GREENVILLE — Army fighter pilot Lt. Morton “Mason” Sher wrote a letter to his family from his post in China on Aug. 19, 1943.
For just over a year, the 22-year-old Greenville High School graduate had been assigned to the 76th Fighter Squadron — a group of several hundred aircraft trying to hold off thousands of Japanese airplanes supporting the Imperial Army’s advance into central China.
Sher’s letter — carefully preserved in a scrapbook curated across three generations — shared some news.
“I find things too exciting here to leave right now,” he wrote.
He was letting another pilot step into an instructing job that would have taken him out of combat.
“He was having a good time,” said Steve Traub, Sher’s nephew. “He was 22 years old for goodness sakes. He wasn’t going to get killed.”
The next day, Aug. 20, 1943, Japanese attack planes were spotted on their way to Sher’s air station in Hengyeng, China, military records show. He climbed into his shark-mouthed P-40 to pursue them.
He never came back.
Lost in a fiery crash into a rice paddy in rural Hunan province, Sher was declared missing in action and presumed dead. A 1947 Army review board found that his remains — like tens of thousands of others — were “likely destroyed” and “unrecoverable,” family records show.
Decades later using data and accounts cobbled together from Sher’s fellow pilots at the time, the 2012 discovery of a stone marker near the site of his crash, a Chinese witness interviewed in 2019, archeological digs in 2019 and 2024, and a family DNA sample submitted from Greenville last spring, a group charged with recovering military remains finally pieced together what happened to Sher — and found him.
Lt. Morton Sher was buried in Greenville on Dec. 14, 2025. An honor guard took the flag draping his plain casket and presented it to the only person left who had known him: Sher’s 94-year-old little sister, Carol Fine.
It was an unlikely path home for Sher — one his family’s rabbi called a “miracle.”
An unexpected message
Bruce and Nikki Fine did not believe it when they started receiving voice messages and emails in early 2025 from a group calling itself the federal Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The agency’s messages claimed they had information about Lt. Morton Sher.
“I mean, we both thought it was a scam,” said Nikki Fine, whose husband is Sher’s nephew.
Fine checked with her father, a former service member, and he agreed that they should get something in writing.
The next day, a letter came. Nikki Fine double-checked with her congressman, Upstate representative William Timmons, and his office confirmed with the Pentagon the story was real.
A research team with the DPAA, the family learned, had undertaken an investigation in 2012 after a person in the Xin Bai village of China came across an old stone marker with Sher’s name on it. The marker, erected by Sher’s airmen buddies in 1943, had been stored in a barn some time in the decades since when a nearby rice paddy had flooded. The person who found it took a picture, and the image made its way to the U.S. government and the DPAA.
Written on the marker: “Lt. Morton Sher. USA. Died Aug, 20, 1943. RIP.” Underneath was a series of Chinese characters.
Finding and identifying the remains of lost service members is a complex and slow process of records searches, interviews, lab tests, family notifications and international communications.
According to the DPAA, the remains of nearly 72,000 other American service members from World War II remain missing. Only 25 individuals lost in the Chinese theater of war have been identified and returned home since 1975.
Sher would be No. 26.
A metal detector and a rib
In 2012, the DPAA opened an investigation and seven years later, in May 2019, the agency sent a team to Xin Bai. They found someone who as a child had witnessed Sher’s crash and could lead them to the crash site. They surveyed 1,500 square meters, located some of the 76-year-old plane wreckage, but saw no evidence of remains.
In 2024, the DPAA sent another team to the site, this time with a metal detector and a plan to find the plane’s engine.
“The highest concentration of metal in that airplane is in the engine in the front, and the pilot sits right behind the engine,” Nikki Fine said. “So they figured if they could find a high concentration of metal, they would know where to look for remains.”
They found bone fragments — jaw, cranium and rib. After a lab in Shanghai determined the remains did not belong to a Chinese individual, they were turned over to the United States.
In early 2025, the DPAA was sending all those emails and voice messages to Bruce Fine because they wanted him to submit a DNA kit. He agreed and about six weeks later, the confirmation came: Lt. Morton Sher had been found.
“They actually took DNA from the piece of rib that they found in China 82 years later in the bottom of a rice paddy,” Nikki Fine said. “Somehow they could still extract DNA, and they matched Bruce’s DNA to Mason’s rib DNA.”
Bruce Fine’s mother could barely remember Sher. She was six years old when her big brother left for college, but through the decades she kept two photos of him: one in which he is holding her and another of him smiling in front of his shark-mouthed P-40. Bruce Fine broke the news to her after the ID was confirmed in June.
“She couldn’t believe it,” he said. “She was very happy.”
Sher’s remains were brought home to Greenville in November. The burial was on a recent Sunday in 2025 — the first night of Hannukah, a holiday that celebrates perseverance.
The Shers come to Greenville
Morton Sher was born in Baltimore on Dec. 14, 1920, the son of Jewish immigrants — Anna and David — who had fled separately from Russia in 1914 because of escalating antisemitic violence there, according to a family history compiled by Sher’s nieces and nephews.
