Nelson, Harold J. Jr.
Army 2nd lieutenant

Harold J. Jr. Nelson, age 20, from Los Angeles County California.

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. Second Lieutenant Harold J. Nelson Jr. entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from Minnesota and served in the 5th Bombardment Squadron, 9th Bombardment Group. He was the navigator on this Superfortress when it was shot down over Tokyo. Surviving the crash, 2LT Nelson was held as a prisoner of war but perished in the Tokyo Military Prison during a fire. He has not yet been definitively associated with any remains recovered from the area and is still unaccounted-for. Today, Second Lieutenant Nelson memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency