63 years of wondering ends as widow buries World War II pilot

There wasn't much to the story, not even a date. It was passed down in a place where time didn't matter much. Here it is: Many years ago, two men went on a hunt in the bush a day and a half's walk from the nearest village, high in the mountains that thrust up above the jungle of Papua New Guinea. One night, they heard aircraft engines and then the sound of a plane smashing into the mountainside. The next day, they looked around but didn't find the wreckage.

There was, of course, a precise time and date: 1:21 a.m., Nov. 5, 1943. Other tales were born at that moment, tales handed down for 60 years all across the United States. "Your Uncle Buddy was a bombardier on an airplane that went missing one night, and we still don't know what happened to him."

"Your father ..."

"Your grandfather ..."

Now the stories have an end. After more than two years of analysis and DNA testing, a Defense Department lab in Hawaii has identified remains of the nine crew members of that B-24D bomber. On Wednesday, Iris Sharber Hafner Hilliard, 88, of Springmoor Retirement Center in Raleigh, will travel to Arlington National Cemetery for the burial of 1st Lt. William M. Hafner, her first husband and the pilot of the plane.

"After all this time, to know, to actually know, is something I just didn't expect," Hilliard said. "It's all I could ask for -- except for him to have come back alive."

1941: Hello, love

It was 1941, and Pasquotank County native Iris Sharber was 23 when she walked into a drugstore in Norfolk, Va. Behind the soda fountain was a good-looking engineering student named Bill Hafner.

Soon they were a pair. She was a little spontaneous, he was more serious -- a good quality in a pilot, even though he flew just little Piper Cubs then, not bombers.

Hafner wanted to finish his degree, but he loved flying and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps even before the war began. They married on the day he graduated from flight school in July 1942.

He got his own bomber and crew and, in October 1943, was assigned to the Pacific. She gave him an identification bracelet and attached to it a silver heart from her own bracelet.

"Honey, you will never know how much the identification bracelet and the little heart mean to me," Hafner wrote on Oct. 29, in one of six letters the 24-year-old sent home. "I never take them off and they are a constant reminder of you; not that I need a reminder as I think of you always."

Hafner's B-24D was fitted with crude radar and specialized in night missions. About 6 p.m. on Nov. 4, 1943, it took off from an airstrip at Dobodura on the southern end of the island for armed reconnaissance near the island of New Ireland to the northeast. A few hours later, the crew found a 10-ship Japanese convoy and was told to shadow it as long as fuel allowed.

At 12:40 a.m., as the plane returned to base, one of its radio operators called to say it had bombed the convoy, scored three direct hits and destroyed a ship. It was later determined that the crew had sunk a light cruiser -- a big prize.

At 1:20 a.m., the radio operator called the airfield and asked that a navigation signal be turned on to help it find its way home. His words were the last heard from the plane.

Nov. 5 was Hafner's birthday, and Iris was visiting his parents' house in Norfolk when a young woman walked up to the house to deliver the news that the plane was missing.

She was so shocked that she can't remember the woman's words.

"I'll never forget the way she looked, though," Hilliard said. "She was just a young girl, and I'm sure she hated to tell us, and her eyes were almost glassy."