Edward Zavala of Raton looks at a picture of his older sibling, Raoul, who was one of nine airmen killed in a kamikaze attack over China on Dec. 7, 1944. A federal company has been asked to disinter human remains found at the crash website from a nationwide cemetery to evaluate their DNA versus that collected from the crew members' households.
Raoul Zavala was not supposed to be on the airplane that day.

However there he remained in the morning hours of Dec. 7, 1944-- the three-year anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor-- manning the wintry radio operator's seat of a B-29 Superfortress on a 6 1/2- hour flight to Manchuria in northeast China.

The 21-year-old New Mexico native, recruited to change an ill radio man, was one of 11 appointed to the team of the Humpin' Honey, so called for its many journeys "flying the bulge" of the Himalayas. Its objective: To sign up with more than 100 B-29s based in western China for a bombing run to Japan-occupied Mukden (now Shenyang), a major munitions.

Roughly 90 bombers reached their targets the next early morning, causing damage to a munitions factory, an aircraft manufacturing plant, and some secondary targets. All but seven made it back to home.

The Humpin' Honey wasn't among them.

After dropping its bombs over the munitions plant at about 10:30 a.m., the B-29 came under heavy fire from numerous Japanese Nakajima Ki-44 fighter aircrafts. The first attack sheared off about 20 feet of the plane's left wing, sending out Zavala's plane into a tailspin. A 2nd Ki-44 rammed the airplane in midair, causing a big explosion and splitting the plane in two.

The Humpin Honey nose art was based upon a pinup woman created by Esquire artist Alberto Vargas for the publications 1944 calendar. Vargas work motivated comparable art on American military aircraft throughout World War II. (Courtesy of Huss household).
The nose section burst into flames upon crashing into farming land 10 miles outside of Mukden. The rest of the plane boiled down about 600 lawns away.

Two team members-- the best and left blister gunners-- parachuted and survived the explosion to the ground below. They were required to a detainee of war camp in Mukden, where they would spend 8 months in captivity up until completion the war.

2 others-- thought to be the radar observer and the tail gunner-- either were eliminated by the force of the surge or when their parachutes stopped working to open. Their bodies were taken away by the Japanese, never ever to be found.

Ten months later on, the American Graves Registration Service-- charged with identifying and burying those eliminated in foreign lands-- suggested that the official status of the nine airmen be changed from "missing out on" to "eliminated in action." Their remains were considered "unrecoverable.".

But that report turned out to be premature. Throughout the initial examination, according to U.S. military records, plans were made with Chinese farmers to gather any bones found at the crash website and turn them over in 30 days.

Raoul Zavala was the radio operator on the final flight of the Humpin' Honey. (Courtesy of Edward Zavala).
Today, those bone fragments-- considering that configured into three sets of human remains-- are buried in 2 graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, nicknamed the "Punchbowl" in deference to its location inside a volcanic crater 10s of countless years old.

Are they from the team of the Humpin' Honey?

That's specifically what an American university concentrating on this type of work-- with aid from the team members' next of kin-- are pushing to discover.

‘‘ I'll be

back'. Raoul Zavala was like a lot of the boys who matured in the Colfax County coal town of Dawson, house to the country's second-deadliest mine catastrophe that declared the lives of 263 males in 1913.

After finishing his sophomore year at Dawson High School, and a short stint in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps, he went to work in the Dawson mines.

Quickly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Zavala left for the West Coast and found work at a defense business, according to his more youthful sibling Edward.

In October 1942, at the age of 19, he employed in the U.S. Army Air Force. He completed basic training in California, attended radio operator school, and was appointed to the crew of a B-17 bomber.

After he had actually been in the service for a year, he came house to invest a week with his family. Edward, now 91, remembers the day his bro left Dawson for the final time.

" We were at the Raton Greyhound depot, and he took me aside and he stated, ‘‘ You understand, I'm going, however I'm going to be back,

'" Edward stated. ‘" I was weeping, and he said, ‘‘ Don't weep, don't cry.' He said, ‘ I'll be back, I …'ll be

back.' I can hear him still …". The household's last interaction with Raoul was a letter he wrote in late November, explaining his crew's Thanksgiving dinner in Calcutta, India. He couldn't state much else, Edward said, besides when a few of them fished, "I was the only one who captured one.".

A week later on, Edward's parents got a telegram from the War Department informing them that their son, a sergeant in the 770th Bombardment Squadron, 462nd Bombardment Group, had actually been declared missing out on in action.

Edward Zavala prepares to position flowers at the memorial stone of his sibling, Raoul, at Dawson Cemetery in August 2019. The stone lies at the foot of the grave of his father, Jesus, believed to be the last miner buried in the historic cemetery in 1950. (Courtesy of Nick Pappas).
For Edward, confirmation and details of his sibling's death would await another 76 years.

Recovering the fallen.

The bearer of that news was John Krueger, a Wisconsin native whose father, Charles, was the flight engineer on the Humpin' Honey's last objective.

