USAAF Pilot's remains identified in Germany

[Kyt]

Ky. WW II pilot's remains identified in Germany - State - Kentucky.com

The remains of a Western Kentucky fighter pilot who was shot down during World War II 63 years ago have been found and identified in Germany.

Second Lt. Howard C. “Cliff” Enoch Jr. of Marion in Crittenden County, will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery on Sept. 22, according to the Kentucky Department of Veterans Affairs.

Enoch, a P-51 fighter pilot with the Air Force's 368th Fighter Squadron, died on March 19, 1945, when he crashed, apparently after shooting it out with a German plane. Enoch's remains were not found until 2006. His son, who was born three months after his death, spent most of his life not knowing exactly what had happened.

“For 63 years, I had no reason to believe I would ever find out what happened to my father,” Howard C. Enoch III of Framingham, Mass., told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “It's been remarkable.”

In an almost identical case last year, Lexington's Wayne Wells learned that the remains of his father had been found in Germany where his B-24 bomber was shot down in June 1944. Wells had spent his life thinking that his father, Lt. Millard C. Wells Jr., had crashed into the North Sea.

Enoch was flying a mission over Germany when he engaged a German Messerschmitt Me-110 fighter about 20 miles east of Leipzig, near the village of Doberschutz, the state VA department said. Both planes apparently went down in flames, according to information the Enoch family has received.

The crash site became part of the Soviet zone after the war, precluding recovery of any remains.

In 2004, a team from the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command surveyed the area and found aircraft wreckage. Two years later, another team recovered human remains. On Wednesday, the Department of Defense announced that the remains have been identified using DNA samples provided by members of the lieutenant's mother's family.

A few of Enoch's relatives still live in Marion. R.C. Hamilton, a second cousin, recalled Wednesday that he and Enoch played together as boys. Enoch graduated from Marion High School in 1942.

“He was kind of a small guy,” Hamilton said, “but a little older than me.”

Enoch briefly attended the University of Cincinnati, then joined the Air Force about November 1942. Hamilton became a soldier himself, fought as an infantryman in Germany and briefly was a prisoner of war. He didn't learn of Enoch's disappearance until he came home from the war.

“His mother, Maddie Enoch, just refused to believe that he had died, and held out for a long time that he was in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere,” Hamilton said.

Enoch's wife, Margarete Wylie Enoch, eventually remarried, and when her son was old enough, she told him that his father had disappeared in the war.

Howard Enoch III didn't know the full story until he was informed last year that remains thought to be his father's had been found.

Enoch told The Associated Press he has been trying to learn more about the father he never knew, and to explain the story to his two young daughters, ages 8 and 6.

“I'm just so proud of him and what he did for his country,” Enoch told the AP.

Gov. Steve Beshear said Wednesday that he will order U.S. and Kentucky flags to be lowered to half-staff at all state government buildings Sept. 22, the date when Lt. Howard Enoch's remains are interred at Arlington.

A memorial service is scheduled at the United Methodist Church in Marion on Oct. 12.

[liverpool annie]

Originally Posted by Kyt

Ky. WW II pilot's remains identified in Germany - State - Kentucky.com

Welcome in out of the cold Enoch !

Jennifer Harper The Washington Times

His life ended in the skies over eastern Germany six decades ago.

Second Lt. Howard C. Enoch Jr. was 19, a Kentucky patriot with a cheerful grin - a fighter pilot who had been in the U.S. Army Air Corps less than a year. He took off in his P-51D Mustang from a British air base one early spring, never to return. German planes had found the lone pilot; his aircraft went down on March 19, 1945.

Back home, his wife waited. She was 17, with a child six months along. But her husband was lost, never to know the son and namesake born that summer, the plane declared unrecoverable.

And no wonder. The wreckage was scattered over a countryside that was to fall under control of the communists who welcomed few outsiders behind the Iron Curtain, even on heartfelt missions.

But the American military is not wont to leave their boys behind.

Howard Enoch is coming home 63 years later. The Defense Department announced Wednesday that his remains had been recovered, identified and would be buried with full military honorsat Arlington National Cemetery in September.

[Antipodean Andy]

Excellent news. Thanks K and A for your posts.

[Kyt]

Ky. pilot killed in WWII Germany finally buried in Arlington | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal

As the soldiers in their dress blues marched off, Howard Enoch III stood yesterday at his father's graveside, clutching the folded American flag that had covered the casket.

For six decades, Enoch's father, 2nd Lt. Howard "Cliff" Enoch Jr. of Marion, Ky., had been one of the missing of World War II, lost in action over Nazi Germany.

Now Lt. Enoch finally was at rest on American soil.

He was interred yesterday at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from the nation's capital, as his 63-year-old son, born three months after his death, looked on.

"For me, it is a dream come true, because now I have a place where I know my father is," Enoch said after the service. "It's a gift to know that you know where someone is, and they're resting in peace."

Lt. Enoch, of the U.S. Army Air Forces, was 20 when his fighter, a P-51D Mustang, was shot down March 19, 1945, during a battle with enemy planes east of Leipzig. The fighter plane crashed near the village of Doberschutz, Germany.

The Soviet Union occupied eastern Germany after the war. The crash site was not found until 2004, and the remains were not recovered for another two years.

Last year, scientists from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory identified the remains as those of Lt. Enoch.

At Arlington yesterday, full honors for the fallen flier included a horse-drawn caisson, a full Army band unit, an escort platoon, a flyover by two T-6 Texan II aircraft, a traditional 21-gun salute by a seven-man firing party and a lone bugler playing taps.

Army Chaplain Maj. David Baum led the graveside service. In a prayer, Baum asked God to "cause us always to remember that what we have was bought at a terrible price."

Later, kneeling, Baum presented the flag on Lt. Enoch's casket to his son, then stood and saluted.

Sitting with Enoch at the grave site were his wife, Lynda, and their two daughters, 9-year-old Emily, and 6-year-old Abigail. They live in Framingham, Mass., where Enoch directs The E. Paul Robsham Jr. Theater Arts Center at Boston College.

Also at the service were Howard Enoch III's half sisters, Jane Marie Fuller and Patricia Louise Larson, both of Hopkinsville, Ky.

The family -- who met with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell after the service -- was accompanied by friends from Kentucky and members of the 359th Fighter Squadron, Lt. Enoch's squadron.

"I thought the ceremony was absolutely magnificent -- everything about it was absolutely the best," Enoch said. "I think my dad was really very, very much honored."

His father, he said, "would have been very flattered and wondered what all the fuss was about over some guy from a small town in Kentucky."

Back in his home state, flags were ordered flown at half staff in his honor by order of Gov. Steve Beshear.

After not knowing for so long what happened to his father, Enoch praised the efforts of strangers who have made it their lives' work to find the missing and return them.

"Before this," Enoch said, "I always thought of my father as a young man, sitting in a beautiful pasture in Germany, waiting for someone to bring him home -- and that is what happened."

[Kyt]

Howard Clifton Enoch, Jr., Second Lieutenant, United States Army Air Forces