BURLINGTON, Vt. (AP) – Wreckage from a plane that carried two Vermonters and went missing in the Himalayas in 1944 has been found in a remote part of India, and now relatives of the crash victims are trying to get the Pentagon to step up efforts to recover their remains.
Capt. William A. Swanson of Proctor was the plane’s pilot; 1st Lt. Irwin “Zipper” Zaetz of Burlington was a last-minute addition to the flight, replacing the regular navigator, who was ill. The mission was to fly from Kunming, China, to Chabua, India, to pick up weapons and other supplies and return to base in China.
They never made it, but exactly what had happened to the B-24 bomber dubbed “Hot as Hell,” remained a mystery for more than 60 years. Then, earlier this year, Zaetz’ brother Larry Zaetz, a longtime Burlington resident now living in Florida, learned along with other crew members’ relatives that a mountain climber from Arizona had found the wreckage near Damrah, a village of 200 in northeastern India.
“After a year or so, I started to give up hope,” said Larry Zaetz, Irwin’s younger brother. “But we never had a service acknowledging his death because we didn’t want Mother to be without hope.”
“I was so elated,” Larry Zaetz said about hearing the plane had been found. “To suddenly know that my brother’s remains were within human reach, I just went through the ceiling.”
But now Zaetz and other relatives say they’ve been frustrated by what they see as the Defense Department’s slowness to send a team to India to retrieve crew members’ remains.
Maj. Brian DeSantis, a spokesman for Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, in Hawaii, said he doubted such an effort would be launched anytime soon. He blamed political instability in the region and said the needed approvals from Indian government ministries, requested nearly a year ago, have not been granted.
“Once the area is deemed safe and we have the permissions, we’ll follow up on this pretty quickly,” DeSantis said.
Zaetz isn’t buying it. He noted India is a U.S. ally, and he called reports of instability in the region out of date.
“I thought our motto was ‘Leave no one behind,”‘ he said. “How can you treat military personnel like this? It’s unbelievable. This is not to be accepted.”
Larry Zaetz’ son Gary was trolling the Internet in June when he decided to punch his uncle’s name, Irwin Zaetz, into a Google search engine. One item returned by the search was a Web site run by businessman and mountaineer Clayton Kuhles of Prescott, Ariz., miarecoveries.org.
“He reported he had discovered a plane wreck,” Gary Zaetz said. “He’d also done some heavy-duty documentary research on the aircraft so we knew it had to be the one that belonged to the crew that included my uncle.”
The Web site include 16 photos of debris from the plane, which is believed to have hit the side of a mountain at about 9,000 feet altitude.
“I knew I couldn’t rely on the U.S. government to put the information out, so I put it up on my Web site,” Kuhles said. “I was hoping some relatives of the crew members would discover the Web site, and bingo — that’s what happened.”
Crew members’ families have been getting their states’ congressional delegations to try to step up pressure on the Pentagon to retrieve the remains.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wrote about the issue in October to Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“JPAC has recovered remains in extremely challenging locations all over the globe, from cliffs in Papua, New Guinea, to 16,000-foot peaks in the Himalayas,” Sanders’ letter to Gates said. “How is it then, that the Department of Defense cannot send a recovery team to an ally’s country to recover the remains of American servicemen?”
DeSantis said JPAC is doing its best, typically does up to 50 recoveries a year and plans them a year ahead of time.
“There are 88,000 people still missing from different wars,” he said. “We can’t go to all the places at once. We make decisions based on the best information we have.”
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Information from: The Burlington Free Press, http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com
AP-ES-12-16-07 1104EST
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