Norman Davis was 12 years old when his older brother Roy was reported missing in action, after he didn’t return to base after a World War II bombing mission in the Pacific.
Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Roy F. Davis, 26, of Peterborough was a member of the 13th Bombardment Squadron of the 3rd Bombardment Group. On March 12, 1944, as one of two crew members aboard an A-20G Havoc bomber, he was reported missing in action after the bomber failed to return to base, in northeastern New Guinea, following an attack on enemy targets on another part of the island.
“He was declared missing,” Davis, 87, of Peterborough, said Sunday. “Then he was declared dead. And from there until last year no further word from anybody. … My mother mourned him for the rest of her life.”
Then last year, the family was notified his remains were found.
“That was a real shock,” Davis said.
Along with shock there was also relief, Davis said, “You pretty much knew what happened, but you never knew. I remember thinking, the whole family thought, after the war they might find him as a Japanese prisoner, but that didn’t happen. … We still hoped. Even after he was declared dead you still wondered — that if he was just some other place — that he didn’t know where he was or who he was.”
Roy Davis was born in Ashby, Mass., in 1918 to Chester and Gertrude Davis. He was the oldest of five sons and grew up in several New Hampshire towns.
“He always considered Peterborough his home town. He lived here growing up,” Davis said.
While Roy Davis was away at war, Norman Davis said the family was living on the Bass Farm in Peterborough where his father worked.
“He was a good brother,” Davis said, but it was the Depression and his brother was usually away, wherever he could find work. “Back in the Depression you worked anywhere you could find work. And we were very marked by the Depression. … He was away working most of the time. … He did farm work and repairs, he was a pretty good mechanic.”
He enjoyed working on cars and was a motorcycle enthusiast, who while stationed in New Guinea found an old motorcycle that he fixed up and rode around the base.
He was never married, but during a furlough in Australian he met and fell in love with a woman.
“He was engaged to an Australian girl, and they were going to be married on his next furlough. Her name was Molly Patterson. But he died before that happened,” Davis said. “She never married, and she died at an early age and she corresponded with my mother.”
Efforts to find Roy Davis and the aircraft both during and after the war were unsuccessful.
The War Department finally declared Davis, as well the other crewmember, 2nd Lt. Vernal J. Bird, deceased on June 30, 1949. Their remains were listed as non-recoverable.
Then in Sept. 2001 a team from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory found a crash site in a remote area of Papua, New Guinea. It was natives who found the wreckage, but they wouldn’t go near it, Davis said.
Bird’s remains were identified in 2013. Roy Davis’ remains were not found until 2016, when a recovery team excavated the crash site and recovered additional remains and evidence.
“There was a 500 pound bomb on the plane that hadn’t exploded, so they had to be very careful about that,” Davis said.
Davis said he and his two brothers all contributed DNA to be matched against the remains. But most telling, was that his brother’s dog tags were found with the remains.
Sitting in his Peterborough living room, 74 years after his brother was declared missing in action, Davis rattled off his brother’s dog tag serial number.
“This is what really got us, they found his dog tags,” Davis said.
As a boy, Davis had the number memorized. “When you mailed letters to him that had to be on the letter.”
Roy Davis is survived by his three brothers Norman Davis, Gerald Davis of Epsom and Kenneth Davis of Hancock.
“It’s a good feeling,” Davis said of being able to bring his older brother home, to the headstone with his name on it, at the family plot in Ashby, Mass.
“Our family came from Ashby and that’s where the family plot is. His mother and father are there and an infant brother, who died before he was born, and his name is on the stone down there and that’s where he belongs,” Davis said.
The burial is planned to take place Saturday with full military honors at Glen Wood Cemetery in Ashby, Mass., at 11 a.m. The public is invited.