National POW/MIA Recognition Day
National POW/MIA Recognition Day
The third Friday of September is national POW/MIA Recognition Day in remembrance of the tens of thousands of veterans captured or still missing from wars that they fought in on behalf of the United States. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) works tirelessly to “provide the fullest possible accounting for our missing personnel to their families and the nation.” (www.dpaa.mil/About/Vision-Mission-Values)
Gun Cleaners of Colorado’s own, Ella Axelrod, is an anthropologist with a specialty in Archaeology (B.A. Colorado College 2019), who has volunteered for several DPAA recovery projects.
During the summers of 2016 and 2017, Ella spent time in Europe working with a University of Wisconsin archaeological field crew under a Department of Defense contract to recover the remains of WWII American pilots. Ella’s crew excavated the remains of a 1941 P47 Thunderbolt that nosedived into a cornfield in Buysscheure, France. In the summer of 2018, the field crew excavated another P47 crash, this time in Quercamps, France. Both this excavation and the one in Buysscheure resulted in successful recoveries.
As a direct result of Ella’s fieldwork, rosettes were placed next to the names of the formerly missing pilots on the Tablets of the Missing in Ardennes Cemetery.
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