More than 82 years after his plane was shot down in Italy, Staff Sergeant Given Clifford Grooms has returned home and was laid to rest in Mt. Latham Cemetery on Oct. 10, 2026.
Grooms, of the 15th US Army Air Force, 449th Bomb Group, 718th Squadron, lost his life on Jan. 30, 1944, during World War II, when his B-24H Liberator plane was shot down. His plane and 10-man crew were returning to their home base of Grottaglie, Italy, after a bomb mission against enemy forces.
From an Oct. 7 press release on the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency website, the plane was last sighted north of the Isle of Morgo off the Italian coast near the town of Grado. Three crew members made it out of the plane before the crash, but only one survived. The other seven members, including Grooms, were believed to have still been in the aircraft when it crashed.
The story of how his family got him home has been decades in the making.
According to the press release, beginning in 1946, the American Graves Registration Service, U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, was the organization tasked with recovering missing American service members in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. AGRS investigators believed the aircraft crashed into the Adriatic Sea, so did not explore the marshy areas near Grado for wreckage. No remains recovered in the vicinity of Grado were ever associated with Grooms, and he was declared non-recoverable in August 1949.
Decades passed. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency renewed recovery efforts in the 1970s, according to the organization's website. Through those efforts, the remains of nearly 1,000 Americans killed in World War II were identified and returned to their families for burial with full military honors. This number is in addition to the roughly 280,000 Americans whose remains were identified in a massive effort immediately after the war.
In February 2010, a team of historians from a DPAA-predecessor organization traveled to the Isle of Morgo to investigate a lead on a possible WWII aircraft crash. Testimony from a local witness and 1945 aerial imagery of the site led the investigators to a duck pond and fish farm, where the team conducted a metal detector survey, finding a series of signals in the pond and along the southern bank.
In 2014, a team collecting additional pre-excavation data discovered human remains that were later identified as a crew member from Grooms’ aircraft.
Soon after that discovery, Betty Gildow, Grooms' oldest surviving niece, received notification of the possibility of recovery. Gildow was five years old when he was killed and doesn’t really remember her uncle. Gildow, along with her daughter, Jackie Taylor, and husband, Dale Taylor, traveled to Wright Patterson Air Force Base for a briefing. It was there that they met the lone survivor from the crash, Harvey Gann, whose testimony was a factor in the recovery efforts.
It was at that meeting that the family received copies of letters written by Grooms’ mother, Hazel Herdman Grooms, to other family members of the missing men from that mission.
For Taylor, the story is in those letters.
“They start off, and it is pretty matter of fact. Little by little, they start to reveal things about themselves,” said Taylor as she spoke of what her great grandmother wrote to the other families. “You just see her anguish in these letters. In some of these letters, she writes that she just knows they are in a prisoner of war camp somewhere. Of course, that didn’t happen. They were killed instantly.
She relies a lot on her faith. I think, probably in their hearts they knew, but they didn’t want to believe it. They wanted to hold on to the sliver of hope as long as they could. At one point she says, ‘I’m 47 years old at the worst time of my life’.”
In the collection of letters is one Hazel Herdman Grooms wrote on the one year anniversary of the day the plane was shot down. Taylor says it is one of the most touching.
The letter reads in part, “It's been a sad day for me. A year ago today, our boys went down somewhere. I call them our boys because I feel they were close together. Given thought so much of his crew. If we only knew they were safe. I don’t know how to brace up and be brave. I’ve tried so hard and it seems like, at times, I can’t stand it. I loved my boy as only a mother can love. It seems like I can’t stand it if I don’t see him again. It seems to me like they had a fair chance to get out. I feel like God is watching over them somewhere.”
Then the letters written by Hazel Grooms just stopped. Taylor said the last letter they have a copy of was written Dec. 20, 1945.
Another family member had saved a copy of a letter that Given wrote to his aunt in Hillsboro.
“Just a week before he died, he said he’d like to be back in the state of Ohio,” Taylor said. “He writes, ‘Hope this thing is over soon, so we can come home.’ He says here, ‘I can’t tell you about our missions. I can tell you we really sweat them out.’ He’s 21 years old. Of course he’s scared.”
It would still be more than a decade before the story was completed.
After the initial briefing in 2014, Gildow was hopeful. But as the years passed, Gildow had her doubts about whether they would ever be able to recover her late uncle. She wasn't sure she would ever see the day when it would happen.
"At the get-go, I thought maybe they would [recover him]. As the years went on, I thought they were never going to do this. But I guess they were working on these excavations all the time," Gildow said.
"I’m relieved, and it is very humbling. It is also exciting to know that the rest of the crew members are going to be going home within the month, too. They have identified everybody."
According to the press release, the DPAA partnered with East Carolina University in early 2018 to conduct an additional survey for more accurate information in preparation for an excavation.
Four recovery efforts, led by DPAA partners Southeastern Archaeological Research, Tamarix Società Agricola Srls, and Isola Di Morgo Srl, were conducted between 2022 and 2025, finding aircraft wreckage, material evidence, life support equipment, and human remains, which were subsequently accessioned into the DPAA laboratory for scientific analysis.
To identify Grooms’ remains, scientists from DPAA used anthropological and dental analysis, as well as material evidence. Additionally, scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used DNA analysis. Gildow said she and her late mother provided DNA samples, which were utilized to identify Grooms' remains and separate them from the other men.
Given entered the U.S. Army Air Forces in Huntington, West Virginia, on Nov. 10, 1942, and was a radio operator of the Liberator Aircraft #41-29217. He was listed as MIA (Missing in Action) for many years. His remains were positively identified on June 9, 2026, and family received the call on June 11, 2026. He was twenty-one years, five months old at the time of his death.
After the family received the full briefing on his identification, and a funeral date was known, plans were made for those who were able to travel to John Glenn Airport in Columbus to be there for the arrival of the plane transporting Grooms' body on Friday, Oct. 2, at 3:05 p.m. A group of 30-some family members, including Gildow and Taylor, rode in a charter bus to and from the airport.
Taylor said a lot of the older family members on the bus remembered Given’s mother, and they were excited that, after all of these years, it was happening.
Gildow is a self-proclaimed non-crier. But, she said she had tears in her eyes when the airplane arrived.
"When I first saw the casket come out of the plane, I had some tears," Gildow said. "I could have cried really easily. I almost get tears now thinking about it. How could it be?"
Taylor said seeing the plane coming in to land was amazing.
“I was just thinking about that line from his letter, ‘I want to be back in the state of Ohio’. We saw it touch down, and he was,” Taylor