World War II airman returns home to North Dakota after 80 years
After 80 years, Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson is finally coming home to Dahlen, with a June 20 funeral and burial drawing Stutsman County into remembrance.
The casket of Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson came back to the Stutsman County countryside this week with a motorcycle escort, a family procession and a community determined to greet a man lost to war for more than eight decades. Ellingson, a Dahlen native who was 25 when he died in World War II, was identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in 2025 and brought home to a waiting family and hometown.
Getting him home took years of work from relatives, military recovery specialists and advocates who would not let his case fade. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency used anthropological analysis, circumstantial evidence, mitochondrial DNA analysis, mitochondrial genome sequencing and nuclear single-nucleotide polymorphism testing to account for Ellingson on June 17, 2025. Family members had pressed for answers for years, and six groups of relatives visited the forensic lab in Hawaii since 2022 while waiting for confirmation.
Ellingson left Dahlen in 1942 to serve in the U.S. Army Air Corps and later served as a radar observer with the 878th Bombardment Squadron, 499th Bombardment Group. On April 14, 1945, he was aboard a B-29 Superfortress on a combat mission to Tokyo when the plane was shot down and crashed in Chiba Prefecture, Honshu. Reports also say he later died in the Tokyo Military Prison fire on May 26, 1945, closing a wartime chapter that left his family without remains or certainty for generations.
The homecoming has become a public act of remembrance across North Dakota and Minnesota, with veterans groups, law enforcement and relatives joining the effort. On June 18, a procession carried Ellingson’s casket from the Fargo Air Museum to Veterans Memorial Park in Grand Forks, and about 200 motorcyclists joined the escort. A celebration followed June 19 at the Terry Ellingson Farm Event Center in Dahlen, underscoring how deeply the return has reached beyond one family into local civic memory.
The final public observances were scheduled for June 20 at Dahlen Lutheran Church, with a viewing at 11 a.m. and a funeral at 2 p.m. Ellingson was then to be interred at Middle Forest River Cemetery in Dahlen, bringing him home to the land and community he left more than 80 years ago.
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