Julia Carvutto, a 90-year-old retired school teacher in Norwalk, Conn., received a phone call from a friend 16 months ago asking if a soldier mentioned in the local newspaper that morning was Julia’s brother, Mart.
“‘What are you talking about,’” Carvutto recalled asking her.
“She said, ‘They found his remains.’ And that’s how I heard … I was in shock. I couldn’t believe it.”
Her son, William Wilcox, lives two houses away and saw the same article about Uncle Mart. The government sought surviving family members of Army Air Corps Staff Sgt. Martin Troy of Norwalk, who was lost 63 years earlier when his World War II bomber went down somewhere over Europe.
“We had no idea that a search was even going on,” Wilcox said.
Over the next year, DNA samples from Carvutto and her son verified that bone fragments taken from a lakeside swamp near the village of Nemesvita in Hungary were the remains of her brother.
On Nov. 20, Carvutto, the last survivor of seven children, will travel with her son and other family members to Washington, D.C., to see Mart buried, finally, with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
There to meet them will be Joseph “Jerry” Conlon, 83, of Roaring Spring, Pa., a survivor of the June 30, 1944 mission that took the lives of Mart Troy and 16 fellow airmen. All four of their B-24 bombers, flying together, were shot down by a swarm of 35 German Messerschmitt fighters.
Conlon, aware for decades that only one crewman on the four planes was never found, made three trips to Hungary since 2003 to help account for Martin Troy. He was there, beside Lake Balaton, when an excavation team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) out of Hickham Air Force Base, Hawaii, began recovering bone fragments. Later he visited Norwalk to tell Carvutto how her brother Martin died and was found.
The lost airman was 30, married and working for Connecticut Light and Power Co. when he was drafted after Pearl Harbor, Carvutto recalled. Three older brothers, who already had children, were not called to war.
“Mart would never complain,” she said.
When color-blindness blocked flight training, he went to gunnery school to learn to fire the .50 caliber waist gun on a B-24. Carvutto said her brother was too “sweet and kind” for her to even imagine him firing on someone.
His B-24H Liberator was part of the 460th Bombardment Group based in Spinazzola, Italy. Its final mission was to bomb an oil refinery east of Berlin. Conlon, a second lieutenant bombardier, was in another aircraft.
When the weather got bad, most of the bombers and the fighter escorts turned back. Four ignored that recall order. When the clouds parted over Hungary, the German fighters attacked. Of 41 crewmen on the four planes, 17 died. The others, including Conlon, parachuted to safety only to be taken prisoner. Conlon rattles off the names of crewmen lost that day, and many who have died since, with a familiarity that honors them all.
“If I tried to will their names out of my head, I couldn’t do it,” he explained. “And I’ll be down there (in Arlington) on the 20th because, see, there’s nobody left of that crew. That crew’s all gone. I’m the only one left from my own crew. One of the other crews has one guy left. Another crew may have two, I’m not sure. One died two days ago … His wife called to tell me. So now there are four of us out of the 41.”
With no remains for Mart, there was no funeral. The family simply waited for word until they each realized on their own that no word would ever come.
Conlon knew Mart’s plane, with him inside, hit the earth still carrying its load of 500-pound bombs. The explosion, he later learned, made a crater nine feet deep and 20 feet in circumference.
Two survivors of Mart’s crew began pressing the Department of Defense in 1957 to find his remains but Army Graves Registration in 1945 had deemed them unrecoverable. Then, in 1999, a Hungarian national meet with former crew members and began turning over bone fragments from the site. In 2003, a JPAC team surveyed the impact area. By 2007 they were excavating the site, with Conlon arriving to watch part of the recovery effort.
The burial of Mart Troy will be his “last effort” on behalf of those crewmen that he served with more than six decades ago. “I’ll be finished,” he said.
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