The remains of a World War II U.S. pilot whose aircraft was shot down in 1944 have been identified after a decadeslong effort to bring the service member home.
Eugene Shauvin, 25, from Spokane, Washington, was accounted for on March 2 after previous attempts to locate his remains at the crash site in Belgium were unsuccessful, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Tuesday.
Efforts to locate Shauvin’s remains were renewed by his daughter, Linda, who was only 3 years old when her father was deployed, after she contacted the Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii in 1999 to say she had evidence that her father’s remains were at the crash site.
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Shauvin was killed on Sept. 17, 1944, when the plane he was piloting, a C-47 Skytrain, was shot down en route to the Netherlands to drop 11 paratroopers. Six paratroopers on the plane were able to bail out of the plane, but Shauvin, along with three other crew members and five paratroopers, died in the crash, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said.
Eight service members’ bodies were located just a few days after the crash by local residents. By 1951, the U.S. military had identified and accounted for everyone involved in the crash except for Shauvin, who was declared “non-recoverable” on Oct. 29, the agency said.
In 2003, a U.S. recovery team located the cockpit at the site but didn’t find Shauvin’s remains and recommended no further excavation. After Linda pushed the laboratory to reconsider its recommendation in 2016, it was determined that there was “sufficient” evidence to support additional excavation upon assessing the 2003 reports.
It took three years for officials to complete a “complex series of negotiations with host-nation authorities, to gain access, permits, and mitigate environmental challenges at the site,” which was further delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last spring, a U.S. recovery team was sent to excavate the site, where it found human remains that were later sent off for an anthropological analysis that confirmed they belonged to Shauvin.
“When we say, ‘No one is left behind,’ we truly mean it. Our country will do whatever it takes, send the right people with the right technology and right ability to find them, bring them home where they belong, and allow their families to close this incredible chapter in their lives,” said Howard Mariteragi, a life support investigator, in a news release last June.
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Shauvin, who was recorded on the Walls of the Missing at the Netherlands American Cemetery along with others missing from World War II, will have a rosette placed next to his name to show he has been accounted for, the agency said.
The lieutenant’s long journey home will come to an end this year as he is set to be buried in his hometown in July, according to the agency.
