The remains of Tuskegee Airman Fred Brewer were found in Europe and returned to the U.S.
From the Department of Defense
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency on Aug. 10, 2023, identified the remains of 2nd Lt. Fred L. Brewer Jr., missing from World War II.
Brewer, who joined the U.S. Army Air Forces from North Carolina, was a Tuskegee Airman and member of the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group. Brewer had been one of 26 Tuskegee Airmen whose whereabouts were unknown.
On Oct. 19, 1944, he piloted a single-seat P-51C Mustang nicknamed “Traveling Light” out of Ramitelli Air Field in Italy as one of 57 fighters on a bomber escort mission over enemy targets in Regensburg, Germany.
The flight left Ramitelli and split into three groups over the Udine area of Italy to continue on to the target area. However, heavy cloud cover forced nine fighters to return to Ramitelli early, and none of the other fighters could locate their bomber aircraft or the target.
Forty-seven fighters eventually returned to base, but Brewer was not among them.
Reports from other pilots on the mission indicate that Brewer had been attempting to climb his aircraft out of the cloud cover but stalled out and fell into a spin. After the war, a body was recovered by U.S. personnel from a civilian cemetery in the area, but the remains could not be identified using techniques available at the time and were interred as an unknown.
Researchers in 2011 examined the case of those unknown remains and discovered that an Italian police report indicated they were recovered from a crashed fighter plane on the same day as Brewer’s disappearance.
German wartime records corroborated this information. In June 2022, the remains were disinterred and sent to a DPAA laboratory for further study. The totality of evidence allowed a positive identification of the remains as those of Brewer.
Second Lt. Fred Brewer is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Florence American Cemetery in Impruneta, Italy.
Nearly 81,000 still missing
Nearly 81,000 American service members remain missing after having served in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts involving the U.S.
According to DPAA, in fiscal year 2023, the agency recovered the remains of 127 service members: 88 from World War II, 35 from Korea, and four from Vietnam.
More than 1,200 service members are still missing from the Vietnam War.
The Department of Defense provided the information for this report.
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