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| 11/11/2009 3:36:00 PM | Email this article • Print this article | Family from all over gathers to honor Musgrave
By RANDY HARRISON
Daily News
He may have been dead and missing for more than six decades, but U.S. Army Staff Sgt. William K. Musgrave was never forgotten.
"Wid" Musgrave, a Crawford County native who was killed in 1943 when the B-24 he was on crashed in the mountains of Papua New Guinea, was buried at Arlington Oct. 26 with full military honors - and plenty of family in attendance.
Musgrave, the son of William L. and Nina (Mount) Musgrave, Hutsonville, was a 23-year-old, married farm worker before enlisting as an Army private in 1942. By the summer of 1943 he was an assistant radio operator aboard a B-24D-110-CO Liberator. The Liberator, with Musgrave and the rest of its 11-member crew, went missing while on a night mission Nov. 20, 1943.
Crew remains were finally recovered 41 years later, and positively identified through DNA testing by the Joint Prisoners of War-MIA Accounting Command's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii earlier this year.
Unfortunately, his parents, widow Roberta (Walters) Musgrave and son Richard Kent Musgrave, did not live to learn his final fate. Richard Kent died in an accident in 1968 and Roberta died in two years later, her sister, Rhea Simons, told the Daily News.
The interment was attended by several surviving relatives, however, including Musgrave's grandson, Richard Todd Musgrave, his wife Michelle, and their three children, Caroline, William and Benjamin, all of New Orleans.
Richard Todd's mother and step-father, Bonnie and Jack Pinkstaff of LaPlace, La., and his in-laws, David and Diane Sibley of Louisiana, also attended, as did Musgrave's nephew, Bruce Musgrave of Miami, Fla. The son of Musgrave's brother Robert, Bruce was accompanied by his wife, two sons, a daughter and her fiancé.
Two cousins also traveled cross country to attend. They were John Warnke of San Diego and his brother Art of Springfield.
Musgrave, along with three of his crew mates, were buried in Arlington's Section 60, an area of the cemetery that serves as the final resting place for service personnel of all eras of American history, including most of troops killed serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Remains of seven members of the Liberator's crew have been returned to family for burial in their hometown cemeteries. The entire crew is memorialized on the tablets of the missing at Manila American Cemetery.
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