World War II MIA: Family hopes effort will bring Harry Younge home

The Younge family was excited.

Henry L. Younge, known to everyone as Harry, was set to be interviewed live on a national radio broadcast from an island in the Pacific Ocean where he was a crew member on one of the American bombers flying missions over Japan in the final months of World War II.

A war correspondent had written a story about the 20-year-old trumpet player from Suffolk County who entertained crewmates in flight, and now the Amityville High School graduate was going to be interviewed on entertainer Eddie Cantor’s popular NBC radio show.

A two-paragraph item printed in Newsday on April 23, 1945, carried the headline: “Copiague GI on Radio Tuesday P.M.”

Younge, a tail gunner on a B-29 Superfortress stationed on Guam, “will go on the air over a nation-wide radio hook-up tomorrow night when he is interviewed on the Eddie Cantor Broadcast,” Newsday reported. “His skill on the trumpet won him the post of manager of the swing band at Syracuse University when he was training there.”

Harry’s parents and three sisters were invited to Cantor’s Manhattan studio for the show. But as they prepared to make the trip from their Amity Harbor home to the city for the April 24 broadcast, the Younges were told Harry wasn’t available for the interview. No details were provided, but the family had a sinking feeling it didn’t bode well for their beloved Harry.

Their worst fears were confirmed two weeks later when a telegram from the War Department notified the family that Harry was listed as missing in action. The Younges later learned from the Pentagon that he was known to have been among the dozens of American prisoners of war who died on May 26, 1945, when the Tokyo military prison where they were being held was engulfed in a firestorm ignited by B-29s.

Harry’s body, the family was told by military officials, was “non-recoverable.” Today, he’s listed among the more than 72,000 American service personnel still unaccounted for from World War II.

A new effort

Now, 77 years after he died amid flames and chaos on that horrific night, Harry Younge’s remains could finally be back on American soil. The unidentified remains of more than three dozen U.S. servicemen killed in the Tokyo prison fire were recently disinterred from a U.S. military cemetery in the Philippines and taken to Hawaii to begin the complex process of identifying skeletal remains buried for decades.

For Janet Clement, Younge’s niece, it’s a major breakthrough in a yearslong quest to “bring Harry home,” a possibility she first mentioned to her mother, Elizabeth, Harry’s sister, just before she died in June 2019 at 96, the last of the Younge siblings.

“My mother and grandmother have gone to their graves not knowing where Harry’s remains might be,” said Clement, a 74-year-old retired elementary school teacher in Richmond, Virginia. “My family only ever knew that he died in a prison camp in Tokyo from an American bombing.”

Harry Younge was born in Copiague on Christmas Day in 1924, the third child and only son of Florence and Lawrence Younge, who also had three daughters: Jewell, Jeanne and Elizabeth, who went by Betty.

A 1943 graduate of Amityville High, where he played trumpet in the band, Harry could often be found playing swing tunes for his friends while Betty, older by two years, showed everyone the latest dance moves.

“They were not only loving siblings, they were the best of friends,” said Clement, whose childhood included a few years living in Amityville, the hometown of her father, Robert Clement, and spending summers there with her paternal grandparents.

Younge entered military service in August 1943. Assigned to the Air Force, then part of the Army, he had training stints in Florida, upstate Syracuse, Nebraska and Kansas, where he became a tail gunner in a B-29. At 5-foot-6½ and weighing 115 pounds, Younge’s size made him the perfect candidate for a job performed in tight quarters.

Off to the Pacific

His squadron was sent to the Pacific, where it arrived in the Mariana Islands in early 1945, six months after U.S. forces had captured Japanese-held Saipan, Tinian and Guam. Younge was one of three New Yorkers among his 11-man crew, along with 2nd Lt. Warren H. Ransler of Syracuse and Sgt. Archer R. Kronick of Schenectady, also upstate.

By mid-April, Younge had flown eight bombing missions as the United States ramped up its air campaign against Japan’s home islands. In letters to his family, Younge told how his crewmates would call out favorite tunes for him to play on his ever-present trumpet during the hourslong flights over the open ocean, Clement said.

In his last letter home, Younge reported that he had been promoted from corporal to sergeant.

Early on April 16, Younge’s plane was shot down during a nighttime mission over Kawasaki, Japan. Five crew members died in the crash and a sixth died when his parachute failed to open. The other five, including Ransler and Younge, bailed out safely.

