79 years after WWII, Navy sailor laid to rest in California

Seventy-nine years after Wilbur A. Mitts was killed during World War II combat operations in the western Pacific Ocean, the Navy sailor has finally been laid to rest in his hometown.

The 24-year-old Monterey County, California man’s remains were buried at Mission Memorial Park in Seaside on this week, U.S. Navy officials said. Sailors from Navy Reserve Center San Jose provided full military honors for Petty Officer Mitts.

Mitts, U.S. Navy Aviation Radioman First Class, was killed on September 10, 1944 while his crew was flying over enemy military targets on the Palau Islands, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA).

He was assigned to Navy Torpedo Squadron 20, USS Enterprise. He was a crewman on a TBM-1 Avenger aircraft when it was struck by enemy anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the ocean.

“TBM-1 Avenger with a crew of three took off from the USS Enterprise for a strike mission against Japanese forces in the Palau Islands. The plane was last seen spinning violently before crashing into the water a few hundred feet from Malakal Island. All three members of the crew were lost in the incident,” DPAA wrote.

In the years following the war, Mitts’ remains were not recovered. For decades, he was memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines.

“While initial efforts to locate Mitts and his crewmembers were not successful, the effort to find
them never stopped,” DPAA wrote.

Following the war, the American Graves Registration Service, an organization that searches for and recovers fallen American military members, conducted exhaustive searches of battle areas and crash sites in Palau in 1947. Investigators could not find any evidence of Mitts or his aircraft.

A newspaper article states that Mitts was a champion boxer before WWII. (Image courtesy DPAA)

In September 2021, Project Recover, a nonprofit organization that searches for missing Americans, found human remains and material evidence. The remains were sent to the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam Hawaii for analysis. Scientists from the DPAA and Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used dental and mitochondrial DNA analysis.

Earlier this year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency officially confirmed that the remains were identified as Mitts.