Minnesota WWII pilot to receive burial with full military honors

A Jackson pilot lost over the Solomon Islands in 1943 will finally be laid to rest at Riverside Cemetery, bringing a long-awaited return home nearly 83 years after he vanished in combat. Lt. (Jr. Grade) Thomas Arthur Ruth will receive full military honors Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the cemetery, 300 U.S. 71 South, in Jackson, Minnesota.

Ruth was born in De Smet, South Dakota, in 1917, but he grew up in Jackson and later enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1941, days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He served as a pilot in Fighting Squadron 21, part of Carrier Air Group 21, and went to war in the Pacific as American forces pushed through the Solomon Islands.

He was reported missing in action on June 30, 1943, after his F4F-4 Wildcat crashed during an aerial mission near Rendova Island. Another pilot on the mission survived a water landing and said Ruth went down in the jungle on Munda Island. The Navy issued a presumptive finding of death on Jan. 5, 1946, after years with no confirmed recovery.

The case changed in 2013, when a Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command investigation team located a crash site and recovered human remains. Family reference samples later helped identify Ruth, and the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency confirmed his identity in April 2025. The agency says the postwar American Graves Registration Service identified more than 280,000 World War II dead, and that since recovery efforts were renewed in the 1970s, the remains of nearly 1,000 Americans killed in World War II have been identified and returned for burial with full military honors.

For Jackson, the burial closes a chapter that began when Ruth left town for war and never came back. A nephew from Loudoun County, Virginia, plans to attend the service to honor a relative he only recently got to know, a reminder of how Ruth’s loss reached far beyond the battlefield and into a family waiting across generations for an answer.