Found At Last
DNA, research finally reveals airman’s fate
By Corky Mau
November 2025
As a child, Pocket resident Ellen Yee would stare at a photo on her grandparents’ mantel. The image showed a smiling, handsome aviator in a leather flight jacket, goggles perched on his head.
Yee knew nothing about the man except his name. He was her Uncle Yuen Hop.
Yuen Hop was a U.S. Army Air Forces sergeant who disappeared during World War II in 1944, before Yee was born. “At the time, the military only told my grandparents that he and two other airmen were missing in Germany,” Yee says.
Yuen Hop grew up in Sebastopol, picking apples in orchards alongside family members. With the war underway, Hop enlisted in the Army after graduation from high school. He survived 14 missions over Germany in 1944, serving as a B17 waist gunner with the 368th Bombardment Squadron.
That December, Hop’s unit was ordered on another mission to help the Battle of the Bulge. His Flying Fortress was hit by enemy aircraft fire over Bingen, Germany.
Crewmembers bailed out. Five were captured. Hop and two others went missing but were never listed as prisoners of war. Presumably, SS troops murdered the aviators. Hop was 20.
Margery Hop Wong was 12 when she last saw her brother. For years, she tried to get the full story. Now 94, she was thrilled when the Army told her they finally had the facts.
The Army Quartermaster Corps gathers information on fallen service personnel. The search for Hop and his colleagues began in 1946 with document reviews and interviews with locals. By 1950, the leads dried up. Hop was declared unaccounted for.
Sixty-three years later, the Quartermasters Mortuary Affairs unit received a fresh lead. German historians uncovered documents that mentioned three American airmen bailing out of a plane. They were captured and killed by German troops. The men were buried in unmarked graves in Kamp-Bornhofen.
Excavation of the burial sites began in 2021. Wong and sister Doris provided DNA samples. DNA analysis and anthropological research confirmed Yuen Hop’s identity in 2024.
After Army officials briefed the Hop family, Wong received a book detailing the historical research, medical and DNA information.
Yuen Hop’s remains came home to San Francisco in January. He was laid to rest at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, 80 years and 40 days after he was declared missing.
“Three generations of our family attended,” Yee says. “Aunt Marge is especially pleased that he’s buried near brother Jimmy, who also died in World War II.”
Hop’s parents and five other siblings died without knowing what happened to their son and brother. “They always said they were proud of him, but they never got closure,” Yee says. “Aunt Marge is the only one who remembers Yuen Hop from their childhood days.”
The story of the airman in the photo is no longer a mystery. But many other families still await word about loved ones. As of June, there were more than 82,000 American service members unaccounted for, most from World War II.
Corky Mau can be reached at corky.sue50@gmail.com. Submissions are due six weeks prior to the publication month. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
