Two weeks after he left Orange County for World War II, Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Ray Packard took off in his P-38 Lightning fighter on a bombing mission over German-occupied France. It took him 64 years to return home.
Packard's plane was among 11 shot down Aug. 25, 1944, when their squadron was overwhelmed in a dogfight with 80 German fighters over Beauvais, a rural area north of Paris. Five of the pilots survived and eluded capture. Two were taken prisoner. The remains of three pilots listed as missing in action were eventually recovered.
The fate of 20-year-old Packard remained a mystery.
"I was 8 years old when my parents got a call in the middle of the night saying my Uncle Ray was missing," said Ron Packard, 72, a nephew who grew up in Orange County and now lives in Lake Havasu City, Ariz. "It hit my family like a thunderstorm. It weighed on my dad significantly."
In August, another phone call from the Army came out of the blue and rekindled those emotions. The remains of Ron Packard's uncle had been found and would be returned to the United States.
The efforts made to find and repatriate missing troops from the Vietnam War are widely recognized. Of the more than 2,600 troops missing in action at the war's end, the remains of 896 have been recovered, the Defense Department says.
Far less known is the work that has quietly gone on for decades to repatriate the missing from World War II. The number of open cases is staggering -- more than 74,000 across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific.
"When I first came to work for this agency, that's all I thought it was -- seeking remains from Vietnam," said Larry Greer, a former Air Force colonel who is director of public affairs for the Pentagon's POW/Missing Personnel Office. "That's only a small part of the picture."
The jungles of islands in the Pacific hide countless downed planes from World War II. Across Europe, farmers plowing fields or developers cutting new roads routinely stumble upon war remains or other evidence -- a scrap of metal stamped with a serial number, for instance -- that leads U.S. military archaeologists to excavate an area.
When the war ended, battlefields in Europe and the Pacific were searched for missing troops. About 79,000 positive identifications were made at forensic laboratories in Germany and Japan between 1945 and 1951, when the trail turned cold.
