Captain Lamar Russell ’39 finally returned home to Rowan County, more than 73 years after this World War II serviceman went missing, a passenger on a B52 that crashed in New Guinea in 1944. He was buried in his hometown of Gold Hill on September 24, 2017 with full military honors.
Russell joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 after earning his baccalaureate degree in biology from Catawba. He trained at Fort Worth, Texas, and Denver, Colorado, before being sent overseas as a second lieutenant in 1942. Stationed first in Australia, then New Guinea, he distinguished himself as part of the photographic section in his bombardment group. He achieved the rank of Captain and received the Legion of Merit Award in December 1943 just two months before he was lost in a plane crash.
The wreckage of the B52 that Russell was aboard with 10 others was not located until 1961, but since DNA testing was not available then, the human remains found were unable to be linked to any specific individual aboard. Those remains ended up being buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., where military services were held for the 11 men lost.
More human remains from the crash site were recovered in recent years and an Army representative contacted Russell’s sister, Patsy Russell Yelton, in 2014 requesting a DNA sample to compare to the DNA in the remains they had found. When the comparison was made, some of the remains found more recently at the crash site were positively identified as belonging to Lamar Russell, the family learned in 2016.
Lamar Russell and his brother, Ernest Russell, both served in the military and both died in 1944, Lamar in the plane crash in New Guinea and Ernest in Saipan in the Marianas. Both are now buried in the family plot of the Gold Hill Cemetery.
