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Sunday, August 6, 2000
Brothers' reunion is bittersweet
Man killed in plane crash is buried 56 years later
By Andy Lefkowitz
Associated Press
BRADFORD, Pa. - It had been 58 years since Elmer DeLucia's last moment alone with his brother, and he did not want this one to go by too quickly.
When everyone else drifted away Saturday from the gravesite of Staff Sgt. Anthony "Bib" DeLucia, Elmer DeLucia stood silent and motionless, watching as his brother's remains were lowered into the ground.
He had never expected to see his brother again.
On Aug. 31, 1944, Anthony DeLucia's B-24 crashed into a mountainside after a bombing run on Japanese ships near what is now Taiwan. The remains of the 10-member crew remained on the mountain for half a century; in 1948, the airmen were declared killed in action.
Back in America, DeLucia's mother, never gave up hope that her son was alive. But by the time she died in 1968, Elmer DeLucia was certain his older brother was dead, his remains lost forever.
Then, in 1996, Chinese farmers searching for herbs found the plane's wreckage on 7,000-foot Kitten Mountain in China's Guangxi Province.
It has taken since then for the Department of Defense to identify each of the dead and return their remains to their families.
Six of the other nine airmen will be buried Aug. 21 at Arlington National Cemetery. Families of the three others are burying them privately.
Elmer DeLucia laid his brother to rest Saturday at the family's hillside plot in a cemetery near the church where the DeLucia boys were baptized.
Military honors at the service included the presentation of a Purple Heart and an American flag to Elmer DeLucia and another surviving brother, Auggie DeLucia, both of whom received Purple Hearts in World War II for their service.
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