Still Trying to Bring Their Fallen Heroes Home

Kyt · Feb 4, 2008

Of 79,000 missing American WWII servicemen 35,000 recoverable

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/nyregion/03remains.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

The military telegram arrived in Peekskill, N.Y., on a springlike day in February 1945. The parents put it down unopened, falling to their knees to pray. Three of their five sons were pilots fighting overseas, and they were afraid to learn which of their boys was dead.

Their firstborn, Joseph Huba, 27, was the one named in the telegram. His transport plane had crashed in the Burmese jungle. And like tens of thousands of other American servicemen who died in World War II, he remained officially missing — a fate that has haunted such families ever since.

“My poor mother would say, ‘If they could just find him so I could bury him — I don’t want the birds picking on his body,’ ” recalled Francis Huba, 84, who remembers Joseph as “the best big brother anyone ever had.”

But it was a nephew — born 15 years after his uncle’s plane went down — who combed military records, interviewed witnesses and is now weighing a third-hand report that Burmese hunters have stumbled on the wreckage of the doomed plane.

More than six decades after the end of World War II, the families of men like Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead. After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something much more personal.

The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.

“We owe these men for giving their lives — we can’t just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides,” said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group, World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006 to compete with organizations pressing for recoveries from the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea. “There’s that saying, ‘No one left behind,’ and we’ve left a generation behind.”

The search has its pitfalls, Ms. Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove more disturbing than ignorance. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the sheer challenge of identifying remains after so many years.

And some relatives have come up empty-handed after expensive private searches, like a Minnesota man who has spent thousands of dollars on underwater dives off Yap Island in the South Pacific without finding his uncle’s sunken B-24.

The numbers are daunting. Of more than 88,000 American servicemen missing in 20th-century conflicts, some 79,000 are casualties of World War II, and though many of them were forever lost at sea, the government classifies about 35,000 as recoverable. The unit responsible for all recoveries, the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, identifies about 75 remains a year. Yet the unit’s forensic successes keep raising expectations.

Last year a sailor killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and buried as an unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, was exhumed, identified as Alfred E. Livingston, and reburied in Worthington, Ind., his hometown.

Similar identifications are now likely for some of the 47 “Okinawa Unknowns,” according to the Defense Department.

And in 2006, the recovery unit confirmed the identity of a World War I doughboy, Pvt. Francis Lupo, discovered in a construction site near Soissons, France, matching mitochondrial DNA from his bones with a niece’s saliva swab. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

“Things that weren’t possible for identification of remains 10 years ago are possible now,” said Gary Zaetz, 53, of Cary, N.C., who has been pressing the government for a recovery from a mountainside in northern India, where a World War II B-24 bomber nicknamed “Hot As Hell” was found a year ago by an Arizona mountaineer.

Mr. Zaetz’s uncle, First Lt. Irwin Zaetz, 26, known as Zipper, was the navigator on that plane when it disappeared in January 1944, with a crew of eight. Like Joseph Huba’s plane, it flew war supplies from India over the Himalayan peaks known as the Hump to Chinese forces resisting the Japanese. It became part of an aluminum trail of 500 wrecks — aircraft felled by icy storms and engine failure as much as by enemy fire. Few who bailed out were ever seen again.

After stumbling on a Web page that featured the “Hot As Hell” debris and listed its crew, Mr. Zaetz tracked down descendants through genealogical Web sites, enlisted many in his campaign, and drew coverage in hometown newspapers from Burlington, Vt. to Concord, Ga.

“One big concern of relatives of the World War II missing is that their families are really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he complained. “The focus has been overwhelmingly on recovery of M.I.A.’s from the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. We’re just looking for some parity of effort here.”

The government created a military recovery unit in the 1970s in response to an outcry after the Vietnam War, but its mission was expanded to all wars in 2000. “We’re doing our best to be as fair as possible, with frankly limited manpower, limited resources,” said a spokesman, Troy Kitch.

The government’s graves identification effort after World War II was enormous, he noted, citing 280,000 remains recovered worldwide between 1945 and 1954, more than 171,000 of them returned to the United States for burial.

The rest were buried in cemeteries around the world maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission — places like the Cemetery of the Pacific, where sweeping vistas draw millions of visitors, and memorial tablets record the names of “comrades in arms whose earthly resting place is known only to God.”

