Hahn, Elmer G.
Army Captain

Elmer G. Hahn, age 26, from Booneville County Idaho Falls, Idaho .

Service era: World War II

Date of death: Saturday, May 26, 1945
Death details: On April 24, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress (serial number 42-94206) with a crew of eleven departed Guam for a bombing mission against enemy installations in Tachikawa, Japan. Just after it dropped its bombs, this plane caught fire and entered a slow downward turn to the right before crashing and burning on the ground. Six members of the crew were killed in the crash. Their remains were later recovered near the crash site and identified. Five members of the crew bailed out and were taken to a military prison in Tokyo, where they later died during an airstrike. The remains of two of those men were later recovered and identified, but the remains of the other three could not be located. Captain Elmer G. Hahn entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from California and served in the 870th Bombardment Squadron, 497th Bombardment Group. He was the pilot aboard this Superfortress when it was shot down. After surviving the crash, he was held as a prisoner of war, and perished at the Tokyo Military Prison during the fire on May 26, 1945. He has not yet been definitively associated with any remains recovered from the area and is still unaccounted-for. Today, Captain Hahn is memorialized in the Courts of the Missing at the National Military Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Five Japanese war criminals were tried for the murder of Hahn and other captured American fliers.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Post Register (1948)