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A Missouri mystery from World War II is cleared up
By STEVE ROCK
The Kansas City Star
More than 60 years after his disappearance, Staff Sgt. Norman L. Nell finally will be memorialized.
Nell, of Tarkio, Mo., was only 21 when he disappeared in April 1944 during a World War II mission over New Guinea. He was a U.S. Army crewman on a B-24 Liberator, and his plane was altering course in bad weather and disappeared without a trace — until the wreckage was found in 2001.
Remains of the 10 crewmen had never been identified.
Until now.
The U.S. Department of Defense recently announced that remains of the 10 crew members have finally been identified.
“Everyone always wondered what happened,” Larry Schreiner, a second cousin of Nell’s, said Tuesday by phone from his home in Florida. “Now we finally have some closure.”
That was hard to come by in the weeks and months and years after Nell’s disappearance, so much so that — to Schreiner’s knowledge — the family never had a funeral.
“They didn’t know if he went down in the jungle, they didn’t know if he went down in the sea, they didn’t know anything,” Schreiner said. “But they always had hope that he was alive.”
Hope faded, however, and Nell’s family had to move on. His father died in 1948, Schreiner said, and his mother died in 2002 at age 104. Nell was an only child and was unmarried, according to Schreiner.
So Schreiner will “absolutely” be in Arlington, Va., in late June when Nell is honored with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. “It’s what his mother wanted,” Schreiner said.
According to the Department of Defense, Nell’s crew had just bombed enemy targets near Hollandia (now called Jayapura) and was returning to the aerodrome at Nadzab, New Guinea. Bad weather forced the aircraft to alter its course, and the crew never returned to friendly lines.
In late 2001, the U.S. Embassy in Papua New Guinea notified the Department of Defense that wreckage of a World War II bomber had been found in Morobe province. That set in motion a chain of events that, over several years, led to this week’s formal identification.
Officials even found Nell’s high school class ring, which will be sent to Schreiner.
Schreiner said that he had been in contact with U.S. military officials for years about the wreckage and that he and other family members had provided DNA samples that proved conclusive. He said military officials had given him a report about the incident that answered scores of questions: The aircraft wasn’t shot down but ran out of fuel, for example, and Nell died of blunt-force trauma to the head from the impact of the crash.
“I find it very interesting that the service went to this trouble to find missing-in-action people,” Schreiner said. “This was really something
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