s remains were not found and it was concluded that he probably parachuted out of the aircraft before it crashed.
In 2004, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) received information from a National Park Service Historian regarding a possible WWII crash site in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, Alaska. The historian turned over ashes believed to be the cremated remains of the crew, however, it was determined they contained no human remains. In 2006, a JPAC team excavated the site and recovered human remains and other non-biological material, including items worn by U.S. Army officers during WWII.
Lt. Hoskins will be buried Friday in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.
--
The Charley River B-24
© Douglas Beckstead, 2007
On a remote ridge high above the Charley River in eastern Alaska lies the wreckage of a WWII B-24 bomber. People fly over it all the time and wonder "What is the story behind it? How did it get there? Why is it still there?"
The plane took off from Ladd Field (in Fairbanks, Alaska) at 0940 on the morning of 21 December 1943. Their mission for the day involved testing a new system that allowed the pilot to bleed avgas into the hydraulic system for feathering the propeller. In sub-freezing temperatures hydraulic fluid becomes very thick and could inhibit the proper function of the system.
There were five men on board the flight that morning: pilot 2Lt Harold Hoskin, co-pilot 1Lt Leon Crane, propeller specialist (from Wright AF) 1Lt James B. Sibert, crew chief MSgt Richard Pompeo, and radio operator Ralph Wenz.
Over the next two hours, the crew conducted a series of routine tests until, at approximately 20,000 feet, as they were preparing to begin the third sequential test of the system, the plane went into the clouds leaving the pilots with no visual reference point. At the same time, Lt Crane later noted that the instruments failed. He also stated that the first indication of something being seriously wrong was what he termed a "feeling of high speed and centrifugal force." The plane was in a flat spin.
After two attempts at controlling the spinning plane, Crane opened the bomb bay doors and Hoskin hit the crash alarm.
Pompeo exited the plane first, followed almost immediately by Crane. According to Crane's later statement, the last time he saw Hoskin he had moved into the radio operator's compartment preparing the bail out right after Crane left. The fate of 1Lt Sibert and SSgt Wenz was unknown at the time.
When Crane's parachute opened, he stated that he saw one chute above him that eventually drifted "over a ridge." This was the last time he saw Sgt Pompeo.
The B-24 burst into flames just before it struck the ground. According to Crane, the post-crash fire burned for a day and a half.
Search parties located the wreckage in mid-March 1944. After excavating the drifted snow from the aircraft, they recovered the bodies of Sibert and Wenz. The whereabouts of Lt Hoskin was unknown. No sign was found of Sgt Pompeo even though the search and rescue teams conducted a thorough search of the area by air and on foot.
In August 2004 I made my second trip to the site. During my investigation of the wreckage, I was drawn to three items that appeared to be two male and one female parts of what were later identified as parachute harness buckles.
Based on the fact that there were parachute harness buckles in the wreckage I notified the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii about the find and sent the sample I recovered along with photographs of the buckles to their lab at Hickam AFB.
In June 2006, JPAC came to Alaska to conduct a site investigation. The archeologist heading the team looked at the information I supplied, the original investigation reports and determined that there was a very high likelihood that there were human remains at the site.
In late August 2006, I returned to the site with the JPAC team. Over the course of the next nine days we excavated the site and found a large concentration of human remains within the area that corresponded to the radio operator's position, right where Lt Crane stated he last saw Lt Hoskin.
These remains were positively identified in April 2007 as being those of Lt Harold Hoskin, the pilot of the B-24.
Lt Hoskin's funeral was held at Arlington National Cemetery on 7 September 2007. The date corresponds to exactly one year after the team returned his remains to the same hangar at Ladd Army Air Field from which he left, 63 years earlier.
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