But such collective memorials do not satisfy searchers like Ms. Phillips, head of the World War II families’ group, who has consulted meteorologists and aviation experts about wind currents over Bangladesh, trying to pinpoint the site of a 1946 crash during early recovery efforts. The plane was carrying the remains of dozens of men, including those of her great-uncle, Second Lt. Joseph Rich of Portland, Me.

In those days, she said, survivors “didn’t question the government — they accepted what they were told.” But like Mr. Zaetz, when Ms. Phillips traced and recruited the kin of others missing in the crash, she found unresolved grief among the old and demands for better answers from the younger generation.

“It’s been all those years and you still have a hole in your heart,” said Ruth Garmong, 83, of Vandergrift, Pa., who cried as she spoke of her first husband, Bill Fetterman, “my high school sweetheart and the love of my life.” He was shot down Dec. 1, 1943, 10 days after his 21st birthday, and six months before the birth of their daughter, Andria.

Now 63, Andria Fetterman Clarey is searching for her mother’s sake, she said: “It breaks my heart that after all these years she hasn’t got anything back.”

Con men, some with Web sites, can capitalize on such emotions, Ms. Phillips cautioned. “There are people trying to sell you bones, telling you it’s your uncle,” she said, or charging for free military documents.

Another factor is the rise of amateur adventurers, epitomized by Clayton Kuhles, the Arizona mountaineer who located the “Hot As Hell” in India.

“It’s a hobby,” said Mr. Kuhles, 53, a history buff who posts information on his Web site, miarecoveries.org. “Some people go to Las Vegas or take a cruise. I like to go on mountaineering expeditions.”

Tips from native hunters are crucial to such expeditions, and with new immigration, leads also surface in the United States. It was through a Burmese refugee that a report recently reached Joseph Huba’s family about a wreck bearing his plane’s serial number. But there were implausible details, like eight dog tags supposedly found at the site that did not match any missing war casualties.

Joseph’s nephew, William Huba Jr., a supervisory agent with the F.B.I. in Syracuse, already had unearthed some disturbing answers about his uncle’s fate, summarized in the minutes of a 1947 military board that abandoned recovery efforts for the plane’s crew of four.

The plane lost an engine, then radio contact. Three parachutes were later spotted not far from the wreck, caught in a canopy of 100-foot trees. Three of the crew had certainly perished in the jungle, the board concluded, and if one went down with the plane, his body probably had been dragged away by wild animals.

“My parents never saw that documentation,” said William Huba Sr., 73, who was in grade school when the telegram arrived. “Maybe in a sense it was better that they didn’t.”

Haunted afresh by Joseph’s death, he and his brother Frank sometimes talk through the night, they said, dispelling fearful images with lived memories: Joe, the high school student, delivering milk for $1 a night to help their immigrant parents make ends meet in the Depression; Joe, the young artist, designing window displays for Sears; Joe, “the best big brother,” who took the younger ones to the city to hear big-name bands, and when he worked late, always brought home a candy bar for them to share.

“I pray for him,” Frank Huba said. “And just to have somebody looking is very meaningful.”
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BC1 · Feb 4, 2008

This is an extraordinary write-up.
Power to their elbow, say I.
BC

Antipodean Andy · Feb 4, 2008

The Gary Zaetz mentioned is Garyz on this forum? Haven't seen him for a while. I can see why!

Kyt · Feb 24, 2008

newsobserver.com | Over Himalayas and Internet, lost flights found

The Hump, American air crews called it. Or, when they were in a darker mood, the Aluminum Trail. The World War II supply route from India into China was dotted with their wreckage.

By whatever name, the route was critical, an aerial highway over some of the world's highest mountains, a path flown by hundreds of U.S. aircraft ferrying supplies to the Chinese Army so it could stay in the fight against Japan.

The cost in planes and lives was staggering. More than 400 U.S. aircraft carrying nearly 1,400 troops disappeared there during the war.

For decades, no one tried to recover their remains.

But now two men -- a self-financed Arizona adventurer and a Cary computer expert -- are fighting to make sure the U.S. government brings those missing fliers home.

And they may be winning.

Night comes suddenly to the Himalayas in winter, so at dusk Clayton Kuhles was ready to give up.

