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The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s Ploiești Unknowns Project

Hello, [ Introduction] 

[SLIDE 2 – PLOIEȘTI]

This presentation is about the United States government’s current efforts to 

identify US Service members still unaccounted for from a mission to bomb oil 

production facilities at Ploiești, Romania, code-named Operation TIDAL WAVE. 

I will review the history of post war investigations to explain why those still 

missing were not recovered or identified in the years immediately following World 

War II. Next, I will describe DPAA’s modern efforts to conduct archival research 

and analysis to support both investigations in the field and the disinterment of 

remains still buried, until recently, under grave markers labeled “unknown”. I will 

conclude with an update on the current status of our efforts to identify the missing 

airmen of Operation TIDAL Wave.

To begin, let’s answer two basic questions, which are: what was Operation 

TIDAL WAVE and why was Ploiești so important? Operation TIDAL WAVE 

was the first large-scale, low-altitude attack by U.S. heavy bomber aircraft upon a 

well-defended target; the oil refineries at Ploiești, Romania. Crude oil provided 

two-thirds of the entire Axis oil supply. Romania produced 60% of those crude oil 
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supplies and an estimated 27% to 35% percent of the refined or synthetic oil

supply. The most important refineries were the several facilities that encircled the 

city of Ploiești, in southeast Romania near the capital, Bucharest. The destruction 

of the oil refineries at Ploiești was a cornerstone to the Allies’ 1943 “Casablanca 

Directive,” a plan for a progressive destruction and dislocation of the German 

military, industrial, and economic systems. In all, 662 Americans lost their lives 

over Romania as a result of combat missions throughout the war, many were 

missions bombing Ploesti. 

[SLIDE 3 – PLOIEȘTI]

Operation TIDAL WAVE’s significance to World War II history, however, 

goes beyond the destruction of the German oil supply. It tested the mettle of the 

American bomber crews and aircraft; and demonstrated the value of large-scale, 

offensive bomber raids. The operation proved that the U.S. Army Air Forces could 

successfully plan and execute a mission to launch five bomber groups consisting of 

177 B-24 Liberators, carrying 1,725 Americans from airfields near Benghazi,

North Africa – and fly approximately 2,100 miles round trip to attack targets from 

unprecedented low altitudes of 100-300 feet. Of the 662 Airmen killed over

Romania, 225 were killed in Operation TIDAL WAVE alone. Ultimately, 80

American Airmen were not recovered after the operation; this presentation focuses 

only on those American Airmen killed in Romania during Operation TIDAL 
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WAVE, whose remains were not identified and the recovered American remains 

buried as “unknowns” following WWII. 

[SLIDE 4 – PRACTICE AND PREPARATION IN LIBYA]

In the Libyan desert, the air crews planned extensively, practicing staggered 

bombing runs on scale models of the city and refineries erected just for this 

mission. Despite the planning, the units were inexperienced at raids of this scale. 

Going into the mission, commanders briefed the crews on the importance of 

success and on the very high level of danger of the mission. Very few expected to 

survive. 

[SLIDE 5 – THE REFINERIES – TARGETS WHITE, RED, BLUE]

Early on the morning of 1 August 1943, aircraft from 5 bombardment groups 

at 5 different airfields at Benghazi, Benina, and Lete, Libya, readied to depart. The 

B-24 Liberator aircraft were selected because the standard B-17 Flying Fortress 

bomber did not have the capability to fly the long distance or carry the large bomb 

loads necessary for this mission. 

Their target? A ring of seven refineries, owned and run by private 

companies, which encircled the city of Ploiesti in about a 2-mile radius. Operation 

TIDAL WAVE planners gave the refineries code-names of White I (one) through 
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V (five), Red, and Blue, and the bomb groups were assigned coded targets and 

positioned in specific formations with staggered departure times. 

[SLIDE 6 – THE MISSION ] 

Each formation of aircraft took the same route through northern Bulgaria 

and approached Ploiești from the southwest. However, some groups became 

confused en route and missed the correct rendezvous point while other groups 

veered too far south. These mix-ups led entire squadrons off-course - delaying the 

arrival of several formations and causing other formations to redirect their 

approach to the city. 

