U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Pharis E. Weekley

Studio portrait of Second Lieutenant Pharis Weekley in his officer's uniform and cap, with navigator's wings, in an ornate oval frame. — Photograph: Weekley family

Name: Pharis Estell Weekley
Lived: 1922 – 1943
Service: U.S. Army Air Forces, 329th Bombardment Squadron, 93rd Bombardment Group
Honored as: Military

A long-delayed homecoming

In May 2023, Second Lieutenant Pharis E. Weekley, a B-24 navigator missing since 1943, came home to Florida with full military honors: a water salute at the Orlando airport and a long escort of veterans on motorcycles down to Avon Park. His eighty-year journey from a Romanian oil field to his grave beside his mother is a story of a family that never stopped hoping, and of the science that finally answered them.

The baritone who wowed the Edisons

Before the war Weekley was known for his baritone voice. He sang for Thomas and Mina Edison at their home. He was a junior pharmacy student at the University of Florida and a strong one, and he volunteered for the service rather than wait to be called. He had a quiet stubbornness about him; he joined the boxing team in secret because his mother had forbidden it. His head for precision took him into aerial navigation.

Operation Tidal Wave

Weekley was the navigator of the B-24 Liberator Lady Jayne of the 329th Bombardment Squadron, 93rd Bombardment Group, in Operation Tidal Wave on 1 August 1943: the low-level raid on the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania, flown at rooftop height to get under the radar. In the anti-aircraft fire over the target Lady Jayne was hit and went down. Of her ten crew, one survived, and was taken prisoner.

Eighty years of not knowing

For nearly eight decades Weekley’s remains lay under an “Unknown” marker in an American military cemetery. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency’s Ploesti Project set out to name the unknowns from the raid. Its forensic team, led by Dr. Megan Ingvoldstad, matched the remains against three kinds of DNA evidence, mitochondrial, Y-chromosome and autosomal, using a single cheek swab that his sister, Marva Turner, had given in 2014. Pharis was identified on 12 July 2022.

Completing the scrapbook

The family’s grief had been kept in a scrapbook that their mother, Naomi, maintained until her death at the age of one hundred. Marva, ninety-three when her brother came home, was there to receive him. In Italy, at the Florence American Cemetery, a bronze rosette was set beside Pharis’s name on the Tablets of the Missing, the mark that says a name is no longer lost.

Laid to rest

On 20 May 2023 Second Lieutenant Pharis E. Weekley was buried at Bougainvillea Cemetery in Avon Park, beside his mother, after her century-long wait. The anthropologist who identified him and a church full of veterans were there. It was the end of an eighty-year flight, and the last line in a story of a family’s devotion.

Photographs

Pharis Weekley as a small boy, seated on a wicker bench in a studio portrait.

Pharis as a boy. Photograph: Weekley family.

A young Pharis Weekley standing behind his sister Marva, both smiling, in a photograph from the 1940s.

Lt. Pharis E. Weekley with his sister Marva. Photograph: Weekley family.

Pharis Weekley in his Army Air Forces uniform and cap, standing by a picket fence.

In uniform, before shipping out. Photograph: Weekley family.

Six B-24 Liberator bombers in formation above the clouds.

B-24 Liberators of the kind Weekley navigated to Ploesti. Photograph: U.S. Army Air Forces.

A soldier in dress uniform and white gloves clasps the hands of Marva Turner, an elderly woman in a floral dress, on the airport tarmac.

Marva Turner is greeted at the airport where she welcomed her brother home, May 2023. Photograph: Heartland Living, June 2023.

Three photographs: a couple watch a hearse arrive, a veteran holds the American flag, and mourners in veterans’ vests fill church pews.

The escort and the service, May 2023. Photograph: Heartland Living, June 2023.

A church altar with a folded flag in a case, wreaths in red, white and blue, and a photograph of Weekley.

The altar at the funeral service. Photograph: Heartland Living, June 2023.

Some twenty members of the Weekley family, from grandparents to small children, gathered for a group photograph.

The Weekley family, gathered for the homecoming. Photograph: Heartland Living, June 2023.

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