375th Bomber Squadron, 308th Bomber Group, Heavy

Hometown: Bradford

Killed in action 31 August 1944, China
Age: 24

Buried: St. Bernards Cemetery, Bradford
Group memorial: Arlington National Cemetery, VA
Repatriated: 3 August 2000

DeLucia was an engineer and first saw duty overseas in North Africa before transferring to China. A 1944 War Department report said the B-24 bomber, with a crew of 10 aboard, took off at 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 31, 1944, from a 14th Air Force base at Liuchow, China. This was DeLucia's 24th birthday, he and nine other airmen were reported missing when their B-24 did not return from a raid on Japanese ships in Formosa. In 1996, Chinese farmers found wreckage of the plane while searching for herbs on 7,000-foot Kitten Mountain in Guangxi Province, near Vietnam. Three years of crash site investigation accounted for all ten men by forensic scientists at the Defense Department’s laboratory in Hawaii.

Anthony W Delucia