WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — On March 11, 1944, as the World War II bomber Heaven Can Wait was hit by enemy fire near the Pacific island of New Guinea, the co-pilot gave a final salute to fellow flyers in a nearby plane before it crashed into the ocean.

All 11 men aboard were killed. Their remains, deep below the vast sea, were designated as non-recoverable.

After an extraordinary investigation by family members and an underwater recovery mission involving elite Navy divers who descended 200 feet (61 meters) in a pressurized bell to reach the ocean floor, the remains of four crew members are finally returning to their hometowns.

In Wappingers Falls, New York, Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, the radio operator, was laid to rest with full military honors and the support of his community on Saturday, over eight decades after leaving behind his wife and baby son.

The bombardier, 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, was to be buried Monday in Livermore, California, where he grew up in a ranching family. The remains of the pilot, 1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, and navigator, 2nd Lt. Donald Sheppick, will be interred in the coming months.

The ceremonies are happening 12 years after one of Kelly’s relatives, Scott Althaus, set out to solve the mystery of where exactly the plane went down.

“I’m just so grateful,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s been an impossible journey — just should never have been able to get to this day. And here we are, 81 years later.”

March 11, 1944: Bomber down

The Army Air Forces plane nicknamed Heaven Can Wait was a B-24 with a cartoon pin-up angel painted on its nose and a crew of 11 on its final flight.

They were on a mission to bomb Japanese targets when the plane was shot down. Other flyers on the mission were not able to spot survivors.

Their wives, parents and siblings were of a generation that tended to be tight-lipped in their grief. But the men were sorely missed.

Sheppick, 26, and Tennyson, 24, each left behind pregnant wives who would sometimes write them two or three letters a day. Darrigan, 26, also was married, and had been able to attend his son’s baptism while on leave. A photo shows him in uniform, smiling as he holds the boy.

Darrigan’s wife, Florence, remarried but quietly held on to photos of her late husband, as well as a telegram informing her of his death.

Tennyson’s wife, Jean, lived until age 96 and never remarried.

“She never stopped believing that he was going to come home,” said her grandson, Scott Jefferson.

Memorial Day 2013: The Search

As Memorial Day approached twelve years ago, Althaus asked his mother for names of relatives who died in World War II.

Althaus, a political science and communications professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, became curious while researching World War II casualties for work. His mother gave him the name of her cousin Thomas Kelly, who was 21 years old when he was reported missing in action.

Althaus recalled that as a boy, he visited Kelly’s memorial stone, which has a bomber engraved on it. He began reading up on the lost plane.

“It was a mystery that I discovered really mattered to my extended family,” he said.

With help from other relatives, he analyzed historical documents, photos and eyewitness recollections. They weighed sometimes conflicting accounts of where the plane went down. After a four-year investigation, Althaus wrote a report concluding that the bomber likely crashed off of Awar Point in what is now Papua New Guinea

The report was shared with Project Recover, a nonprofit committed to finding and repatriating missing American service members and a partner of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. A team from Project Recover, led by researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, located the debris field in 2017 after searching nearly 10 square miles (27 square kilometers) of seafloor.

The DPAA launched its deepest ever underwater recovery mission in 2023.

A Navy dive team recovered dog tags, including Darrigan’s partially corroded tag with his the name of his wife, Florence, as an emergency contact. Kelly’s ring was recovered. The stone was gone, but the word BOMBARDIER was still legible.

And they recovered remains that underwent DNA testing. Last September, the military officially accounted for Darrigan, Kelly, Sheppick and Tennyson.

With seven men who were on the plane still unaccounted for, a future DPAA mission to the site is possible.

Memorial Day 2025: Belated Homecomings

More than 200 people honored Darrigan on Saturday in Wappingers Falls, some waving flags from the sidewalk during the procession to the church, others saluting him at a graveside ceremony under cloudy skies.

“After 80 years, this great soldier has come home to rest,” Darrigan’s great niece, Susan Pineiro, told mourners at his graveside.

Darrigan’s son died in 2020, but his grandson Eric Schindler attended.

Darrigan’s 85-year-old niece, Virginia Pineiro, solemnly accepted the folded flag.

Kelly’s remains arrived in the Bay Area on Friday. He was to be buried Monday at his family’s cemetery plot, right by the marker with the bomber etched on it. A procession of Veterans of Foreign Wars motorcyclists will pass by Kelly’s old home and high school before he is interred.

“I think it’s very unlikely that Tom Kelly’s memory is going to fade soon,” said Althaus, now a volunteer with Project Recover.

Sheppick will be buried in the months ahead near his parents in a cemetery in Coal Center, Pennsylvania. His niece, Deborah Wineland, said she thinks her late father, Sheppick’s younger brother, would have wanted it that way. The son Sheppick never met died of cancer while in high school.

Tennyson will be interred on June 27 in Wichita, Kansas. He’ll be buried beside his wife, Jean, who died in 2017, just months before the wreckage was located.

“I think because she never stopped believing that he was coming back to her, that it’s only fitting she be proven right,” Jefferson said.