The Missing

These are just some of the individual cases in which PIP and the families of the missing are seeking information. In each, the serviceman was reported captured alive, or reported in enemy custody, and was never returned.

Each profile sets out what is known, what remains unresolved, why the case matters, the evidence and sources behind it, and what specific information the family and PIP are asking for.

Korean War

• Capt. Gilbert Ashley and the Ashley Five — a bomber crew captured in January 1953 whose survival the North Koreans confirmed by radio, declared alive by U.S. officials in August 1953, and never accounted for. Fourteen men were aboard: three came home, 1st Lt. Dewey Stopa died in captivity and is still carried as killed in action, and others were seen to get out alive.
• James O’Meara, USAF — aboard the same B-29; a returning crewman wrote his mother that he saw him jump and that he did not appear to be injured. Never accounted for.
• Maj. Sam Logan, USAF — B-29 shot down north of Pyongyang in September 1950; his name was found scratched into a Pyongyang jail wall, and the Soviet news agency published his photograph in captivity that November.
• Lt. William Crone, USAF — shot down on his thirtieth birthday; four Soviet veterans remembered his identification card.
• Capt. Ara Mooradian, USAF — B-29 bombardier lost on Black Tuesday, October 1951; a Gulag survivor described an American with a scar on his cheek, and Mooradian’s photograph showed one.
• Cpl. Ronald “Dutch” Van Wees, U.S. Army — last seen advancing into a Chinese trench line in November 1952; his mother sued President Eisenhower on behalf of the families.
• Capt. James B. Brown, USMC — night fighter pilot lost in 1953; an American held in China reported that he kept wiping “Captain Brown” off a prison wall, and it kept coming back.
• 1st Lt. Dewey Stopa, USAF — Ashley crew bombardier; captured, marched north in tennis shoes with frozen feet, died at Pike’s Peak. His ID card is in the Pyongyang war museum.
• 1st Lt. Gerard Peter Cyr, USAF — Mosquito observer lost over Heartbreak Ridge; the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) itself records his torn ID card was seen in the Pyongyang museum, and says it knows nothing more.
• 1st Lt. Richard Blaine Rosenvall, USAF — turned back with a fuel problem and vanished; his ID card is on display in Pyongyang.
• Cpl. Elmer Vinae Wing Jr., U.S. Army — lost on a Punchbowl patrol; DPAA says the circumstances are unknown; his Social Security card is on display in Pyongyang.
• Airman Hidemaro Ishida, USAF — one of the Ashley Five, confirmed alive after the Armistice.
• 1st Lt. Arthur Olsen, USAF — one of the Ashley Five, confirmed alive after the Armistice.
• 1st Lt. John Shaddick, USAF — one of the Ashley Five; his mother went to China in 1955 and was told he was alive and that his return must be negotiated.
• Capt. Harold Turner, USAF — one of the Ashley Five, confirmed alive after the Armistice.
• 1st Lt. Dewey Henry, USAF — Ashley crew navigator; a repatriated prisoner reported a Lt Henry seen in captivity and “doing fine.”
• Sgt. Richard G. Desautels, U.S. Army — the one case the U.S. government has conceded in writing — taken into China, died there, the file never produced.
• 2nd Lt. Thomas Odenbaugh, USMC — the second name scratched on the Pyongyang cell wall beside Sam Logan’s.
• Capt. Harry C. Moore, USAF — F-51 pilot, shot down 1 June 1951; a Soviet officer later told U.S. investigators he was interrogated by the commander of the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps.
• Sgt. Gerald Glasser, U.S. Army — a well-known resident of Chinese-run POW Camp 1, reported by 66 returning Americans, removed from the camp by Chinese officers in 1953 and never returned.
• Staff Sgt. Joseph Stephen Dougherty, USAF — B-29 radio operator who bailed out over North Korea on 23 October 1951; a Soviet document found in 2001 at Podolsk describes the capture and interrogation of a B-29 radio operator days later.

1st Lt. Leonard W. Button, U.S. Army — captured alive behind enemy lines in May 1953 and confirmed in both U.S. and Russian records; still carried as missing in action.

