Lt. Jack Volz, KIA IN 1943, Finally Laid To Rest In Louisville This Weekend

For those who scratch their heads, and wonder what America is about, and what makes America tick, OldSouth shares this story from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Jack E. Volz, a World War II aviator declared dead a year and a day after his B-24 Liberator went missing in the South Pacific in 1943, will be laid to rest with full military honors Saturday at Cave Hill Cemetery.
Volz’s remains will arrive from Hawaii just before noon Thursday at Louisville International Airport, where a military honor squad will escort him to a hearse that will make the trip to Ratterman’s Funeral Home in St. Matthews.

“It’s such a special miracle,” said niece Marilyn Simonds, 63.

Volz, 21, and his crew and plane vanished on Oct. 27, 1943. Sixty years later, in 2003, someone who had passed by the wreckage in Papua, New Guinea and picked up Volz’s identification card turned it over to a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command team, which located the crash site in 2005.

In early 2007, after the Army obtained DNA samples from family members, the crash site was excavated and the remains were taken to Hawaii.

After the matches were confirmed, the Army sat with the family, presenting some three hundred pages of evidence that these remains were indeed those of Lt. Volz, and arranged for the funeral at one of the great historic cemeteries of the country. A portion of his remains will also be interred with the remains of his crew in Arlington Cemetery in August.

Lt. Volz was one of millions of young lives cut short by the utter madness of collectivist, utopian and nation-as-religion monsters of the twentieth century. But in America, the sacrifice he made to help set things right is not forgotten. Here is an opportunity, in some small way, to redeem this tragedy, and to remind ourselves and the world who we all are when we are at our best.

Here's hoping, and encouraging, that many will take the time to pay their respects at the funeral home and cemetery tomorrow, to give the young man a fitting welcome home.

The funeral home is here.

Cave Hill Cemetery is here.