The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • Page A11

Sunday, May 27, 2012 Page 11A As the lone survivor of a flight crew downed by the Japanese during World War II, Jose Holguin made a promise to his fallen comrades 'I WILL NEVER LEAVE' By RICK HAMPSON USA Today The fallen navigator waited until dawn to crawl from the jungle. His back was broken, his jaw ripped open by shrapnel. There was a bullet hole in his left leg. In the night, Lt. Jose Holguin had parachuted from a burning B-17.

Painted on its nose were a scantily clad woman and the words "Naughty but Nice." Now, the bomber lay before him in pieces. He hobbled to the plane's mid-section, where he saw the charred, mangled bodies of two of his nine comrades. He fired his pistol twice, signaling the crew to rendezvous. He heard nothing in return. This is when he made his hardest decision to flee and his most important promise, one as old as war.

"I told the men that I couldn't take them with me," he would recall. "But I would be back to take care of them." Des Moines Sunday Register State Edition Jose Holguin, left, was part of lone survivor of the crash, and a flight crew shot down off the he made it his mission to track coast of New Guinea during World War II. Holguin was the down the remains of his fallen comrades, usa today photos tempts at identification failed, the remains, case "IB 28" were buried as unknown in Punchbowl, the vast military cemetery in Honolulu. Holguin told the Army that these were his buddies, and Rebecca helped him get Sen. Alan Cranston of California to intervene to have the bodies exhumed.

In February 1985, they were identified as Sgt. Robert Griebel, Lt. Herman Knott, Sgt. Pace Payne, Lt. Frank Peattie and Sgt.

Henry Garcia the ring's "HG." They were reburied in their home towns. Holguin attended each service, pinning the men's medals on their relatives and sometimes giving them a piece of the plane he'd retrieved. Garcia was last. "We are thankful he has been returned to us," Holguin said at the grave. "We are thankful that he is no longer among the unknown.

We are thankful that he is home." When congratulated, Holguin demurred, "There are four men I haven't found." Army expeditions in 1983 and 1984 found no remains. Holguin was still following leads in March 1994 when he died of a sudden heart attack. He was 73. The case seemed closed. But a military expedition to the crash site in 2001 discovered equipment, coins, rings and badges belonging to the crew, as well as human remains that could be subjected to DNA analysis.

It was nine years before soldiers were sent to Leonard Gionet's door. Since the remains found in 2001 could not be linked to a single crewman, they were attributed to all nine. They were buried in a single coffin at Arlington National Cemetery last September. Twenty-eight members of the Gionet family attended. They included his son, who in a sense finally had his father, and his widow, to whom he was married for 391 days.

At the grave they thought not only of the nine who died in the crash, but of the one who survived. "He could have gone on with his life," Leonard Gionet says of Jose Holguin. "But he thought that was his duty, to bring them home." That was June 26, 1943, on an island in the Southwest Pacific, at the height of World War II. Many vows like Holguin's were uttered in the war. But when it ended, 79,000 Americans were missing and presumed dead.

Half were virtually unrecoverable lost to the deepest oceans, highest mountains or thickest jungles. So when the war ended in 1945, Americans mostly got on with living. The dead rested where they fell. Today, that's changing. No nation has ever tried so hard to recover so many remains from battlefields so distant and so old.

This is manifest each Memorial Day at new grave sites bearing remains discovered or identified over the past 12 months. Since Memorial Day 2011, the bodies of 79 servicemen from wars past have been accounted for, including 20 from World War II. The military's "full accounting mission," originally focused on Vietnam, is expanding. As many World War II cases have been investigated over the past two years as in the six previous, according to the POWMIA Accounting Command. Last year, the war was the focus of a third of the military's 63 recovery expeditions.

Only the United States has the technology, the personnel and the money for such a task. Recovering a single set of remains can involve everything from ground-penetrating radar to hand-panning mud, and easily cost a million dollars. Leonard Wong, who teaches at the Army War College, says that in the post-911 era, the mission fills a national need to express support for troops and their families. Sometimes the military cannot or will not do it alone. Sometimes it takes a Jose Holguin.

Having survived the crash, he spent two years as a POW. After the war, like most veterans, he moved on. But he didn't forget his promise to the men of Naughty but Nice. He couldn't; it was "like a rumble inside me," he said. And it got louder and louder.

A survivor's quest At noon one Saturday two years ago, Leonard Gionet found two soldiers at his door in Portland, Ore. They said the remains of his father Leonard who was killed 67 years earlier, when Gionet was 6 months old had been identified. The elder Gionet went down with Naughty but Nice, having never seen his son. Growing up, Leonard had to construct a father out of photos, stories and his father's medals, which were pinned on Leonard when he was 3. The family had long given up hope of having anything to bury or In 1983, Jose Holguin met with two New Guinea natives who, death 40 years earlier.

