– After 71 years, a glimmer in US Arunachal search
telegraph.india
Sumir Karmakar
December 14, 2015
The American recovery team at Damroh village in Arunachal Pradesh recently. Telegraph picture
Guwahati, Dec. 13: First Lieutenant Irwin Zaetz’s “Hot as Hell” bomber had disappeared over Arunachal Pradesh on January 25, 1944, while on a supply mission for the Allied Forces during the World War II.
Since then, his family -like that of several other American soldiers – has been awaiting word from India, pinning their hopes on the US Army Soldier’s Credo: “never to leave a fallen comrade”.
Seventy-one years later, a US team has found possible human remains from the suspected crash site in Arunachal – the first time such a discovery has been made.
“These are the first possible human remains to be found in India,” Maj. Natasha Waggoner of the US Air Force said in an email to The Telegraph.
Maj. Waggoner belongs to the public affairs office of the Defense Prisoners of War Accounting Agency, a team of which had reached Arunachal in September and scoured the high-altitude Damroh village in the Upper Siang district.
Thirteen members of the Defense Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency (DPAA/MIA) were in Arunachal for the search. The DPAA is an agency within the US department of defence, whose mission is to recover missing personnel listed as prisoners of war or missing in action from all past wars and conflicts and from countries around the world. Over 83,000 Americans are said to be still missing from various conflicts worldwide.
Whether the human remains found in Arunachal are that of the American soldier’s is yet to be established. The remains will be analysed in a DPAA laboratory for identification.
The find marks a milestone in an extraordinary and perseverant effort that has been going on for years to access the remote heights of Arunachal. Factors such as the search involved Americans and the territory holds significance for China also ensured that invisible barriers stayed in place for long.
In 2009, India had allowed the US agency to carry out a search in Arunachal Pradesh following repeated requests from the families of the soldiers.
“In February 2009, we conducted a recovery at the site in Arunachal, but had to cease operations after a short window of work due to inclement weather conditions (snowfall).
Over the next six years, turmoil and security concerns in Arunachal Pradesh precluded us from obtaining approval from the Government of India to resume recovery operations. In May this year, India again approved the request,” Maj. Waggoner said in the email. “In 2014, the DPAA conducted investigations on two sites in Assam and Nagaland but no human remains could be found.”
The majority of the episodes that led to the disappearance of 400 Americans in India during the World War II are believed to have occurred in this area since the main air re-supply route from India to China during the conflict was over the Himalayas, which later came to be known as “the hump”.
For the search in Arunachal Pradesh between October 2 and November 3, the US team had hired the services of Rimo Expedition, an Indian adventure tourism company with experience in organising expeditions to the Himalayas.
“The team began their efforts on October 2 with a 10-mile hike through treacherous terrain climbing nearly 10,000 feet to the base camp at Damroh,” Maj. Waggoner said.
The aircraft associated with the site was First Lt Zaetz’s B-24J, called Hot as Hell. First Lt Zaetz was in the US Army Air Forces (which preceded today’s US Air Force) and assigned to the 308th bomb group of 425th bomb squadron. Eight US Army Air Corps members went down with the plane that was lost while flying from Kunming in China to Upper Assam’s Chabua, a distance of over 1,400km.
The location of the crash site, about 300km from the Arunachal capital Itanagar, was unknown till 2006 when American MIA investigator Clayton Kuhles, with the help of a local tour guide Oken Tayeng, trekked to the site.
First Lt Zaetz’s nephew Gary Zaetz, a software specialist with IBM in North Carolina, had told this newspaper in April that bad weather might have caused the disappearance of the plane in 1944.