It was Dec. 7, 2006 -- Pearl Harbor Day -- and he had been rummaging for five hours among snow, shredded aluminum and bent propellers on the side of a nameless mountain nearly 2 miles up. He had found pieces of parachute, whole engines, even an intact landing gear retracted into a wing. Kuhles had not, though, found the one reason he had hiked to this remote corner of India: an identification number for the shattered World War II-era bomber.

The businessman from Prescott, Ariz., started hunting such wrecks almost by accident. On his way home from a mountaineering expedition in Nepal, he made a side-trip to explore Burma. A guide that Kuhles hired there noticed his interest in World War II sites and asked if he wanted to see a wreck. Sure, he said.

A reason to climb

Only later, after Kuhles got home, did he read up on The Hump. The number of wrecks, and the number of families who still didn't know what happened to their loved ones, surprised him and gave him an idea. Climbing just for the sake of bagging another difficult peak had begun to lose its luster. But here, he thought, was a way not only to feed his hunger for adventure but also do some good.

Before the 2006 expedition, Kuhles had identified four wrecks on other trips to the region. This time he hoped to find numbers that would lead to names, but he was having no luck. As he wrapped up his final fruitless inspection that Dec. 7, he knew the winter weather was about to force him out of the mountains for the year.

Time to go, he told the local tribesmen who had guided him to the site. The men started down the trail to their high camp for the night. They were hungry, cold and already thinking about the 10-mile slog the next day over frozen ridges and through jungle-clogged valleys to the nearest village.

Then Kuhles noticed another pile of wreckage beside the trail. One last stack of torn aluminum, one last chance to figure out who had died here. One last stab at an answer for aged brothers, sisters and widows back home who had wondered for six decades about the fate of the plane's crew.

He switched on his headlamp and began flipping over the panels.

Googling in Cary

Six months later, Gary Zaetz idly booted up Google on his home computer in Cary. On a whim, the IBM software technician typed "1st Lt. Irwin Zaetz" into the search field.

His uncle -- along with the rest of an eight-man crew that included Sgt. James Hinson of Greensboro -- had been missing for 63 years, but with the speed of a broadband Internet connection, that family mystery was about to end.

Up came Kuhles' Web site, MIA Recoveries : Locate and Document Missing WWII Aircraft and Pilots, and with it a startling array of information. There were photos of scattered wreckage, the GPS-measured longitude and latitude of the crash site and a copy of the government form that Kuhles filled out in his concise, almost scientific style for the U.S. military unit that recovers missing remains.

"... construction number was researched, crosses to serial #4277308."

Also on the site was the crew manifest for the plane that bore that serial number, a B-24J dubbed "Hot As Hell" by its crew. The navigator was Irwin Zaetz.

Gary Zaetz didn't think much about the ramifications of the plane being found, of the steps that remained before the story would end. He picked up the phone to break the news to his father, Larry, a younger brother of the missing man.

"It's quite a thing," Larry Zaetz said in a recent interview. "For 63 years, we didn't know anything, and there wasn't really any way for us to find out much."

After the initial news sank in, it became clear that the story was far from done. Not only did the U.S. government not have a plan to investigate the site, but didn't even have an arrangement with India for U.S. military teams to recover remains there.

Kuhles had used his unusual expertise to good effect. Now it was Zaetz's turn.

Families join effort

At his keyboard, he harnessed the Internet to hunt for surviving relatives of the other seven crew members. He Googled genealogy experts and asked them for help, searched online census records for the names of the fliers' siblings and Googled contacts at libraries in the crew members' hometowns. Then he e-mailed the library researchers to find the missing men's newspaper obituaries. With those, he could glean the names of their survivors.

Along the way, he enlisted family members in a campaign to open India to U.S. recovery teams. The group has contacted military officials, members of Congress and newspapers in the United States, as well as journalists and government officials in India.

With every new article they sparked, every electronic letter to the editor, every blog posting, the visibility on the Web of their multi-pronged lobbying effort grew.

Zaetz and other members of crew families also began appearing at the monthly meetings for MIA families held around the country by the military, and they joined forces with a group that is pressing the government to put more emphasis on recovering World War II missing.

The Hawaii-based unit responsible for recovering the remains of missing U.S. service members was formed in response to public pressure to find troops who went missing during the Vietnam War, and still concentrates its missions in Southeast Asia, where its three foreign satellite offices are located.

