After 6 Decades...

[Walt's Daughter]

The following article will draw the interest of historian, forensic anthropologist and WWII buffs. What is also of interest is how this story ties back into the important business at hand within the ground robotics world. Scan the article, but don't miss the closing paragraph.

 

 

New York Times August 25, 2006

After 6 Decades, 3 Who Died In French Fields Are Home By Michael Wilson

 

The original crew nicknamed her Chow-hound, painting the name on the big, cold nose above a cartoon dog lazing atop a cartoon bomb. It was the only thing cheery about the machine of destruction, and the bombs inside were real.

 

Chow-hound was a B-17G Flying Fortress that flew many bombing missions in World War II, and the crew changed over the years.

 

"She had a lot of sorties," said Gwendolyn Haugen, a forensic anthropologist for the military who has recently become familiar with the bomber and its crew: The remains of three crew members, one of them a technical sergeant from Queens, were recently unearthed in France and returned for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

 

Chow-hound's last flight was on Aug. 8, 1944, in the skies over occupied France, carrying a crew of nine. The big bomber was just 10 minutes from its target and was over Caen in Normandy when it was hit by antiaircraft flak. Later, witnesses described the bomber breaking apart in the sky. The tail fell away, and the fuselage dropped, spinning, to earth.

 

French villagers quickly buried four of the dead men. The bodies of two others were recovered by advancing American ground troops the following week, and the bodies of the four who were buried were exhumed and returned to the United States.

 

The last three men were the one from Queens, Tech. Sgt. Henry F. Kortebein, of Maspeth; and Second Lt. David J. Nelson, of Chicago; and Tech. Sgt. Blake A. Treece Jr., of Marshall, Ark. They were buried yesterday, 62 years and 17 days after Chow-hound fell.

 

"All that time, not knowing what had happened to him," said a nephew, Henry Kortebein, 44, of Jacksonville, Fla., who was named for his uncle. His mother attended the funeral.

 

"She was real glad to be able to get closure for the family," he said in a telephone interview.

 

On the day of the crash, wreckage rained down over farmland, according to a report by the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, which searches for the 88,000 military personnel who remain unaccounted for. Most of the missing died in World War II, and most of them are believed to be lost at sea.

 

The three Chow-hound crewmen might as well have been. A French landowner, believing the search for the missing to be over, had long ago collected debris from his fields and laid it at the biggest crater left from the crash, then filled the hole and topped it with fresh soil. Cows tramped over the wreckage and the bodies for six decades.

 

A French group, the Association Normande du Souvenir Aérien 39/45, which still hunts for and inspects crash sites, contacted the accounting command in 2002 about the pasture, just south of the city of Lonlay-l'Abbey, according to the command report. A team, including Ms. Haugen, went to France and began work at the site on June 9, 2004.

 

"Lot of cows, lot of cheese," she said. "Quiet little quaint Normandy farming communities."

 

The search took a month, using backhoes, rakes and buckets. The team found parts of the airplane itself, including two engines, parts of the wings, and the hind legs of the dog painted on the nose, but for official purposes, Chow-hound itself was identified by the serial number recovered from a .50-caliber machine gun.

 

The team also found six intact bombs, each weighing 250 pounds. "It got dangerous for us to continue," Ms. Haugen said. An explosive ordnance professional worked carefully on the bombs and got them away safely.

 

Of Sergeant Kortebein of Queens, the little that was recovered was described as a "paucity of remains" in the command report. The group found parts of his right shoulder and right forearm.

 

That was enough for mitochondrial DNA testing, a technique often used in identifying such remains. The bones were sent to the command laboratory in Hawaii. As the identities of the missing crewmen were no secret, the command contacted Sergeant Kortebein's sister in Arizona for a blood sample, Mr. Kortebein said.

 

Satisfied with the match, the command turned the remains over to the family, Ms. Haugen said. Relatives of the three crewmen were allowed time with the caskets on Wednesday, according to The New York Sun, which reported the recovery of the remains yesterday. Mr. Kortebein said that besides his mother, six members of his uncle's family were there.

 

"She's got pictures of him when he was in the war, and the Purple Heart," he said.

 

The accounting command recovers about six bodies a month, or 75 a year. Many are still unidentified, little more than plastic bags of grit and bone fragments too small to extract DNA.

 

The successful recovery in France was followed by tragedy, Ms. Haugen said. The explosives expert who helped remove the six bombs was a marine, Staff Sgt. Kenneth Blake Pospisil, 35. He was killed in Iraq in December, outside Ramadi, as he approached a bomb he was going to defuse.