Until her last breath, nearly 50 years after her son's wounded bomber plunged into the Pacific Ocean, Dessie Arnett Amick clung to the faintest of hopes that her baby-faced airman would someday return from World War II.

On Tuesday, he finally did.

The remains of 2nd Lt. Jack S. Arnett, missing since Sept. 1, 1944, when his B-24 Liberator and 10-man crew were shot out of the sky by Japanese artillery, arrived at Orlando International Airport with an Army escort.

"He will be where he belongs now — among his brothers and those who loved him," said Carolyn Arnett Rocchio, 77, of Boynton Beach, who described her cousin as handsome and smart, a mischievous boy who liked to shoot the blossoms off their grandmother's flowers with a BB gun.

An Army honor guard greeted the soldier's remains Tuesday, and the Orlando Fire Department fired water cannons over the plane, but no family members were waiting at the end of the airman's amazing odyssey from ocean floor to OIA.

Arnett's mother died in 1993 at the age of 99 in her Audubon Park home where an oil portrait of the 23-year-old pilot served as living-room sentry for 40 years. His father, B.B., and younger brother, Warren, are dead, too.

His wife remarried and died. They had no children.

His lone surviving sibling, Howard Arnett, 92, of Winter Park, a former Navy pilot and private aviator who flew Pacific routes after the war in search of his brother or the plane's wreckage, is confused by Alzheimer's disease.

Howard Arnett, nonetheless, played a crucial role in his kid brother's return.

He provided DNA that helped military investigators from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command identify bones found in the wreckage of a U.S. bomber discovered 70 feet deep in the ocean near the Republic of Palau in 2004.

Hit by the enemy

The last flight of Jack Arnett and his crew, members of the U.S. Army Air Force's 424th Bombardment Squadron, rumbled off a primitive airstrip on Wakde Island shortly after 6:30 a.m. The taxing eight-hour round-trip bombing run would take them over the Japanese Army's regional headquarters.

The U.S. military had launched the air offensive six days earlier, hoping to soften Japanese defenses on the islands in preparation for a bold invasion directed by Adm. Chester Nimitz and Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

The islands were the Japanese Imperial Army's last strategic stronghold between Allied forces and the Philippines — and the site of some of the most ferocious battles of the war in the Pacific, where an estimated 1,500 Americans died.

Arnett's plane, known as '453 for its tail number's defining digits, was among a squadron of 18 bombers.

According to an official Army action report, the '453 dropped its payload over the island town of Koror about 11 a.m. when Japanese garrisons unleashed "heavy, intense" anti-aircraft artillery barrages skyward.

The hellfire ripped into the '453 twice. An engine burst into flames. The left wing broke off.

The plane with its crew spun like a burning tornado and then broke in two as it rammed the water.

Arnett's family, who lived at that time in the small town of Friendly, W.Va., were told only that his bomber was hit by the enemy and had crashed into the Pacific Ocean. They also learned that airmen in other bombers recalled seeing two or three parachutes drifting into the ocean and a Japanese boat speeding toward them.

The shrieking onslaught of anti-aircraft bullets had prevented fellow fliers from attempting a rescue.

In 1945, at the war's end and nearly a year after the '453's disappearance, Arnett's mother wrote a letter to the mother of Jimmie Doyle, the tail gunner on the lost flight. She commiserated with the Texas mother about "the boys."

"I suppose you had a letter from the War Dept. on Sept. 2nd saying their status was unchanged, and they are still considered 'missing.' I am thankful for that thread of hope, and, of course, with the surrender of Japan and the taking over of Palau by our forces, and also the discovery of so many prisoners who have been missing for two or three years, it does put renewed hope in our hearts right now," Dessie Arnett wrote in her neat cursive. "I think it is the uncertainty that is so hard, and alternating between hope and despair."

Honored as 'fallen hero'

Rocchio, who was 12 when the Army classified her cousin as "missing in action," doesn't think her aunt completely lost hope that Jack would someday return — though the War Department issued a finding of death in 1946.

She recalled that Aunt Dessie once pleaded with a theater owner to rerun a "Movietone News" reel because she was certain she had seen her son among the gaunt soldiers liberated from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

In 1951, after a pair of Army reviews reaffirmed the plane was lost and the Japanese had executed the three airmen who parachuted from the '453, the government declared all 11 missing crew members as "nonrecoverable."

Arnett's parents bought a marker for him in the Friendly Cemetery, where local veterans honor his service as a "fallen hero" every year. They then retired and moved to Orlando, where his father died in 1957 and Dessie remarried.

She never removed the portrait of her son from her wall.

Even after they left West Virginia, Millie Arnett of Winter Park, Howard's wife of 41 years, said her mother-in-law and husband never let go of the notion that Jack "was out there" and might reappear at any time.

Rocchio, who helped arrange for the remains to be flown to Orlando, thinks her cousin would still be lost if not for the extraordinary efforts of Pat Scannon and scuba-diving adventurers known as The BentProp Project.

The nonprofit group's work, detailed in a documentary called Last Flight Home, also spawned a lengthy article in the June 2008 issue of GQ magazine. The story featured the son of Jimmie Doyle, Scannon and others who played important roles in the recovery of the airmen, including U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Andy Baldwin, who was The Bachelor in the ABC reality show's 10th season.

Dog tags and aviator sunglasses

Scannon, 60, an experienced diver and owner of a California biotech company, has plumbed the waters surrounding the tiny Palaun islands for more than 15 years in search of missing U.S. World War II planes and their crews.

