There were no small missions for the Tulsamerican, and the Battle of the Bulge was likely its biggest yet. Like 951 other B-24 Liberator bombers, the Tulsamerican had come a long way—the plane had been the very last one to roll off the line at Tusla, Oklahoma, paid for out of the plant worker's own pockets. On a cloudy day unfit for flight on December 16, the Tulsamerican was sent deep into German territory to bomb fuel refineries near the Polish border, leading a squad of six bombers.



Luftwaffe planes swarmed the bombers before they could reach the target. Three were shot down, but not before a few Nazi fighters went down as well. For the barely surviving Tulsamerican, the choices in the air were grim. The only hope was an emergency landing on the small island of Vis off the coast of Croatia.

Before he was the pilot of the Tulsamerican, Lieutenant Eugene Ford had been a mechanic. He likely knew what sort of miracle it would take for a proper landing. The engines gave out. The plane crashed into the water before it ever got to Vis. Seven out of the ten crewmen aboard survived. Ford, flight engineer Charles E. Priest, and navigator Russell C. Landry were never found.



Until now. The story of how Ford’s remains were eventually recovered airs tonight, November 7, on PBS in Nova’s “Last B-24,” about the Tulsamerican and other attempts to recover the remains of other U.S. veterans:

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The United States first began accounting for those missing in action after the Vietnam War. As years went on, these efforts started to include the Korean War in 1996 and World War II. In 2015, the government consolidated its disparate efforts into the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the DPAA.



In 2017, Kelly McKeague, a former engineer, came to the DPAA after 34 years in the Navy with a mission to keep an agency with deep emotional stakes free of bloat. He now serves as the agency's director.



“If we don’t come to this work with a healthy sense of appreciation of the emotional intelligence aspect of this,” he tells Popular Mechanics, “then we’re going to fail. Or at least not be as effective as we could be… This is a generational mission in scope. Time doesn’t matter. Family matters.”

The Tulsamerican was first found by an amateur diver in 2010 on the ocean floor, off the coast of Vis. One of the first partners the DPAA found for the Tulsamerican project was Dr. Brendan Foley, an American in southern Sweden and underwater archaeologist at Lund University, who’s spent much of his career diving into ancient shipwrecks. The relative proximity of Lt. Ford’s crash struck a chord with Foley, who also happens to be a lifelong World War II aviation aficionado. “I was as excited for going out to the Tulsamerican job as I was for any job I’ve ever done in underwater archaeology in ancient wrecks.”

Vis has changed radically from its battle-scarred days. After the war, then-President Tito turned the island into a permanent military base. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, though, the island has turned to tourism. But what Foley remembers is the heat. “It was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit every day. We were in a big gray metal box—that’s what the ship was. We were sweating like crazy.”

Amid the unrelenting heat, bad weather, and working in one-hour shifts to account for decompression sickness, Foley and his team had a month to find clues that might lead to any remains of soldiers from the Tulsamerican. On their third week, they arrived at the moment of truth.



“The parachute canopy was pinned under one of the propeller blades, right next to the cockpit area. The DPAA told us, ‘You gotta move that parachute—that’s where you often find remains.' But the problem was, this was a historic monument and the Croatians didn’t want us to stir the wreckage very much. So we had to get special permission to disturb the parachute.”

Painstakingly and with the help of a small, remotely operated vehicle, the team began to uncover Lt. Ford’s remains. Foley describes the experience of seeing the remains of Lt. Ford, who he could identify by his uniform and location:



“[It was] a moment unlike any other I’d had under water. Because I knew who the individuals aboard the plane were, I had read their personal files, we’d seen their pictures. We’d watched the interview with the last surviving crewman.



... So I said ‘Rest easy, young lieutenant. We’re going to take care of you. We’re going to bring you home.’ And then we did.”

Lt. Ford will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery alongside the ashes of someone he never met in life: his son, Richard William Ford, who died in Vietnam.

The intensity of the feeling that Foley, Short, and the entire team felt through the entire mission is one that makes sense to Director McKeague. “We always say, we think this defines as a nation,” McKeague tells Popular Mechanics. “Here we are, 70 years later, where we are actively pursuing making this right. We send men and women off to war. It’s our obligation, should they go missing, to be brought back home.”

Nova’s “Last B-24,” about the Tulsamerican and other DPAA cases, will debut on PBS on Wednesday, November 7.

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