Human Remains Found by UMD Anthropologists Lead to WWII Airman’s Identification

A freckle-faced basketball star in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas, Frank Johnstone joined the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1943 and deployed to Europe as a World War II pilot. 

In 1945, during a mission targeting Linz, Austria, the 20-year-old second lieutenant was serving as a navigator on a B-24 “Liberator” bomber that was shot down and crashed near the Alps. Several airmen bailed out before impact, but Johnstone was not among them. No traces of his body were immediately found, and the Department of Defense (DOD) listed him as missing in action. Five months later he was declared dead.

Last month, eight decades after the crash, the DOD announced that Johnstone’s remains had finally been identified—and that a team of University of Maryland researchers played a lead role.

“Being able to use our skills to help people who’ve been waiting a long time for answers is a great feeling,” said Assistant Research Professor of anthropology Marilyn London, who co-led with Adam Fracchia Ph.D. ’14 the 2017 and 2018 excavations in Austria that uncovered human remains that modern forensics would show to be Johnstone’s. 

The clues to the lost airman’s whereabouts began to surface in 1950, when Army officials visited a remote area in the village of Grossraming, where a local gravedigger reportedly buried the remains of nine U.S. airmen linked to various plane crashes. 

In 2017, London was recruited by the DOD’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), an organization that recovers and identifies the remains of missing service members, including 73,000 WWII veterans. She belongs to a small community of U.S. forensic anthropologists focused on IDing remains linked to criminal cases and other unidentified remains, and she has investigated several plane crash sites, including the Pennsylvania field where United Flight 93 went down on Sept. 11, 2001.

During a briefing at DPAA’s headquarters in Hawaii, London was told that a WWII plane had gone down in Grossraming. They asked her to survey the general crash site in hopes of recovering long-buried debris offering information about the aircraft—the engine’s serial number, for instance—and the personal effects of those aboard, like buttons and watch parts. 

“You can find all kinds of things on an airplane,” London said. “Those flyboys always carry good luck charms, so you never know.”

If London’s team was lucky, it would discover human remains. But after all those years, expectations were low. 

During back-to-back summer field schools, a UMD-led contingent comprising 16 students and alums traveled to Grossraming, now known for its lush valleys and popular hiking trails, and joined University of Vienna students and researchers to begin the excavation. Each day they trudged up a hill perched above a working farm and entered the forest that contained the crash site.

“I thought there would be no better way to spend my (time in) field school than on a really good cause,” Sharon Ridge ’18, granddaughter of a WWII veteran, said then.

London, too, reminisced about her late father, who served as a member of the Army Air Forces in WWII.

After weeks of dirtying their hands as they searched through aircraft fragments, the researchers were excited when they found evidence of human remains. London declined to go into detail, respecting the Johnstone family’s privacy.

Over the last several years, DPAA scientists have used dental and anthropological analyses, material and circumstantial evidence and mitochondrial DNA examinations to finally identify the redheaded Texan. The DOD declined to make Johnstone’s family’s contact information available for an interview. 

It’s possible London and her students will be invited to Johnstone’s burial ceremony, where he will be laid to rest with appropriate regalia and medals, she said. In the meantime, the UMD professor will celebrate the experience as a tribute to her father. 

“This honors his contributions and those of all the people who put their lives on the line and did what they needed to stop the Axis powers,” she said.