An American pilot killed on D-Day was finally laid to rest in France, after a multi-generational effort by family members in Tucson and elsewhere.
Henry Brean William Joseph McGowan was listed as missing in action for almost 75 years, but there was never much question about what happened to him.
People are also reading… “We felt the presence of our ancestors with us, because they would have been so happy,” said Mary Saraceni, a life-long Tucsonan who attended the ceremony for her Uncle Bill. “We just knew it was this burning desire of my mom and my aunt and my honorary auntie, his widow, to get this buttoned up and done with.
The pasture was searched again in 2010, this time by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency at the request of McGowan’s nephew, Paul Stouffer. “All that delay had built up a well of emotions,” Saraceni said. “It had been this rollercoaster of emotions, because my whole life he was missing in action. Then suddenly we had confirmation, and we were ready to bury him.”The family originally planned to lay McGowan to rest on July 26, 2020, on what would have been his 100th birthday.The closure the McGowan family had all been seeking since the Second World War would have to wait two more years.
Saraceni said her mother crossed the Atlantic on an ocean liner that had just returned to passenger service after spending the war as an Allied troop transport. They also visited the obelisk the village had erected in McGowan’s honor at the church across from where he crashed. “It just bothered him that somebody who'd given their life wasn't being recognized,” she said. “He kept the pressure on the French people, while my cousin, Paul, kept the pressure on the Department of Defense.”
One of her many bylines from that year was an on-set interview at Old Tucson with a Hollywood star named Ronny Reagan. Another was a human interest story about her own 57-year-old father enrolling in the same freshman class at the U of A as his mortified youngest daughter, Mary Jo. They shared the same Spanish class, and both were journalism majors, naturally.
“She was so insistent that someone in her direct family line knew where this place was so that it didn't get lost in the shuffle,” Saraceni said. Suzanne Schaefer Bryan, McGowan’s war-time bride of just four months, was the last of their generation to go. She died in California at age 96 on March 5, 2018, roughly 6 months before her first husband was finally found.
McGowan was already listed, along with 1,556 others, on the cemetery’s Walls of the Missing, a curved garden of marble panels on the east side of the memorial.There are now 20 such rosettes affixed to the marble walls for those no longer missing. A French priest sanctified the gravesite with incense and performed Catholic funeral rites over McGowan’s flag-draped casket.
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