SHENANDOAH -- If ever a soldier's remains seemed hopelessly lost at war, they were his.

Shot down 57 years ago over North Korea, Lt. Col. Douglas Hampton Hatfield's B-29 bomber spiraled upside-down, exploding in flames into a remote mountainside.

Hatfield, a dashing hometown hero from the Blue Ridge Mountains hamlet of Shenandoah, was first declared missing in action, then killed in action in that fiery crash of April 12, 1951.

Decades passed, and the North Korean landscape closed over the crash site as the nation grew increasingly isolated and suspicious of the United States. Hatfield's family gradually gave him up for lost.

But this past winter, in what one family member called a miracle, a specialized U.S. military unit returned Hatfield's cremated remains in a polished walnut box to his son Steve -- who was 3 years old when his father's plane was downed by a swarm of MiG fighters.

"I didn't think I'd live to see it," said Steve Hatfield, 60.

The search consumed 14 years. It took luck, courage and perseverance, and was helped and hindered by the North Koreans, who staged a bizarre deception at a remote, heavily guarded archaeological dig.

Bringing Hatfield home illustrated the challenges and rewards of a unique American crusade: The U.S. is the only nation in the world that scours distant, forgotten and sometimes still-dangerous battlegrounds for the remains of long-lost troops.

The job will never end. One American is still missing from the first Persian Gulf War, 1,750 from Vietnam, 120 from the Cold War, more than 78,000 from World War II, and 8,100 from the Korean War, including about 5,100 believed to be inside North Korea. The search costs about $50 million a year.

. . .

Douglas Hampton Hatfield was a Virginia Military Institute graduate with a pencil-thin, Errol Flynn moustache, a distinctive stutter and a rebellious streak.

He was the son of a Norfolk & Western physician in Shenandoah, a tiny railroad hub tucked into the Appalachian Mountains on the banks of the Shenandoah River. The family lived in Broad Hall, a sprawling, three-story white house that is now a funeral home.

Douglas, the eldest of four children, graduated from Shenandoah High School in 1936 and from VMI in 1940 with a degree in chemistry. Even then, he was a daredevil. He drove a motorcycle, fast, and had walked away from several crashes.

Immediately after graduation, Hatfield joined the Army Air Corps to learn to fly. One day while training in Tennessee, his family said, he broke a long list of regulations by flying a P-38 Lightning fighter to Shenandoah and buzzing the town repeatedly at low altitude and full throttle. Family members, who knew who it was, ran outside and waved as the plane zoomed over Broad Hall. Local legend had him flying under a bridge that spanned the Shenandoah River.

Hatfield flew bombing missions over Japan from a base in India, soaring over the Himalayas -- "over the hump." Like most bombers in those days, Hatfield's was decorated with a painting of a scantily clad woman and bore the nickname "Lucky Lady." But another nickname was painted on the side: "Miss Shorty," as Hatfield called his wife, Mary Margaret.

Between missions, Hatfield liked to play jazz, and when he could not buy a bass fiddle in India, he built his own, younger brother Jack Hatfield, 69, said.

Hatfield was a romantic, so perfect a picture of the American fighting man, that he was featured in a 1945 photo spread in Look magazine.

. . .

After the war, Douglas and Mary Margaret Hatfield settled in Shenandoah. She taught at the high school. Their son Stephan, their only child, was born during what turned out to be only a short break between wars.

After victory in World War II, the U.S. plunged into a tense Cold War with the Soviet Union and uncertain relations with China, shadowed by the constant threat of nuclear war. In 1950, communist North Korea, a Soviet ally on the border of China, invaded South Korea, a U.S. ally. America entered the war, and Hatfield took back to the air.

Before he was sent overseas, Hatfield again took advantage of a training flight to buzz Shenandoah, this time in a giant, lumbering B-29 Superfortress bomber with a 141-foot wingspan, leaving some in the little town gaping. His father warned him that he was courting trouble.

The Air Force sent Hatfield to Okinawa as commanding officer of a B-29 squadron whose target was North Korea. At first the bombing runs encountered little opposition. But soon swarms of fast, Russian-built MiG fighters began greeting the slow B-29s en route. In a bit of Cold War subterfuge, the MiGs were flown by top Soviet pilots wearing North Korean flight suits and speaking pidgin North Korean on the radio. The bombing missions became hazardous.

Hatfield impressed his men with his manner as well as his flying. "He was very distinguished, straight as a string," recalled Donald Pemberton, 77, an airplane mechanic who worked on Hatfield's B-29. "Damn good-looking guy. Real debonair. A dandy, but very likable. He treated his enlisted people outstandingly."

