Zehler, Laverne J
Army Corporal

Laverne J Zehler, age 20, from Genesee County Batavia, New York .

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. Cpl. LaVerne J. Zehler entered the U.S. Army Air Forces from New York and served in the 93rd Bombardment Squadron, 19th Bombardment Group. On March 10, 1945, he was the radio operator on a B-29 Superfortress (serial number 44-69686) that took off from Guam for a bombing mission against enemy installations in Tokyo, Japan. During the mission, this aircraft crashed in Itabashi Village, Tsukuba District, Ibaraki Prefecture. Nine of the 12 men on board died in the crash. Of the three survivors, one was executed and the other two, including Zehler, were sent to the Tokyo Military Prison. On the night of May 25, 1945, a massive air raid ignited fires that consumed large parts of Tokyo, including the prison. All American prisoners held there were killed. U.S. personnel later recovered the remains of U.S. service members from the site of the fire, but not all could be identified at the time. Zehler has not been associated with any remains recovered from the area and is still unaccounted for. He is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Source: National Archives, Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Times Union (1946)