News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: US To Investigate China Crash Sites

Date: February 08, 2001

"China urges U.S. search for remains at crash sites in Tibet
By Robert Burns AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON -- With China's encouragement, Pentagon officials are planning to visit two plane crash sites in the Himalayan Mountains that may hold the remains of American airmen lost in World War II.

U.S. officials have tentatively linked one of the crash sites in Tibet to a C-46 transport lost on March 27, 1944, on a flight from Kunming, China, to Sookarating in the far northeastern reaches of India. The plane's crew of four is listed in Pentagon records as missing, according to spokesman Larry Greer.

Greer said Thursday the names of the four men are being withheld until relatives are contacted and told of the possibility that their remains could be found, recovered and identified by Pentagon forensic specialists.

Less is known about the second crash site, also in Tibet.

Both aircraft, which the Chinese Foreign Ministry described as World War II-era American planes, are presumed to have been flying "the Hump" -- the famous route over the Himalayas that American airmen used to bring ammunition and supplies to Chinese troops fighting on the side of the Allies against Japan.

China first notified the Pentagon of the discoveries last fall and provided the first details in January. They said no human remains were found in an initial survey of the areas, but some unspecified personal effects were recovered. Large portions of both aircraft apparently remain intact.

During discussions in Beijing in January, Foreign Ministry officials urged that Pentagon specialists visit the sites in late August or early September to get the most favorable weather. They offered to provide guides, according to a Pentagon report summarizing the Beijing talks.

It is not clear how the aircraft wreckage was discovered. China said they were found in August 1999 and May 2000.

Both crash sites were said to be in Milin County in the Lang Gong region of Tibet, which has been ruled by China since 1950. Chinese officials reported that a local herdsmen said he went to one of the crash sites years ago and saw three people dead. He said two were huddled against each other in a small cave near where the aircraft crashed in a snow-covered ravine. That description suggests that the two had survived the crash only to succumb to the elements.

A veteran of Hump flights, Otha Spencer of Commerce, Texas, wrote about the experience in his book, "Flying the Hump: Memories of an Air War." He said more than 600 planes and 1,000 crewmen were lost on these flights, which he called more dangerous in bad weather than flying combat against the Japanese.

"We handled the fear on the Hump flights by ignoring the danger," he wrote.

When Burma fell to the Japanese in May 1942, the only route into China to supply aid to Gen. Chiang Kai-shek's forces was north out of India's Assam Valley across the eastern reaches of the Himalayas and east into China to U.S. bases.

Some U.S. B-29 and B-24 bombers flew the route, as well as C-87 Liberators, cargo versions of the B-24. Some B-25s also flew weather reconnaissance missions over the Himalayas during the war.

The C-46 transports, of the type tentatively associated with one of the newly discovered crash sites in Tibet, were so prone to crashes that some pilots referred to the plane as a "flying coffin" and its path across the Himalayas as the "aluminum trail."

China's notification to the Pentagon of having found the two crash sites in Tibet is highly unusual. The only previous case involving Tibet was in 1994, when China reported a crash site on a Himalayan glacier in the restive region. Remains eventually were recovered and identified by American search teams.

In 1996 China pointed U.S. officials to the wreckage of a B-24 bomber that had crashed in a mountain ravine in Guangxi Province in southeastern China. The remains of all 10 crew members were recovered, identified and returned to their families last summer."