Rib Lake WWII veteran finally coming home

After more than 80 years, PFC Lee Clendenning is finally coming home.

After decades of questions and uncertainty, Lee’s family will get closure and peace in knowing Lee’s remains have been identified by forensic scientists at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and will be coming home.

“It is a long time coming,” said Lee “Butch” Clendenning, nephew and namesake of Pfc. Lee Clendenning.

He remembers his grandmother always wondering because there was no body, there was no confirmation of death. “She lived out the rest of her life without really knowing,” Butch said, recalling his grandmother being very concerned about the fate of her son up until her own death.

Butch praises Jessie Higa, a Hawaii-based historian of Hickam Field at the National Cemetery of the Pacific, at the Punchbowl in Honolulu who kept Lee’s story alive over the years, sharing information to visitors about Lee and his brother Charles.

Lee Clendenning was 23 years old in December 1941. He was assigned to 23rd Bombardment Squadron (heavy), 5th Bombardment Group at Hickam Airfield on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. He worked as a cook.

On. Dec. 7th, 1941, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese aircraft expanded to Hickam Field, targeting U.S. aircrafts and ships, barracks, supply buildings, and the base chapel. The attack on military targets across the island lasted four hours.

Lee’s older brother Charles, who was also serving in Hawaii, was injured in the attack. Charles and a friend, Sergeant A.H. Gierach, reported having seen Lee killed that day.

“Lee died a good soldier and you may well be proud of him,” Gierach wrote in a letter to Lee’s parents that was later printed in the Rib Lake Herald in December 1941.

However, official word from the U.S. Military was that Lee was among the missing.

Dr. Laurel Freas of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency based in Oahu, explained that the recovery efforts immediately following the attacks on Dec. 7, 1941 were not very detailed.

“All we know is that his remains were recovered sometime between the time of the attack and December 9th, when they were buried in the post cemetery at Schofield Barracks, which is another U.S. Army installation here,” she said. Freas is the scientist who headed up the identification efforts on Pfc. Lee Clendenning.

She said the military records do not show if Lee was at his duty station or on leave at the time of the attack, only that he was somewhere on Hickam Field when he was killed.

She explained that the military’s Graves Registration Service had the task at the end of WWII to recover and identify all of the missing and return them to their families. The service exhumed those buried at Schofield Barracks following the Pearl Harbor attack, but who had not been identified, to try to work through and identify the remains. That included not only Lee, but a number of other service members as well.

She explained that these efforts took place in 1947 and 1948. Any individuals who could not be identified were reburied as “unknowns” in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

See RIB LAKE on page 14 “It is often referred to as the Arlington of the Pacific,” she said. “It is a beautiful cemetery,” she said.

She said the DPAA has a long history of working to build the case to identify the individuals who are buried at unknowns at the cemetery. “We've been working on unknowns from the Korean war, and from all across all of the various theaters of conflict from World War II,” she said.

In 2019, the proposal was made to disinter the remains some of the unidentified soldiers. She said there were 12 sets of remains that were disinterred and brought to the DPAA lab in 2020.

She said at this point they began the large scale analysis of the remains. “One thing that we've learned in working with remains from these historic contexts is that they often are co-mingled, so the bones of multiple individuals are often mixed together,” she said.

Identifying co-mingled remains is a lot like combining the pieces from several puzzles into one box and then have someone throw the box tops away. The first step to separate them would be to find the corner pieces that go with each puzzle and then work out from there with the pieces that fit together.

In the lab, this means taking DNA samples from multiple locations. “Typically, we sample the skull and bone from the upper arm. A bone from the lower arm on the opposite side, so left and right, and then the same thing with the legs will sample the right upper leg and then the left, lower leg or vice versa. And what that does is give us a number of sort of anchor points throughout the skeleton,” she said. From there they go through and piece the skeleton together based on how the bones fit with each other. She explained that they look at things like if the bones mirror each other or if they articulate properly in the joints. “That helps us one determine if all the remains in a given unknown, actually belong to the same person. If all of those things line up, then we can establish that it's just a single person,” she said.