Pemberton said Hatfield would keep post-mission beer ice cold by storing it in the belly of his B-29, which flew without heat at a frigid 30,000 feet. Hatfield also smuggled his classic red Oldsmobile convertible from Guam to Okinawa, against regulations, by winching it up into the bomb bay of his B-29, Pemberton said.

. . .

Hatfield received orders to come home in April 1951, but as squadron commander he decided to make a last bombing run on April 12 with a new and inexperienced crew. The target was a strategic bridge in North Korean town of Sinuiju, near the Chinese border. As many as 20 MiGs arrived before the B-29s reached the bridge. Hatfield's mission involved about 30 planes, Pemberton said.

A tail gunner in another B-29 saw Hatfield's plane knocked out of the sky. He reported seeing no parachutes as the B-29, with 11 crewmembers, spiraled toward a mountain. The rest of the B-29s kept going, dropped their bombs and then turned to their home base in Okinawa.

Crippled planes sometimes straggled home long after the rest of the squadron had arrived, and Pemberton said the flight crew waited all night for Hatfield's B-29, fortified with beer and whiskey. When the sun rose, Pemberton recalled, "I said, 'Boys, he's not coming home.'"

David Hutchinson was an orderly on Okinawa who also knew Hatfield. "He was just an overall good guy," said Hutchinson, 78. "I had a lot of tears when I found out he was MIA."

At home in Shenandoah, Hatfield's father, who rarely showed emotion, "just put his head in his hands and cried," said Jack Hatfield. He also cried for his brother, who was 20years older than he. "Douglas was really my hero. I idolized him. I can remember him carrying me around on his shoulders."

The family heard little after the initial report his plane had been shot down. Mary Margaret at first refused to believe he was dead. She continued to write him letters every week for two years, the family said. "She held on to the belief he was not dead," said niece Carol Shuler. "She never gave up. She even talked to people in the plane" that survived the crash and the war.

In September 1954, two members of Hatfield's crew who had parachuted into captivity in North Korea were released in a large-scale prisoner exchange known as the Big Switch. A third member of the crew had died a captive.

One of the former POWs told Mary Margaret Hatfield that just before he jumped out of the plane, he saw a MiG's guns obliterate the flight deck, where her husband had been standing between the pilot and the co-pilot.

. . .

Immediately after the war ended July 27, 1953, in a cease-fire rather than peace, the North Koreans turned over some remains of dead U.S. servicemen. But the remains came with little background or documentation, and scientists could not yet identify them.

The North Koreans handed over another 208 boxes of remains in the early 1990s, during a brief thaw in U.S.-North Korean relations. Again the remains were mixed up and lacking much documentation. But they included the names of three members of Hatfield's B-29 crew, and the North Koreans reported finding them in a mountainous, rural terrain where the crash most likely occurred.

The bones were flown to the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. It is the world's largest forensic anthropology lab. The Army began hunting for the crew members' next of kin in order to obtain samples of their DNA.

Among those who answered the call were Hatfield's younger brother Jack, an engineer in York County, and his sister Maxine in Harrisonburg, who drove to local hospitals to give blood samples to be shipped to Hawaii. Maxine's daughter, Carol Shuler, drove her mother to Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg.

The blood would show the same sequences of mitochondrial DNA -- passed through their mother and preserved in cells' mitochondria, outside the nuclei. Unlike other types of DNA, mitochondrial DNA can be detected in small fragments of very old bones.

After several years, DNA tests and other analyses positively identified some of the remains in the box as those of three of the B-29's crew. Hatfield and eight others remained missing. Many of the bones in the box were too small to test. The lab put them in storage. The Hatfield case stalled for five years.

"To tell you the truth, I never thought we would find him," said Continued on Page A11 Continued from Page A10 Steve Hatfield of the long delays. "I never thought anything would happen with it."

. . .

Then the search resumed in a strange new direction. In 1996, the North Koreans finally agreed to let specialized American teams into their country to conduct search missions for remains of U.S. troops for the first time.

The search missions are planned and carried out by teams of specialists from the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, whose mission is "to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of the nation's past conflicts." JPAC has teams in South Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea.

Most nations welcome the JPAC teams with modest security restrictions. But the restrictions in North Korea "are in a class of their own," said John Byrd, a JPAC anthropologist who has led several missions there. Armed North Korean soldiers enforce a perimeter at the teams' field camps; the soldiers wear whistles around their necks to blow as a last warning to anyone getting too close to the edge.

"Once in a while, you get a little tension," Byrd said.

