Remains of WWII soldier from Detroit identified 80 years after plane was shot down

DETROIT – The remains of a World War II Detroit soldier, identified 80 years after his plane was shot down during a bombing mission, will be buried in Kansas.

On December 1, 1943, 2nd Lt. John E. McLauchlen Jr., 25, of the United States Army Air Forces, was piloting a B-24J Liberator bomber on a bombing mission from Panagarh, India, to the Insein marshalling yard, north of Rangoon, Burma. According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agencyhis plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and the left wing caught fire.

Witnesses said his plane plunged abruptly and disappeared beneath the clouds. Three enemy planes followed the plane into the clouds and nothing was heard from him again. The remains of the crew were not found or identified during the war and they were all subsequently declared missing.

In 1947, the American Grave Registration Service (AGRS) recovered the remains of eight people involved in the crash of a B-24 Liberator near Yodayadet, Burma. Local witnesses told the AGRS at the time that there were no survivors of the crash and that Japanese forces had instructed them to bury the remains in two large graves.

The remains found in these graves were known under the unknown names X-505A, X-505B, X-505C, X-505D, X-505E, X-505F, -H). They could not be identified at the time and were buried as unknown at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (NMCP), Honolulu, Hawaii, also known as Punchbowl.

In October 2020, after receiving an exhumation request from the family, the DPAA exhumed the remains from the cemetery and sent them to the DPAA laboratory for analysis. Scientists used anthropological analysis and physical evidence to identify the remains. The Armed Forces Forensic Pathology System has used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis.

McLauchlen's remains were identified and he was located by DPAA on January 25, 2024. McLauchlen's remains will be interred on July 8 at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery in Kansas. Belden-Larkin Funeral Home will conduct funeral services following the interment.