[SLIDE 7 –GERMAN ANTI-AIRCRAFT TACTICS] 

To the surprise of the American pilots, the German forces anticipated their 

arrival. Large barrage balloons tethered with metal cables hovered over Ploiesti,

designed to impede the flight of the American bombers. German forces opened 

smoke pots in the surrounding fields and set oil tanks around the refineries aflame, 

sending up dense clouds of black smoke and blinding the pilots. The German army 

placed anti-aircraft guns along the railroad tracks, among the oil tanks, and in the 

fields outside of town. As the Liberators approached Ploiești, German ground 

defenses unleashed an intense hail of 37mm anti-aircraft and machine gun fire at 
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the low-flying aircraft. As a consequence of all these tactics, some crewmembers 

were injured or killed by anti-aircraft fire; Pilots, navigators, and bombardiers were 

disoriented; and the targeted refineries were often obscured.

[SLIDE 8– CONFUSION - THE LOSSES - THE CASUALTIES] 

Flight path errors also resulted in formations bombing wrong targets and 

disrupted the timing of the flight waves – contributing to the chaos and leaving 

later waves of aircraft to fly through a dangerous, smoke-filled air space.

This chaotic and smoky scenario also obscured eyewitness views of which 

aircraft crashed where and when. All the errors and confusion of the mission 

contributed to the difficulties that post-war investigators encountered during their 

efforts to recover and identify the deceased. 

Fifty-one of 177 aircraft failed to return from Operation TIDAL WAVE. 

This current effort focuses on the twenty-two aircraft that crashed in or near the 

Ploiești refineries with casualties believed to be buried as Unknowns. Of the 

remaining twenty-nine aircraft that failed to return, three aircraft crashed in 

Romania without casualties where the crewmembers became prisoners of war, and 

another twenty-six aircraft were lost outside of Romanian borders. Future efforts 

and field work will focus on the unaccounted-for from the other twenty-nine 

aircraft that failed to return.
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[SLIDE 9 – BURIALS ] 

So, what happened to the hundreds of Airmen killed during the bombing raid

of Operation TIDAL WAVE? Well, while we know that local efforts were made 

to recover and inter the dead in the immediate aftermath of the Operation, few 

details about those efforts have survived. DPAA historians believe the job of 

recovering the dead primarily fell to Romanian citizens. After the raid, local 

residents who were unprepared for the extensive casualties, endeavored to recover 

and bury the deceased Americans over three days. Casualties recovered near 

Ploiești were placed in caskets and interred into the existing Hero Section of the 

Civilian and Military Cemetery of Bolovan in Ploiești. Romanian authorities could 

only identify 27American remains at the time of initial burial. The other remains 

were interred as Unknown US Service members. American casualties from 

aircraft crashes outside of the city were interred in ten small cemeteries in the 

surrounding villages. Each of the red dots represents a cemetery where American 

soldiers were buried.

It is important for us to understand the circumstances of recovery and what

factors contributed to the high number of American remains buried as unidentified. 

Not the least was the condition of the remains – badly burned and often 

fragmented. It is likely the Romanian citizens collected remains with personal 
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vehicles such trucks and farm wagons as they discovered crash sites and isolated 

remains. In some cases, this may have led to a mixing – or commingling – of the 

fragmented and partial remains. For reasons, unknown, civilians often interred

more than a single set of remains in a single casket, sometimes as many as three 

individuals were included in one casket. The men rested where local Romanians 

had buried them until the end of the war.

 

[SLIDE 10 – CEMETERIES] 

In 1946, the War Department tasked the American Graves Registration Command 

(AGRC), part of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps, to formally investigate, 

search for, recover, and identify fallen American personnel in the European 

Theater, including Romania. This included processing remains from temporary 

American military cemeteries, as well as recovering thousands of remains from 

plane crashes, isolated graves, and battlefields across Europe. In the case of those 

buried after Operation TIDAL WAVE, graves registration personnel would need to 

travel to Ploesti to disinter the remains from the cemeteries depicted here.

[SLIDE 11 – HERO SECTION OF THE CIVILIAN AND MILITARY 

CEMETERY OF BOLOVAN]
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In late 1946 and early 1947, a graves registration team, in coordination with the 

Romanian government and under the direction of the Romanian Gendarmerie, or 

military police, began the work of exhuming Operation TIDAL WAVE remains 

from Bolovan Cemetery. This graves registration team did not include a physical 

anthropologist – or the tools to extensively analyze and identify remains as they 

were collected. Unlike in other countries, the dead were not first processed by 

Americans at the gravesite, but in the processing centers in France and Belgium 

weeks or months later. The team also realized that the Romanian Gendarmerie had 

removed all the identification tags and personal possessions. The Romanians sent 

these items to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva as evidence 

of their casualty status, but this action made subsequent identification extremely 

difficult.

