Homecoming for Robert Bayne–66 years later

The weekend starts today.  Over the Memorial Day Weekend I will be posting a number of articles, pictures, and videos to commemorate Memorial Day.  Here is our first–The Homecoming for Robert Bayne.  He gave all.

The Baltimore Sun: 

Calvin and Kenneth Bayne stood silently among Army officers, watching their brother’s remains transferred from a plane to a waiting hearse. Kenneth kept his hand on his heart. Calvin saluted and then walked directly to the flag-draped casket and kissed it.

The somber ceremony on a tarmac at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport offered the two men the first tangible contact with their older brother in more than 66 years. Pfc. Robert B. Bayne went missing in action in 1945 as he fought along the Rhine River near Mannheim, Germany. The Army officially identified his body in March of this year, largely spurred by the constant urging of the 83-year-old fraternal twins who were teens when the man they called “Buddy” enlisted.

The Army had imposed tight security restrictions for the transfer and asked family members to remain in place. Only Calvin Bayne, ever the feistier brother, broke ranks. He moved briskly from cluster of soldiers and approached the hearse.

“I had to kiss the casket,” he said after the ceremony. “Nothing was going to stop me.”

DNA taken from each brother helped Army researchers identify Robert Bayne’s remains, which had been unidentified at the end of the war and buried in St. Avold Cemetery in northern France.

The brothers, who live in Dundalk near their boyhood home, are making plans for a funeral Mass on Saturday at their parish church and a graveside service with military honors at the family plot.

“We are not done yet,” Kenneth Bayne said. “When we lay him to rest Saturday, he will really be home with us.”

Robert Bayne enlisted in 1944 and served in the infantry. At 26, he volunteered for a risky mission crossing the Rhine. Three of the four American soldiers on that March 1945 mission were killed, but only two bodies were identified at the end of the war. The Army relied on dental records to identify the third soldier, but because of an error that went undetected for years, those X-rays did not match the ones taken from Bayne at his induction.

After meeting decades ago with the lone survivor of that mission, the Baynes became convinced that the unknown soldier buried in France was their brother. Army officials repeatedly denied their requests for further testing, but the brothers persisted. Ken Bayne has kept detailed records of every conversation and every correspondence related to Robert, whose status was changed to “killed in action” in 1946. He has documentation from 1949, when the Army said it had insufficient evidence to establish an identification, and from 1957, when the Army denied one last request to review the case.

DNA research finally confirmed their beliefs after both men submitted samples in 2008. Last summer, the Army disinterred the remains and transported them to a lab in Hawaii for testing.

What wonderful brothers to keep after this until they found their brother and brought him home.  What must this have been like for Robert Bayne’s parents?  They never knew what happened to their son.  Perhaps efforts like this one aren’t for the dead, but for the living. 

In the middle of all the doom and gloom of war, politics, middle east spring, floods, tornadoes, and all the other woes of the world, somehow, this Baltimore Sun story is just a real shot in the arm on a warm spring day.  It restores hope.