Jose Holguin; Sole B-17 Survivor Kept Vow to Find Remains

Jose Holguin, a World War II navigator whose unrelenting, single-minded quest to recover the bodies of the nine fellow crewmen who were killed when their bomber was shot down more than 50 years ago, is dead.

Holguin, who became a school administrator in Los Angeles after retiring from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel, was 73. By the time of his death Tuesday of a heart attack at his Los Feliz home, he had brought five of his fellow fliers home for burial.

Holguin began his search years after he became the lone survivor of the June 26, 1943, crash of his B-17 after it was shot down by a Japanese fighter over the South Pacific island of New Britain.

Holguin--whose honors included the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Prisoner of War and Army Commendation medals--was the navigator and had his parachute on when the bomber was hit. He accidentally tumbled through an open door of the crippled plane and floated away to what would prove to be two years in a Japanese prison camp on New Britain.

Only seven of the camp’s 64 captives lived to see freedom again.

In 1981, 18 years after he retired from the Air Force and after he became an assistant principal at Verdugo Hills High School, he responded to what he described as “the noise from a rumbling train that just kept getting louder.” The thought that his old comrades were “still out there” took him on the first of three visits to New Britain.

He found the wreckage of his B-17, christened “Naughty but Nice.” The scantily clad calendar girl painted on the plane’s nose was still visible but there were no signs of the crewmen’s remains.

But he determined that some of the crew members’ bodies had been recovered and buried in unmarked graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. He prevailed on the Army to identify the bodies in those graves. With the help of former Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), he determined that five of them were members of his crew. Those five were finally laid to rest in their hometowns; one, Sgt. Henry Garcia, is buried in Whittier.

Holguin never was able to locate his other four comrades in arms.

At Garcia’s reburial in 1985, Holguin recalled the anguish he experienced when he first crawled from the jungle to the wreckage of his plane, with bullets in his jaw and leg and his back broken.

“The only thing I could do was to tell the (dead) men, in my silent way, that I couldn’t take them with me but I would be back to take care of them.”

Holguin’s survivors include his wife, Rebecca, three sons, three daughters and five grandchildren.