“They were determined to escape that horror so that they and the family they would ultimately create together could trade a life of pain and uncertainty for one of limitless opportunity,” Bruce Fine said at Sher’s Dec. 14 funeral.
After meeting, marrying and having children in Maryland, Anna and David Sher followed family to South Carolina in the mid-1920s.
By 1931, David Sher had opened a business, Piedmont Steel and Metal, in Greenville, and the family became active members of Congregation Beth Israel on Townes Street, the center of a Jewish community of fewer than 200 people, said Traub, another of Sher’s nephews.
Mason would go on to attend Greenville High School, where old yearbooks still in the school’s library show he was an officer in the aviation club and a member of student government. He graduated in 1938 and left the following fall for the University of Alabama, yearbooks and family records show.
“He was bubbly,” said Traub, who heard stories about Sher from older family members. “I mean, he was into everything he started. … And he was very outspoken and very well spoken. Everybody liked him.”
Pilot training
At about this time, war was brewing in Europe and Asia. The Japanese had occupied Beijing in 1937, and Adolph Hitler’s Germany had absorbed neighboring Austria in spring 1938. An invasion of Poland — and war across Europe — would follow in September 1939.
By 1940, Mason was managing the Alabama basketball team, but he had also joined the university’s Reserve Officer Training Corps and completed a government-sponsored civilian pilot training program in Tuscaloosa, family records show.
He already knew he wanted to fly for his country, family members said.
Passage of the Lend-Lease Act in spring 1941, while Mason was finishing his junior year at Alabama, enabled a still neutral United States to provide weapons — and airplanes — to its allies. These allies included China, at war with Japan since 1931.
In early 1941, official U.S. involvement in World War II was nearly a year away, but American fighter pilots already were flying in Great Britain and secretly working with China to build an air force there, according to a 1958 account in Air & Space Forces Magazine.
After his junior year in June 1941, Mason left Alabama to enlist in the Army at Fort Jackson in Columbia, family records show. He started Army Air Corps pilot training the following week.
War breaks out
As Sher learned the basics of combat aviation through the fall of 1941, a mercenary crew of veteran U.S. pilots in Kunming, China, was studying Japanese fighter pilot tactics and practicing “pursuit” skills, the 1958 article said. The American Volunteer Group in China was still training when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
Eleven days later, Japanese planes attacked Kunming. The American response was deadly, downing 20 Japanese airplanes for every one U.S. plane. That engagement, and the shark teeth on the noses of their P-40 fighter planes, soon earned them the nickname “Fighting Tigers” in the American press, 1958 article said.
Back in Texas, Mason Sher, now 21, graduated from fighter-pilot training in January 1942 and was shipped to the Panama Canal. Six months later, he would be reassigned to the Flying Tigers’ successor group, the 76th Fighter Squadron in China.
“A year ago today I was in Mimia [sic] waiting for you folks to come down — Remember??” Sher wrote to his parents on Aug. 19, 1943. “Time certainly rolls by in a hurry when you are constantly on the move.”
In October 1942, Sher survived his first crash with help from Chinese citizens. He was flying back to base after escorting a group of bombers on an air raid of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong when two Japanese Zero fighters attacked and chased down his P-40.
He crash landed his “ship” in a field and later wrote a letter — eventually published by the Associated Press — that recounted the mission.
‘Far away from the world we live in’
Sher bumped his head in the landing and woke up hanging upside down in his cockpit, he wrote. When he came to, a group of people were standing around his plane. He showed them a Chinese flag, and they rushed to help.
“They covered my ship with grass and took me into a ditch in which I could hide,” he wrote. “About five minutes later, the two Jap Zero’s that had been following me came over the field looking for my ship.”
The camouflage worked. The villagers fetched a doctor, gave him a bed and found an interpreter — a middle-school English teacher, Sher wrote. As they prepared to get him back to base, a five-day journey on horseback, he toured a temple, a school and factories. A day before his departure, the village threw a celebration, and 15,000 people showed up, he wrote. When he left, people lined the streets and shot off fireworks.
Sher’s step-mother Celia “Mama” Sher, his little brother Jack and, later, his nephew Steve Traub preserved clippings of Sher’s story.
“He was telling them all the things (the Americans) were going to do, and they were cheering,” Traub said. “Then they wanted him to sing a song, so he sang the Alabama fight song.”
American pilots were revered by many Chinese citizens at this time, as they were holding back a Japanese army that by 1943 had overtaken Burma and occupied a quarter of China, according to historians with the Pacific Atrocities Education center.
“I had learned much from these people and was reluctant to leave them behind, but I had been out of action for quite a while and was anxious to get back,” Sher wrote in 1942. “Someday, however, I hope to return and visit all my good friends that live so far away from the world we live in.”
Sher would go on to log a total of 525 hours in the air — more than half of that in combat — before he was shot down less than a year later.
