Memorial

More information

T/Sgt Walter A. Mc Clellan attended Pensacola High School for three years and was employed at the A and R Naval Air Station in civilian life.

His sister remembers he liked to dance, he hated school, and he was slow to temper.

He enlisted at Camp Blanding, Florida on 24 November 1943 and was assigned to the AAF Radio School at the Sioux Falls Army Air field in Soux Falls, South Carolina for training as a radio operator-mechanic. He left for overseas duty in February 1945.

Flak was moderate accurate and a few enemy jet aircraft were in the vicinity. One jet aircraft made a pass at the formation and rammed the subject B-17, tearing off the outer panel of the left wing. The aircraft blew up after collision and it went down in a gradual dive going out of sight into the high clouds through which the formation was flying. It is not known whether ramming was intentional or not. The aircraft was under control until it started into a gradual dive.

The entire crew of eight was killed.

In December 1955 an investigation group of three Americans, escorted by Russian officers, proceeded tot the area of Freiberg. After questioning inhabitants of Freiberg and other villiages, no proof could be found that this aircraft did crash in this area. Therefore the exact location of the crash remains unknown.

Seven crew members are still missing.

Two reports from German citizens in 1956 and 2007 indicated that the remains of a 19-year-old were buried as an "unknown" in a local cemetery in Burkhardswalde.

Following the war, the US Army Graves Registration Command attempted to locate and recover the remains of the US personnel lost in Europe but increasing political tension with the Soviet Union precluded productive work in the Soviet-occupied areas. On May 28, 2007 a German national living near Burkhardswalde contacted the JPAC to report the presence of a grave in the local church cemetery that bore the marker ´hier ruht ein unbekannte allierte Flieger´(here rest an unknown allied Flier). After JPAC reviewed the church register, the church records indicated that the grave held the remains of a 19 year old American flyer who had parachuted from his aircraft, captured by German SS forces and taken to Burkhardswalde executed and buried in the town's sports filed. After the war, the remains were exhumed by the townpeople and reburied in the church cemetery. On September 2, 2008 a JPAC recovery team traveled to the village of Burkhardswalde and exhumed the grave.

The remains recovered were identified as T/Sgt Walter Adele Mc Clellan. He was reburied on 23 April 2010 at the Barrancas National Cemetery, Pensacola, Escambia County, Florida with full military honors.