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Pacific Historian
Morlock: WWII aviator's long-lost remains to rest in Tucson BLAKE
MORLOCK Tucson Citizen
Tucson never met Hyman Stiglitz. Bad luck and the German
Luftwaffe saw to that. Tech. Sgt. Stiglitz might have been discharged
from the U.S. Army Air Corps and might have settled with his sister and
parents in Tucson. Or he might have done as his brother did and found
his own way in his own place of American terra firma. Instead,
Stiglitz's first trip to Tucson will be his last - and it will never
end. His remains will arrive Saturday after having been entombed for 61
years in the wreckage of his B-24 Liberator bomber south of Berlin. The
Fort Huachuca Honor Guard will meet his casket, and he will be buried
next to his parents and sister at Evergreen Mortuary. His post-mortem
journey to Tucson required the luck of salvage hunters, the skill of a
forensics team and the will of a niece afraid of needles. It starts at
his end on July 7, 1944. Stiglitz's crew had a reputation for getting
shot up during missions. It was known as "the hard-luck crew of the
hard-luck squadron of the hard-luck group" in the armadas of U.S.
bombers flying out of eastern England during World War II, according to
his unit's Web site. Nine days after D-Day, the crew safely landed
because Stiglitz dangled on a small catwalk in an open bomb bay 20,000
feet up and released bombs fused to detonate that hadn't dropped as
planned. It bought them three weeks, during which Stiglitz's crew
enjoyed one more seven-day pass in London. The day they died, hard luck
struck again and left his group of Liberators unprotected by U.S.
fighters busy elsewhere in the sky. The German fighter pilots attacked.
The crew was doomed. They fell to earth so violently, no one could
crawl out escape hatches and parachute to safety. The plane crashed into
the German countryside. After the war, U.S. recovery crews scavenged
Germany, looking for missing air crews, but Stiglitz's crew had gone
down in the Soviet sector, which later became known as East Germany.
Americans were not allowed to search freely during the days of the Cold
War, said Maj. Brian DeSantis, spokesman for the U.S. Joint POW/MIA
Accounting Command in Hawaii. In 2001, after reunification, German
wreck hunters heard about the crash site and called German authorities,
who contacted the U.S. military. The Accounting Command took over the
crash site in November 2002, DeSantis said. One of the investigators
was forensic anthropologist Greg Berg, a University of Arizona graduate.
The challenge immediately was to sort out the remains after the violence
of the crash in 1944, Berg said. "You end up with commingled remains
mixing plane, equipment, ammunition and remains all together," Berg
said. The problem in identifying the MIA soldiers from World War II is
the backtracking needed to find the next of kin with contact information
dating to the 1940s. Some 78,000 U.S. troops are still MIA from World
War II. The Stiglitz family lived in Boston at the time its son was
shot down. It subsequently moved to Chicago before settling in Tucson in
1959. It took five years to sort through the remains, get DNA matches
and identify the dead. Stiglitz and seven other crew members were
identified. Sorting the remains meant forensics experts needed
mitochondrial DNA, unchanged from mother to daughter, Berg said. They
needed a female relative. From that they could confirm his identity.
Stiglitz never met his niece Casonti McClure, but she proved to be his
only living female relative. They needed her DNA, but that meant facing
her fear of needles and blood. She agreed and gave the blood, but it
didn't go well. "It was a big needle with a big bag of blood," said
McClure, a high school dance teacher in Tucson, the daughter of Berta
Wright. "I passed out." At first she heard it wasn't a match. Her
cousin in San Diego later told her she was a match. "Uncle Hymie" was
coming home - or some place like it. McClure's father, Adolph Wright,
said Stiglitz was a fine violinist and a kind man. "He was an artistic
type," Wright said. "He kind of kept to himself." The family went on
without Stiglitz, whom it long ago stopped talking about. The dead can
get left behind as the living go on with their lives. He'll be buried
next to the people who knew him best. His sister, Berta Wright, made a
name for herself as owner of a chain of art shops. His mother, Anna
Stiglitz, popular in the local Jewish community, was known as a
prodigious fundraiser. The Tucson media recognized her volunteer work at
Handmaker Foundation. They lived into their 80s. Hymie died at 25
after a final bout with hard luck.
