Wasilewski, Emil T.
Army 2nd lieutenant

Emil T. Wasilewski, age 22, from Christian County Illinois.

Service era: World War II
Schools: Lindblom High

Date of death: Wednesday, September 13, 1944
Death details: On February 11, 2012, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC, now DPAA) accounted for Second Lieutenant Emil T. Wasilewski, missing from World War II. Second Lieutenant Wasilewski, who entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from Illinois, served with the 327th Bombardment Squadron, 92nd Bombardment Group (Heavy). On September 13, 1944, he was a bombardier aboard 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, 2LT Wasilewski’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 men 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 further recovery efforts of the seven remaining men including 2LT Wasilewski. 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 and eventually identified 2LT Wasilewski from these collective remains.
Cemetery: Memorialized at St. Casimir Cemetery, Chicago

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Chicago Tribune (1944)