Army ROTC cadets Carson Criswell, Jonathan Ellwanger and Zack Ellwanger and anthropology student Max von Husen flew to Europe on Thursday to join an archaeological dig at the crash site of an American B-17 bomber that was shot down over Germany in March of 1945.

Their plan was to “land in Warsaw, drive straight down and I think the next day we’re turning dirt,” said Lt. Col. Rich Ingleby, commanding officer of the U of A Army ROTC, before departing with the students.

The team from Tucson will be assisting a group of archaeologists from California that has been conducting fieldwork at the site for the past six years under a contract with the federal Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

“This is a recovery team,” said Jesse Stephen, who helped organize this year’s trip as DPAA’s Tucson-based chief of innovation. The goal is to bring back “biological remains that then can be explicitly identified as one of our missing in action,” he said.

The B-17 Flying Fortress from the 15th Air Force was downed after a bombing raid on Berlin.

Debris from the aircraft was later found near the Czech Republic border in southwestern Poland, about 160 miles from Warsaw.

“Extensive quantities of materials have been examined at the site since 2019, including aircraft wreckage and possible evidentiary materials” that are still undergoing laboratory analysis at the DPAA forensic lab at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, Stephen said.

Numbered aircraft parts and other items from the site have been traced back to “a specific loss incident,” he said, but the agency is withholding the name of the aircraft and its missing crew members while the recovery effort continues.

Investigators don’t want to give family members false hope or risk having word get out about the return of a missing servicemember before the next of kin can be properly notified by military casualty officers, Stephen said.

This marks the sixth time fieldwork has been conducted at the crash site. After this trip, a determination will be made about whether to continue excavations there, Stephen said.

Circumstantial evidence won’t do. Definitive forensic proof is required to meet the legal threshold for identification.

“Even if we’ve got the aircraft, we’ve got dog tags, we’ve got the place, that’s never going to result in an ID,” Stephen said. “We have to be out there doing this work that the lieutenant colonel and the cadets and the archeology student are going to do to bring these guys home.”

Ingleby said he can’t think of a better way to teach “the next generation of Army officers” about leadership and what it really means to take care of the soldiers under your command.

“A big tenet of our beliefs is no soldier left behind,” he said. “This opportunity shows them firsthand the importance of that tenet and the lengths we will go to as a nation to go out and find our missing and to bring them home, even 80 years later.”

The idea for the partnership sprang from a visit to the U of A early last year by DPAA Deputy Director Fern Sumpter Winbush, who was in Phoenix for one of the agency’s regular update meetings with the families of missing servicemembers.

Winbush, a retired Army colonel, toured the campus in Tucson and met with the university’s Army ROTC.

About a year later, Ingleby said, he got an email from Stephen asking if he’d be interested in teaming up.

The collaborative effort is being funded jointly by the Army’s cadet command and the DPAA.

Stephen said the agency already partners with more than 100 different organizations across the country and around the world, but they are always looking for more of what he called “force multipliers.”

The DPAA can use all the help it can get. Though the agency identifies an average of about 200 individuals a year, there are more than 80,000 servicemembers who are still unaccounted for, and almost 90% of them have been missing since World War II.

“It’s the worst part of the mission,” Stephen said. “I mean, the amount of work that goes into those 200 is mindboggling. But then you turn around and you look at the scoreboard, and it’s pretty, pretty sobering.”

He and Ingleby hope the collaboration in Poland will lead not only to future missions involving U of A students but to an expanded partnership between the DPAA and ROTC units at colleges and universities nationwide.

As far as Stephen is concerned, the U of A is the perfect fit for a pilot program like this. “There’s a deep history here of military service, and there’s a deep history here of archeology, specifically,” said the Tucson native, who spent more than eight years traveling the world as a field investigator for DPAA before his current agency posting at the university.

To prepare for the recovery mission, the U of A team made a visit in April to the 390th Memorial Museum, a separate nonprofit historical collection housed at the Pima Air and Space Museum to commemorate the World War II service of the Eighth Air Force’s 390th Bombardment Group.

The behind-the-scenes tour gave them a chance to climb around inside the museum’s intact B-17 and familiarize themselves with parts and equipment salvaged from the wreckage of another Flying Fortress. They also met with 101-year-old museum docent Walter Ram, who served as a B-17 radioman until his aircraft was shot down over Europe and he was captured by the Germans.

The museum’s executive director, Bill Buckingham, said he was excited to host the students and contribute in some small way to an effort that could end up “bringing back fallen heroes.”

Serving on a bomber crew over Europe was one of the most dangerous wartime jobs an American servicemember could have. Buckingham said the chances of surviving your first five bombing runs were about 18%. Of the 12,732 B-17s produced between 1935 and 1945, 4,735 were lost during combat missions.

“It was a phenomenally durable and sturdy aircraft. It could survive incredible combat damage,” he said. “But every machine has its limits.”

The Eighth Air Force alone, which operated from bases in the United Kingdom, suffered half of all the U.S. Army Air Forces’ casualties in World War II, with more than 26,000 dead.

And the 15th Air Force was “no great place to earn a paycheck, either,” Buckingham said.

That collection of bombardment groups, based in North Africa and eventually Italy, lost more than 3,300 aircraft and saw more than 21,000 of its personnel killed, wounded or taken prisoner, including the crew from the crashed B-17 now being excavated in Poland.

Stephen said the operation is one of dozens currently underway across Europe and around the globe.

During fiscal year 2024, DPAA and its partners conducted nearly 100 investigations and recovery missions in 36 different countries.

Ingleby said he and his team plan to work at the crash site six days a week, then spend their day off resting and cleaning the mud off of themselves.

“We’ll work sun-up to sundown, until they kick us off,” he said.

Stephen said the students can expect to spend most of their time washing buckets of dirt through quarter-inch, wire-mesh screens — a messy, labor-intensive job that is as repetitive as it is important.

“The idea there is that every square inch of soil is being examined and looked at for anything that might be evidentiary,” he said. “These guys are not going to Europe to have a fun time. They’re going to Europe to basically man this site for three or four weeks and do as much work as humanly possible.”

Any suspected remains that are recovered will be flown back to the U.S. on a military transport, typically in a flag-draped vessel with a uniformed military escort. Everything is done with a high degree of respect and security, Stephen said, to maintain an exacting chain of custody that lasts “from the moment that a recovery happens in the field to the actual identification and repatriation of those remains to the family.”

Ingleby also wants his cadets to connect with their mission on a personal level.

“They’re going to learn the names of the missing air crew. They’re going to see their photos,” he said. “We’ve talked about it already, but we’re going to continue to reinforce that these people have a family. Someone still knows about grandpa or uncle so-and-so who didn’t come home. There’s probably still a photo on the wall somewhere. These guys are not so far back that they’re completely forgotten.”

Stephen said it can take months or years to positively identify the remains of missing servicemembers after they have been recovered, so the team from the U of A might not know the results of their work for quite some time.

And there is always the chance that no identification will be made from what is collected at the crash site. Not every recovery mission results in a recovery.

“There are different ways to measure success,” Stephen said. “Their success is not based on whether or not the agency eventually identifies or does not identify these individuals. Their success will be measured by giving their full attention and effort to this activity — getting over there, working as a team and doing everything they can.

“If they do that,” he said, “it will be a huge success.”