An estimated 200 U.S. planes were lost in Pacific battles.

On the BentProp Web site, Scannon explained that the families and friends of MIAs live with "a painful lack of closure: they do not know exactly how and where their loved ones died. … The only antidote for such painful lack of closure is information. Unfortunately the ocean and jungles don't give up information about long-lost aircraft without a struggle. The ocean can bury an aircraft under sand and silt, or gradually envelop it in a shrine of coral."

His group scoured the waters for a decade in search of the '453, using clues from mission reports, reunions of Arnett's bomber squadron, archival film and a tip from an elderly fisherman who recalled seeing wreckage while spear fishing.

On Jan. 26, 2004, Scannon's group found a B-24 propeller and then scattered remains of the '453, parts of which were remarkably intact and preserved by the salt water. BentProp immediately notified the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, and the government agency that searches for U.S. prisoners of war and missing soldiers dispatched a recovery dive team.

During the next four years, military divers meticulously lifted hundreds of items from the ocean floor and the encrusted hull of the plane's remains, including bones, Arnett's dog tags, his aviator sunglasses and his watch.

Four other missing crew members were identified through DNA, including Jimmie Doyle, and three others have been returned to their families for military burials in Texas, Ohio and California. Remains that have not been linked to the other missing crewmen will be interred together in April at Arlington National Cemetery.

Arnett's service will be at 1 p.m. Saturday at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 1603 E. Winter Park Road, Orlando, and his ashes scattered over the same grounds as his brother, Warren, an Orlando businessman who died in 2003.

Howard Arnett, Rocchio and Scannon are expected to attend the memorial arranged by Baldwin-Fairchild Funeral Home. The skeletal remains were covered by a full military dress uniform and Arnett's medals.

U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Charleston Winston of Joint Forces Headquarters Florida said he is trying to arrange a flyover for the service that will include a vintage B-24 bomber, similar to the lost Liberator.

"He was a hero from World War II," Winston said. "He earned his honors with his life."

Stephen Hudak can be reached at shudak@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5930.

Funeral Highlights Search for Missing Servicemembers

By Ian Graham
Special to American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2009 - The leaves are changing color at Arlington National Cemetery � a bright backdrop for something as sobering as a funeral. An Army chaplain in his dress blues presents a folded flag to the fallen's next of kin, a man who looks to be in his 40s.

This is not a father mourning the loss of his son, though. Rather, it's a son finally receiving closure after his father went missing in the South Pacific decades ago. Funeral services like this, identical in form and location to the ones performed for the fallen from Iraq and Afghanistan, bring to light the ongoing search the Defense Department has undertaken to make sure every servicemember who goes abroad comes home.

"We're not looking for a name on a piece of paper, we're looking for our fathers, uncles, and brothers," said Army Lt. Col. Eric Wolf, chief of the Past Conflict Repatriations Branch of the Army's Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center.

Wolf's office oversees the Army's effort to locate and identify the remains of every missing soldier. Forensic evidence, genealogy and old-fashioned detective work are all a part of the process, which sometimes begins in the unlikeliest of circumstances.

Wolf described one story that began with a scuba expedition. The divers found the wreckage of a B-26 that had gone down in 1942 off the coast of Palau. After a string of phone calls to different groups and agencies that dealt with military wreckage, the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or JPAC, became involved.

The JPAC, based in Honolulu, conducted a full archaeological dig, 70 feet under water, gathering human remains and other artifacts from the wreckage. Some research gave them the names of the men who were aboard the plane.

"It's then we get to make the phone call, to this family who's known their father and husband have been missing, to tell them 'We think we've found your father,'" Wolf said.

Wolf's office then works with the family to get any information it might need to positively identify remains, whether it's something forensic like a blood sample or dental records or photographs and anecdotal evidence, such as artifact identification.

In the case of the Palau wreckage, Wolf found the family, then living in Texas, and got to brief them on how their father was found and what the Army would be able to do for them as the family of a deceased servicemember.

Sometimes a search is quick, and remains can be easily identified because of artifacts such as identification tags or dental remains that are easy to research and compare. But some cases have been in the works for more than 10 years.

Wolf's office stays in contact with the families it works with as it investigates, sharing information to put the pieces together, even if it takes waiting for new technology such as mitochondrial DNA testing to develop before conclusive results can be found. Once those results are found, he said, the length of the wait seems trivial.

"It's the most rewarding and fulfilling mission I've had in my 26 years in the Army," he said. "It's heartwarming to know, as a soldier myself, that no matter where I am in the world, or what I'm doing, I have the confidence and knowledge that, should I perish or go missing, the military and our government will never stop looking for me. Every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine has a long trail of family and the nation behind them."

Once they remains are identified and returned to the family, they can be buried with the honors given to any current servicemember � in today's case, a caisson and honor guard from the Army's Old Guard and music by the Army Band helped bring to an end the mystery surrounding the disappearance of the crew of "The Happy Legend," a B-25 that went missing Dec. 5, 1942, near Papua, New Guinea.

For Wolf, it means seven fewer people on the ever-shrinking list of soldiers unaccounted for, and a return to the continuing pursuit of soldiers still missing.

"It may sound cliché -- I know it does -- but they are never forgotten," he said. "We will never forget. We're going to keep searching until we bring every one of our brothers home from the battlefield."