201904.04
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Body of ‘everyman’ airman stationed at March Field near Riverside identified — 75 years after World War II death

by in News

Preparing for a bombing mission against the Japanese in January 1944, Staff Sgt. Vincent Rogers wrote to his parents with his usual candor: He wanted to go home.

Five days later, Jan. 22, Rogers’ B-24J bomber crashed shortly after take-off, killing him and six others. His body remained in an unmarked coffin in the central Pacific Tarawa Atoll for 75 years, long after the death of his parents.

But his letters home made the war come alive for visitors to the March Field Air Museum, where a seven-panel exhibit on Rogers personalizes airmen’s experience, said Jeff Houlihan, the museum’s curator.

Now the exhibit on Rogers, a Buffalo, New York, native who trained in Texas and at March Field near Riverside, will be updated.

“Vince is found,” said Houlihan, who sees the airman as a friend after reading more than 200 of his personal, revealing letters. Those letters were sent to the Pentagon to assist with the search for Rogers, and now, a decade after the letters were found, Rogers’ body has been found as well.

  • March Field Air Museum curator Jeff Houlihan points to the original Western Union telegram sent to World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr.’s parents after his death in 1944. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • March Field Air Museum curator Jeff Houlihan talks about an exhibit on World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr., whose remains have now been identified long after his death in World War II. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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  • A 1944 photograph shows the wreckage of Vincent J. Rogers Jr.’s B-24J in the Tarawa Atoll in the Central Pacific. It is part of a display at the March Field Air Museum near Riverside. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • The original Western Union telegram sent to World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr.’s parents following his death in 1944 is displayed at an exhibit for the airman at March Field Air Museum near Riverside. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • March Field Air Museum curator Jeff Houlihan talks about an exhibit on World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr., who died in a plane crash in the Tarawa Atoll of the Central Pacific in January 1944. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • This undated photo provided by the March Field Air Museum near Riverside shows Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Vincent J. Rogers Jr. at his home in Snyder, N.Y. U.S. military officials say the remains of the western New York airman killed in a plane crash in the Pacific during World War II have been identified. (Courtesy of March Field Air Museum, via AP)

  • In this 1944 photo provided by the U.S. Army, a member of the military stands near a B-24 bomber that crashed shortly after take-off from an airfield on the Tarawa atoll in the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific Ocean during World War II. U.S. military officials say the remains of Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Vincent J. Rogers Jr., who was the radio operator on the aircraft, have been identified. Rogers was from Snyder, N.Y., outside of Buffalo. (Courtesy of U.S. Army, via AP)

  • March Field Air Museum has an exhibit on Vincent Rogers Jr. (File photo by Kurt Miller, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

  • March Field Air Museum’s exhibit on Vincent Rogers Jr. include letters he wrote home. (File photo by Kurt Miller, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

  • Letters from Vincent J. Rogers Jr. to his parents are on display at the March Field Air Museum near Riverside. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • March Field Air Museum curator Jeff Houlihan talks about an exhibit on World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

  • A display at the March Field Air Museum near Riverside depicts the military service of World War II airman Vincent J. Rogers Jr. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced Monday, April 1, that Rogers had been found March 21 with the help of History Flight, Inc.

The family hasn’t been fully briefed, so details of the recovery process can’t yet be made public, said Sgt. First Class Kristen Duus, an agency spokeswoman.

Rogers’ remains were found under a house in 2014, after History Flight got a permit to relocate the family and look under the foundation, History Flight spokeswoman Katie Rasdorf said.

He was the last of the crew to be identified and the 100th person listed as MIA on Tarawa to be recovered, she said.

Most of those were Marines among the 1,000 Americans who died taking the atoll in November 1943, Rasdorf said.

Two months later, Rogers was the radio operator on a bomber that was heavily weighed down, Houlihan said. It crashed in shallow water near shore, setting off an explosion and killing seven of the 10 people onboard. The survivors and the bodies were immediately brought back, but Rogers’ body didn’t make it to his parents in New York as planned.

Rogers wrote frequently and frankly to his mother between his enlistment in October 1942 and his death in January 1944.

The good and the bad of the training and combat experience come through, as does the process of a new recruit transforming into a veteran between

“He wants to do his part, but this is a 19-, 20- and 21-year old guy saying exactly what he thinks,” Houlihan said. “He hasn’t put any ‘Greatest Generation’ spin on it.”

The directness allows visitors with no military experience to identify with Rogers as he first starts out and see him mature and harden, Houlihan said.

In some cases, the sarcasm leaps off the page, as when he says four jobs were offered to him and he’s “disgusted” by them all.

“Parachute rigger is another doozie,” he wrote. “I’ve done so much of that don’t you know. Anyway I’ve always wanted to be a rigger.”

He also wrote about his girlfriend, Betty Meinhold, who over the course of the war became his fiance but never his wife. Museum staff have been unable to find her or the letters they presumably exchanged.

Some letters aren’t appropriate because of their content — graphic sexual cartoons and discussions of Japanese people that would now be recognized as racist — but the humanity shines through, Houlihan said.

“Everyone can see themselves, or their son or their nephew, in his voice. He’s everyman,” he said. “If I wanted to invent the perfect person to show the experience, I couldn’t have done better than this.”

The letters sat in a storage locker for decades, until a distant relative noticed them and saw that some were sent from March Field and mentioned the base. The relative, who Houlihan said wants to remain anonymous, donated them about 10 years ago.

Now, the exhibit includes Rogers’ “office” — a cramped turret he worked in because he crouched down and pretended to be under the height limit of 6 feet — and other memorabilia, along with audio recordings of the letters read by a 19-year-old California Baptist University student.

The final panel of the exhibit currently discusses the attempt to find Rogers, including envelopes sent to the Pentagon in the hope that DNA he left when he licked them shut could be matched to a body.

Houlihan thinks it’s more likely that the DNA was matched to a surviving relative.

Soon, the exhibit will reveal how he was identified and where his body is now.

That decision is up to his surviving relative.

Perhaps Buffalo, where his parents erected a marker over an empty grave. Perhaps Arlington National Cemetery. Perhaps Riverside National Cemetery, so Rogers’ body will rest close to his final letters pining for home.