Ransler, the only member of Younge’s crew to survive the war, evaded capture for 19 days before being caught. He, along with Younge and the three other crew members, were taken to the Tokyo headquarters of the dreaded Kempeitai, the Japanese army’s secret police. On May 11, all but Ransler were transferred to the Tokyo military prison, where dozens of other downed U.S. flyers were being held in several cellblocks.

Late on the night of May 25, bombs dropped by U.S. B-29s started exploding near the prison, then several landed in the facility, causing extensive damage. Soon, flames whipped up by high winds spread the fire from nearby homes to the prison complex.

In postwar interrogations by American war crimes investigators, several Japanese prison guards described the intense flames and smoke that engulfed the prison for hours, forcing them to flee to bomb shelters.

The prison warden’s orders to keep the 60-plus American prisoners of war locked in their cells during bombing raids doomed most of them to a fiery death. Some managed to escape their burning cells, only to be cut down by sword-wielding guards, according to U.S. investigators.

The guards told investigators they buried the bodies of all 62 American POWs in a 50-foot trench on the prison grounds. In February 1946, a team from the Army’s Graves Registration Service excavated the site and recovered 62 sets of remains.

Twenty-five of the POWs were eventually identified from dental records and evidence such as dog tags. The remains of the other 37 were deemed unidentifiable and reinterred at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines, where they were officially recorded as “unknowns.”

They remained there until earlier this year, when their disinterment was approved by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the Pentagon office tasked with finding, recovering and identifying missing U.S. military personnel lost in action during overseas conflicts.

Bringing them home

A total of 39 unknown sets of remains associated with the Tokyo prison fire were disinterred in March and April, according to the DPAA. All were placed in separate flag-draped coffins, loaded aboard a U.S. Air Force transport and flown to Joint Base Pearl
Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii. There, experts will attempt to match the individual remains with DNA samples provided by relatives of the unidentified servicemen.

The move by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency to disinter the remains was prompted by a yearslong effort started by Michael Krehl, whose maternal grandfather, Sgt. Leonard J. McNeill of Orlando, Florida, was among the POWs known to have died in the fire at the Tokyo prison.

Krehl told Newsday he got interested in McNeill’s World War II service when a cousin mentioned that their maternal grandfather had died in the war.

“I had no idea of any of this,” said Krehl, 58, a retired masonry contractor from Florida who lived in Centerport in the early 1980s.

His mother, who died in 1985, never talked about her father, he said.

Krehl learned that his grandfather was among the Tokyo prison fire victims whose remains were buried as unknowns at the Manila cemetery. Under DPAA’s rules for consideration of disinterring unidentified remains that initially came from a common grave, Krehl had to get 60% of the relatives of all 62 victims of the prison fire to submit DNA samples for possible matches. Krehl set up a Facebook page, facebook.com/Sgt.McNeill, in 2018 dedicated to the repatriation.

Through years of research, phone calls and letter writing, Krehl contacted enough relatives of the fallen servicemen to get to 59%. Still, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency wouldn’t budge. Krehl then sought help from elected officials, starting with U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). Eventually 16 other senators joined the effort, and last July, all 17 signed a letter sent to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin requesting that the agency allow an exception to the 60% rule.

Last fall, the agency said it had received enough DNA samples from the relatives of the unknowns to disinter the remains.

A case summary for Younge provided to Clement in October stated, “This process is careful and methodical and can take several years with no assurance of how many of the remains will be identified.”

Clement hopes it doesn’t take that long to determine if her Uncle Harry’s remains are among those brought to Hawaii. She worries that the agency’s actions have come too late for many of the relatives, like herself, who are getting on in age.

“We don’t have very long,” Clement said. “There’s a clock ticking.”

In the meantime, she still wonders if Harry had his trumpet with him on that final flight, playing tunes for the fellas to relieve the stress of another combat mission. She tends to think he did, since no instrument was among the dozens of personal items sent back home to his grieving mother.

And among Harry’s military records obtained by Clement was a neatly typed “Inventory of Effects” that accompanied the box delivered to Mrs. Florence Younge of Emerson Avenue in Copiague. Last on the list of sundry items — such as socks, stamps and military insignia — is the notation about a musical accessory:

“1 trumpet mute”