Six hundred US airmen were reported to have died in the air raids at Ploesti. By January 1943 Graves Registration were finishing up retrieving all of the bodies. For operations like Tidal Wave, Graves Registration was aided by Romanian officials because what little was left of the men had been immediately taken and buried in mass graves or local cemeteries. It was hard because of the charred remains often being mixed with those of German and Romanian soldiers. This caused only 15 out of 194 unknown flyers to get identified by 1947.
While in Europe, Dr. Franks still wrote to congressmen and generals. On February 11, 1948 he got a report about 185 unknown bodies being recovered from Ploesti and taken to the Ardennes American Cemetery at Neuville-en-Condroz, Belgium to be identified.
There was one body in particular that had the gold bar of a 2nd Lt. on its shirt. He was given the designation X-5191 and he was missing the bones from his right hand, a section of pelvic bone, both knee caps, a section of left thigh bone, and all left-hand finger bones.The body was too decomposed and missing all of its fingers, so the forensic specialists were unable to take prints. X-5191 was then buried at Neuville-en-Condroz in Plot V, Row 8, Grave 177.
In early 1948, the military decided to reopen Jesse’s case. This is when they discovered that not only was X-5191 a similar height to Jesse, but he also had red hair and a near perfect matching dental chart.
On April 12, 1948, the military concluded that this was Jesse. Dr. Franks, however, still had doubts after searching for Jesse for so long and received a copy of the bodies tooth chart for comparison on September 2, 1948 and confirmed it was him. Jesse’s body later got moved to a different plot among the known soldiers. After 6 years of wondering, Dr. Franks finally knew where his son was.