Cold War reconnaissance losses

• Maj. Samuel N. Busch, USAF — commander of an RB-29 downed by Soviet fighters on 13 June 1952 in the Sea of Japan.
• AD3 Jack D. Lively, U.S. Navy — one of ten crewmen aboard a P2V-3W shot down near Vladivostok on 6 November 1951, a crew associated with reports of surviving U.S. aviators reported at Hospital 404.
• Lt. j.g. James Deane, U.S. Navy — co-pilot of a P4M Mercator shot down by PRC MiGs on 23 August 1956, tracked by U.S. intelligence reporting in Chinese custody for roughly two years afterward.
• The Privateer crew — ten men aboard a U.S. Navy Privateer shot down by Soviet fighters over the Baltic on 8 April 1950. In 1956 the United States formally told Moscow that crew members had been reported alive in Soviet camps.
• AD3 Lloyd Smith Jr., U.S. Navy — seen drifting toward the Chinese coast on a life raft after a Navy patrol plane was shot down off Shantou in January 1953; reportedly captured and paraded through the city
• Ens. Dwight C. Angell, U.S. Navy — crewman on the Navy patrol plane shot down off Shantou, China, in January 1953; pulled aboard a Coast Guard rescue plane that crashed on takeoff, and never found
• The RB-50 crew, 29 July 1953 — 18 men aboard over the Sea of Japan two days after the Korean armistice; one rescued, seven seen alive in the water among Soviet patrol boats.
• The Yuri Island RB-29 crew, 7 Oct. 1952 — eight aboard off Hokkaido; Soviet patrol boats reached the site first, and one man was recovered 43 years later.
• The RB-50 crew, 10 Sept. 1956 — 16 men lost over the Sea of Japan behind an Air Force typhoon cover story.

Pfc. Ryeu Sup “Roy” Chung, U.S. Army — vanished from his unit in Germany in June 1979 and surfaced in North Korea. Treated officially as a defection; his family never accepted it.

Vietnam War

• Maj. John T. McDonnell, U.S. Army — Cobra pilot lost in Thua Thien Province on 6 March 1969; his identification card later surfaced in the Hue Military Museum.
• Lt. Cmdr. James “Kelly” Patterson, U.S. Navy — last reported alive in Hoa Binh Province in May 1967, with later reporting that he was taken to a Soviet facility in Priozersk, Kazakhstan.
• Col. David L. Hrdlicka, USAF — shot down in Sam Neua, Laos, on 18 May 1965, photographed in Pathet Lao custody, not returned in 1973.
• Two Americans alive in Hanoi — unrepatriated Americans reported repeatedly from 1974 at the office in charge of U.S. POW records and remains, by a defector who passed a polygraph examination.
• Senior Master Sgt. Bennie Lee Dexter — captured in 1966 and still carried as a prisoner of war when Operation Homecoming closed; in 1976 an American called “Mr. Benny” received a family photograph in a camp in Tay Ninh
• Sgt. 1st Class Dallas Reese Pridemore, U.S. Army — abducted while visiting a Vietnamese family; in 1992 an enemy commander said the girlfriend who compromised him was one of his own agents
• Maj. Henry M. Serex, USAF — electronic warfare officer aboard the EB-66C “Bat 21,” shot down over Quang Tri Province in April 1972. Twenty years later his escape-and-evade authenticator and his name were read in satellite imagery of a field beside a prison in northern Vietnam.
• Maj. Victor J. Apodaca Jr., USAF — F-4C Phantom aircraft commander lost over North Vietnam in June 1967; the government identified remains in 2001, and his sisters do not accept the identification
• Sgt. Joseph A. Matejov, USAF — one of eight men aboard the EC-47Q “Baron 52” shot down over Laos in February 1973; enemy radio reported four Americans captured that day, and his family does not accept the accounting
• Baron 52 crew, USAF — the eight men aboard the EC-47Q lost over Laos on Feb. 5, 1973, one of the most hotly contested cases in the history of the POW issue
• CW3 William P. Milliner, U.S. Army — copilot of a Cobra gunship that disappeared into clouds near Khe Sanh returning from a mission over Laos in March 1971
• SFC Robert D. Owen, U.S. Army — member of a Special Forces reconnaissance team that vanished in Salavan Province, Laos, in May 1968

Identity unresolved

Four men in enemy hands whose names we do not know. All are open cases, and all are here because a face without a name is still a missing American.

• Tearful POW? — an American filmed weeping in communist captivity, never identified.
• “The Horse” — a Russian man reported to Pentagon investigators as a possible Korean War Marine prisoner. Genuine POW, imposter or hoax — never resolved.
• “Juozas” / “Joe” — Lithuanian-American Korean War Aviator — an American aviator of Lithuanian descent reported held in the Soviet Gulag, never identified.
• The Hungarian-American Pilot — reportedly escaped Hungary across the Austrian border, joined the U.S. military, was captured in Vietnam, taken to the Soviet Union and returned to Hungary for trial. Never identified.