Curt Holguin, Jose's son, said, "My dad ing. Some relatives of troops listed as missing in Vietnam demanded an accounting, spurring the government to act. That summer, he went back to New Britain. He tracked down villagers he'd met in 1943 and spread the word that he was looking for the crash site. When he came back a year later, an old man led him and other searchers into the jungle.

They climbed a gentle ridge, hacking their way through undergrowth. Suddenly, they came on an open B-17 cockpit control columns, seat backs, instrument panel. Nearby, Holguin found the plane's nose half buried in the ground. His crew lifted it up. There, on the left side, was the Naughty but Nice pinup girl.

There was no sign of human remains. It was the same when he came back a third time, in 1983. Before giving up, he searched New Britain's war archives. There he found an old U.S. Army report.

In 1949, natives had directed an Army survey engineer to a crash site where he found wreckage he could not identify and partial remains of several bodies in a shallow grave. The only clue was a gold ring inscribed "HG." The bodies were sent to the Army's forensic skeletal lab in Hawaii. When at- as teens, found him near loved these two lieutenant colonel in the Air Force before leaving in 1963 for a career as a Los Angeles school teacher and administrator. Unfulfilled, Holguin's vow seemed to take a toll, his son Curt recalls. At times this man, so solicitous toward his comrades' families, showed flashes of violent anger toward his own.

He could be abusive to his wife, neglectful of his children, inflexible and autocratic. The rumble inside him would not be still. By 1981, Holguin his children largely raised and educated had time and money to make good on his promise. American attitudes toward recovery of war remains were chang- any grave to visit. Now, he marveled, these soldiers are here as if my father died in Afghanistan.

The discovery was not entirely unexpected; Gionet knew about Jose Holguin. Holguin had joined the Army Air Force shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942, he went to the Pacific, where American and Japanese fliers battled under hellish conditions high mountains, unpredictable weather, poorly charted terrain. The Naughty but Nice was a melting pot with men from seven states. They included Gionet of Massachusetts; Henry Garcia, like Holguin a Mexican-American from Los Angeles; and Frank Peattie, an Upstate New Yorker of Scotch-Irish descent.

On the night of June 25, they hit a Japanese airfield near Rabaul on New Britain island, off the coast of New Guinea. As they left the target, fire from a Japanese fighter killed the pilot and set fire to the left wing. Holguin bailed out seconds before the plane crashed, he later told his family. His parachute collapsed in the tree canopy, and he broke two vertebrae in the fall. He limped away, using a branch for a crutch, Get Real Value With Honda.

and inflated his flotation vest to drift down a stream. After almost a month, he was discovered by natives, who tended his wounds and, rather than have their village destroyed, gave him to the Japanese. By war's end in August 1945, only six of his 64 fellow POWs were alive. In the months after he got home, Holguin and his wife, Rebecca, contacted and visited the crew's families around the country. He often was the first to tell them their husband or son was dead.

He told Delia Gionet about Leonard a month before she heard from the War Department. Today, families are promptly notified by special military teams that follow strict protocols. Holguin was neither obligated to carry out this mission, nor trained for it. And he did it, his son Curt says, while suffering from posttraumatic stress. A dream deferred The moment he heard the war was over, Holguin said, he had one thought: "How do I get back into the mountains for my crew?" Other obligations took precedence.

In 1946, the Holguins had the first of seven children. He rose to When he returned from the war, Jose Holguin refused to forget the men he left behind: the other nine crew members of the B-17 nicknamed Naughty but Nice, pictured at left, that was shot down in the jungle of Papua New Guinea in 1943. TOCK built I TO VXAST? EU2000 Super quiet 53 to 59 dB(A) Lightweight (less than 47 lbs.) Power to computers and other equipment dryer, and sr Power for microwave, refri 3-Year Warranty $1149.95 EU6500 120240V Selector Switch Super Quiet 60 dB(A) tEle, Martinc Perfect for RV's a 3-Year Warranty id Home Backup Power $4499.95 HRR216VKA Exclusive Honda QuadraCuta Twin Blade System for and bagging Honda Smart Dri comfort control Variable Speed Control with adjusi 3 in 1 versatility (mulch, baj; -3-year warranty $479.00 HRX217VKA -MicroCutTwii finer clippings Honda Smart comfort control Mulch, bag, di Blade Sysi 'rive Variable Speed iarge or leaf shred wi tools required Exclusive Honda Auto Choke Sysi 3 Year Limited Full Warranty $699.00 Garvis Honda 1603 Euclid Des Moines, IA 50313 515-243-6217 www.garvishonda.com Sales Parts Service.