The remains of a Tuskegee Airman who went missing during war II may are found, consistent with a replacement report about human remains recently discovered in Europe.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is examining the likelihood that human remains and other objects retrieved from a crash site in Austria may are those of Capt. Lawrence E. Dickson, consistent with a Sunday, April 8, an article from The Washington Post.
Should it’s Dickson, one among 900 Black pilots trained at Alabama’s Tuskegee Army Air Field during WWII,, he’d be the primary Tuskegee Airman DPAA has accounted for. There’s also an opportunity he’d be the primary of 27 missing Tuskegee Airmen found since the war ended.
After leaving his base in Italy on December 23, 1944, 24-year-old Dickson’s plane began losing speed. He turned back toward home, but the flight continued to fail, taking place over what the opposite two pilots in his formation thought was a mountainous region of northeastern Italy.
Following the top of the war in Europe, his wife, Phyllis Dickson, who had received a telegram in January 1945 informing her that “Dickson has been reported missing in action,” sent a letter to the War Department saying she’d been “greatly distressed” and hoped to receive news about her husband.
The army had also looked for Dickson within the mountainous area where his plane was thought to possess gone down, but neither his plane nor his remains were found.
Yet 68 years after the military recommended his body be deemed “nonrecoverable,” his daughter, Marla L. Andrews, 75, got a call saying the look for Dickson’s remains was on. This followed an archaeological team discovering portions of a P-51 Mustang, which he flew, and human bones.
Andrews — who said there was a void over the daddy she longed to understand — and other relations recently provided cheek swabs to match with DNA material taken from a bone at the crash site.
Now it’s a scheme.
“At this age, I’m alleged to know that you simply roll with the punches,” she told The Washington Post. “You take it because it comes.”
