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Title: 'Restored Honor': A World War II Pilot's Long Road Home
Source:
ABC News
URL Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/restored-h ... ts-long-road/story?id=31897868
Published: Jun 21, 2015
Author: ALEXANDER MALLIN
Post Date: 2015-06-21 22:06:00 by Gatlin
Keywords: None
Views: 1432
Comments: 5
It was in the middle of the burial ceremony for Lt. John W. Herb when a commercial airline roared overhead and among the dozens of family members, it was perhaps the most unlikely guest who felt the sting of nostalgia. The sound took Manfred Romer back to April 13, 1945, when as a 5-year-old he heard a plane flying just a few hundred feet over his head. He watched it catch fire before disappearing out of view and crashing close to his home in Amt Neuhaus, Germany. “There was a huge plume of smoke,” Romer told ABC News through a translator. “So this is something that ust burned in my memory.” That memory would stick with Romer until after his retirement, when he decided to return to his old home to find out what happened to that plane, and more importantly he said, the pilot inside. Just a year later, Romer would find himself in Arlington National Cemetery, standing alongside the pilot’s relatives in a moment seven decades in the making, at what would be the young lieutenant’s final resting place. “For me it is a very moving day,” Romer said. “Not just today, but all of the days that led up to today.” Herb’s story is similar to the thousands of other American soldiers still deemed “missing in action” during WW2. Because he had no wife and children, with time the family moved on. “This took me completely by surprise,” said Michael Herb, John’s cousin. “I mean, we knew of Jon, we knew his plane was lost. But we thought he was gone forever. We never thought that we would ever see him or hear of him again.” A little over a year ago, Herb’s family was entirely unaware that a German man thousands of miles away was quickly piecing an intricate puzzle together to try and locate the body of their relative. A breakthrough happened, Romer says, when he met two 85-year-old women who remembered the crash in great detail and actually arrived on the scene soon after Herb’s plane went down. The women had documented the incident, writing that they came upon the scene of the wreckage and Herb was alive. But they said he was soon shot and thrown in a shallow grave. “When there is war, many people lose their honor. Their honor is stolen from them,” Romer said. “It was my great wish to restore honor to this man.” Romer said he gathered one of his sons and several grandchildren and began scouring 50,000 square meters of forest with a metal detector. They found more than 200 pieces of the plane. He soon contacted German authorities, who reached out to the U.S. Department of Defense. In June of last year, members of the Missing Allied Air Crew Recovery Team (MAACRT) and the Army’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) accompanied Romer as he led them to the scene of the crash. The women had documented the incident, writing that they came upon the scene of the wreckage and Herb was alive. But they said he was soon shot and thrown in a shallow grave. “When there is war, many people lose their honor. Their honor is stolen from them,” Romer said. “It was my great wish to restore honor to this man.” Romer said he gathered one of his sons and several grandchildren and began scouring 50,000 square meters of forest with a metal detector. They found more than 200 pieces of the plane. He soon contacted German authorities, who reached out to the U.S. Department of Defense. In June of last year, members of the Missing Allied Air Crew Recovery Team (MAACRT) and the Army’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) accompanied Romer as he led them to the scene of the crash. “I was very emotional, and I think that I would be this emotional, to be honest with you, even if he wasn't a member of our family,” Michael said. “I think that watching this for any soldier that has given his life in the defense of the country is moving.” Romer, in his first trip ever to America, has since become close with several of Herb’s relatives. He said he plans to cowrite a book about his search with Patti Herb, Michael’s wife. Wally Hood, another cousin of Herb, said he has started exchanging letters with Romer, and has no doubt Herb’s body would never have been found without him. “[Romer] told me his dad went missing in action in Russia and was never found,” Hood said. “And he said, no family deserves that, and this guy, whoever it is, deserves to have his family find him, and that was his whole mission.”
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#1. To: Gatlin (#0)
(Edited)
FieldsOfHonor-Database.com: HERB, John William
Great supplement....thanks.
