Remains of U.S. WWII pilot who never returned from bombing mission identified with DNA

The remains of a 24-year-old U.S. pilot who never returned from a bombing mission in World War II have been accounted for and confirmed, officials from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Monday.  

Charles G. Reynolds was a U.S. Army Air Forces first lieutenant from Bridgeport, Ohio, the agency said in a news release. In late 1943, he was a pilot assigned to the 498th Bombardment Squadron in the Pacific Theater. On Nov. 27, 1943, the plane that he was a crewmember of did not return from a bombing mission near Wewak, New Guinea, the agency said, because the aircraft had taken heavy damage and was forced to make an emergency landing in a lagoon. Efforts to recover Reynolds's remains failed, and the crew was labeled missing in action at the time. 

After the war, an organization called the Grave Registration Service searched for fallen American soldiers and personnel. Their searches included "exhaustive searches of battle areas and crash sites in New Guinea," and while searching the area where the plane had gone down, they found wreckage associated with the aircraft and "fragmentary sets of human remains," the agency said.