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 pilots relatives in a moment seven decades in the making, at what would be the young lieutenants 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.
Herbs 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, Johns 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, Herbs 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 Herbs 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 Armys 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 Armys 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 Herbs relatives. He said he plans to cowrite a book about his search with Patti Herb, Michaels wife.
Wally Hood, another cousin of Herb, said he has started exchanging letters with Romer, and has no doubt Herbs 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.