(Radio Iowa) – An Iowan killed in action during World War II has finally been laid to rest near his hometown of Pacific Junction. U-S Army Air Forces 2nd Lieutenant Blaine Wilcox was on a bombing mission targeting an oil refinery in Germany. The plane — nicknamed the “Son of a Blitz” — was hit and all nine crew members were killed.

In 2019, elderly Germans told researchers they had seen three or four airmen fall from the sky near a village that was miles away from the plane’s crash site in Germany. In 2022, a team exhumed graves in Poland and discovered three sets of remains buried with equipment and clothing belonging to American airmen from World War II.

2nd Lieutenant Blaine Wilcox (dpaa.mil photo)

Wilcox was later identified as one of the three. Wilcox was 26 years old when he died on October 7th, 1944. Yesterday (Tuesday) — exactly 81 years later — he was buried in Glenwood. Wilcox was one of seven children and his obituary notes he was on a team that won a state championship playing kittenball — a sport now known as softball. Wilcox married in 1941 and had one son. He was commissioned in the U-S Army Air Forces in 1943.