Iowa Professor Dan Davis serves as Scientific Recovery Expert for the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA)

Dan Davis’s interview with Sue Danielson was aired early one Sunday morning over WHO Radio. An Associate Professor at Luther College, he teaches ancient Greek, Latin, and classical studies courses, including Greek and Roman archaeology, Greek and Roman civilization, ancient science, and marine archaeology.

But Professor Davis was also a marine archaeologist for the E/V Nautilus expeditions, led by Dr. Robert Ballard and Dr. Michael Brennan from 2008 to 2013. Their survey areas included the Black Sea and the southeast Aegean, areas that witnessed high volumes of seaborne commercial traffic through the Middle Ages and discovered and documented nearly fifty shipwrecks.

Dan Davis and Robert Ballard aboard the R/V Endeavor, Black Sea

Why I was interested

Dan Davis with Project Recovery

In 2019, this Iowa professor was invited to serve as a Scientific Recovery Expert for the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), whose mission it is to search for and locate American MIAs and POWs from conflicts around the world. He volunteers with DPAA-partner Project Recover and the University of Delaware to locate missing World War II aircraft underwater. The goal is to locate American service members still missing in action since World War II and to bring home their remains, providing recognition and closure for families.

Oh, I fired off an email to Dan Davis to let him know about the B-25G lost off New Guinea with six crew aboard, including my mother’s brother, Dale Wilson. I told him I am still in contact with Mary Ragsdale, the niece of the bomber’s navigator, and two great nieces of the very young Ted Sharpton, sixth crewman (whose first mission was his last).

Pilot Wieland, Copilot Wilson, Navigator Stack. Front: Aerial Gunner Woollenweber and Radio Gunner Banko. The next man wasn’t on the crew when it was shot down, but gunner Ted Sharpton took his place.

Dale Wilson was the twin of Darlene Wilson Scar. One of her sons is still living, as are several grandchildren (who are having a reunion in Iowa soon). We all would be blessed if Dale Wilson’s remains were found and brought back to Iowa, where his parents and youngest brother are buried. (The engine of Junior Wilson’s P-40 threw a rod and exploded, killing him the day the second atomic bomb was dropped. Their brother Danny Wilson, a P-38 Lightning pilot, was KIA in Austria and is buried in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France.)

And that there has been one serious attempt to locate the bomber, which ended with the heart attack of the diver.

My email caught Dan Davis here in Des Moines, his home town, ready to leave the next day on a flight to Denmark and the search for a downed B-24 bomber. (They were successful, with a service for one of the crew just last month.)

Dan Davis checked with the historian for Project Recover and learned that they are tracking the case of B-25G, 42-64889, MACR 1177. He said he’d keep recommending Dale Wilson’s lost bomber to them, “especially since there’s an Iowa connection.”

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