American researchers have launched a new drive in Poland to try to establish the fate of over 100 servicemen missing since World War II, the US embassy in Warsaw said.

A team from the Department of Defence’s Prisoner of War and Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) in Washington are to stay in Poland until September 14, the embassy said in a statement.

They are to focus efforts on finding the remains of the missing around the western Polish cities of Kedzierzyn-Kozle, Wroclaw, Szczecin and Kostrzyn nad Odra.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain two decades ago, DPMO teams have travelled there on several occasions to conduct research and interviews related to servicemen presumed to have perished on what is now Polish territory.

The US Air Force was heavily involved in the bombing campaign against Nazi Germany, which lost swathes of territory to Poland under post-war border changes.

For example, the northwestern Polish port city of Szczecin was known as Stettin while Wroclaw in the southwest was called Breslau.

German cities were pounded by Allied air attacks during the war and many aircraft were shot down.

In addition, US planes were downed by the Germans over occupied Poland itself, notably as they flew the risky route from liberated Italy to drop arms and supplies to the Polish resistance during the failed 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

The Nazis also set up prisoner-of-war camps across what was then eastern Germany as well as occupied Poland.

Allied troops who died in captivity were generally buried on site. In some cases, the time lapse has made it hard to identify grave locations, while documentary evidence about the person laid to rest has been lost.