Joe A. De Jarnette was killed in action on April 8, 1944. Eighty years later, the U.S. Army Air Force 1st lieutenant was brought home.
A Fort Thomas native, De Jarnette was 24 when an enemy fighter aircraft shot down his B-24H “Liberator,” Little Joe, while he was a bombing mission to Brunswick, Germany.
His niece, Virginia Justice, told LINK nky that she was only 4 years old when De Jarnette was shot down.
“The only memory I have is when he came home from school, I guess maybe it was the last trip he made home before he was assigned overseas,” Justice said.
Airmen aboard other planes flying in formation with Little Joe did not report seeing anyone exiting the Little Joe before it crashed near Salzwedel, according to a report from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, known as the DPAA.
The crash site could not be located by Allied forces during the war, and the remains of all 10 crewmembers were unaccounted for after the war.
After the family received news of his plane being shot down, Justice said that her grandmother, De Jarnette’s mother, refused to believe it.
“To her, he really wasn’t dead,” Justice said. “She said he had amnesia, and some good German family took him in, and that’s the way she dealt with it the rest of her life, until she died. So he never died, according to her.”
That’s the way things stood with the family until 2025; however, the journey to finding De Jarnette and the rest of Little Joe’s crew began ten years before.
Finding Little Joe
In 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency got a hit on a site that they thought could have been the plane they were searching for.
Dr. Nicole Eilers, a historian who works with the agency and specifically worked on the case of Little Joe, told LINK nky that they were originally tipped off about the site by a third-party German research group.
These groups have researchers and generally interested parties who “do research, and sometimes they take their metal detectors (not always legally, but you know, that’s just the way it is) and sometimes these guys find possible leads and get in touch with us.”
In this case, the Missing Allied Aircrew Research Team reached out to their agency about the site. However, Eilers said they had to explain to the group that, “just because they think they might have found Little Joe doesn’t mean that we can put forth the resources to go out and dig because we are stewards of taxpayer funds, and you want to be pretty sure that it’s the right plane that you’re looking for before you go out and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to dig it up.”
Another obstacle is getting permission from the German farmers the site is on to dig up their land and making sure they were digging up a plane that had a missing crew, not one that had already been identified or had a surviving crew.
“What makes this one a challenge is that a lot of our aircraft were shot down around the same time in that area,” Eilers said.
While the work first started in 2015, it took years of research and a COVID delay before a team of investigators was able to make it out to the area in 2021.
The trip, Eilers said, was supposed to just be a survey, but in a happy surprise, they found a piece of identification that allowed them to confirm it was Little Joe.
Then, in the summer of 2023, crews began excavating the site, and by November, they were able to recover the remains of the entire crew.
“It’s a really big deal,” said Eilers. “It’s pretty exciting for everyone.”
This recovery brought missing family members home for ten families.
“For the families, it’s everything,” said Eilers. “For those of us who work on them, the historians, the scientists, it was a really, extremely emotional.”
Eilers said that for the Little Joe crew in particular, there were a couple of families who were very involved over the years, and bringing them home meant a lot to everyone involved.
“You don’t know if you’re going to find the remains until you find them,” Eilers said. “When you can actually come full circle and be able to say, ‘I have good news, we did actually find them.’ It’s just… there’s no words to describe it.”
Bringing the crew home
After the remains of missing individuals are found, scientists from the DPAA use anthropological and dental analysis, and scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System use mitochondrial DNA analysis to make identifications.
For Justice, who was born in the same Fort Thomas home as De Jarnette and now lives in Southgate, her part began last July when she said she got a notice from the army, asking for samples of her DNA to test against possible remains they had found.
In January of this year, Justice said they finally got their answer to what happened to her uncle.
“We knew it had happened, but you didn’t get any proof of it,” Justice said. “It was just the army saying they knew his plane was shot down, and now we know that he’s at peace.”
Justice said working with the army has been a good experience.
“They gave us a lovely book that is sometimes gruesome to look at, but it has lots of memories that are things that happened over there and everything,” Justice said.
Since January, the family has been working to make arrangements for De Jarnette’s ceremony and internment. They chose to have his remains cremated and interred in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Erlanger.
Dobbling, Muehlenkamp-Erschell Funeral Home performed the funerary services, which Justice said were unique for them.
“The funeral home had never had anything like this before,” Justice said. “They’ve had servicemen come back, but never anybody who had been deceased for 80 years. So it was quite an experience for them.”
Remembering Joe A. De Jarnette
Before joining the military, Justice told LINK nky, De Jarnette attended Transylvania College in Lexington for three years, playing football and visiting home on the weekends.
After three years in college, he left to join the military, starting as a private and eventually working his way up to lieutenant.
He was the pilot of the plane when it was shot down, and Justice said she still gets upset thinking about it.
“That’s the one thing that really bothers me, is thinking here he was, seeing that other plane either coming at him or shooting at him, and knowing he was going to die,” Justice said.
On April 17, De Jarnette’s remains landed at CVG, and following a ceremony, were escorted to the funeral home by members Rolling Thunder, a motorcycle club made of service members.
Justice said that due to mobility issues, she was not able to go to the airport for the ceremony, but her caretaker went for her.
“She took a picture of the sun setting,” Justice said. “It was such a beautiful thing. And she said to me, ‘I think your uncle was saying, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’”
On April 26, a funeral was held at the Dobbling, Muehlenkamp-Erschell Fort Thomas location. A burial ceremony with full military honors was held afterward at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
De Jarnette’s name is recorded on the Walls of the Missing at Netherlands American Cemetery, Margraten, Netherlands, along with others still missing from WWII. A rosette has been placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.