Heat is on Pentagon

The Pentagon is feeling new pressure from the World War II families, pressure made possible by the Internet, said Larry Greer of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office in Washington who is familiar with the "Hot as Hell" case.

"These are the nieces and nephews and grandchildren, and they've discovered how effective they can be with modern means of communication," Greer said. "They have discovered that they can reach out and touch the government in a way that's similar to what the [Vietnam War] families did a generation ago."

The United States devotes more money -- about $105 million annually, Greer said -- to recovering and identifying missing troops than any other country, but the mission is vast. There are 1,700 troops still missing in Vietnam and surrounding countries from the war there, about 8,100 from the Korean War and 78,000 from World War II, with 35,000 from that war thought to be recoverable.

Along the Hump alone, there are nearly as many missing U.S. troops as in Southeast Asia.

Many can be recovered, Kuhles thinks. In just a few months of searching spread over the past few years, he has positively identified eight wrecks and has at least 14 more solid leads to investigate on future expeditions.

Because he's having to pay for the trips himself, it will be a while before he can check them all. He has talked with the government about funding his expeditions, but to no avail.

The military thinks about 430 U.S. planes are missing in the areas where Kuhles has been searching. The missing include more than 100 in India, about 100 in Burma, now called Myanmar, and more than 170 in China, said Troy Kitch, spokesman for the Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command.

There also are British, Canadian and Chinese aircraft missing along that route, too.

The missing troops in Burma are probably out of bounds until the totalitarian regime there ends, and Kitch's unit has recovered only a handful of remains in China and none in India.

The Hump in a fog

U.S. air crews flying The Hump were sometimes attacked by Japanese fighters, but their toughest foes were the mountains and weather. In summer, monsoon rains made the mountains hard to see. In winter, fierce storms and heavy icing knocked planes out of the sky.

It was that winter weather the crew of "Hot as Hell" must have been pondering as it boarded the boxy bomber on Jan. 25, 1944, at their base in Kunming, China.

While most planes that flew The Hump were transport aircraft moving supplies to bolster the Chinese military, "Hot as Hell" was a bomber. Like the others in its unit, said Gary Zaetz, the crew had to ferry in its own bombs and other supplies. It took about three trips over The Hump to supply each combat run.

First Lt. Irwin Zaetz, 26, had already flown a host of harrowing combat missions and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross. It was just chance, though, that he was flying on this mission.

His regular plane was another B-24, "Chug-a-Lug Junior," but for some reason he was asked to fill in on "Hot as Hell." His family isn't sure why. According to different sources, the plane's regular navigator was either late or sick.

Zaetz, a star athlete in three sports at Burlington High School in Burlington, Vt., had earned the nickname "Zipper" because of the way he moved up and down the basketball court. A sharp dresser, he had always been careful to act the gentleman, to say and do the right things, even in high school, said Larry Zaetz, who idolized his athletic sibling and attended not just his games but even his practices.

Irwin Zaetz had been married for less than two years to his high school sweetheart, Ethel. The other crew members were single, Gary Zaetz said, but two were engaged, including one of the gunners, Hinson of Greensboro.

There was reportedly thick fog that day over part of the route, almost down to ground level, said Zaetz, who has scoured federal archives and practically every other available record for information about his uncle and the crash.

It was one of those days that The Hump lived up to its deadly reputation. Five planes flew the same route that day, Zaetz said, and all five crashed. Some crew members on three of the planes survived, but those on "Hot as Hell" and another plane vanished.

India to allow recovery

In January, during a regular meeting in Washington between officials from the United States and India, the Indians agreed to host American recovery teams for the first time.

Next month, the commanding general of Kitch's unit will travel to India to negotiate the details of the first recovery efforts there.

And among the first six wrecks to be officially investigated, Greer said -- all of them found by Kuhles -- will be "Hot as Hell."

Still, there are enough wreck sites to keep Kuhles busy for several lifetimes, and Zaetz said his battle isn't over, either, because the Pentagon has said it will probably be 2009 before it can send its first mission to India. First would come a small group to assess the site, and only afterwards could a recovery mission be scheduled.

What's more, the military ID lab is meticulous -- it has to be -- and even after remains are recovered, it can take a year or more to identify them properly.

