September 6th 2023.
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Second Lieutenant Fred L Brewer Jr, a heroic World War II fighter pilot, was identified 79 years after he crashed and went missing during a mission. On August 10th, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency made the announcement.
Brewer was one of the less than 1,000 black pilots trained in a segregated airfield. He flew a P-51C Mustang nicknamed Traveling Light out of Ramitelli Air Field in Italy on October 19, 1944. He was part of the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group, and was one of 57 pilots on a bomber escort mission in Regensburg, Germany.
Heavy cloud cover forced nine of the planes to return to base. Unfortunately, Brewer was not one of them. According to the DPAA, reports from the mission suggest that he was attempting to climb his aircraft out of the clouds, however, he stalled out and fell into a spin.
At the end of World War II, US personnel recovered a body from a civilian cemetery, but it could not be identified and was marked as unknown. In 2011, researchers examined the remains and discovered an Italian police report that said it had been recovered from a crashed fighter jet the same day Brewer went missing. War records from Germany corroborated this.
The remains were disinterred in June 2022 and sent to a DPAA lab, which led to the positive identification of Brewer. His cousin, Robena Brewer Harrison, spoke about the devastation his family experienced when he was first reported missing: "It just left a void within our family. My aunt, who was his mother, Janie, she never, ever recovered from that."
Brewer's name was on the Tablets of the Missing at the Florence American Cemetery in Impruneta, Italy. The DPAA will add a rosette next to his name to commemorate that he has been accounted for almost eight decades later. This is a testament to the bravery and dedication of Second Lieutenant Fred L Brewer Jr.
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