Missing No More: Remains Of Southington WWII Airman Recovered
- Philip Thibodeau
- Nov 25
- 4 min read
On the night of March 22, 1945, six weeks before Nazi Germany surrendered, a fleet of B-17G ‘Flying Fortress’ bombers belonging to the 429th Bombardment Squadron, 2nd Bombardment Group, took off from an airfield in Italy to begin a long, hazardous journey northward.
On board one of those B-17s was Technical Sergeant Donald Arthur Dorman. Dorman, who was born in Meriden and grew up in Southington, had enlisted in the U. S. Army Air Forces in 1942. An upper turret gunner, he was tasked with defending his plane from enemy fighters using a mounted pair of .50 caliber machine guns. He was 21 years old, and about to embark on his final flight.
The squadron’s mission that night was to bomb an oil refinery in the southeast corner of Germany, not far from the border with Poland. As it approached its target, Dorman’s plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire. The crew steered the plane east, hoping to make an emergency landing on Russian-controlled territory in Poland. The plane was then struck again by fire from German fighter planes. Some crew members managed to parachute out before the crash. Two who made it safely to the ground before being taken prisoner were the sole surviving witnesses to the ordeal.
The other eight crew members were officially listed as MIA because their bodies were never found. And that is where Dorman’s story stood – until this past September.
The Recovery
In the decades after WWII, the task of recovering the remains of U.S. military personnel who were designated MIA belonged to the American Graves Registration Command. As the Cold War intensified, cooperation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union ground to a halt, which hampered efforts by the Command to look for the remains of the missing in Soviet-controlled Poland. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, the possibility of finding identifiable remains seemed very remote indeed.
But in the late 1990’s, advances in genetic testing made it possible to reconstruct an individual’s genetic profile from microscopic fragments of organic material. With the arrival of this new technology, hopes of identifying remains rose again. The search for remains was renewed in 2008. The first order of business was to find the crash site. Four years later, investigators determined that a B-17 had crashed near the Polish village of Glinica in 1945.
In 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency contracted with Alta Archaeological Consulting of Santa Rosa, California, to excavate at the site of the crash. This past summer, a 20-person team of volunteers and paid staff performed the back-breaking work of shoveling clay into buckets and sifting it to look for fragments of the plane and signs of the crew. This article from the Arizona Daily Star offers an illustrated account of their efforts.
The archaeologists found what they were looking for: not just pieces of the bomber, but the remains of multiple individuals. The remains were sent to the Agency’s laboratory for analysis. Fortunately, they contained enough DNA to yield full genetic sequences. The next step was to sample DNA from the relatives of the eight missing crew members so that the sequences could be compared and family connections established.
Of the matches that were made, one involved a cousin of Dorman, who still lives in Southington. On September 19 of this year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced that the remains of Technical Sergeant Donald A. Dorman had been identified. Dorman is MIA no longer.
The Return
News of the identification first reached Rachel Wache, the chair of Southington’s Veterans Committee, while she was at the Apple Harvest Festival. There an old acquaintance came up to her and said, “Rachel, I have something very interesting that you might want to see.” Pulling out her phone, she showed the official announcement to Wache. The woman with the phone was Sergeant Dorman’s cousin.
Wache had the honor of announcing this discovery to the Veterans Committee at their monthly meeting at the Calendar House. She is working now to coordinate the return of the remains and the burial ceremony. A local funeral home and the American Legion have been contacted, as well as the Southington Historical Society and Southington's school system, in the hope that their archives may contain more information about Dorman.
Wache says that she has been informed by the Department of Defense that they will not be taking any further actions in the case until sometime next year. When the remains are released, a military funeral will be held with full honors. Donald’s mother was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, so the tentative plan is to bury him there.
The Southington Outsider will update this story further as it develops.
