This is Bob Myers from the Historical Society of Michigan with a Michigan history moment for hundreds of thousands of American families during World War I. War Department telegrams announcing a soldier missing in action began an agonized wait for information. Many of them would never find out what happened to their loved ones. But Frederick Zinn of Battle Creek made it his life's work to bring closure to the families of missing soldiers and airmen. Zinn graduated from the University of Michigan in 1914 and went on a tour of Europe just as World War I broke out. He enlisted in the French Foreign Legion and was wounded in the Champagne offensive. After recovering, he enlisted in the Lafayette Escadrille, a squadron of American volunteers formed to fly for France. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Zinn transferred to the new US Army Air Service. He led training programs for replacement pilots and sent new pilots to squadrons at the front lines, where their life expectancy was measured in weeks. Many simply went missing. Syn stayed in Europe after the war. He had sent many of the missing men to the front, and he wanted to bring closure to their families. He scoured combat reports, interviewed French villagers, examined German records, and flew over battlefield areas looking for grave sites and airplane wreckage. Zinn found them. American airmen lay in shallow graves scattered all over France, sometimes marked with a broken propeller as a cross. In all, Zinn located the remains of 194 of the 200 American airmen who fell behind German lines. Zinn went back to work tracing missing American air crew after the outbreak of World War II. His plans included the use of missing air crew reports and ground search teams, as well as an organization to search for missing servicemen from all branches of the military. Later, he came up with the practice of having standardized serial numbers affixed to key aircraft parts to make it easier to identify the wreckage. Many of Zinn's innovations remain in practice today. For example, he proposed that the military create a unified organization to oversee the recovery of the remains of military personnel. In 2003, the Pentagon formed the Joint POW MIA Accounting Command and made Zinn's idea a reality. Frederick Zinn died of lung cancer in 1960. He rests today in a Battle Creek cemetery just off the end of a Runway at the W.K. kellogg Regional Airport. This Michigan history moment was brought to you by michiganhistorymagazine.org.