Time is short

Meanwhile, the last family members who knew missing World War II troops are dying off quickly. Among those for the "Hot as Hell" crew, a brother of the bombardier, 1st Lt. Robert E. Oxford, is 95 years old, Zaetz said. A sister of co-pilot Sheldon L. Chambers is 90, and two brothers are in their 70s; Larry Zaetz is 83 and Irwin Zaetz' widow, Ethel Wolfe, is 89.

"That's just way too long to make us wait," Gary Zaetz said. "The families see no reason to delay it that long."

There are two weather windows between the winter storms and the summer monsoons, he said, and there is time to organize, at the very least, for the fall window, from September to November.

Kitch, though, said that JPAC's work for 2008 is already scheduled. The Pentagon is trying to be fair, but with limited resources and the need to plan the complex expeditions far in advance, it can't move more quickly.

"It's really exciting that we're getting into India, but when you are dealing with other families who have also been waiting decades, how do you put one above the other?" he said. "We bend over backwards to be as fair as possible to meet all the families' expectations, but it's just not possible."

The military hopes to set its schedule for initial site checks in India during the meeting there next month.

And Gary Zaetz said he won't be finished even when the government schedules a recovery expedition to the "Hot as Hell" site. He wants to shift from pursuing his uncle's fate in cyberspace to hunting it in person, to step into Kuhles' world.

He has begun getting inoculations, with an eye toward flying to India and hiking to the crash site.
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Kyt · Mar 18, 2008

FEATURE-U.S. to search for missing WW2 airmen in India | Reuters

NEW DELHI, March 18 (Reuters) - In honour of the crouching, naked blonde painted on its nose, its pilot had named his bomber the "Hot as Hell".

But it was a freezing and stormy day as the American B-24 Liberator made its way across the Himalayas on Jan 25, 1944, flying what was known as "the Hump", perhaps the most dangerous route in air transport history.

It was one of nine American planes that went down that day as they tried to resupply China's besieged army in the city of Kunming, desperately trying to hold out against the invading Japanese during World War Two.

Many of the wrecks have never been found.

The Hot as Hell's crew of eight were listed as Missing in Action and later presumed dead. Its fate was a mystery the crewmen's families lived with for 60 years.

That is until Clayton Kuhles, an Arizona businessmen who spends his free time trekking through the mountains of northeastern India in search of World War Two plane wrecks, found the debris of the plane in thick jungle on December 2006.

Kuhles has found the remains of nine planes in the remote state of Arunachal Pradesh in the past five years, doggedly logging his discoveries, informing American military authorities and posting them on his website (MIA Recoveries : Locate and Document Missing WWII Aircraft and Pilots).

Now, after determined lobbying from relatives of the dead airmen, the U.S. military is finally swinging into action.

This month it announced it was in discussions with the Indian government to conduct a joint operation to search for some of the planes and bring the airmen's remains home.

"We were very, very happy to see that," said Gary Zaetz, nephew of the Hot as Hell's Navigator First Lieutenant Irwin Zaetz. "We would like them to do it some time this year."

ALUMINIUM TRAIL

By the end of the war, 650,000 tonnes of gasoline, munitions and other supplies were flown over the Hump, from northeastern India across Burma to Kunming. On a single day in August 1945, more than a thousand round-trips were made across the mountains, carrying a payload of more than 5,000 tonnes.

With just a map, a compass and a radio signal to navigate by, the route, passing over 4,500 metre (15,000-foot) ridges, was so hazardous airmen also nicknamed it "the Aluminium Trail".

Many planes suffered from icing, some ran out of fuel, others lost their way in storms and simply crashed into the mountains. Rescue missions were mounted but with sketchy results.

The U.S. Department of Defense says than more than 500 U.S. aircraft and 1,200 crewmembers are still missing in the China-Burma-India theatre from World War Two, with 416 Americans missing in India alone.

But with so many more missing in places like Korea and Vietnam, its attention and efforts appeared to be elsewhere - until Kuhles entered the scene.

It all began, he says, with a chance comment from a guide while holidaying in Myanmar, as Burma is now known.

Hearing of Kuhles' interest in military history, he mentioned that a Kachin hunter had once told him about a plane wreck in the northern jungles, close to the Indian border.

