6 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 7-13, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com 831 One of Diana Ward’s strongest memories from her childhood in Seaside is taking flowers to the ocean with her grandmother, somewhere between Lovers Point and Asilomar, she thinks, to be cast onto the waves. There was no gravestone for June Mitts’ son, Aviation Radioman 1st Class Wilbur Archie Mitts, 24, lost to sea near the Palau Islands in 1944, while flying a pre-invasion strike against Japanese forces with two crewmembers. Ward remembers her grandmother saying how hard it was to have no grave to bring flowers to—the ocean was her only connection to her son. “My grandmother didn’t like the ocean,” Ward says. “She was a Midwest girl and missed Missouri. She thought the ocean was treacherous.” June Mitts had moved from Missouri to Seaside many years before with Wilbur and his three siblings. He attended Seaside Elementary School and graduated from Monterey High School. Mitts and his two crewmembers were aboard a TBM-1 Avenger torpedo bomber that took off from the USS Enterprise as part of Operation Forager, according to the Navy Personnel Command. Their plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and was last seen “spinning violently before crashing a few hundred feet from Malakai Island,” according to a press release. Ward never met her Uncle Wilbur— he died three days before her birth. “Everyone focused on me because their grief was strong,” says Ward, who now lives in Modesto. She remembers a wall of photos in her grandmother’s home in Seaside that included a picture of Mitts and his two crewmembers, and a framed death notification signed by President Harry Truman. “I’ve been told he was very outgoing, he really enjoyed people, and was very easy going, very likable. He had a lot of friends,” Ward says of her uncle. Mitts had an amateur boxing career before he joined the Navy—he was the 1941 Golden Gloves welterweight champion for Northern California, fighting 37 bouts with only two defeats. Mitts also played guitar with his brother, Ward’s father. The two young men recorded themselves on some vinyl records, a “wonderful gift” to Ward. “I finally got to hear Wilbur’s voice, singing with my dad,” she says. The family had no expectations they would ever hear another word about Mitts’ remains. The American Graves Registration Service, the agency responsible for recovering missing American servicemembers, did extensive searches until 1947, but could not find any evidence of the plane or its crew. So when the Navy called Ward asking for DNA samples approximately 75 years after Mitts plane was lost, it was a surprise. “They cautioned we shouldn’t get our hopes up,” says Ward, who was contacted as Mitts’ oldest living relative. Officials needed DNA from someone from Mitts’ maternal line—Ward is on a paternal line—so she shared what names she could. Unbeknownst to the family, a group called the BentProp Project—now called Project Recover—had begun searching for Mitts’ plane and the crew’s remains in 2003 as part of a larger mission to find lost WWII servicemembers in the Pacific. Remains of the plane were found just off Malakai Island. Mitts’ remains were recovered during two searches, one in 2019 and another in 2021. They were sent to a laboratory at Joint Base Pearl HarborHickam in Hawaii for analysis, and using the DNA from the youngest son of a cousin of Ward’s, investigators were able to positively identify Mitts on Feb. 23, 2023. The call came to Ward with the news, asking her to decide where his remains would be buried. She chose Mission Memorial Park in Seaside, where other family members were buried. On Sept. 11, possibly up to 20 family members from around the country will gather at Mission Memorial Park to celebrate his life “and the sacrifice he made for all of us,” Ward says. They will sing a hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” According to Ward, her grandmother told her she sang the hymn every morning in remembrance of her lost son. “So now he has a place,” Ward says. She plans on taking flowers to his new home. Home Again A Seaside serviceman lost to the sea in 1944 is finally returning to his family. By Pam Marino Wilbur Archie Mitts was 21 in 1941 when he traveled from his family’s home in Seaside to San Francisco to enlist in the Navy during World War II. He died after his plane was shot down in 1944. Before the war, he had a successful amateur boxing career in Salinas. “They cautioned we shouldn’t get our hopes up.” TALES FROM THE AREA CODE
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