Family finally gets to bury remains
SoldierÕs saga ends 63 years later
By SCOTT CANON, The Kansas City Star
ST. JOSEPH - Finally, the son can bury the father he never knew.
More than 60 years after going missing in action in World War II, David BaumanÕs father will be put to rest in Missouri soil. With the burial of the servicemanÕs remains, many old anxieties will be set away even as the event stirs some thoughts anew.
ÒItÕs not happy or sad,Ó Bauman said. ÒIt just is.Ó
BaumanÕs mother was pregnant with him in 1943 when her husband, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, disappeared on a mission in the South Pacific.
When the war was over and the crew from the missing B-24 hadnÕt been found, the Army stopped sending paychecks to their families and cashed out insurance packages. The government declared the men dead in January 1946 and pronounced their remains Òunrecoverable.Ó
Then, in 2000, a hunter in Papua New Guinea wandered upon some plane wreckage and walked out of the jungle with a few bones and the dog tags of Lt. David R. Eppright - BaumanÕs father.
Two years went by before the hunter passed that evidence on to the U.S. embassy. Another year would pass before BaumanÕs wife, Peggy, would stumble across something on the Internet suggesting the military might have found the long-lost plane. It took yet another year to find a relative on the maternal side of EpprightÕs family who could give a DNA sample.
Finally, this April two military men sat down with Bauman and his mother, 88-year-old Helen Pennington, in her St. Joseph home. They went page by page through a book of the evidence gathered from the jungle site where the B-24 crashed. They saw photographs and scientific discussions of the remains Eppright, a one-time schoolteacher and farm boy from Warrensburg, Mo.
ÒI guess I was pretty wound up after that,Ó Bauman said.
The book documents the exacting work of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii. It shows the dog tags. It holds pictures of the 25-year-old lieutenantÕs bones; his teeth, the uppers and the lowers, and his size 7 boot.
BaumanÕs mother has filled the inches-thick book with bookmarks to note things she finds particularly interesting or conclusive.
ÒThose pictures are worth a million dollars to me,Ó she said. ÒWe know what happened. Nobody captured Õem. Nobody tortured Õem.Ó
The mission
Minds have not always been so at rest about the fate of the nine young men aboard the bomber that left Dobodura, Papua New Guinea, on Nov. 5, 1943.
The plane was on an armed reconnaissance mission headed toward Kavieng, New Ireland. During the flight, the crew radioed back that it had spotted a Japanese naval convoy. Its last orders were to simply track the ships and come back when fuel was low. But something happened - lost now to the ages - and the plane sunk a Japanese cruiser and was never heard from again. Bauman grew up with another father - even took on another name -and tended to think of his biological dad at times when he needed to entertain Òwhat-ifs.Ó
ÒThere were days when I thought my second fatherÕs rules felt entirely too restrictive and I thought about how things would have been different if my first father was around,Ó he said.
But Bauman says now he didnÕt feel a particular burden growing up.
ÒI knew there were other war orphans in St. Joe,Ó he said. ÒThere were enough of us that it didnÕt make me as different as having red hair did. Having red hair made me different.Ó
Now the hair has gone to gray and thinned. Over the many years his thoughts have regularly strayed to what happened to his father.
ÒYou know, even through the Õ50s youÕd hear these stories of Japanese soldiers who were on some isolated island in the Pacific still hiding out,Ó Bauman said. ÒYour head knows that didnÕt happen with my dad, butÉ
The evidence book, with all its graphic details, gives the decisive information to what happened. At what was probably a speed of 200 mph or more, the plane slammed into the side of mountain at 10,800 feet above sea level in Papua New Guinea. The trauma to the plane and the bones suggest the men likely died instantly.
The funeral
Today, there will be visitation and an evening service at Huffman Memorial United Methodist Church in St. Joseph. On Tuesday, EppingtonÕs remains will be buried in his familyÕs plot at the Sunset Hills cemetery in Warrensburg - where a marker was placed for him more than 60 years ago.
Members of an active duty honor guard from Fort Leavenworth will act as pallbearers at both the memorial service and the burial.
ÒItÕs just like one of those kids coming home from Iraq,Ó Bauman said. ÒYou forget that he was never a veteran. É He never got that far.Ó
Another burial
In July, there will be another burial.
Like at many crash sites left unattended for so many years, the bones and personal effects of troops become mixed together and the military cannot separate every last bone fragment from the next.
ÒThereÕs only so much we can do,Ó said Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the remains recovery outfit in Hawaii.
So the Òcommon remainsÓ will be cremated and buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Of nearly half a million Americans lost in the long-ago war, the remains of some 78,000 have still not been recovered. The military finds and identifies those of about 150 troops a year.
ÒThe amazing thing is that weÕre not unusual in having lost somebody,Ó Bauman said. ÒItÕs that he was ever found.Ó
First glance
Lt. David R. Eppright, David BaumanÕs father, went MIA during WWII.
In 2000, a hunter in Papua New Guinea wandered upon plane wreckage and EpprightÕs remains.