Captain Lawrence E. Dickson may have been found after 73 years

On his 68th mission, a few days before Christmas 1944, Captain Lawrence E. Dickson, a Tuskegee airman, had engine problems and went down near the snow-covered Alps in northern Italy according to the Washington Post;

On Jan. 8, 1945, Phyllis Dickson got the dreaded telegram.

“The Secretary of War desires to express his deep regret that your husband Captain Lawrence E Dickson has been reported missing in action,” it read. “If further details … are received you will be promptly notified.”

Phyllis and Lawrence Dickson had been married in November 1941. He was a native of South Carolina, had taught himself how to play the guitar and spent two years studying chemistry at the City College of New York.

Now DPAA thinks that they found Captain Dickson, not in Tarvisio, Italy where thought that he’d gone down, but six miles away near Hohenthurn, Austria;

In May 2012, Frank and a small team went to Austria for one day. He met Domanig, and a local man who said as a child in the 1950s he often visited the site, until he found what looked like a human leg bone in the dirt.

“It scared him,” Frank said. “He never went back to the site after that.”

The man agreed to take Frank there.

The spot was in a pleasant clearing in the forest off a logging road near Hohenthurn.

There was a shallow crater, and moss covered the ground. When Frank pulled back the moss, airplane parts, consistent with a P-51, were right beneath the surface.

“They still had the ash on them, still burnt,” he said. “All of the older pine trees around the site had scars on the trees from when the plane was burning and the .50-caliber rounds popped off and hit the trees.”

Experts would later identify airplane bullet casings, part of a machine gun ammunition loading chute and human remains buried in the dirt.

In November, the human remains were sent for analysis to the DPAA laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, outside Omaha.

His 75-year-old daughter, Marla L. Andrews, awaits news so she can lay her father to rest finally.

Category: We Remember