News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: WW II Crew Remains Found

Date: September 05, 2001

"Remains of World War II Crew Found
By ANATOLY MEDETSKY, Associated Press Writer

VLADIVOSKTOK, Russia (AP) - U.S. experts have found the remains of at least two Americans who died when their Navy bomber crashed on a volcano in Russia's far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula during World War II.

Fending off fierce winds and roaming bears at the remote site, the experts sawed through the mangled mass of the plane's wreckage during a monthlong expedition. They announced their findings Wednesday.

The remains will be sent to the United States for identification - a process that could take up to a year, said Ann Bunch, an anthropologist for the U.S. Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, which led the excavations.


The PV-1 Ventura bomber took off from Attu Island in Alaska's Aleutian chain on March 25, 1944, flying west through darkness to drop bombs on the Japanese Kuril island chain. The treacherous route became known as the "Empire Express" and the men who flew it were "bats."

The Ventura was apparently hit by Japanese anti-aircraft guns, and the crippled aircraft crashed on the southern side of Mutnovsky volcano on the sparsely populated peninsula.

For years, the seven Americans aboard the plane were listed as missing in action because the Soviet Far East was off limits to foreigners, Bunch said.

A Russian geologist found the wreckage in 1962, but it wasn't until 1999 that a local historian reported it to the U.S. government. U.S. officials traveled to the site a year ago and confirmed it was the missing plane.

A 10-person team including forensics specialists arrived at the site on Aug. 6 to search for remains. Helped by Russians, they recovered a number of bone fragments from the wreckage and dirt apparently belonging to two individuals, Bunch said.

"There could be more in what we've found," she said, because the body count depends on how many bones are duplicated. "But they probably do not have all seven."

"One possibility is that animals destroyed the (other) remains," she said.

The remains will be flown on Monday to the laboratory on Hawaii, where the DNA of the bones will be compared with that of the crew's relatives, she said.

The excavations, held under the auspices of the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission for POWs and Missing in Action, ended Saturday.

"We had to go through a big piece of wreck ... and we had to slice it with a saw. The bones were actually in the metal," Bunch said.

The work, conducted at an altitude of 6,500 feet, was "very, very challenging," said Michael Kowalsky, a senior analyst for the POW-MIA commission. "We got a lot more rain that we'd expected and the wind was strong," he said.

Also, bears dropped in on the site when hunting season began. "We once saw three in one day - very near," Bunch said.

Kowalsky said the expedition turned up leads to at least three more crashed American planes in the region.

The PV-1 Ventura crew were pilot Lt. Walter S. Whitman of Philadelphia; co-pilot Lt. John W. Hanlon Jr. of Worcester, Mass.; photographer Jack Parlier of Mt. Sterling, Ill.; mechanic Donald Graham Lewallen of Omaha, Neb.; Samuel Leslie Crown Jr. of Columbus, Ohio; Clarence Crome Fridley of Manhattan, Kan.; and James Stephen Palko of Superior, Wis."