Eck, Harry W.
Army 1st lieutenant

Harry W. Eck, age 23, from Ward County Minot, North Dakota .

Parents: Harry B. Eck

Service era: World War II
Schools: Minot High graduate, University of North Dakota

Date of death: Wednesday, September 13, 1944
Death details: On December 19, 2011, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) accounted for First Lieutenant Harry W. Eck, missing from World War II. First Lieutenant Eck, who entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from North Dakota, served with the 327th Bombardment Squadron, 92nd Bombardment Group (Heavy). On September 13, 1944, he was the pilot of a B-17G Flying Fortress (serial number 42-31250, nicknamed “Mag the Hag, the 2nd”) that carried nine crew members on a bombing mission against oil refineries near Merseburg, Germany, and then moved to targets near Altenburg, south of Merseburg. At some point, 1LT Eck’s aircraft was hit by enemy fire and crashed near Neustadt. One crew member successfully parachuted out of the aircraft before it crashed, but the remaining eight were killed in the crash and their bodies recovered by German forces and buried in a cemetery in Neustadt. Following the war, U.S. Army Graves Registration Service personnel recovered and moved the remains of one crew member to a U.S. military cemetery in Holland; however, by 1953, access to eastern Germany was restricted by the Soviet Union, which prevented any further recovery efforts of the seven remaining crew members including 1LT Eck. In 1991, a German national digging a grave in the Neustadt cemetery discovered a U.S. military identification tag and notified officials. German burial law restricted any further site investigation efforts; however, the law changed in 2007. In 2008, JPAC officials traveled to the site where they recovered human remains and military equipment correlating to the B-17G’s loss, and JPAC analysts used modern forensic techniques to eventually identify 1LT Eck from these collective remains.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Fargo Forum (1945)