WWII Hero Returns Home: Remains of Livermore Airman, Missing for Decades, Identified and Set for 2025 Commemoration

The Bay Area takes a solemn yet relieved breath as Second Lieutenant Thomas V. Kelly Jr., a son of Livermore, returns home after being lost in WWII for 80 years. His remains, found off Papua New Guinea’s coast, have now been identified, bringing closure to his family after a long search by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and Project Recover, according to aKTVU report.

Back on March 11, 1944, Kelly’s B-24 bomber “Heaven Can Wait” met its fate, set ablaze and ultimately sucked beneath the waves by Japanese anti-aircraft fire. This sequence of tragic events has echoed through the decades as a family’s unanswered call. Despite exhaustive searches post-war, the American Graves Registration Service resigned in 1950, designating Kelly and his crew as non-recoverable, a detail released by theDefense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Yet, refusing to let the story end there, Kelly’s relatives, spurred by a drive that outlasted years, partnered with Dr. Scott Althaus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and took up the mantle of researchers to unearth their lost airman.

Thanks to this joint endeavor, advanced technology such as underwater robots and sonar scans led Project Recover to the watery wreckage in 2017, the critical clue in an 11-day search that spanned 27 square kilometers. It dived over 200 feet below, according toKTVU. The DPAA’s underwater recovery operation in 2023 retrieved human remains alongside personal and aircraft artifacts, which paved the way for accurate identification using dental, DNA, and anthropological analyses.

“We ve come to read his letters and understand more about the memories that we do have to fill the gaps in our knowledge of him. We know that he was a young man who was very excited to serve his country and who was doing exactly what he wanted to do,” Scott Althaus, Kelly Jr.’s cousin, reflected in an interview withKTVU. Althaus also noted that the find is not merely a familial triumph but a moment of collective remembrance for the Livermore community and beyond, asserting, “this is somebody who served us all, and he s finally going to be coming home.”

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