Pacific Wrecks Forum

New information could help bring soldier's body home
Sunday, July 08, 2007
By DAVID FERRARA
Staff Reporter

The sudden telephone call roused memories and sorrow that hadn't faded after more than six decades.

The voice on the other end told Dorothy McVay Carstens that her brother, Lt. Woodie Lackland McVay Jr., could soon have a proper burial in Mobile.

"I'm so glad that we now know what happened, and he will be brought home," the Daphne resident recently told the Press-Register. "It's just been a miracle."

The squadron leader's single-passenger F6F Hellcat was shot down as he strafed seaplanes on Feb. 22, 1944, somewhere over Saipan, in the South Pacific.

He survived the attack, with a broken arm and a broken leg, but was captured by the Japanese. Military officials told his family in Alabama that he was "missing in action."

But he had died shortly after the crash, according to a World War II researcher, and apparently because of a mix-up with paperwork, his body was buried as "unknown."

The military officially declared McVay dead two years after he went missing.

For 63 years, no one knew the whereabouts of the body.

His parents died wondering. His widow, the former Annie Ruth Heidelberg, whom he had met at the Fairhope pier, remarried about five years after the crash and created a new life in Bay Minette without him. He never met his granddaughter. He only saw his daughter the first 10 days of her life, and she died at age 51 in 1995.


Buried in Hawaii?

But now family members and an amateur historian -- the one who called Carstens in June 2006 -- say they believe McVay is buried in a grave in Hawaii. They've been working for the past year to prove it and to have the body exhumed and buried in a family plot in Mobile's Pine Crest Cemetery, his family said.

His sister and his widow, who remarried and became Annie Ruth Owen, still grieve.

Owen said she tries to divert her thoughts whenever she thinks about him, because that's the easiest way to move forward.

"You don't get over something like that -- ever," she said.

The couple never talked about where he would be buried if something should happen -- he was only 26. But he loved Alabama. His body should be home, she said, with family.

"I believe in life after death," Owen said. "I believe that the soul leaves the body and goes to be with the Lord. But you feel like he's there, anyway. Rather than him being far away, it just makes you feel better to have him nearby."

Ted Darcy, a Vietnam veteran from Massachusetts, has spent years tracking the remains of World War II soldiers buried in graves without their names. McVay would be No. 33, and Darcy said he's close to locating at least eight other World War II soldiers from Alabama whose bodies were never returned to their families.

If Darcy's research proves correct, McVay's body could be returned to Mobile for a funeral service by the end of the year.

But there's also a chance that McVay's family could wait even longer.


Relative frustrated

McVay's granddaughter, Elizabeth Huff of Birmingham, has worked closely with Darcy ever since she heard the news.

She said she's grown frustrated with the "bureaucracy" and "red tape." She wants peace for her "Grandpa," a man she grew to love through stories about his life.

A burial, she said, "is closure for my grandmother and my great-aunt. For me, it's a new discovery. I got to know a little bit more about how he lived and a whole lot more about how he died."

Last month, she e-mailed U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby's Birmingham office in the hope that he could facilitate the exhumation. But another month could pass before Huff gets an answer, according to Shelby's spokeswoman, Laura Henderson.

"I'm frustrated because this could've happened a while ago and it hasn't," Huff said. "Now I'm wondering whether it is going to happen."

Even if McVay's body is exhumed, the DNA records won't be finalized for months, possibly a year, according to Air Force Staff Sgt. Elizabeth Feeney with Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) on Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

Just after Darcy's discovery, the organization received Carstens' DNA sample. But Feeney said officials have no record of a request for an exhumation. Darcy said he is working to obtain files from the U.S. Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., that he will send to JPAC.

Darcy thinks McVay should still be wearing his uniform. According to the autopsy report, he had his name stamped on his underwear.


Lost near Saipan

The military file on McVay is slim.

"We know that he was lost near Saipan in 1944," Feeney said. "But really, that's the only information we have on him right now."

McVay was 5 feet 11 inches tall with brown hair, fair skin, blue-green eyes and a constellation of freckles, according to his sister. People would ask if they were twins, she said, though he was two years older. He graduated from Murphy High School and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Spring Hill College. He loved to spend his summers in the woods of Salitpa.

Darcy said he first received McVay's autopsy report a couple of years ago.

Somehow, the original report had been mixed in with classified documents on an investigation into war crimes. A New Zealand researcher had unsealed the file and sent the autopsy report to Darcy.

Darcy scrolled the giant database he created more than a decade ago, found McVay's name and traced his body to the Punchbowl National Cemetery in Oahu, Hawaii.

Darcy said he doesn't contact family members until he's "99 percent sure" he can locate a body. He believes McVay rests under one of 10 grave markers in the military veterans cemetery in Oahu.

"One of them is no doubt going to be McVay," Darcy said, explaining that the autopsy report fuels his confidence. "It's one of the better cases I've ever worked."

Once he verified his research, he called Carstens.

She thought back to 1944 and the first time she heard her brother was missing.


'The hardest thing'

Carstens had been working in Washington, D.C., for the State Department at the time. For two months she hounded the Department of Defense, in what would be a futile search for answers. Eventually, she moved back home with her parents in Mobile and lived in relative isolation.