[SLIDE 12 – AGRC REPORTS] Graves registration teams were trained to record 

information about their recoveries to help with identification. The forms they 

used, a few examples of which you see here, included entries for the individual’s 

name (if known), military organization and unit, rank, and service number. They 

also recorded, when known, the date of the initial recovery, the town name and 

coordinates where the remains were located, names of other individuals found in 

the area, an estimated date of death, and information about the burial (if one 
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occurred) including other Americans interred nearby. Operation TIDAL WAVE 

deceased were already buried as unidentified so the graves registration team relied 

on documentation and burial information gathered and provided by Romanian 

officials instead of investigating and recording details of the recovery and burial 

independently.

Remains that had no means of identification were issued an X-number designation 

(the X indicating unknown), such as X-123. The X-number became the file name 

for that unknown remains. Today these files are referred to as “X-Files.” The Xfile for each unknown held a compilation of the records and documents gathered 

and created during the investigation and identification process. . 

[SLIDE 13 – AGRC PROCESSING]

Once the remains were exhumed, AGRC teams transported them to processing 

points in Belgium and France. There, anthropologists and identification 

technicians analyzed the bones to estimate the individual’s height, weight, and age 

(if possible) and completed skeletal charts to show which bones were missing or 

damaged. 

[SLIDE 14 – SKELETAL] Tooth charts, such as the one you see in the center of 

this slide, were and still are vital to identification efforts. Dental technicians 
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examined the teeth of remains and recorded which teeth were present, previously 

extracted, posthumously missing, and had cavities or contained fillings. Examiners

also combed through the material evidence for any clues for identification, 

including names or numbers written on clothing and personal effects. Using the 

charted information from the forensic analysis and other clues of the recovery, 

technicians compared the details of each remains to similar records compiled in the

Individual Deceased Personnel File – or IDPF - of those lost in the 1 August 1943 

raid. During this process, the AGRC successfully identified 140 Operation TIDAL 

WAVE American airmen.

[SLIDE 15 – AGRC EFFORTS – REBURIALS - UNRESOLVED]

Despite the AGRC’s best efforts, a significant number of the deceased military 

personnel from WWII could not be identified with the technology of the 1940s. 

By 1951, the US Government formally ended it’s global initiative to recover 

WWII missing – known as The Return of the Dead program. After multiple 

investigations and forensic reviews, 80 Airmen from Operation TIDAL WAVE 

were still missing. Without any new leads for recovery or identification, and after 

a final review of each Airmen’s case, the missing were determined to be “Nonrecoverable.”
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At the same time, 89 sets of remains recovered from Bolovan Cemetery in

Ploesti were still unidentified. And though graves registration investigators 

remained convinced that the remains were those of Army Air Forces personnel still 

missing from the 1 August 1943 raid, the evidence and tools available could not 

associate them with any particular Airman. The War Department declared these 

unknown remains “unidentifiable and permanently interred them at the US 

Military Cemetery at Neuville-en-Condroz Cemetery (today, Ardennes American 

Cemetery), and Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, both in Belgium.

From the close of the “Return of the World War II Dead Program” until 

1998, no field investigations into Romania losses took place. In 1998, and then 

again from 2005 - 2007, predecessor agencies to the Defense POW/MIA 

Accounting Agency or DPAA investigated five incidents of aircraft lost during 

1944 missions to Romania. In 2014, historians and anthropologists at the Joint 

POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), another predecessor of DPAA, initiated 

a project to research and disinter all unknowns recovered from Romania, resulting 

in the effort I am speaking to you about today.

In 2015, the Department of Defense reorganized various parts of the POW/MIA 

accounting community into DPAA, creating a single defense agency responsible 

for researching, investigating, recovering, and identifying the remains of U.S. 
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personnel still missing from past conflicts including World War II. As part of that 

reorganization, the Office of the Secretary of Defense authorized DPAA to pursue 

disinterment of Unknown remains for identification.

Within the new agency, the Ploiești Unknowns Project became a high 

priority due to aspects of the Operation TIDAL WAVE losses I discussed above. 

Specifically, the ability to associate a set of buried unknowns with a group of still 

missing individuals from a single Operation in a confined geographic area raised

the potential for the 80 Airmen still missing from the raids to be identified and 

returned to their families for honored burial. Consequently, the Ploiești Unknowns 

Project became one of the Europe-Mediterranean Directorate’s dedicated

disinterment efforts.

The Ploiești Unknowns Project pursued two main objectives. First, historians and 

analysts strove to research and write a historical summary for every American 

service member missing from Operation TIDAL WAVE. Second, they 

recommended disinterment for every set of unknown remains recovered in 

Romania. 

