|
By Anatoly Medetsky 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 month long 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 September 10 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 September 1.
``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.
Searchers also set up a grid and screened soil that was regularly removed from underneath the craft.
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. They were in the same valley coming over the crest of it to the other side,'' Bunch said.
Members of 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.
Kowalsky said the expedition turned up leads to at least three more crashed American planes in the region.
The group investigated reports of a B-25 bomber lying on Shumshu Island and saw wreckage of another plane on Paramushir Island, both in the Kurils.
Also, a local resident gave them an English data plate from possibly an American plane and took them on a hike along Kamchatka's Avacha River. They found "parts that looked from World War II," Kowalsky said, adding that further expeditions will do more thorough research.
|
|
Copyright c 2001 "Vladivostok Novosti"
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed in any form. 13 Narodny Prospect Vladivostok, 690014 Russia
Phone: 7 (4232) 415-592, Fax: 7 (4232) 415-615
Published by Vladivostok Novosti, Ltd. |