MORLOCK Tucson Citizen
Tucson never met Hyman Stiglitz. Bad luck and the German
Luftwaffe saw to that. Tech. Sgt. Stiglitz might have been discharged
from the U.S. Army Air Corps and might have settled with his sister and
parents in Tucson. Or he might have done as his brother did and found
his own way in his own place of American terra firma. Instead,
Stiglitz's first trip to Tucson will be his last - and it will never
end. His remains will arrive Saturday after having been entombed for 61
years in the wreckage of his B-24 Liberator bomber south of Berlin. The
Fort Huachuca Honor Guard will meet his casket, and he will be buried
next to his parents and sister at Evergreen Mortuary. His post-mortem
journey to Tucson required the luck of salvage hunters, the skill of a
forensics team and the will of a niece afraid of needles. It starts at
his end on July 7, 1944. Stiglitz's crew had a reputation for getting
shot up during missions. It was known as "the hard-luck crew of the
hard-luck squadron of the hard-luck group" in the armadas of U.S.
bombers flying out of eastern England during World War II, according to
his unit's Web site. Nine days after D-Day, the crew safely landed
because Stiglitz dangled on a small catwalk in an open bomb bay 20,000
feet up and released bombs fused to detonate that hadn't dropped as
planned. It bought them three weeks, during which Stiglitz's crew
enjoyed one more seven-day pass in London. The day they died, hard luck
struck again and left his group of Liberators unprotected by U.S.
fighters busy elsewhere in the sky. The German fighter pilots attacked.
The crew was doomed. They fell to earth so violently, no one could
crawl out escape hatches and parachute to safety. The plane crashed into
the German countryside. After the war, U.S. recovery crews scavenged
Germany, looking for missing air crews, but Stiglitz's crew had gone
down in the Soviet sector, which later became known as East Germany.
Americans were not allowed to search freely during the days of the Cold
War, said Maj. Brian DeSantis, spokesman for the U.S. Joint POW/MIA
Accounting Command in Hawaii. In 2001, after reunification, German
wreck hunters heard about the crash site and called German authorities,
who contacted the U.S. military. The Accounting Command took over the
crash site in November 2002, DeSantis said. One of the investigators
was forensic anthropologist Greg Berg, a University of Arizona graduate.
The challenge immediately was to sort out the remains after the violence
of the crash in 1944, Berg said. "You end up with commingled remains
mixing plane, equipment, ammunition and remains all together," Berg
said. The problem in identifying the MIA soldiers from World War II is
the backtracking needed to find the next of kin with contact information
dating to the 1940s. Some 78,000 U.S. troops are still MIA from World
War II. The Stiglitz family lived in Boston at the time its son was
shot down. It subsequently moved to Chicago before settling in Tucson in
1959. It took five years to sort through the remains, get DNA matches
and identify the dead. Stiglitz and seven other crew members were
identified. Sorting the remains meant forensics experts needed
mitochondrial DNA, unchanged from mother to daughter, Berg said. They
needed a female relative. From that they could confirm his identity.
Stiglitz never met his niece Casonti McClure, but she proved to be his
only living female relative. They needed her DNA, but that meant facing
her fear of needles and blood. She agreed and gave the blood, but it
didn't go well. "It was a big needle with a big bag of blood," said
McClure, a high school dance teacher in Tucson, the daughter of Berta
Wright. "I passed out." At first she heard it wasn't a match. Her
cousin in San Diego later told her she was a match. "Uncle Hymie" was
coming home - or some place like it. McClure's father, Adolph Wright,
said Stiglitz was a fine violinist and a kind man. "He was an artistic
type," Wright said. "He kind of kept to himself." The family went on
without Stiglitz, whom it long ago stopped talking about. The dead can
get left behind as the living go on with their lives. He'll be buried
next to the people who knew him best. His sister, Berta Wright, made a
name for herself as owner of a chain of art shops. His mother, Anna
Stiglitz, popular in the local Jewish community, was known as a
prodigious fundraiser. The Tucson media recognized her volunteer work at
Handmaker Foundation. They lived into their 80s. Hymie died at 25
after a final bout with hard luck.
