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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Note: this topic is dated 8/5/2004. |
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Posted on 08/05/2004 5:29:51 AM PDT by Former Military Chick
San Diego Union-Tribune August 4, 2004
Somber Search For Lost Sailors
Team will attempt to remove remains from '62 crash site
By James W. Crawley, Staff Writer
The 10 men look relaxed in the glossy black-and-white photograph as they stood or knelt beneath the belly of their patrol plane.
Yet it was Dec. 29, 1961, and the Cold War was hot. The Navy men were hunters. They flew aircraft equipped with radar, metal detectors and other secret equipment to ferret out Soviet submarines lurking in the North Atlantic.
Two weeks later, all but one of them were dead. They were killed when their airplane, a P-2V Neptune, crashed on a frozen, desolate glacier above the Arctic Circle in faraway Greenland.
Forty-two years later, Don Latimer, the petty officer 1st class standing on the far right, keeps the picture in a thick scrapbook at his Paradise Hills home.
Every time the 66-year-old Latimer looks at the picture, it reminds him of the ill-fated crew of aircraft LA-9 – nine colleagues in the photo plus three not pictured – who never returned from the mission.
Soon, the airmen finally may be coming home, as a team of Navy sailors and civilians fly to Greenland in hopes of completing the removal of the crew's remains. A 1966 recovery mission failed to recover all the bodies.
The 16-member team, with cadaver-locating dogs, is in Keflavik, Iceland, and plans to fly to the crash site tomorrow, said Mike Maus, a Navy spokesman in Norfolk, Va. They hope to complete the recovery by Aug. 16.
Latimer is ambivalent about the effort.
"I'm of mixed feelings on the recovery," he said. "Why upset (the family members) by telling them there's more bodies?"
And yet, he added, he doesn't want the remains of his former crew mates left there in the elements.
As the Navy searches for the aviators, Latimer waits and remembers their final days.
Patrolling at low altitude in the P-2V was an adventure, he recalled.
"Flying at 300 feet doesn't give you much margin of error," Latimer said. However, his unit, Patrol Squadron 5, hadn't lost a plane in years, and the pilot was the executive officer and an experienced flier.
Latimer would have been on the fatal flight as the lead electronics technician, running the radar or the magnetic anomaly detector, which can sense the steel hulls of diving subs.
But in early January 1962, just days before the crew was to fly to Keflavik, he received orders to transfer to San Diego. So another sailor flew to Iceland in his place.
On Jan. 12, 1962 – on its first flight over Greenland and in a substitute plane – the 12-man crew vanished without warning or a distress call.
Latimer learned of the crash a day before leaving Spain for San Diego.
What if he had been on the final flight?
"Maybe I would have made a difference," he said. "I might have been able to use the radar to warn them or something. But I'll never know.
"It really bothered me for a while," he said.
Finding the lost crew of LA-9 has been difficult.
Searches in 1962 found nothing, so the Navy assumed the plane fell into the sea.
Then, in August 1966, a team of geologists stumbled onto the accident site, on a Greenland glacier a few miles from the ocean, finding several bodies in the wreckage. The researchers left the site and the bodies undisturbed, reporting the location to military officials.
The Navy sent in a small group, spending only a day to search for bodies and destroy the plane's top-secret gear with explosives.
Seven bodies and partial remains of three others were recovered from the wreckage. The partial remains could not be individually identified and were buried at Arlington Cemetery in a common grave.
In 1995, geologists, including a member of the 1966 group, again stopped at the site and found more bones in the snow and ice.
The accident would have remained a historical footnote if not for former squadron mate Bob Pettway of McDonald, Tenn.
After finding information about the crash while browsing the Internet, he began researching the mishap and tracked down the geologist who visited the site in 1966 and 1995 and discovered that some crew members' bones remained in Greenland.
"That got me kind of upset," said Pettway, who joined the Secret Service after leaving the Navy.
During his research, he contacted Latimer, who was soon busy hunting for answers.
He used his genealogy experience to help locate the crew's surviving family members. DNA has been obtained so military pathologists might positively identify any remains yet to be found.
He also located two members of the 1966 search team and interviewed them.
Pettway, Latimer, family members and former squadron members wrote letters to the Navy and Congress urging further recovery efforts. They lobbied newspaper and TV reporters to do stories.
Finally, the Navy agreed this year to mount a recovery mission.
"There's going to be closure for the five families because of this," Pettway said.
But, Latimer acknowledged, it's been nearly nine years since anyone has been at the crash scene, and, although wreckage was visible during a recent reconnaissance flight, searchers may not be able to find the last remains again.
Even if no one else is recovered, he will yet be satisfied.
"At least we'll know they've made a good effort," Latimer said.
Thought this might interest you.
VP ping
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Note: this topic is dated 8/5/2004. |
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