'He just went in the service and he never came back'
Team may have found remains of WWII soldier
By GREG CUNNINGHAM The Amarillo Globe-News
PANHANDLE - Cathryn Brown is ready for an end to 60 years of uncertainty.
Since March 27, 1944, the 87-year-old Panhandle native has had to live with the uncertainty of what happened to her brother, whose plane crashed while crossing the Himalayas in World War II.
"He just went in the service and he never came back," Brown said of her brother, John Hanlon. "He was a happy-go-lucky kid. He loved people so much.
"It's been hard not to know what happened all this time."
The end to Brown's uncertainty may come courtesy of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a multiservice unit known as JPAC that is tasked with recovering the remains of missing soldiers from all this country's wars.
JPAC sent a unit into Tibet two years ago and pulled out the remains of four people, possibly including Hanlon's.
A corporal in the Army Air Corps, Hanlon was aboard a C-46 transport plane flying from India to China when the aircraft went down in the Himalayas.
Tom Hanlon said his brother was flying a dangerous route, known as "The Hump" that claimed more than 600 aircraft during the war.
"A lot of planes went down in there," Tom Hanlon said. "They called it the "Aluminum Trail," because there were so many of those planes that crashed, you could just follow the trail of crash sites."
The problem with "The Hump" was the C-46 was not designed to fly high enough to cross above the mountain peaks, so the pilots had to fly through the valleys. The tight quarters, combined with primitive navigation and the mountain chain's sudden, violent storms, claimed more than 1,000 fliers during the war.
Brown said she was in nurse's training when she got the word her brother's plane had crashed. Information was sketchy at first, indicating the plane had crashed in a river, rather than in the mountains, but the family still held out hope.
Brown said their hopes were buoyed by continuing stories of pilots being smuggled out by natives.
"I kept thinking that he would be listed as a POW," Brown said. "But when the end of the war came and no one had heard from him, we started to realize what had happened."
"You always hold out some hope," said Tom Hanlon, who lives in Carthage. "It wasn't like he was on an invasion in Normandy and got blown up. We knew he was in a plane, and the plane crashed. There's always hope when there's a plane crash."
That steadily fading hope was all that was left to the family for nearly 60 years until 2002 when a group of Tibetan hunters stumbled on a crash site on the side of a mountain at about 14,000 feet.
The Chinese government alerted U.S. authorities, and JPAC sprang into action.
Members of JPAC take their missions seriously.
"There is a promise that we make to everybody that comes in the service - that nobody will be left behind," said Lt. Col. Mark Brown. "That's a promise made right at the swearing in. We're deadly serious about keeping that promise."
JPAC sent a team into the Himalayas in October 2002 and found Hanlon's plane surprisingly intact, along with four sets of human remains.
Once the bodies were recovered, the arduous task of identifying the soldiers began. JPAC was able to identify two of the soldiers, but Hanlon was not among those identified.
The process has been continuing for more than a year, but there is no way to say when - or whether - the other two sets of remains will be identified, said Maj. Rumi Nielson-Green.
"It's a scientific process, and it takes as long as the science demands," Nielson-Green said. "The process can be lengthy. We've had some identifications that have taken over 15 years. We have over 900 remains in our archives where we're waiting for the technology to reach a point we can identify them."
The specific identification of Hanlon is important to the former airman's family, but they take comfort in knowing that what they believe are his remains - whether identified or not - have been brought back and will hopefully be returned soon to the family.
"I guess it's sad to know for sure that he is dead, but it's also a relief to finally know what happened to him," Brown said.
Her brother agreed, although he wished it could have happened sooner.
"Now you can finally stop wondering," Tom Hanlon said. "It's just too bad that some of my other older brothers who were in the military and my mother and father, they didn't get to hear. It's too bad it didn't happen when they were still alive."
©2004 AMARILLO GLOBE-NEWS