A long journey home for a local World War II soldier ended Thursday with a memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery honoring his formerly lost B-24D Liberator crew. Staff Sgt. Claude G. Tyler, of Landover, and 11 others died in October 1943 when their plane crashed in Papua New Guinea, but it took more than a half-century to find their remains and bring them back to the United States. Tyler, 24, and seven other crew members had been previously buried at Arlington. Three others were buried Thursday with a memorial casket containing remains from the crash that could not be conclusively linked to any one of the fallen men.
“Meeting all the families and relatives of the rest of the crew members, it was just wonderful — it finally just made everything complete,” said Russell Gordy, Tyler’s nephew and one of his two surviving relatives.
The crew’s remains were discovered in 2003 after a Papua New Guinea man reported a possible crash site to the U.S. military. But they were not identified as the missing B-24D Liberator crew until they were exhumed in 2007.
The crew was carrying out a reconnaissance mission on shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea when it lost radio contact in bad weather. The mission was to help mount an attack on the Japanese in eastern Papua New Guinea for the eventual invasion of the Philippines.
But the plane got caught in a storm and the crew lost radio contact and never returned. Searches in the weeks that followed were fruitless, and a postwar investigation concluded in 1949 that the bodies were unrecoverable.
Gordy, who was 7 when his uncle was killed, said his family assumed the plane crashed in the water and they would never get the opportunity to say goodbye.
“When they called me a couple years ago on the phone and told me the remains of Claude Garrett Tyler had been found and it was definitely Claude Garret Tyler, that the DNA of my brother and me matched 100 percent, I don’t know, I sat and cried,” he said. “It was really overwhelming.”
Tyler was buried at Arlington last year on the 67th anniversary of the plane crash.
He was survived by his sister, Gladys Paddy, brother, Clyde Tyler, and half sister, Evelyn Marks. He is survived now by Gordy, of Huntingtown, and nephew Wayne Gordy, of Chesapeake Beach.