The first objective—the writing of individual case summaries—is the 

backbone of the DPAA’s family outreach. If you are the family of a missing 

American from World War II and attend a DPAA Family Member Update, or write 
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to your service casualty office for information, you will receive a case summary.

We construct these case summaries by researching and analyzing unit records, 

personnel files, and documents from foreign archives. These narrative documents 

describe what we know today about the circumstances and location of loss, 

previous efforts by Army investigators to find that person, and what our next steps 

are for research and investigation.

[SLIDE 16 – PLOIEȘTI MISSING & UNKNOWNS]

The second goal required more detail-oriented research and data collection. 

Historians at DPAA compiled data on all the known physical characteristics, 

circumstances of loss, survivor statements, recovery, and burial locations of 

identified soldiers, as well as previous AGRC investigation reports.

Once the files and information of all the unresolved losses were reviewed 

and analyzed, the DPAA historian then reviewed the files of unidentified remains 

(or X-files) recovered from the Bolovan Cemetery. 

Using the X-files, historians compiled recovery and temporary burial details 

and the physical characteristics recorded by AGRC technicians such as the 

estimated height, weight, and age, available dental remains, and what portions of 

the skeleton were recovered. 
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Through this research and data collection effort, researchers compared the 

compiled data of the individual losses with that of the unknowns. For the Ploiești 

Unknowns Project, this detailed work did not produce “one-to-one” historical 

evidence connecting individual unknowns to individual missing service members, 

but did establish that it is “more likely than not” that most of the Unknowns can be 

identified through disinterment and renewed forensic testing. 

Upon completion of that historical research and analysis, the project 

progressed to the next stage: a forensic science-based effort, led by modern

physical anthropology and DNA analysis. 

[SLIDE 17 – DISINTERMENT] It is important to note, the exhumation of the 

unknowns is not a simple process. These remains were honorably and permanently 

buried in the 1940s and 1950s. The Department of Defense policy, released in 

2015, allows DPAA to disinter individual unknown remains if historians and 

scientists can establish there is a likelihood of an identification. This effort is 

typically done on a case-by-case basis. However, once historical research 

established the disinterment and analysis of the Ploesti Unknowns should be 

pursued as a set, DPAA requested approval from the Department of Defense to 

disinter all unknowns recovered in Romania. While some Ploesti Unknowns were 

approved for disinterment in 2017 as part of a pilot project, the overall Ploesti 
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Project group was approved for disinterment in 2019. For all disinterments, once 

approved, the remains are exhumed from an American Battle Monuments 

Commission cemetery and transferred to the DPAA laboratory for full 

anthropological analysis and, hopefully, identification. 

Since the commencement of Ploiești Unknowns Project, DPAA has disinterred 

associated Unknowns and the DPAA laboratory has begun making identifications; 

to stay informed of the progress of that effort, please visit the DPAA website for 

identification announcements.

[SLIDE 18 – FIELD INVESTIGATION] At the time you view this presentation, 

the remains of most—or even all—of the missing from Operation TIDAL WAVE 

may already be in the DPAA laboratory. DPAA is not planning field 

investigations for personnel killed during Operation TIDAL WAVE until all of the 

Romania unknowns are processed and analysts have determined who is still 

unaccounted-for and from which aircraft.

In all cases, preparation for potential field work begins with research. For 

Operation TIDAL WAVE, DPAA historians conducted initial research in 

Romanian archives and continue to work closely with the local Romanian 

government officials, academics, and individuals who have expertise in the WWII 

history of the region, all of whom are extremely supportive of our efforts. If 
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future field investigations for unrecovered Airmen killed in Operation TIDAL 

WAVE is necessary, DPAA historians are prepared. 

[SLIDE 19 – ID PHOTOS] 

It is our sincere hope that, through the efforts outlined in this video we can recover 

and identify all of the missing from Operation TIDAL WAVE in Ploiești, 

Romania.

Finally, while we talk about the numbers of missing soldiers, each one is a 

person, whose loss devastated a family. Each recovery and identification allows us 

to celebrate that service member’s life, service, and sacrifice, and hopefully offers 

some measure of closure. Here are the faces of most of the Ploiești casualties 

DPAA has identified since 2017. They are missing no more.

If you are the family of a missing American from Operation TIDAL WAVE 

in Romania, and you have not already done so, please contact the US Army’s

Service Casualty Office to learn how your family’s DNA information may help in 

identifying the unknown remains we currently have under analysis in the DPAA 

laboratory.

Thank you for your time, and for your support in this noble mission.