Original Army Serial Number - 39677575
Enlisted April 25, 1941 in Salt Lake City

Until his remains were found, he was remembered at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial - # 56781190

Burial with full military honors Sept. 28, 2013, in Springville, Utah.

Vernal J. Bird
ID: 0-750321
Entered the Service From: Utah
Rank: Second Lieutenant
Service: U.S. Army Air Forces, 5th Air Force, 13th Bomber Squadron, 3rd Bomber Group, Light
Died: Friday, April 05, 1946
Memorialized at: Manila American Cemetery
Location: Fort Bonifacio, Manila, Philippines
Awards: Air Medal, Purple Heart

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Daily Herald September 24, 2013

2Lt. Vernal John Bird had been listed as Missing in Action since his A-20G Havoc bomber disappeared near Papua New Guinea on March 12, 1944. Now, after 69 years, the remains of the WWII pilot are returning to be buried with full military honors in the Springville Evergreen Cemetery on Saturday.

The 25-year-old pilot and his co-pilot, Staff Sgt. Roy F. Davis, were returning to the American base at Nadzab, Papua New Guinea after bombing Japanese airfields in western New Guinea. The base was located next to Lae, where Amelia Earhart began her own ill-fated flight in 1937. Their plane never returned to base.

Lt. Bird was missing in action, but he was never forgotten by his family. As the years passed, his 12 brothers and sisters gave up hope that they would ever know what happened to their youngest brother.

"Vernal was loved by all of us. He was definitely the family favorite," said his only surviving sister Elaine Jack, 92. "I was the youngest, two years younger, but he was the favorite. He was always a good student and a hard worker. He was the student body president at Pleasant Grove High School before we moved to Springville. He first joined the army in 1941. I remember the year because it was when Pearl Harbor was bombed."

Jack, who now lives in a retirement home in Oregon, recalled how proud their family was of their son and brother serving in WWII.

She said, "We were all so proud of him. He entered the army, but he always wanted to fly so he became part of the Army Air Force. I am wondering if he was one of the famous 'ninety day wonders' as they were called because he joined in 1941 and received his wings in October of 1942. We knew from his letters that he would fly bombing runs just above the treetops. He wrote a letter to my brother Freeman and told him they flew right in the leaves sometimes."

His sister will never forget how the family felt when the telegrams came to their home. The first notifying them that Bird was missing, the second declaring him dead.

"We were heartbroken. Mother was so worried about the possibility that he might be a prisoner of war and we also heard his plane may have gone down in the sea. We just accepted that he was lost, like so many pilots in the war. We knew from his letters that he was flying very dangerous missions low over the trees where there was danger of being shot down."

"We'd just kind of given up until my niece Lorna called me and asked me to send in my DNA into the military a few years ago. She had gotten interested in his story from the letters her dad saved."

Lorna Bird Snyder, Jack's niece, moved into the home of her parents in Springville after they passed away. As she sorted through the boxes stored by her parents in 2003, she found herself compelled to find out what happened to her uncle.

"Daddy was next youngest before Vernal and Elaine. They had a close sibling relationship and Vernal wrote to my dad Freeman often. I found boxes of letters when I moved into my parent's home and that's what started my interest in finding the story of what happened," she said.

"We all grew up with a picture of Vernal in our homes. He was only 25 when he died, and of course I never met him, but we all knew our parents loved him. I took the letters and started putting them in order and then I wanted to know more about what happened to him so I did a Google search. That was the start of how he was found."

Snyder explained that even though a Papuan named Charles Wintawa found the wreckage of a plane in 2001, Vernal Bird would not have been identified from what he had recovered from the site.

"Charles Wintawa had found the plane and took the engine identification plates and a bone to an American recovery team who was working on a different site," she said. "But without the DNA that I had convinced my aunt to send in, they never would have connected it to my uncle. The military has a lot of military wrecks they are excavating, and a lot of bones stored at the Hickam Air Force Base with no identification. If we hadn't had the DNA in 2006 we would never have been notified that he had been found."

On July 12, 2013, Elaine Jack got the phone call she never thought would happen. As next of kin, she heard the news that her brother's remains had been found and would be sent back to Utah for burial. The next person to receive the good news was Snyder.

"All the research I did was lovely and interesting but the thing that made the difference was Aunt Elaine's DNA. I want other families who have lost someone as a POW or MIA to get the information on how to submit DNA," said Jack. "There are over 80,000 lost from WWII on and they'll probably never find many of them. There were 600 wrecks not found in Papua New Guinea alone. Families should contact their Casualty Office for whichever branch of service their family member came from."

The years Snyder has spent in finding out what happened to her uncle, have also brought the family he never knew together.

"It has made such a difference. The beauty of it is that when I called the cousins they all felt as I did that we wanted to know about our uncle that we had been taught to love. We know what happened and he's coming back to us. It was worth it to see how it has connected our family. There will be more than 120 family members at the airport on Wednesday to meet the plane and attend his funeral after all these years."


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Update - September 28, 2013

SALT LAKE CITY – Only a sole surviving sibling has a distant memory of a World War II pilot whose recently identified remains will be buried Saturday with full military honors in Utah.

U.S. Air Force 2nd Lt. Vernal J. Bird had more than a dozen brothers and sisters when he crashed over a Pacific Ocean island nearly 70 years ago. He disappeared over Papua New Guinea on a 1944 bombing run of Japanese airfields there. He was 25.

The crash site was discovered 12 years ago, but it wasn't until this summer that the Air Force was able to identify partial remains found there as belonging to Bird.

This week, about 150 distant relatives showed up at the Salt Lake airport as those remains -- only a single leg bone was recovered -- arrived inside a flag-draped casket on an airliner.

None of them knew Bird personally. His younger sister, Elaine Bird Jack of Eugene, Ore., is his lone surviving sibling and the only one who has a memory of him, said Lorna Bird Snyder, the airman's 66-year-old niece.

The 92-year-old Jack is in Utah for the burial at Evergreen Cemetery in Springville, Snyder told The Associated Press. She was the 13th child of the family; Bird was the 12th.

Jack provided a DNA sample that was used to identify her brother's fibula, the outer and thinner of the long bones of a lower leg.

Relatives are hoping a full excavation of the crash site will yield more remains, Snyder said.

The Air Force is moving cautiously because a 500-pound unexploded bomb is still attached to the A-20G Havoc bomber.

The remains of Bird's co-pilot, Staff Sgt. Roy Davis from New Hampshire, have not been found.

The crash site on a forested mountainside was discovered in 2001 by a Papuan national, who delivered the fibula along with engine identification plates of the bomber to an American recovery team.

The Air Force identified the bone as Bird's in July.

In the airman's last letter to his family, he described how he flew his light bomber barely above tree-top level, saying "we fly right in the leaves at times." It was written two days before his bomber went down March 12, 1944.

His niece spent years researching where -- over the Pacific Ocean or New Guinea -- his plane might have gone down. She compared boxes of the airman's letters against records of the American-Australian effort against the Japanese.

If not for Snyder's dogged efforts, the recovered bone might never have gotten a DNA comparison.

Vernal Bird was born Oct. 29, 1918, in Lindon to Walter F. and Christina Pearsson Ash Bird. He attended schools in Lindon and Pleasant Grove. The family later moved to Springville, another Utah County town, according to an obituary.

Although Jack is the only one who knew Bird personally, relatives never forgot him, Snyder said. They kept the airman's smiling portrait among family mementos.

"My parents of course loved him," Snyder said. "They instilled in us that Vernal was an honorable, brave, intelligent young man. We loved his picture."

Published September 28, 2013 - FoxNews.com