Like Edward, John and his twin brother Bruce-- born roughly 10 days after their daddy went overseas-- knew little about the deadly flight until they were gotten in touch with in April 1999 by Sgt. Walt Huss, among the two survivors, who made it a point to visit all the team's households soon after the war.

" On his own and out of the blue, Walt next reconnected with Bruce and I when we were about 50 years old," stated John, 79, who retired as a senior federal investigator for the National Institutes of Health. "Before that we understood next to nothing of what happened on that flight.".

That started Krueger on a decades-long journey that led in July 2020 to the University of Wisconsin Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project, which works to research, recover, determine, and repatriate the remains of missing U.S. servicemen.

The project traces its roots to 2014, when the university's Biotechnology Center helped recognize the remains of a World War II soldier eliminated in the closing days of the Battle of Normandy, according to its site. Given that 2016, the task's team of academics and trainee volunteers have actually recuperated the remains of 2 others, both American fighter pilots, after investing a number of summer seasons excavating crash sites in northern France.

Unbeknownst to Krueger, the group currently was investigating the fate of the Humpin' Honey's lost crewmen, in part since John's daddy was a university graduate.

In November 2020, Krueger reached Edward and Betty Zavala by phone at their Raton house. At the time, he was attempting to secure a photo of Raoul on behalf of the university's MIA team. Later, he began sharing files and other products with the Zavalas that he had obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and other means.

" One of the unique things about the Zavalas … … is they provided me the guts to say, ‘‘ Hey, this is going to work,'" Krueger said of his first interaction with a team member's family. "That persuaded me that this wasn't simply a fixation from my perspective.".

Determining the remains.

Much of what is learnt about the Humpin' Honey's final hours can be credited to D.J. Schaefer, who signed up with the university's MIA task in February 2020 while pursuing his history degree.

Schaefer, a 29-year-old Army veteran, soon ended up being the lead researcher, working closely with Krueger to collect a number of the deceased's personnel files, locate next of kin, and confirm the precise area of the crash.

D.J. Schaefer.
Schaefer also discovered that skeletal remains were discovered at the crash website.

" None of the families knew," he stated in a telephone interview last month. "I was the first to determine this.".

While it's uncertain whether the remains are of American or Asian origin, Schaefer is positive that at least one set belongs to a team member, given that Indian currency was found at the crash website of the India-based crew. Indian and Chinese fiat money, as well as nine Indian coins, were recovered there, according to military documents.

" There is no reason why charred Indian currency would remain in Mukden," said Schaefer, who continues to lead the investigation while pursuing an academic degree in maritime archaeology at East Carolina University. "They're from our leaflets. A minimum of one without a doubt.".

Burial authority rests with federal agency.

Whether Schaefer will be shown correct remains in the hands of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense that is responsible for recovering and recognizing the remains of missing out on service members. Both the University of Wisconsin's MIA job, in December 2021, and Krueger as a next of kin, in March 2022, submitted formal demands to disinter.

In cases of commingled remains, according to the DPAA, the company needs household DNA from at least 60 percent of the missing personnel to consider disinterring at a nationwide cemetery-- or, in this instance, six of the 9 lost team members. To date, five households have actually supplied DNA, Schaefer stated, and he expects acquiring DNA from the staying families soon.

At that point, the DPAA can file a formal demand to disinter, which will be reviewed by a number of federal offices, including the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. The decision rests with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. If approved-- the procedure takes about a year-- the DPAA would get in touch with the cemetery to set up the disinterment, generally within a couple of weeks.

DNA screening and sequencing takes a lot longer: between 2 to seven years, depending on the condition of the remains, and there's no assurance of identification. In a best-case circumstance, the U.S. Army Past Conflict Repatriations Branch will notify the household of a match and make arrangements for transfer and burial-- with full military honors-- in compliance with the household's desires.

‘‘ Closure for my bro'.

If it ever gets that far, Krueger is positive that a minimum of one set of remains will be that of a missing out on crewman, offered they were found at the crash website together with Indian currency.

" I 'd enjoy it to be my dad even if I know just how much that impacted my grandfather … … However, it would imply simply as much to me … … if, in reality, we show that it's one of the other members of the team," he stated.

" So irrespective of whether it's the best person or not, my real benefit in investing all this time is the conviction this is an unfinished job that either Walt Huss or even my daddy would have desired us to complete.".

For Edward Zavala, recognition of the remains would be welcome after all these years. If they were to turn out to be those of his brother, Edward stated, they would be buried in a cemetery plot scheduled next to his own in Raton.

In any case, he stated, he is grateful to everyone involved in the University of Wisconsin's MIA project.

" I would give them a lot of credit, and I would hope that they would never ever quit that program and keep going since it has actually helped me," he stated.

" If absolutely nothing else, closure. Closure for my brother.".

Nick Pappas is a former city editor at the Albuquerque Journal. His book about Raoul Zavala's hometown, "Crosses of Iron: The Tragic Story of Dawson, New Mexico, and Its Twin Mining Disasters," will be launched by the University of New Mexico Press on Oct. 1.