Remains of sergeant on WWII mission identified

The remains of a 23-year-old Utah youth who was killed during a World War II bombing mission have been identified, a federal agency said Thursday.

Elvin L. Phillips, who was a sergeant in the US Army Air Forces, was a gunner aboard an aircraft that crashed north of Bucharest, Romania, in the summer of 1943, according to the Defense Accounting Agency POW/MIA ( DPAA, in the English abbreviation) revealed in a press release.

“To identify Phillips’ remains, DPAA scientists used anthropological analyses,” the agency explained, noting that the scientists also used mitochondrial DNA.

Now, Phillips’ remains will be buried in Bluffdale, Utah.

His name was engraved on the Tablets of the Disappeared at the Florence American Cemetery and memorial, which is a site of the American Battle Monuments Commission in Impruneta, Italy.

“A rosette will be placed next to his name to indicate that he has been accounted for,” the agency said.

Phillips was a member of the 66th Bombardment Squadron, 44th Bomber Group and was the tail gunner on the B-24 Liberator aircraft carrying eight other crew members and took off from Libya on August 1, 1943, as part of Operation Tidal Wave in Romania, according to the MIA Accounting Agency.

The targets were oil refineries in Ploiesti, as the DPAA explains. Phillips was killed by anti-aircraft fire near Ploiesti and the heavily damaged plane crashed. Two crew members were rescued and survived, the agency says.

Initially, Phillips’ remains were buried as unknown in the Heroes Section of the Bolovan Civil and Military Cemetery in the city of Ploiesti, capital of Prahova, Romania.

After the war, the American Graves Registry Command recovered all American remains from the cemetery for identification. More than 80 unknown persons could not be identified and these remains were buried in two cemeteries in Belgium, the agency said.

In 2017, the agency began exhuming unidentified remains believed to be associated with missing aviators from Operation Tidal Wave. These remains were sent to the agency’s Laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, to be examined and identified, the agency explained. Phillips’ remains were identified in March and released on Thursday.

World War II began in 1939 and ended in 1945, with over 16 million American soldiers serving in the battle. A total of 405,399 American soldiers died in the war.