"I didn't go out for six months," she said. "It was the hardest thing I've ever gone through, and I've gone through a lot of different things. It's something you just don't get over."

Carstens thought about the brother she loved.

Although her memory sometimes fades these days, the 87-year-old remembers her brother fondly: The summers they spent crabbing on either side of Mobile Bay, where they learned to swim; his passion for the outdoors; his pet guinea pigs, pigeons and doves; how eager he was to fight for his country.

"You couldn't help but love him," Carstens said.

Their parents, Lottie Haynes McVay and W.L. McVay Sr., were devastated when he disappeared.

"We always kept hoping something would turn up," Carstens said. "Nobody seemed to know at that time what had happened."

He "paid the ultimate sacrifice," Huff said.

"I want good to come of this from a standpoint of accountability ... and to have him be honored," she said. "I think that every American soldier deserves that. The cruel reality is there are so many families who didn't know what happened to their loved ones and still don't know."

McVay would've turned 90 this December. He may not be buried in the red Alabama soil by his birthday. But after 63 years of lost records, mysteries and tears, his family will work until he's home.

Lt. McVay's family needs help to bring hero home
Sunday, July 29, 2007

The body of the Navy fighter pilot is out there, in a lonely grave for unknown warriors, waiting to be brought home to Alabama so his family can honor him and tell him goodbye.

This 26-year-old husband and father was undeniably a hero, in the best tradition of our heroes. In the best tradi- tion of the brave men and women who give their lives for freedom.

They give their lives so I can write this column. So you can read it on a Sunday morning.

The young pilot was a squadron leader, and he often took the most dangerous assignments for himself. His single-passenger plane crashed while he strafed enemy aircraft on a crucial mission for his country.

His family never forgot, but his government apparently did.

Lt. Woodie L. McVay of Mobile didn't fly missions in a war of ambiguity. He fought in the Pacific during World War II, taking off from the aircraft carrier Yorktown. His plane was lost over Saipan in 1944, and his family was told only that he was "missing in action."

Last year, they were stunned to learn otherwise.

McVay's body was recovered from a shallow grave by the U.S. government a few months after he was shot down. He was identified, autopsied and then somehow, carelessly - shamefully - lost. McVay's family never was told.

Then two men, Ted Darcy and Ray Emory, who research the war dead, obtained McVay's autopsy report and located his grave. This is what Darcy and Emory do - they find unknown World War II dead, identify them and return them to their homes for proper burial. They want the same for McVay, but a mountain of government red tape is blocking the way.

That's where Birmingham's Elizabeth Huff comes in. Huff is McVay's only granddaughter; her mother (McVay's daughter) died years ago, but her grandmother (McVay's wife) and great-aunt (McVay's sister) still are alive and living in Mobile. They're both 87 years old.

Huff is frustrated, though, and for good reason. Not only was the family told for more than 60 years that McVay was MIA when he wasn't, but now there's also seemingly endless delays in getting the needed files, including identifying dental records, from the government.

The latest word is that it'll take at least 24 weeks and cost $28 for each file. Six months may not sound long after 63 years, but it may be too long for McVay's widow and sister.

"It's ridiculous to find out that your grandfather was positively identified by the Army, then placed in an unknown grave, and now, 63 years later, I'm having to get these records to prove that so we can bring him home," Huff says. "It's not even ridiculous. It's an atrocity."

Like her grandfather, Huff, wife of Jefferson County Family Court presiding Circuit Judge Brian Huff, is on a crucial mission now. She's learned far more than she ever wanted about the federal government's endless bureaucracy.

There are thousands of other World War II dead who could be identified, too, Huff says, "if the military had cared enough to go back and get the bodies."

Huff doesn't hide her anger. "I think if the American people knew this was going on, they wouldn't think this would be tolerable," she says. "It's not right. This precipitates distrust" in the government.

Huff continues: "What's frustrating is that no one seems to care. Senators have been contacted about other cases. Ex-presidents have been contacted. Nobody wants to deal with this. They want to keep it buried. Somebody might say, `That happened years ago; what does it matter?' It matters to the families. It makes a world of difference."

Huff, too, is calling for help from Washington. She's been in touch with Sens. Richard Shelby's and Jeff Sessions' offices. She also has brought in Reps. Spencer Bachus, R-Vestavia Hills; Artur Davis, D-Birmingham; and Jo Bonner, R-Mobile.

If they will get together and speak for this Alabama hero and this Alabama family, McVay will come home, sooner rather than later.

Huff says her grandfather was "misplaced, then left like some unimportant discard, because it was inconvenient (to recover him). People say it was war, that they didn't have computers back then, but that's not acceptable. This is a human being who served this country, and everyone who serves should be honored and brought home.

"Today, they do that," Huff says. "Today, their families can have closure."

Our members of Congress boast they provide strong constituent service, and they usually do. How about now, this time? Then McVay's family can give him what the government wouldn't: a proper funeral for a fallen hero. Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an editorial writer and editor of the Sunday Commentary section for The News. E-mail: jkennedy@bhamnews.com.