Kuhles decided it would be fun to take a look, and off they set, interviewing the hunter, eventually finding the wreck.

"It was so remote I am absolutely positive no Westerner has even been to that site - or to any of the others I have found," he said. "Locals know about them from hunting trips, when they are looking for game animals or medicinal herbs."

The search then moved to India, where Kuhles relies on local guide Oken Tayeng to track down crash sites, most of them high in the mountains in almost impassable jungle in Arunachal Pradesh, where tales of the wrecks have passed into local folklore.

"We have known about the aircraft since were children," Tayeng said. "But most people think they are English planes, because for them white people mean English."

Tribal contacts and distant relatives have helped Tayeng trace the planes. He says he has information about at least five or six more for Kuhles to look into on his next expedition.

They found the Hot As Hell close to Tayeng's ancestral village of Damroh. The crucial tail number was missing, but another amateur military enthusiast, Matthew Poole from Maryland, helped identify the plane from serial numbers found on individual parts - a painstaking process in itself.

TRACKING DOWN RELATIVES

Zaetz had always been interested in his father's and his uncle's military careers. He was aimlessly cruising the internet when he googled his uncle Irwin's name in the summer of 2007. Up popped Kuhles' website, listing the entire crew.

"I was totally flabbergasted," he said. "Our family had always regretted we had never found out what happened to my uncle's flight."

It was Zaetz' turn to play detective, spending the next six months tracking down the surviving relatives of the crew.

Their parents have all died, but the pilot's 92-year-old sister, the co-pilot's 90-year-old sister, the bombardier's 95-year-old brother and his uncle Irwin's 88-year-old wife Ethel are still alive.

Then there are people like Susan Parham, who was engaged to be married to the plane's bombardier, First Lieutenant Robert Oxford and who still remembers the young man who took to country music programmes at the local school in Concord, GA.

"Our efforts are really time critical," said Zaetz. "We don't know how long these very, very elderly relatives have with us."

"We want to ensure they have meaningful closure before their time runs out."

But it has been "frustrating" dealing with U.S. officials over the past year, Zaetz says, as he and his 83-year old father Larry tried to interest them in Kuhles' discoveries.

Officials from the Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action (MIA/POW) Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii rebuffed them at first, saying the area, a disputed zone near the India-China border was too dangerous or too politically sensitive to explore.

But the Zaetz family stirred up Congress and the American press, and looks to have got what they wanted.

JPAC's commander, Rear Admiral Donna L. Crisp, is in New Delhi this week and is expected to announce an expedition will be mounted before the snows set in.

If remains are recovered, JPAC will conduct DNA tests on the bones to match them to records of the crewmen's relatives. All will be entitled to a burial with a military honour guard at a National Cemetery if relatives wish.

But Zaetz says his family want their uncle with them.

"We want his remains buried at the family plot in Burlington, Vermont," he said. "There is a marker for my uncle there in the Jewish cemetery, and also for Captain William Swanson."
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Kyt · Jun 25, 2008

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | US seeks pilot remains in India

A US team is visiting the remote state of Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India to search for the remains of US pilots who crashed during WWII.

US Consul-General in Calcutta Henry Jardine told the BBC the mission "was in its preliminary stages".

It is thought the remains of up to 400 Americans could still be in Arunachal Pradesh, which borders Burma and China.

Many more servicemen went missing during allied operations to supply China's Kuomintang army fighting Japan.

The team which has been sent is from the US Joint POW-MIA Accounting Comand (Jpac).

"We are just going to Arunachal Pradesh to speak to various people in the government who could help in the search," said Mr Jardine, who is accompanying the team.

Jpac conducts investigation and recovery missions for US defence personnel around the world who went missing during America's many wars.

More than 78,000 Americans are unaccounted for from World War II, with the remains of about 35,000 deemed recoverable.

'The Hump'

The groundwork for the investigation mission to Arunachal Pradesh was done during a meeting between its officials and those of the Indian government in Delhi in March.

During the meeting, the officials discussed a tentative timeline for future investigations and recoveries of aircraft crash sites associated with missing US servicemen from World War II, said Jpac spokesman Major Brian DeSantis.

"Now our team is going to Arunachal Pradesh to discuss details of future operations with Ministry of Defence and Arunachal Pradesh officials.

