Remains of area WWII veteran recovered and returned home

WAPPINGERS FALLS — True to a promise to bring every hero home, the nation’s Defense Department’s Prisoner of war/Missing in action Accounting Agency announced on Tuesday, Jan. 21, that the remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Eugene J. Darrigan of Wappingers Falls, New York, would be returning home. Lost in a plane shot down over water in 1944, the bomber’s wreckage was discovered in 2023 bearing the remains that were identified in 2024, 80 years after the WWII hero was killed in action.

Defense Department scientists used dental records, DNA analysis and other evidence bits including identification tags to identify the bomber crew’s remains that were unearthed from the crash site during a month of underwater excavation and recovery between March and April 2023.

In March of 1944, Darrigan had been assigned to the 320th Bombardment Squadron and deployed to New Guinea in the Pacific, serving as a radio operator aboard a bomber. On March 11, his crew undertook a bombing mission along the northern coast of New Guinea and were fired upon by the enemy’s anti-aircraft weapons, causing an on-board bomb to burst into flame and the plane to fall into the sea.

The search for the crash site continued for four years until 1948 and in 1950 the military unit conducting the search declared that Darrigan and his fellow crew members were non-recoverable and, therefore, lost.

In a four-year period beginning in 2013, however, the family of 2nd Lt. Kelly — the bombardier on the lost plane — undertook to reopen the search, working with a researcher from the University of Illinois—Champaign-Urbana. Experts at “Project Recover,” partnered with the Defense Department’s Accounting Agency, located the plane’s wreckage using modern sonar technology.

Darrigan’s name is listed on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial, along with other WWII heroes whose names remain among the missing. To signify that Darrigan’s remains have been located, a symbol will be added next to his name.

Staff Sgt. Darrigan will be buried in Calverton, New York. The burial date has not yet been determined.