WWII bomber crash left 11 dead and 'non-recoverable.' 4 are finally
coming home
[May 27, 2025]
By MICHAEL HILL
WAPPINGERS FALLS, N.Y. (AP) — As the World War II bomber Heaven Can Wait
was hit by enemy fire off the Pacific island of New Guinea on March 11,
1944, the co-pilot managed a final salute to flyers in an adjacent plane
before crashing into the water.
All 11 men aboard were killed. Their remains, deep below the vast sea,
were designated as non-recoverable.
Yet four crew members' remains are beginning to return to their
hometowns after a remarkable investigation by family members and a
recovery mission involving elite Navy divers who descended 200 feet (61
meters) in a pressurized bell to reach the sea floor.
Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, the radio operator, was buried with military
honors and community support on Saturday in his hometown of Wappingers
Falls, New York, more than eight decades after leaving behind his wife
and baby son.
The bombardier, 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly, was to be buried Monday in
Livermore, California, where he grew up in a ranching family. The
remains of the pilot, 1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, and navigator, 2nd Lt.
Donald Sheppick, will be interred in the coming months.
The ceremonies are happening 12 years after one of Kelly's relatives,
Scott Althaus, set out to solve the mystery of where exactly the plane
went down.
“I’m just so grateful,” he told The Associated Press. “It’s been an
impossible journey — just should never have been able to get to this
day. And here we are, 81 years later.”
March 11, 1944: Bomber down
The Army Air Forces plane nicknamed Heaven Can Wait was a B-24 with a
cartoon pin-up angel painted on its nose and a crew of 11 on its final
flight.
They were on a mission to bomb Japanese targets when the plane was shot
down. Other flyers on the mission were not able to spot survivors.
Their wives, parents and siblings were of a generation that tended to be
tight-lipped in their grief. But the men were sorely missed.
Sheppick, 26, and Tennyson, 24, each left behind pregnant wives who
would sometimes write them two or three letters a day. Darrigan, 26,
also was married, and had been able to attend his son's baptism while on
leave. A photo shows him in uniform, smiling as he holds the boy.
Darrigan’s wife, Florence, remarried but quietly held on to photos of
her late husband, as well as a telegram informing her of his death.
Tennyson’s wife, Jean, lived until age 96 and never remarried.
“She never stopped believing that he was going to come home,” said her
grandson, Scott Jefferson.
Memorial Day 2013: The Search
As Memorial Day approached 12 years ago, Althaus asked his mother for
names of relatives who died in World War II.
Althaus, a political science and communications professor at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, became curious while
researching World War II casualties for work. His mother gave him the
name of her cousin Thomas Kelly, who was 21 years old when he was
reported missing in action.
Althaus recalled that as a boy, he visited Kelly's memorial stone, which
has a bomber engraved on it. He began reading up on the lost plane.
“It was a mystery that I discovered really mattered to my extended
family,” he said.
With help from other relatives, he analyzed historical documents, photos
and eyewitness recollections. They weighed sometimes conflicting
accounts of where the plane went down. After a four-year investigation,
Althaus wrote a report concluding that the bomber likely crashed off of
Awar Point in what is now Papua New Guinea
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This 1943 photo shows 10 of the 11 members of the crew of the World
War II B-24 bomber, Heaven Can Wait, that went down in the waters of
Hansa Bay, Papua New Guinea in 1944, including Staff Sgt. Eugene
Darrigan, top row second from right, and, bottom row from left, 2nd
Lt. Donald Sheppick, 1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, and 2nd Lt. Tomas
Kelly, far right. (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency via AP)
The report was shared with Project Recover, a nonprofit committed to
finding and repatriating missing American service members and a
partner of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, or DPAA. A team
from Project Recover, led by researchers from Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, located the debris field in 2017 after searching
nearly 10 square miles (27 square kilometers) of seafloor.
The DPAA launched its deepest ever underwater recovery mission in
2023.
A Navy dive team recovered dog tags, including Darrigan’s partially
corroded tag with his the name of his wife, Florence, as an
emergency contact. Kelly’s ring was recovered. The stone was gone,
but the word BOMBARDIER was still legible.
And they recovered remains that underwent DNA testing. Last
September, the military officially accounted for Darrigan, Kelly,
Sheppick and Tennyson.
With seven men who were on the plane still unaccounted for, a future
DPAA mission to the site is possible.
Memorial Day 2025: Belated Homecomings
More than 200 people honored Darrigan on Saturday in Wappingers
Falls, some waving flags from the sidewalk during the procession to
the church, others saluting him at a graveside ceremony under cloudy
skies.
“After 80 years, this great soldier has come home to rest,”
Darrigan’s great niece, Susan Pineiro, told mourners at his
graveside.
Darrigan’s son died in 2020, but his grandson Eric Schindler
attended.
Darrigan’s 85-year-old niece, Virginia Pineiro, solemnly accepted
the folded flag.
Kelly's remains arrived in the Bay Area on Friday. He was to be
buried Monday at his family’s cemetery plot, right by the marker
with the bomber etched on it. A procession of Veterans of Foreign
Wars motorcyclists will pass by Kelly’s old home and high school
before he is interred.
“I think it’s very unlikely that Tom Kelly’s memory is going to fade
soon,” said Althaus, now a volunteer with Project Recover.
Sheppick will be buried in the months ahead near his parents in a
cemetery in Coal Center, Pennsylvania. His niece, Deborah Wineland,
said she thinks her late father, Sheppick's younger brother, would
have wanted it that way. The son Sheppick never met died of cancer
while in high school.
Tennyson will be interred on June 27 in Wichita, Kansas. He'll be
buried beside his wife, Jean, who died in 2017, just months before
the wreckage was located.
“I think because she never stopped believing that he was coming back
to her, that it’s only fitting she be proven right,” Jefferson said.
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