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Rest in Peace Lt Ambrose


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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/642 ... urned.html

Friday, May 19, 2006 · Last updated 6:28 a.m. PT

Service held for WWII fighter pilot lost in North Cascades

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHILADELPHIA -- More than six decades after his plane crashed in a ravine in the North Cascades of Washington state, a World War II fighter pilot will be interred following a military funeral attended by a daughter who was eight weeks old when he failed to make it home.

Lt. Kenneth W. Ambrose, 24, had been fighting Japanese aircraft over the Aleutian Islands and was hoping to see his daughter for the first time on a maintenance run back to California in November 1942.

"He radioed in to Bellingham (Wash.) Field that he was having plane trouble," said his daughter, Kathleen Edwards, of Blue Bell. "That was the last they heard from him."

The P-38E Lightning airplane was never found, until two hikers stumbled on the wreck in September 1997 in the Pasayten Wilderness Area, part of the Okanogan National Forest.

After delays in tracing the plane due to lost military records and the passage of 64 years, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command sent specialists to the site in the summer of 2004 and recovered some of the pilot's remains, his dog tags and his twisted glasses frames. Additional archaeological investigation was done in 2005.

Cye Laramie, an amateur military historian from Olympia, Wash., who was enlisted in the search by hiker Chad Norris and his father, Steve Norris, called Edwards in August 2003 about the discovery.

She excitedly discussed the find with her mother, Marguerite Crowe, 86, of Blue Bell.

"We talked about it for months afterward," Edwards said. "She laughed, she cried, she was absolutely amazed."

"She had never really talked about my father," Edwards said. "It wasn't until high school when I really found out that my stepfather wasn't my father."

Only this year did JPAC complete its investigation and rule that the bones found at the crash site were those of Ambrose.

Crowe had Parkinson's disease and was very ill by the time Edwards was formally notified on March 22.

"Then she rallied, and I was getting ready to tell her, and she just died suddenly," Edwards said.

Edwards said she had planned a funeral Friday with full military honors at Philadelphia National Cemetery. The Norrises and Laramie were expected, she said. She said her father would be interred in Indiantown Gap National Cemetery in Annville.