She said if they don’t match, they may have to do additional DNA testing, noting that it is possible for the remains of one person to end up in multiple caskets.

“In this case, we were actually very lucky all of the DNA samples came back as one set and everything pair matched every bone, articulated properly with all of its neighbors,” she said.

When they felt confident they had all one person, they turned to comparing the DNA samples with those that had been provided by the family members of missing service members. That work is handled in an armed forces lab located in Dover, Del. “They're a very, very important partner of ours, we work extremely closely with them. And couldn't do what we do without the work that they do,” Freas said.

In this case, the lab testing came back that the five samples taken from the set of remains all had the same sequence and they all match the family reference samples that were provided by the Clendenning family.

Freas said this gave them one more piece of the puzzle and one more line of evidence.

Other lines of evidence were sought through things like dental records where cavities and missing teeth had been noted on the military records before Lee’s death. The goal of this is to develop an independent line of evidence that identify the remains. She said it is when all the pieces come together they then know that it is him.

All of these processes and investigation takes time. The groups working with each individual prepare their final reports when they feel they have enough evidence for a positive identification. They then go through a case review meeting where they present their case to lab management and a medical examiner and walk them through the evidence they found to make the identification.

“It's almost like a master's thesis or a dissertation defense where we sort of have to defend our work, they'll ask us questions . . . to make sure that we've considered all possibilities that we haven't left any stone unturned,” she said.

The case review for the identification of Pfc. Lee Clendenning was held last November. She said there was some additional DNA testing on the paternal line Y chromosome that was still in progress before they could absolutely confirm the remains were a positive match to Lee.

Once the remains are identified the case goes to the branch of the military the service member was part of in order for the military to contact the family and arrange for funeral arrangements.

Freas explained that the DPAA will keep the remains until the service casualty office provides them with disposition directions, at which time, the remains, with military escort will be brought to where the family directs for burial.

Butch Clendenning said the family is working with the military and he hopes they can bring his uncle’s remains home to Rib Lake sometime this summer.

World War II to now, a significant amount of time, effort and resources have gone into finding and bringing soldiers like Pfc. Lee Clendenning home.

“We do this because this is part of the promise that we as the nation have made to our uniformed service members. And part of the promise that they make to themselves that we will leave no man behind, I will never leave a fallen comrade,” Freas said. “These young men gave their life and we owe their families the duty, the obligation of doing everything we can to recover them, identify them and return them home for a burial, fitting of the honor and dignity of their sacrifice.”

Freas noted that this promise and the efforts to fulfill it is largely an “American thing,” explaining that there are a few other nations, such as South Korea, that have similar robust efforts to bring their service members home.

“There's no country really that performs it at the level that we do here in the United States and a large part of that is just the scope of our involvement in these conflicts across the 20th century,” she said.

Freas said she believes the way technology is progressing that there may come a day when there may be no more unknowns. She noted the decline in the number of missing through all the conflicts from WWII to today. “I don't think it's ever possible to say never, to be 100% absolute, but there are so many things now that really help us recover and identify service members much more rapidly today, as opposed to in our historic conflicts,” she said.

According to Freas, the people working at DPAA and with their partner military agencies to identify and bring home fallen service members all have their motivations with many, including herself, having military ties that go back generations.

“I only played a small role in the entirety of the process that resulted in Pfc. Clendenning being able to be returned home, but everyone here has their own personal connection to the mission, their own passion. Everyone here is as committed as dedicated as inspired by this work as I am, we're all here, because we believe deeply in the importance and the value of this work. And I just think that really is a tremendous statement on, again, our commitment to this mission of identifying our missing service numbers and returning them to their families,” Freas said.

Hickam Hawaii, Dec. 7, 1941— Airmen with other personnel man a gun emplacement set up in a bomb crater between Hangars 11-13 and 15-17 at Hickam Field. US AIR FORCE

The first bombs to strike Hickam Field Dec. 7, 1941 were dropped on Hawaiian Air Depot buildings and the hangar line, causing thick clouds of smoke to billow upward. (Courtesy photo, John W. Wilson) US AIR FORCE