WWII Missing Returned

[Fred Lohr (D Troop)]

Missing Soldier Returns for Burial
July 03, 2010
Richmond Times - Dispatch

HAYNESVILLE -- When Fannie Withers Dawson died at 102 years old, buried with her was an unfulfilled dream she carried to her grave.

"It was that she would see her son come home alive. She always felt there was a chance," said Dawson's only surviving child. "She would never accept that Richard was dead."

Yesterday, as the nation prepared to celebrate its 234th year of independence, word was formally announced that World War II airman Richard M. Dawson, one of Fannie Dawson's five children, is indeed finally coming home.

 
He will be buried July 15 at Arlington National Cemetery, putting to rest his mother's dream but also a remarkable story of the military's dedicated mission to locate and identify soldiers missing in action.

"To me what it says, is that they never gave up," Richard Dawson's only surviving sibling said yesterday from her home in Richmond County on Virginia's Northern Neck. "I'm just thankful that the Department of Defense kept its word and did what it set out to do."

Christine Dawson King, now 77, barely remembers her brother, who would be 91 now. He never went to high school, King recalls, apparently intent to carry on the family farming operation: corn, tomatoes, and wheat. Her father, William Morgan Dawson, raised five children with Fannie and plowed the farm with horses.

Richard Dawson joined the Army three years before World War II began, his sister said. On May 23, 1944, seven Army airmen, including Pfc. Dawson, 25, were aboard a C-47A Skytrain tasked with resupplying Allied forces in Burma.

The plane never returned. But in late 2002, a missionary came up with a data plate from a C-47 crash site 31 miles from the plane's destination. The next year, a Burmese citizen turned over human remains and certain identifying material.

An identification tag for Dawson was found during excavations in 2003 and 2004 carried out by the Department of Defense's Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office.

King's DNA helped confirm that her brother was among the seven victims.

Six other soldiers also are returning home and are scheduled to be buried July 15 at Arlington, as well. They are from Chicago; Floral Park, N.Y.; Millen, Ga.; Tyrone, Pa.; Sacramento, Calif.; and Piedmont, Ala.

King will go to the service with a niece, thinking of her mother, Fannie, who died in 1999, and of how a long, sad, hopeful story has at last ended.

King lives in the same home she and her brothers and sisters grew up in; the land is still full of crops and within shouting distance is Totuskey Baptist Church, where Fannie and husband William are buried and where a granite marker lists nearly 100 war dead from the area.

Richard Dawson's name is there, the only man designated as missing in action.

And in a safe place, Christine keeps the remnants of a life she barely knew -- letters between son and mother and the newfound dog tag that bears Fannie's name as well as Richard's.

"My mother lost her husband at an early age and a son when he was 35," she said, referring to another son. "But she always said that the pain of those deaths, even of her own children, never equaled the pain of not knowing if Richard had died."