Navy radioman missing since 1944 identified after Pacific crash recovery

A 19-year-old Navy radioman who vanished when his seaplane crashed in the Pacific has finally been named, giving Robert L. Cyr Jr.’s family a conclusion that wartime records could not.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said Cyr was accounted for on Nov. 5, 2025, after laboratory analysis and DNA comparison with family reference samples confirmed that remains recovered from the wreck site were his. Cyr had enlisted at 17 and was serving with Navy Patrol Squadron 91 when he boarded a PBY-5 Catalina that crashed during takeoff on Jan. 22, 1944, in the Segond Channel in the New Hebrides, now the Republic of Vanuatu.

Of the nine men aboard, three survived. Four were recovered in the days after the crash, while two, including Cyr, were not recovered until decades later. He was reported missing to his parents two days after the accident, on Jan. 24, 1944, and an official death certificate followed on Feb. 22, 1944. The Navy later classified him as non-recoverable on April 19, 1949.

A DPAA partner investigation team began work at the site in 2022 and found PBY-5 wreckage off Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, along with possible human remains, bone tissue and other material evidence. The identification gives modern forensic science a central role in a case that began as a combat loss over the South Pacific and ended, after years of uncertainty, with a name restored to the record.

Cyr’s name is etched on the Tablets of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. A rosette will now be placed beside his name to show he has been accounted for. He is scheduled to be buried with full military honors on May 2, 2026, at Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater, Florida, where his family lives.

His service was recognized with the Navy Unit Commendation, American Defense Service Medal with Fleet Clasp, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with Bronze Star, World War II Victory Medal and American Campaign Medal. For American war accounting, Cyr’s identification is part of an unfinished national ledger that continues to be rewritten as DNA, field recovery and archival work bring the dead home one by one.