WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. — As the World War II bomber Heaven Can Wait was hit by enemy fire off the Pacific island of New Guinea on March 11, 1944, the co-pilot managed a final salute to flyers in an adjacent plane before crashing into the water.

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

Yet four crew members’ remains are beginning to return to their hometowns after a remarkable investigation by family members and a recovery mission involving elite Navy divers who descended 200 feet in a pressurized bell to reach the sea floor.

Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, the radio operator was buried Saturday with military honors and community support in his hometown, Wappingers Falls, New York, more than 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 ... 81 years later.”

March 11, 1944

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 a mission to bomb Japanese targets when the plane was shot down. Other crews 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 held on to photos of him, as well as a telegram informing her of his death.

Tennyson’s wife, Jean, lived until 96 and didn’t remarry. “She never stopped believing that he was going to come home,” said her grandson, Scott Jefferson.

Memorial Day 2013

As Memorial Day approached 12 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 when he was reported missing in action.

With help from other relatives, he analyzed historical documents, photos and witnesses’ recollections. After a four-year investigation, Althaus wrote a report that the bomber likely crashed off Awar Point, 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. A team from Project Recover, led by researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, located the debris field in 2017.

The DPAA launched its deepest underwater recovery mission in 2023.

A Navy dive team recovered dog tags, including Darrigan’s partially corroded tag with 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. In September, the military officially accounted for Darrigan, Kelly, Sheppick and Tennyson. With seven men unaccounted for, another DPAA dive to the site is possible.

Memorial Day 2025

More than 200 people honored Darrigan in Wappingers Falls, some waving flags from a sidewalk, others saluting him. Kelly’s remains arrived Friday in the Bay Area; he was to be buried at his family’s cemetery plot, right by the marker with the bomber etched on it. Sheppick will be buried near his parents in a cemetery in Coal Center, Pennsylvania.

Tennyson will be interred June 27 in Wichita, Kansas, beside his wife, Jean, who died in 2017, 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.