"This will be followed by site visits in early fall [autumn] to determine the scope of debris fields and evaluate unique logistical requirements associated with each site. This process sets the groundwork for future recovery teams," said Major DeSantis.

The first full excavation mission should begin after the monsoon and is scheduled to be finished by the end of the year, he said.

There are more than 1,300 individuals missing - primarily from aircraft crashes - in and around the border area between India, Burma and China, an area known to pilots as "the Hump".

The dangers of flying over the region have been recounted by veterans like Jack Barnard.

While it is impossible to say with certainty in which country a specific plane was lost, Jpac analysts estimate that more than 400 Americans are unaccounted for in Arunachal Pradesh.

Many of the crash sites are across the border in Burma and not accessible to the US team because the Burmese military is not expected to co-operate.

'Every spare moment'

The Jpac mission to Arunachal Pradesh will make the likes of Gary Zaetz very happy.

His uncle, US Army Air Force 1st Lieutenant Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz, disappeared along with his entire crew on 25 January, 1944 when his B-24 Liberator aircraft failed to arrive at Chabua airfield in India's Assam state from Kunming in China.

Then last summer, Mr Zaetz learnt that wreckage had been discovered in the district of East Siang in Arunachal Pradesh in December 2006.

"Since learning of this find, my father and I have spent every spare moment searching for relatives of the other crewmen and have worked with the US government to arrange the sending of a recovery team to the site of the crash," Gary Zaetz said in an email.

Allied pilots flew thousands of sorties to supply the Kuomintang army fighting against Japan.

The planes took off from airfields in north-east India and flew into China's Yunan Province, but many like Irwin Zaetz just vanished over "the Hump".

Later, the Allies built the Stilwell Road connecting north-east India to Yunan through Burma to beef up supplies to keep China in the war.
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Kyt · Jun 27, 2008

AFP: US team in India to hunt for WWII 'Hump' missing

A US defence department team has arrived in India to prepare a search for the remains of hundreds of American personnel who went missing over the Himalayan "Hump" during World War II, diplomats and officials said.

The team, from the Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC), will fly to the northeast frontier state of Arunachal Pradesh for a "site survey" ahead of the search once monsoon rains stop in October.

"It's still very early on in the process, and currently JPAC is meeting with the Indian government and the operations will happen only in October," said Henry Jardine, US consul-general in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata.

"Right now we are in preliminary stages of discussions," Jardine told AFP. "We are hoping the operations can start after the monsoon and more information will be put out after the mission starts in October."

The team will be hunting for US flight crews whose transport planes -- carrying supplies between Burma and besieged Allied forces in China -- went down in the notorious, mountainous area that pilots called "The Hump".

They were forced to fly the perilous route in April 1942 when the Japanese army cut off the main road between Burma and China, and the operations continued until near the end of the war in 1945.

In all, Allied pilots ferried some 650,000 tonnes of fuel, munitions and equipment over the mountains to resupply the Chinese government and other anti-Japanese forces.

The mountains were eventually dubbed the "Aluminium Trail" because of the number of crashes.

"It's impossible to pinpoint sites of crashed Allied planes, but JPAC analysts estimate more than 400 Americans are lost in this region," said an Indian military official holding talks with the US team.

"The Hump was a busy sector during the war. We'll also take help in terms of intelligence and other ground support from our own ex-servicemen and World War II veterans who live in the state," the official said.

Jardine said China had recovered some remains of US servicemen but JPAC had yet to make it to the Indian side of the border -- an extremely sensitive part of India because it is claimed by Beijing as part of Tibet.

The Indian air force will lend light helicopters and all-weather transport aircraft while the army will extend ground support and security to the JPAC team, officials here said.

"India will provide all logistics support to JPAC once the mission starts on our territory," defence ministry spokesman Sitanshu Kar said in New Delhi.

But the task is not expected to be easy.

"The route passes over 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) of icy ridges, and it's going to one hell of a job to hunt for men downed six decades ago," said Joginder Singh, an army veteran and a retired Himalayan climber.

"The extreme temperatures up there, however, may have preserved some bits and pieces," added 83-year-old Singh, who fought Japanese troops in what was British India.
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Pathfinder · Jun 27, 2008

I hope they'll find those missing airmen and can finally lay them to rest in their home country.

Antipodean Andy · Jul 13, 2008

Good to see how far this has progressed.

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