News-Info-Alerts

Re: WW II Remains Found in Tibet

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: October 01, 2002

"WWII Remains Found in Tibet
Himalayas held U.S. flight crew

By Ted Anthony
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

October 1, 2002
Beijing - Lost to their country and their families, they lay on a lonely Himalayan mountainside for six decades - enough time for their war to end and others to begin, for children to grow and have their own children, for the enemy they were fighting to become a friend.

But this week, remains believed to be those of four American airmen killed during World War II when their cargo plane crashed onto a lofty meadow in eastern Tibet are finally on their way home - thanks to the cooperation of two governments that spent many of the intervening years as rivals.

No one is certain who they are, though the U.S. military has the crew manifest of the C-46 transport that went down in March 1944 along the "hump route," named for the spectacular snow-shrouded peaks pilots see when crossing high above the Himalayan Mountains.

The remains were retrieved from the plateau, about 1,250 miles southwest of Beijing, during a nearly two-month operation conducted with Chinese government searchers during the summer. Another C-46 crash site several mountains away was investigated and its contents tagged for future retrieval.

"It's like winning the jackpot, getting up there and finding these," U.S. Army Capt. Daniel Rouse, leader of the search team from the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, said at a news conference yesterday at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

The C-46, pressurized for high-altitude wartime runs, crashed during a return trip along the supply run from India to the Chinese wartime capital of Kunming that ferried goods to China-based U.S. forces and Chinese Nationalist government forces battling the Japanese.

Five years later, the communists drove the Nationalists from the mainland and established a government the United States regarded as a threat, precluding for decades any chance of cooperative searches.

The plane slammed into the mountain high above the Tibetan village of Langko and wound up in a pasture - an unusual sight amid the rocky terrain typical at 15,650 feet. The wings, sheared off on impact, were found nearby; the fuselage, damaged but recognizable, still shone in the sun. Its landing gear was still up when found.

"They probably got lost, ran out of fuel and simply hit the mountain," said James Pokines, the search team's anthropologist. All four crew members probably died instantly, but the instant depressurization might well have killed them anyway if they survived impact, he said.

More than 500 U.S. planes are believed to have crashed over the Himalayas between 1942 and 1945. More than 1,000 U.S. airmen are believed to have perished in such crashes along what became known as the "Aluminum Trail" for its many lost planes.

Neither the Chinese nor the American government knew of the plane's location until 2000, when two Langko villagers - a farmer and an elderly woman, both in their 80s - told regional authorities about the site.

"I assume all the locals knew about it ... " Pokines said. "We know that people visited the site and carried off whatever was useful to them."

The airmen's remains arrived in Beijing on Saturday under the team's care and are being stored in a U.S. Embassy compound. They depart Thursday for the United States, where they will be examined and tested for DNA matches to produce positive identification.

That could take months, though Pokines suggested that relatives of the airmen on the crew manifest may have contributed DNA samples for comparison.

© 2002, Newsday, Inc. "