A Pittsburgh-area World War II serviceman whose remains were unidentified for 80 years will be laid to rest back home on Sunday, Oct. 12.

Paul F. Eshleman Jr., 21, was a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He was a radio operator on a B-24 Liberator that was shot down during a bombing mission over Romania on Aug. 1, 1943.

His remains were not identified until Sept. 27, 2023, at a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency laboratory in Honolulu.

Eshelman was identified, in part, through the use of DNA provided by his namesake nephew, Paul Derstine, 68, a Ross native who has lived in Virginia since 1996.

Derstine will be attending services for the uncle he never knew at H.P. Brandt Funeral Home in Ross, where a public visitation will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday before burial with military honors at 3:30 p.m. in Allegheny County Memorial Park in McCandless.

What Derstine knows of his uncle comes from his mother, Marian Derstine, Eshelman’s sister who died in 1986. Eshelman also had a brother, Richard, the middle child in the family who also was a World War II veteran and 86 when he died in May 2013.

Eshelman graduated from Perry High School. He entered the military in May 1942 and went overseas in April 1943. He served with the 344th Bombardment Squadron, 98th Bombardment Group, 9th Air Force.

“I thought, obviously, he was a hero,” Paul Derstine said. “He died serving his country and doing what he thought was in the best interest of the country at the time.”

According to the Army’s Past Conflicts Repatriations Branch, Eshelman’s bomber, “Tagalong,” was one of 177 B-24 Liberators carrying 1,725 American airmen in Operation Tidal Wave. The mission was to destroy the oil fields and refineries around the city of Ploiesti in Romania, which produced 60% of the Axis Powers’ crude oil and an estimated 27% to 35% of refined or synthetic oil.

They took off from airfields near Benghazi, Libya, for the mission that required them to attack targets from unprecedented low altitudes of 100 to 300 feet. Officials believed it would be more precise and minimize civilian casualties.

German defenders were expecting them. The U.S. suffered heavy losses, with 51 of the B-24s not returning and 225 airmen lost.

The Romanian government believed it recovered and buried the remains of 216 Americans. Of those, 27 were identified and given named burials. Romanian citizens buried the rest as unknown “American soldiers” in the Hero Section of the Civilian and Military Cemetery of Bolovan in Ploiesti.

After the war, the American Graves Registration Command disinterred all American remains from Bolovan Cemetery for identification. It was unable to identify more than 80 unknowns from the cemetery, and those remains were interred at Ardennes American Cemetery and Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, both in Belgium.

In 2017, the accounting agency began exhuming unknowns believed to be associated with unaccounted-for airmen from Operation Tidal Wave losses. The remains were sent to its laboratory for examination and identification.

Scientists used dental and anthropological analysis and DNA, from Derstine and his sister, Lesa Naughton, of Lexington, S.C. to identify Eshelman’s remains.

His remains will be buried next to graves for his mother, Alice Eshelman, and his sister, Marian. His father, Paul, is buried in another location in the same section of Allegheny County Memorial Park, Derstine said.

“It’s great work that the Army, 82 years later, is still trying to reunite these MIAs with their families,” Derstine said. “I’m just sad that my mother and grandmother weren’t alive to see him come back home. I’m looking forward to finally putting him to rest and having closure on what happened to him.”

Eshelman is memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at the North Africa American Cemetery in Tunis, Tunisia.

His name also is recorded on the Tablets of the Missing at the Florence American Cemetery, an American Battle Monuments Commission site in Impruneta, Italy, along with others still missing from World War II.

A rosette next to his name indicates he has been accounted for.

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