In 2008 a dog tag was unearthed in northern Germany by a man who worked for an explosive ordnance disposal team. He had been looking for unexploded bombs near a former World War II airfield at Bad Zwischenahn to make sure that the area was safe for new construction. The dog tag had belonged to an American airman named Scott Brewer from Boise, Idaho. Brewer was the son of a department store salesman. He was handsome and popular and worked as a bartender in Boise before enlisting. He became a staff sergeant in the 66th Bomber Squadron, 44th Bomber Group, and served as a tail gunner on a B-24. On 26 February 1943 they were assigned a new target: the Focke-Wulf aircraft factories in Bremen. But German fighter pilots downed the B-24 as soon as it approached the target from the Frisian Islands off the coast of northern Germany. Brewer and other members of the crew were first buried in the German village cemetery. Brewer was not married and had no children. But he had worn a bracelet with the name ‘Mary’ on it. After a difficult search and much help from local media the dog tag was eventually reunited with some distant relatives. No one ever managed to find out who Mary might have been. Today Scott Brewer is buried, like so many other airmen, in the American cemetery at Neuville-en-Condroz in Belgium.
