enlarge Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer

John Hoskin of Gorham holds a 1942 photograph of his brother, 2nd Lt. Harold Hoskin, an Army Air Corps pilot killed in World War II. John Hoskin provided a DNA sample that helped identify his older brother’s remains.

enlarge Courtesy John Hoskin

2nd Lt. Harold Hoskin, who was at Bates College in Lewiston when he learned Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, left college and joined the Army a few months later in 1942.

enlarge Courtesy John Hoskin

A family-contributed photo shows the crash site in Alaska where Harold Hoskin of Houlton died. One crewman survived and later led rescuers to the sit

HOME AGAIN ARMY AIR CORPS LT. HAROLD HOSKIN, who will be buried Friday at Arlington National Cemetery, is one of four missing servicemen from Maine whose remains have been returned this year. The others were:

AIR FORCE LT. COL. PAUL GETCHELL, 32, of Portland. Getchell's bomber was shot down on Jan. 13, 1969, over Laos during the Vietnam War. Getchell left behind a wife, Teresa Getchell, and two children. The family was notified in December 2006 that bone fragments uncovered at the site belonged to Getchell. He was buried with full military honors at Arlington on May 21.

AIR FORCE SGT. DONALD MICHAUD, 32, of Biddeford. Michaud disappeared Sept. 9, 1978, with two others during a diving expedition in a submerged cavern in Greece. He left behind a wife and three children. Michaud's remains were found in October 2006 and identified by Air Force pathologists. He was buried with full military honors on July 20 at St. Joseph's Cemetery in Biddeford.

AIR FORCE LT. WILLIAM A. BUJOLD, 24, of Rumford. Bujold was a navigator on a plane shot down during a bombing run over a Japanese air base in New Britain Province, Papua, New Guinea, on May 21, 1943. The military, using DNA testing, identified Bujold's remains in November 2006. He was buried with full military honors on Aug. 24, 2007, at St. John's Catholic Cemetery in Rumford, next to his mother and father.

Sources: Press Herald staff; The Associated Press

GORHAM — John Hoskin remembers what his family thought after his older brother's plane failed to return from a test flight over the Alaskan wilderness during World War II.

"We all figured he was going to walk out some day," Hoskin said.

But 2nd Lt. Harold Hoskin, an Army Air Corps pilot, never walked out of the Yukon.

A crew member did survive, however, and his incredible return set off a chain of events that concludes this week when Harold Hoskin's remains are buried at Arlington National Cemetery more than 60 years after his death.

"He's able to get the military honors he deserves," said Mary Hoskin, John's wife.

It will be the fourth time this year that military officials have used DNA analysis to identify and return the remains of a missing Mainer to the family.

The latest discovery came after a two-year investigation of a crash site in Alaska's remote Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.

What researchers found helped dust off a chapter of Hoskin family history that was incomplete and seldom-discussed after the war.

Family members said it helped give a daughter the first true glimpse of her father's character and brought an uncle closer to his niece.

Harold Hoskin was a 22-year-old Houlton native with a child on the way and dreams of becoming a doctor when he flew a B-24 bomber out of Ladd Field in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Dec. 21, 1943.

Hoskin led a crew of five assigned to test the bomber's propeller systems in cold weather. An engine malfunctioned during the flight and sent the plane into a downward spiral, according to military documents.

"The thing started falling apart in the air," said John Hoskin, 83, a retired Baptist minister who lives in Gorham. The bomber crashed on a remote mountain.

Search teams could not find the wreckage for months. Then 2nd Lt. Leon Crane, one of the five crew members, returned to the base after wandering in the wilderness and living off of food stores from trapper's cabins.

Crane led searchers to the crash site, where they found the remains of two other crewmen. But they never found Harold Hoskin's body and assumed he was the last crew member to parachute from the bomber.

But Harold Hoskin never left the plane. Former National Park Historian Douglas Beckstead convinced military investigators to return to the site after he discovered several artifacts -- including parachute harness buckles -- at the largely intact crash site three years ago.

The team recovered bone fragments from the plane wreckage last summer. Beckstead contacted John Hoskin, the pilot's only remaining sibling, and asked for a DNA sample.

The results were announced in March. "It was a match," John Hoskin said.

The find rekindled John Hoskin's curiosity, which had dimmed since he and his wife tracked down Crane, the man who wandered through the Alaskan wilderness after the crash, at his Philadelphia home in the early 1990s.

Crane had little to say about the event and has since died, they said.

John Hoskin reconnected with his niece, and convinced her to look through love letters his brother sent to her mother during the war. She learned that Harold Hoskin was in a zoology laboratory at Bates College in Lewiston when he learned Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. He left college and joined the Army almost two months later, at the end of January 1942.

Harold Hoskin married his girlfriend, Mary, days after he finished pilot training a year later.

The couple eagerly awaited the birth of their first child at the time of the crash. They even settled on a name, Dick, because they expected a boy. Mary Hoskin gave birth to their daughter five months later.

In the meantime, she boxed up every letter from her husband, could not discuss his death and did not remarry for more than two decades. She died in 2004.

"Any time I ever asked her about it, she would cry," said Joann Goldstein, 63, of Punta Gorda, Fla., their...