The Pilot Who Came Home
This story is shared in honor of Captain Ellis Spear Middleton II and his daughter, Hart Asbury, whose memory keeps his story alive.
I met her on a walking track.
It was just another morning—people circling, getting their steps in, doing what we all try to do… stay healthy a little longer. She was walking with a friend, smiling, easy to talk to. Her name was Hart Asbury.
We started talking like people do—nothing heavy at first. But somewhere along the way, she mentioned her father. He had been a pilot in World War II.
Then she said something that stopped me.
He never came home.
His name was Captain Ellis Spear Middleton II.
He was born on December 1, 1919, in Washington, D.C., and became a fighter pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces. He flew a P-47 Thunderbolt—one of the most rugged aircraft of the war—and was a decorated pilot, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and later the Purple Heart.
By September 1944, he was flying missions in support of Operation Market Garden.
On September 23, 1944, near Kleve, Germany, his aircraft went down.
He was 25 years old.
At the time, there was no confirmed crash site, no final message, and no grave—just a telegram and then silence.
For most families, that would have been the end of it.
But not for his.
Even before the war was over, his father began searching. He refused to accept that his son had simply disappeared. What followed became a mission of its own.
He printed and distributed more than 30,000 circulars across Europe, each carrying his son’s photograph They were posted in towns, train stations, and public places across Holland, Belgium, and France—anywhere someone might have seen something.
Then he waited.
And people responded.
Letters came in from across Europe—hundreds of them—from people offering help, sharing what they remembered, trying to piece together what had happened to an American pilot who had fallen from the sky.
One of those responses changed everything.
In a forest near Kleve, a German ranger named Karl Riemer had seen the crash. He told investigators that the pilot had been buried by German paratroopers, who placed a crude birch cross over the grave.
When they located the site, they found it—but not as they expected.
The grave was marked as an “unknown German soldier,” in an isolated cemetery far from where anyone would have thought to look.
The grave was opened and examined.
The remains, along with evidence found at the site and nearby wreckage, confirmed the truth.
The unknown soldier was not German.
He was Captain Ellis Spear Middleton II.
After nearly three years, his family finally had their answer.
The search didn’t just bring one answer.
In the process, it helped identify the remains of six to eight other missing American soldiers, giving their families the same closure his family had fought so hard to find.
He was first laid to rest in a U.S. military cemetery in Belgium before finally being brought home to the United States.
He rests today at Arlington National Cemetery, properly identified, properly honored.
Not missing.
Not unknown.
Found.
This is “Hart”, the daughter of Ellis Middleton.