Sebastopol World War II vet's long journey home

Airman’s lost remains recently discovered 80 years after war’s end

Yuen Hop in his airmen’s uniform and civilian clothes. (Photos from the Hop family)

In 1943, Yuen Hop, who had just finished his senior year at Analy High School, enlisted in the U.S. Army and went off to fight in World War II. He never came home. His plane was shot down over Germany during the historic Battle of the Bulge on Dec. 29, 1944, and his body was never found.

Until now.

Eighty years after the end of World War II, Yuen Hop’s remains, which were not found until last June, will be interred at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno on Feb. 7, 2025.

Yuen’s story is one of a family’s many decades of grief without closure and the tenacious efforts by U.S. military officials that “no fallen comrades are ever left behind — no matter how long it takes.”

The recovery and identification of Hop’s remains follows a long trail of U.S. military paper-based investigations, battlefield visits, interviews with German war survivors and, ultimately, the use of anthropological and biological DNA analysis. Hop’s remains and identity were certified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) and shared with his family this past June.

Of the 407,000 official U.S. military deaths from World War II, there are still 71,986 unaccounted for, including 1,000 from the Battle of the Bulge, where Hop died.

Yuen Hop grew up in Sebastopol with three brothers and four sisters. His father and mother, Gin and Chan Hop, were Chinese immigrants, who moved from San Francisco to Sebastopol, where they leased orchards and processed some of their own fruit. All of the Hop children attended Analy and local schools. The family house was at 364 Pitt Avenue, a small tidy bungalow that still stands just west of the Safeway store in downtown Sebastopol. All of Yuen’s brothers fought in World War II or the later Korean War. Two of them also were war casualties.

After the wars, the Hop family moved back to San Francisco, and Yuen’s remaining relatives now live on the San Francisco Peninsula and in San Jose.

Through all the years since he went missing, his airman’s portrait hung above his parents’ mantelpiece, where new generations of the extended Hop family could always be reminded of their “unclosed loss.” Yuen’s sister, Margery, took a special interest in resolving the family’s grief. She contacted various U.S. Army agencies, on and off throughout the years.

In 1950, after success in locating and identifying most of the 19,000 Battle of the Bulge casualties, Hop and two others from his bomber crew were declared “non-recoverable” and listed as MIA (Missing in Action) by the American Graves Registration Command (AGRC). But search efforts were renewed in 2013 by DPAA researchers armed with new DNA technology and some recent discoveries of war-era German documents and eyewitness accounts.

“We were very surprised after so many years when the military contacted us last June to provide us the final closure,” said Ron Hop, son of Yuen’s brother, Yee. “My uncle’s death was always something that stayed with our family. We believed he had died in the battle, but we never were sure about any of the details about how he died or exactly where.”

The battle and Yuen’s death

Hop was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Forces 368^th Bombardment Group, 306^th Bombardment Squadron. On Dec. 29, 1944, he was a waist gunner on a B-17G Flying Fortress bomber as part of a crew of nine. His plane was part of a major aerial attack on German forces that were causing great losses to U.S. and Allied ground troops at the Belgium-Germany border. The aerial assault included 823 bombers and 724 Thunderbolt and Mustang fighters.

A B-17G Flying Fortress

Hop’s aircraft was hit twice by heavy enemy artillery and caught fire. Before parachuting, Hop rescued his plane’s rear gunner, Franklin Leonard, and helped him rig his parachute. Five of the crewmembers landed and were taken as prisoners by German soldiers. One crewmember died and was buried on the spot. Hop and two others were unaccounted for and not included on POW lists.

In 2013, DPAA researchers interviewed current-day German officials and found new evidence of the three missing U.S. airmen, including Hop. Although none of the three were imprisoned, documents referencing “war crimes” were found, suggesting that Hop and the others were executed by either German SS officers or prison war camp staff.

Until then, Hop had survived 14 previous wartime bombing missions over enemy terrain. Poor weather on Dec. 29, 1944, forced the 306^th Squadron to fly closer to German artillery installations than preferred. That day’s Allied aerial assault proved successful, and the Battle of the Bulge ended just three weeks later with a German retreat. But dozens of planes and U.S. airmen’s lives were lost that day.

Between 2021 and early 2022, DPAA teams searched local gravesites and excavated a suspected burial site in the Kamp-Bornhofen Cemetery, near Bingen, Germany. Remnants of skeletal bones were found and transferred to the DPAA laboratories in Hawaii where Hop’s identity was finally confirmed.

Staff Sergeant Yuen Hop was posthumously awarded The Purple Heart, Air Medal with one Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster, Prison of War Medal, Army Good Conduct Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with two Bronze Stars, World War II Victory Medal, U.S. Army Air Forces Gunner Badge Wings, Marksman Badge and an Honorable Service Lapel Button. Hop’s name also is recorded on the Wall of the Missing at Lorraine American Cemetery in St. Avold, France.

At Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7, there will be a formal military honor ceremony followed by the family’s eulogy given by nephew Ron Hop. Among others in attendance will be Yuen Hop’s 91-year-old sister, Margery Hop Wong. The young airman from the photo that hung over the family’s mantel for almost 80 years would have been 101 years old this year.