Well, we didn't have the backstory. Usually, we get the story but no Rest Of The Story. So this was a reverse from the usual fare: a Rest Of The Story with no main story. And a story about some German finding an airman's crash site seemed incomplete without knowing something about the airman and his comrades, their missions, etc. The story was light on details about Lt. Herb and focused on the German and Herb's surviving cousins who had mostly forgotten him. I noticed this about the point in the article where I was reading that the German is going to write a book with Herb's cousins' wife. That seemed a lot of detail to include when they hadn't given a paragraph to Herb's easily discoverable bio info.
I grew more curious about the P-51 and how the airman had skimmed the trees so as to rip off the air scoop for the plane's radiators. The intake clearly visible from the side: From the rear (showing where the air exits after flowing over the radiators): From what I gather, this superior radiator system was a great advance over other systems in aircraft of the era. The airman flew way too low if his air scoop could get ripped off. That would have taken contact with a large branch or tree trunk. Now we can understand a little better. He takes a hard hit from a tree by pulling up too late from a strafing run and loses his scoop and his engine starts overheating immediately, leading to loss of power, just as you lose a lot of power in a car if your engine is overheating. As a result, he couldn't gain altitude again and his engine would quit shortly from overheating. He wouldn't have seen the missing scoop himself but the other flyers would have seen it. This is a situation where your flying buddies can see you're in trouble and that it probably won't have a happy ending. And it didn't.
TC, thanks for the back story. 2nd Lt John W. Herb, thanks for your service to our nation, and may you RIP!! God Bless You!! Si vis pacem, para bellum
Servicenumber: O-511812 
Age: Not available Born: 1922, Ohio Hometown: Cuyahoga County, Ohio Family: Whalen Herb (father)
Vera (Hood) Herb (mother)Rank: Second Lieutenant Function: Pilot Regiment: - Battalion: - Division – Transport: - Company – Squadron: 368th Fighter Squadron Unit – Group: 359th Fighter Group Plane data:
(Serialnumber, MACR, etc.)Serialnumber: 44-72260
Type: P-51D
Nickname: Mary Lou
Mission: Penetration escort to Neumunster, then strafing
MACR: 13905Date of death: 13 April 1945 Status: MIA Place of death: Gudow, Germany Spot: Not available Awards: Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal, Purple Heart Gravenumber: Walls of the Missing Cemetery: American War Cemetery Margraten Biography: - Other information: 2nd Lt John W. Herb enlisted in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 4 November 1942.
On 13 April 1945 Lt Col Baccus led an escort to Gustrow followed by strafing in northern Germany. The 368th had a big day as they hit Neumünster Airfield an claimed 15 kills; four apiece going to Capt Denman, Lt Barber and Lt Herb. On one pass, Lt Herb tore the coolant scoop off his plane when he hit a tree. Northwest of Hamburg his engine quit, and while trying to belly-in, his P-51 hit a wood and exploded. He was flying "Mary Lou" on that last mission.
"At 16.30 my flight, wich consisted of Lt's Bergber Marson, Herb and myself spotted numerous enemy aircraft parked in an open space adjecent to a wooded area south of Neumunster, Germany. We made several passes on these parked e/a and destroyed twelve of them. Lt. Herb flew too close to the trees while making this attack, and tore his collant scoop off. His ship was unable to gain altitude due to this damage, so the flight headed for friendly territory. In vicinity N/W of Hamburg Lt. Herb's engine quit and he tried to crash land his ship in an open field, but approximately 30 yards away he crashed into some trees, fell to the ground and burned. I believe Lt. Herb was killed."
Lt Herb is memorialized on the Wall of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery Margraten, but on February 19, 2015, he was officially accounted for and his remains returned to the United States. Lt Herb will be interred with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on June 18, 2015.
#2. To: TooConservative (#1)
#3. To: Gatlin (#2)
#4. To: Gatlin (#2)
#5. To: TooConservative (#1)
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