Sixty-three years on, WWII air cadet Leo Mustonen laid to rest in the United States

Son of Finnish immigrant parents identified by elimination after body was discovered last year

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Jyri Raivio in Washington
     
      A typical military burial was carried out in the small Minnesota town of Brainerd on Friday. A detachment of soldiers fired a 21-gun salute over the grave, as the urn carrying the ashes of the deceased was placed into the ground next to his parent's resting-place.
      Almost everything else about the ceremony was, however, somewhat untypical. This was not the laying to rest of an American GI killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The deceased was a U.S. airman named Leo Mustonen, who had died at the age of 22 in an air crash while on active service, though not in combat.
      He was the second son of carpenter Arvid Mustonen and his wife Anna, a Finnish couple who had emigrated to the United States. His plane went down on November 18th, 1942 over the Sierra Nevada in California, and two other Air Force cadets and a pilot also died in the accident.
     
Some hikers found the body by chance last fall, while out on the Darwin Glacier in the Kings Canyon National Park.
      The discovery sparked off an identification process for "the frozen airman" that generated considerable media attention in the United States. Mustonen was eventually identified from his badly-corroded serviceman's dog-tag and on the basis of DNA samples - or rather more accurately on the basis of the elimination of all three of the other victims through DNA analysis.
     
The U.S. military was thus able to make good on what is described as "the most sacred of promises" to its members and their next-of-kin: ensuring wherever humanly possible that the men and women under its charge get home again, come what may.
      The work is a colossal task for an army, navy, and air force that operates worldwide. According to the New York Times, which featured the Mustonen case extensively in its edition of March 24th, an estimated 88,000 military personnel remain unaccounted for. The vast majority of these victims - some 78,000 - are from World War II. Most of these are believed lost at sea.
      Until last October, this list of the missing also included Air Cadet Leo Mustonen, who had trained as a navigator. He, two other cadets, and a pilot took off from a base near Sacramento, CA in a Beechcraft AT-7 trainer on a four-hour navigational exercise, from which they never returned.
     
Nearly five years later, in 1947, some pieces of wreckage, the dog-tags of one of the four victims, and what was described at the time as "a small piece of frozen flesh" were found on the Darwin Glacier. A group burial was carried out in California, on behalf of all four men.
      Thereafter, the incident slipped into the archives and out of memory, until the fairly well-preserved body was found from the ice of the glacier, roughly 4,000 metres above sea level. The victim was wearing a parachute pack marked "US Army". The chute was unopened.
      The process of identification was carried out by an army forensic laboratory on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, which specialises in these grim and often lengthy tasks.
     
The most important clue turned out to be the badly-corroded nametag around his neck. The name appeared quite illegible, but painstaking work allowed the team to make out the letters "EO A M". The first two and the last clearly pointed to Mustonen's name, but the "A" had the scientists scratching their heads. Leo Mustonen's second initial was "M".
      The riddle was solved when it was discovered that a bureaucratic lapse had meant that Mustonen's military papers had him registered incorrectly from the outset - as Leo A. Mustonen.
     
DNA analysis might have been an option, but in this case no direct matching was possible, since the victim had no surviving relatives who could have provided a reliable sample. His parents and his elder brother Arvo are all long since deceased.
      On the other hand it was possible to get matching DNA samples from relatives of the other three missing men, and none of these showed a DNA fit with the frozen body found on the Darwin Glacier.
      By this reverse process of elimination, and with the dog-tag as confirmation, the forensic scientists in Hawaii declared the case solved. Leo M. Mustonen's body was cremated and his ashes were interred with full military honours on Friday.
      Officials are now considering a further search of the crash site in the hope of "bringing home" the three servicemen still unaccounted for.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.3.2006
     
Note: Albeit that the two lives are obviously rather different, the case of Leo M. Mustonen will bring back memories of another Finnish-American serviceman, Lauri Törni, a.k.a. Capt. Larry Thorne. His remarkable military career and the circumstances of his death in Vietnam and subsequent burial in Arlington National Cemetery - 38 years later - are described in the attached article from 2003.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Legendary Finnish war hero Lauri Törni (Larry Thorne) to get final resting place in Arlington National Cemetery (12.6.2003)

Links:
  New York Times article from 24.3.2006 (may require registration)
  Beechcraft AT-7 (site contains several references to this particular flight)

JYRI RAIVIO / Helsingin Sanomat
jyri.raivio@hs.fi