In the first week of October 2000, a JPAC recovery team headed into North Korea to excavate several promising sites in a mountainous area near the village of Yon gam-dong, where U.S. infantrymen in foxholes had fought against Chinese troops in late November 1950. The site is roughly 65 miles east of the area where Hatfield's B-29 crashed.

The recovery team made the trip the usual way: flying into China, where visas to North Korea are available; catching one of the twice-weekly commercial flights from Beijing to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang; riding in 4-wheel-drive trucks driven by North Korean soldiers to the end of the paved roads; then hiking for about 90 minutes into the mountains to set up a base camp.

The North Korean mountains were weathered and rounded like the Blue Ridge; they even showed traces of fall color. Soldiers took the recovery team to a depression in the mountainside, down a ridge from where some loggers were felling trees with hand axes and saws. The North Koreans said bones had been tossed into the depression over time by people finding them on logging trails.

As soon as the dig began, JPAC anthropologist William Belcher saw that the bones had been planted in the site recently. "To us [anthropologists], something like that is plain as day, like reading a book." The North Koreans insisted otherwise. Belcher did not argue; he kept excavating the site down to bedrock. In the course of six days, the team recovered numerous bone fragments, including pieces of a skull and jaw.

The team brought out the remains through China, where Belcher described the mission to Byrd, who was about to lead the next recovery team into North Korea. To Byrd's surprise, the North Koreans took him and his team to the exact same depression Belcher had just excavated the planted bones.

Byrd pointed out that fact to the soldiers, he said, and one of them standing at the edge of the site "poked a stick into some leaves, and up popped a bone fragment. He said, 'You need to look more carefully.'" Byrd let it go and set out excavating another trove of planted remains.

Why the North Koreans "salted" the site with bones for the Americans to find is unclear, Byrd said in a recent interview. They may have been trying to keep the Americans supplied with bones at the site to keep them from asking to search elsewhere; they may have been trying to make sure the Americans found remains; or they may simply have enjoyed a bizarre laugh at the Americans' expense.

"It was as if they had taken the bones and buried him again," Steve Hatfield said of the North Koreans.

Byrd said the deception did not discourage him. "We've gotten a lot of remains from North Korea, regardless of how silly the process is there in some respects," he said.

. . .

JPAC suspended searches in North Korea in 2005 because of disagreements about U.S. communications gear. If that dispute can be resolved, Byrd said, "I might be the first one back into North Korea."

At the lab in Hawaii, closer examination of the bones planted in the depression showed a degree of breakage more in line with a plane crash than an infantry firefight.

A lab analyst noticed that a DNA sequence found in several of the bones from the depression matched a sequence in some of the remains handed over in boxes by the North Koreans in 1993.

In early 2007, mitochondrial DNA test results from the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Md., strongly suggested that bones from both the 1993 boxes and the 2000 recovery site contained remains of Hatfield and other crew members. JPAC's dental tests and anthropological study pointed to Hatfield as well.

So detailed is the analysis that Steve Hatfield said he was told the bones showed that his father had died when the plane hit the mountain.

JPAC concluded that the North Koreans had recovered the remains of the B-29 crew at least by 1993 but held onto some of the remains and "used the pretext of a . . . recovery operation" seven years later to return them to the U.S. Some of the bones in both collections are still too small to identify.

. . .

The word reached the Hatfield family in a phone call in April 2007 -- four years after Hatfield's mother died. "She always wanted this put to rest, but it never happened for her," Steve Hatfield said.

Two military officers drove up to Steve's home in the mountains of Westcliffe, Colo., to tell him about the search and about his father's last moments. They gave Steve a walnut box containing his father's cremated remains, along with an American flag and duplicates of his father's medals.

"They were angels," said Hatfield, who followed his father's footsteps as a flier, running rescue missions in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. "I can't express how great those people were."

Shuler, the only member of the family still living in Shenandoah, where memories of Hatfield's good looks and daredevil ways are fading, called the return of Hatfield's remains a miracle.

Steve Hatfield, retired from the Air Force now, said he has no recollection of his father. But he said he remembers the many times growing up when he felt alone and fatherless. The gift of Hatfield's ashes made an immediate difference: "I kept him out on the hearth to celebrate this past Christmas with me for the first time" in many years.

Last month, Steve Hatfield traveled to Mary Margaret's favorite spot on the Pacific Ocean, a place called Abalone Cove near Rancho Palos Verdes in California. He had sprinkled his mother's ashes there several years ago. Now, he hopped out on the rocks in the water and said a few words about how nice it was that his father had finally been able to spend time with him, from Thanksgiving to Easter.

Then Steve Hatfield commended his father's ashes to the sea.
Contact Carlos Santos at (434) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.

Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or wgeroux@timesdispatch.com.