DENVER — Denver resident Nina Corcoran Newcomb has been on a mission for the past three years to find the remains of her great-uncle Robert Francis Corcoran who was originally from Connecticut and served in World War II.
At the time, Robert Corcoran’s father and two brothers were all serving in the war, so he decided to enlist and was stationed in Denver at Lowry Air Force Base in 1942. Sadly, Robert was killed in Italy during the battle of Anzio when the plane he was a gunner in was hit on March 2, 1944.
According to Newcomb, the two gunners both parachuted out and the pilot was able to crash land the plane and live. The other gunner landed in ally territory and lived but Robert Corcoran was blown into enemy territory where he was captured by the Germans, killed, and buried.
“We know that because a German officer went above and beyond, and he wrote a note and drew a map of where he buried my Great-Uncle Robert,” Newcomb said. “He didn’t have to do that and because of that map, we have hope to find him.”
Newcomb said after the war, the U.S. Army Air Forces went to look for Robert Corcoran’s buried body according to the map but searched 30 kilometers in the wrong direction and never found his remains.
Newcomb’s journey to find out more about her missing great-uncle started because her family never knew much about him. Even though Robert was her father’s favorite uncle, she said it was a subject her dad and the family didn’t really talk about.
“The family always said, ‘Oh yeah, Uncle Bobby died and it’s so sad’,” Newcomb said. “Then everybody would just get really quiet and if you tried to ask a question, you just feel this thickness and this sadness in the air where there was maybe you shouldn’t ask any questions.”
Newcomb said her family didn’t even know where her great-uncle was buried but she did find her first piece of information after a computer search.
“One time, I found a memorial with his name on it in Italy,” Newcomb said. “That’s like the first piece of any information that this generation had on him, and my dad was really excited.”
In 2020, Newcomb’s fitness businesses were closed due to the pandemic so during her spare time, she started doing some more digging to try to find out any information on her own.
“Then I was like, ‘So he died, and nobody knows where he’s at? So that means he’s MIA’ and so I put in: Robert Francis Corcoran, into Google and then plus MIA and then there was so much information,” Newcomb said. “There are 80,000 missing in action from World War II…there are 80,000 of me out there that probably don’t know.”
Now with the map from the German soldier and more information, Nina’s journey led her to get in contact with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA)—a U.S. Department of Defense agency that finds missing service members from past conflicts starting with WWII through today.
According to DPAA, more than 81,500 Americans remain missing from WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Gulf Wars/other conflicts. The department was started in 2015 and as of 2021, they’ve recovered 1,000 missing soldiers.
The group is part of an overall accounting mission with groups like Project Recover, recovering several thousand missing soldiers for the past four decades. Josh Frank is a research analyst and field investigator for DPAA and Nina’s point of contact who largely does work in the Mediterranean and North Africa.
“Italy is my main country I largely work in over everywhere else,” Frank said. “I do the research heading into the mission, go into the National Archives, pouring through records, getting an idea of where you want to look and then I carry that over by actually going into the field and looking for sites whether that’s a plane crash or a burial."
Frank said the process starts by going through old military records and getting a sense of what happened out on the battlefields and airfields.
“[We] try to put a spot on the ground where we think somebody went missing and really get a sense of how big our circle around that spot,” Frank said. “The Germans drew a very specific sketch map. The Germans said, ‘We buried Private Robert Corcoran in this place,’ and we found historical imagery, so we went to find photos that were taken over the area from airplanes during WWII and layered it on top of what things look like now because the land has changed a lot.”
Josh Frank and his team eventually got in contact with the landowner with help from the Italian government. But Frank said the landowner had questions of her own.
“There’s Roman and Etruscan stuff everywhere, it is the land of classical archeology,” Frank said. “There’s lots of reasons a landowner wouldn’t want the U.S. government or any foreign government on their land the same as an American would.”
Newcomb said it was disappointing news to hear after getting one step closer to finding her great-uncle.
“[DPAA] tried to reach out to her with many different avenues and finally were able to meet with her,” Newcomb said. “Her concern was that in Italy, if you find something and it’s kind of close to Rome, that’s an archive, the government will take over your land and she just wanted to make sure that wasn’t going to occur.”
Frank said after a lot of back and forth, DPAA and the landowner came to an agreement.
“We got her to say yes, and we’re working with permits through the Italian archeologists and largely figure out when the best time to do it that would be the least impactful on the business she has there.”
It was an update Newcomb said she was excited to hear after three years of searching. In June, Newcomb and her family were honored to receive her great-uncle’s Purple Heart during a ceremony.
“To reflect back on what life was like in WWII in the United States,” Newcomb said. “And for the families that didn’t have people come home, it’s just devastating but there’s another level of pain when it’s an MIA.”
Newcomb hopes Josh and his team will find her great-uncle Robert Francis Corcoran’s gravesite, to answer her family’s life-long questions after nearly 79 years.
“There is a chance,” Newcomb said. “There’s a higher chance that he’s still there waiting for us to bring him home.”
You can find more information about DPAA on their website.
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