There are many others like Bob - civilians and servicemen who lived through the most horrific war in modern history and now search through cyberspace for old friends and enemies. The CompuServe and AOL military forums are full of tributes and search queries. Web sites, too, are beginning to proliferate. The one for the B24 Liberator bombers (www.macbww.com/B24) includes hundreds of postings from airmen or relatives trying to find out exactly what happened in the explosive skies over Europe and Asia. Most questions are unanswerable. But for a lucky few like Bob Lehnherr, there are volunteers who have the time, energy and expertise to help them solve 50-year-old mysteries.

In a CompuServe military-and-veterans forum, Lehnherr found Maurice Rowe, a retired British air-traffic controller who survived the blitz of England as a child. Rowe was using his knowledge of military records to help people find missing persons. He visited Lehnherr in Seattle to learn more about Joe, then traveled to Alabama to pore over the records of the USAF Historical Research Center at Maxwell Air Force Base. He found out which German fighters had downed Joe’s B24, nicknamed the Black Widow, in February 1944, and even the name of the pilot who claimed the kill. Rowe started tracing the five crew members who had survived the crash and had spent more than a year in POW camps. Joe, the bombardier, probably was killed when the shooting started, Rowe learned. But he still couldn’t discover what had happened to Joe’s body.

Finally, a few weeks ago, Rowe found Vincent Riel, one of the Black Widow’s waist gunners, alive in Annapolis, Md. Vincent and his wife, Shirley, had saved letters, including several from Joe’s father, Frank Adams. Frank had worked in El Dorado for an undertaker, and when the war was over, he went to Europe to help exhume and identify the dead. On April 6, 1948, he wrote to Riel to tell him what had happened. ““I have found the boys,’’ he began the letter. They had been buried together in a single grave as ““five unknowns.’’ Under his supervision, they were taken together back to the United States and buried at a U.S. military cemetery in St. Louis.

Lehnherr, in Seattle, says he hopes to present the materials gathered about Lt. Joseph Adams to the little museum in El Dorado and to see that, by Veteran’s Day, Joe’s name is on the plaques dedicated to the war dead of Butler County, Kans. As for Rowe, he’s still on the Net, working, he says, ““to lay the ghosts to rest.''