83 years after a final WWII mission in the Pacific, New York's Nicholas Governale comes home

U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Nicholas Governale, handsome and young and carrying a grown man’s burdens, left Brooklyn on World War II’s cusp. Not until his bones came back this week did his family celebrate a funeral Mass.

They did this Friday at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Roman Catholic Church in Williamsburg — not his parents or his four brothers and sisters, because those generations have passed, but their descendants from East Northport and Queens and farther afield, nieces and nephews and cousins grown into the middle age he did not reach.

“We are doing what we know my grandparents would have wanted: bring him home, give him a Mass, and for him to be buried in the family plot,” Anthony Veneziano, 57, an assistant principal in New York City schools who lives in Howard Beach, said in an interview this week.

Governale was one of four crewmen killed July 10, 1943, when a B-25C-1 bomber on a scouting mission off Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands clipped trees on takeoff and crashed into the sea in deep water almost 2 miles offshore. He was 22, serving as a gunner.

For nearly 80 years the remains of the men aboard the plane were deemed unrecoverable by the U.S. military, among at least 71,762 service members the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency says are still missing from World War II.

The War Department and a DPAA antecedent, the American Graves Registration Service, knew roughly where the plane went down, but it took modern technology to locate it precisely enough for recovery. In 2017, Project Recover, a Bend, Oregon, nonprofit that searches for Americans missing in action, did so after surveying a roughly 9-square-mile area of ocean floor with two sonar-equipped autonomous underwater vehicles. The plane was under 121 feet of water.

In 2022 and 2024, missions that were delayed by the coronavirus and then hampered by bad weather, DPAA dive teams recovered “possible human remains,” bones and teeth the agency’s forensic experts determined were consistent with a man Governale’s height and age, according to a 2025 report by the agency.

Again, the DPAA used technology unavailable in Governale’s lifetime, including tests that compared genetic material found in the remains with mitochondrial DNA from Governale’s maternal relatives. The genetic data was 876,000 times more likely to be observed in Governale’s relatives than in the general Caucasian population, agency scientists concluded.

Governale’s nephews, Anthony and Ed Veneziano, learned last summer that their uncle’s remains had been recovered. The DPAA publicly announced Governale had been accounted for in January.

The news was shocking, said Ed, 71, of East Northport, retired former partner of a family-owned clothing store, Cato’s Army Navy, in Greenpoint. “These are things my family never talked about,” he said. “It was a great loss for my grandmother and grandfather, something they wanted to put in the background and not think about.”

The nephews had, nevertheless, learned about their Uncle Nick from stories their aunts and uncles told at family gatherings. Some of their relatives had shared the fantasy that, since Governale’s body had not been recovered, he might have survived the crash. “There was always a hope that one day, there would be a knock at the door, and there he would be, or that he would be found somewhere on an island,” Ed said.

Governale was the eldest surviving son of five children born to Sicilian immigrants Anna and Calogero Governale (two older siblings had died as young children). He attended East New York Vocational High School with hopes of becoming a mechanic but dropped out at 16 to work as a laborer because his family needed money. Ed said that their grandmother, Governale’s mother, had refused to wear black after he went missing. “She didn’t want to accept the fact that he had passed,” he said.

This year, as Anthony and Ed prepared for Governale’s return, they sorted through a pile of documents Ed said his grandparents had preserved like “treasures”: letters, telegrams and photographs Governale sent home from various postings including Mitchel Field on Long Island, Hawaii and Guadalcanal, along with DPAA reports meticulously documenting its recovery work.

The nephews shared the documents with this reporter. They function more like a time capsule than a history of the age or even of the war. Governale’s knowledge of events may have been incomplete, or he may have been deliberately omitting information: He alludes several times to the military censors he knew were reading his letters before they got to his family and repeatedly tells his mother not to worry about developments she may read in newspapers of the day.

Thus the attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the nation’s entry into the war and may have precipitated Governale’s own decision to rejoin the Army Air Corps after having worked as a civilian aircraft engine mechanic, merits mere lines in a 1941 letter: “Sunday morning 7th of December I reenlisted with my old outfit.”

Governale, the nephews said, was his family’s breadwinner after his father, a laborer, became disabled and unable to work, and his anxiety over money is evident. “Are you receiving my checks OK?” he asks. “I’m sorry I can’t send more,” he says in another.

He explains his decision to take a job in Hawaii: “I would be a fool not to take a government job that will make me earn enough money to take care of us all.” Later, he added: “Please explain to the kids that I’m awfully sorry I couldn’t send them anything for Christmas. Maybe someday I will be able to make it up to them.”

Some passages read as more meditation than missive. “How old is everyone and what class and grade are the kids in,” he writes in October 1942. “I’ve been away so long I have lost track of all time.”

They show a young man trying to help the people he loves, and perhaps himself too, confront the possibility that he will die imminently. “I guess by now you know about the crash,” he writes, in 1940, of a plane crash over Bellerose that killed a friend. “We live in fame, and die in flames,” he writes, apparently referencing a line from what is now the U.S. Air Force Song. “When your number is up, you can’t do anything about it.”

He returns to the subject in 1941, in a letter that describes how the U.S., already “sending everything but men,” was headed for war: “This little note that I’m writing is not to scare you or bluff you. It’s to make you all realize and face the truth. … If by Act of God anything ever happens to me, I want you to know that I have a $3,000 insurance policy in Mother and Dad’s name and a will leaving all my belongings to them. We must face the truth so don’t start to cry and worry. It is what any sensible person would do.”

After the summer of 1943, the letters from Governale stop, replaced by those from America's military and political leaders. "Nothing the War Department can do or say will in any way repair the loss of your loved one," writes Secretary of War Henry Stimson in October, 1943. "Please believe me, Sincerely Yours..."

In a phone interview earlier this week, Derek Abbey, Project Recover’s CEO, said he and other organization members would attend Governale's funeral. It was important, he said, “to show our support, bear witness and participate in the memorialization.”

Abbey said he’d worked for Recover for 22 years, first as a volunteer, later as an employee. Before that, he was an active duty Marine. He took it as an article of faith, he said, that people who swear an oath to defend the nation’s Constitution are owed a corresponding guarantee: “that we will do everything we can to bring them home, and it doesn’t have an expiration date.”

At the church on Friday, an honor guard of Patriot Guard Riders in motorcycle gear and service members in uniform assembled. Army Master Sgt. Shana Israel, 40, who normally works at Fort Dix, said she’d volunteered. “I did not know this man,” but he “paved the way for the younger generation. I thank him for that,” she said in an interview.

Inside, Ed Veneziano spoke briefly and eloquently to a crowd of about 100 mourners. Governale, he said, “represents the courage of a generation. He represents the sacrifice of immigrant families who gave everything to this country. He represents a son who deeply loved his family and never stopped thinking of home. Uncle Nicky, you were never forgotten, not for a single day.”