Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
February 3, 2008
Pg. 1
By Nina Bernstein
The military telegram arrived in Peekskill, N.Y., on a springlike day in February 1945. The parents put it down unopened, falling to their knees to pray. Three of their five sons were pilots fighting overseas, and they were afraid to learn which of their boys was dead.
Their firstborn, Joseph Huba, 27, was the one named in the telegram. His transport plane had crashed in the Burmese jungle. And like tens of thousands of other American servicemen who died in World War II, he remained officially missing — a fate that has haunted such families ever since.
“My poor mother would say, ‘If they could just find him so I could bury him — I don’t want the birds picking on his body,’” recalled Francis Huba, 84, who remembers Joseph as “the best big brother anyone ever had.”
But it was a nephew — born 15 years after his uncle’s plane went down — who combed military records, interviewed witnesses and is now weighing a third-hand report that Burmese hunters have stumbled on the wreckage of the doomed plane.
More than six decades after the end of World War II, the families of men like Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead. After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something much more personal.
The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.
“We owe these men for giving their lives — we can’t just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides,” said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group, World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006 to compete with organizations pressing for recoveries from the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea. “There’s that saying, ‘No one left behind,’ and we’ve left a generation behind.”
The search has its pitfalls, Ms. Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove more disturbing than ignorance. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the sheer challenge of identifying remains after so many years.
And some relatives have come up empty-handed after expensive private searches, like a Minnesota man who has spent thousands of dollars on underwater dives off Yap Island in the South Pacific without finding his uncle’s sunken B-24.
The numbers are daunting. Of more than 88,000 American servicemen missing in 20th-century conflicts, some 79,000 are casualties of World War II, and though many of them were forever lost at sea, the government classifies about 35,000 as recoverable. The unit responsible for all recoveries, the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, identifies about 75 remains a year. Yet the unit’s forensic successes keep raising expectations.
Last year a sailor killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and buried as an unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, was exhumed, identified as Alfred E. Livingston, and reburied in Worthington, Ind., his hometown.
Similar identifications are now likely for some of the 47 “Okinawa Unknowns,” according to the Defense Department.
And in 2006, the recovery unit confirmed the identity of a World War I doughboy, Pvt. Francis Lupo, discovered in a construction site near Soissons, France, matching mitochondrial DNA from his bones with a niece’s saliva swab. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
“Things that weren’t possible for identification of remains 10 years ago are possible now,” said Gary Zaetz, 53, of Cary, N.C., who has been pressing the government for a recovery from a mountainside in northern India, where a World War II B-24 bomber nicknamed “Hot As Hell” was found a year ago by an Arizona mountaineer.
Mr. Zaetz’s uncle, First Lt. Irwin Zaetz, 26, known as Zipper, was the navigator on that plane when it disappeared in January 1944, with a crew of eight. Like Joseph Huba’s plane, it flew war supplies from India over the Himalayan peaks known as the Hump to Chinese forces resisting the Japanese. It became part of an aluminum trail of 500 wrecks — aircraft felled by icy storms and engine failure as much as by enemy fire. Few who bailed out were ever seen again.
After stumbling on a Web page that featured the “Hot As Hell” debris and listed its crew, Mr. Zaetz tracked down descendants through genealogical Web sites, enlisted many in his campaign, and drew coverage in hometown newspapers from Burlington, Vt. to Concord, Ga.
“One big concern of relatives of the World War II missing is that their families are really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he complained. “The focus has been overwhelmingly on recovery of M.I.A.’s from the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. We’re just looking for some parity of effort here.”
The government created a military recovery unit in the 1970s in response to an outcry after the Vietnam War, but its mission was expanded to all wars in 2000. “We’re doing our best to be as fair as possible, with frankly limited manpower, limited resources,” said a spokesman, Troy Kitch.
The government’s graves identification effort after World War II was enormous, he noted, citing 280,000 remains recovered worldwide between 1945 and 1954, more than 171,000 of them returned to the United States for burial.
The rest were buried in cemeteries around the world maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission — places like the Cemetery of the Pacific, where sweeping vistas draw millions of visitors, and memorial tablets record the names of “comrades in arms whose earthly resting place is known only to God.”
But such collective memorials do not satisfy searchers like Ms. Phillips, head of the World War II families’ group, who has consulted meteorologists and aviation experts about wind currents over Bangladesh, trying to pinpoint the site of a 1946 crash during early recovery efforts. The plane was carrying the remains of dozens of men, including those of her great-uncle, Second Lt. Joseph Rich of Portland, Me.
In those days, she said, survivors “didn’t question the government — they accepted what they were told.” But like Mr. Zaetz, when Ms. Phillips traced and recruited the kin of others missing in the crash, she found unresolved grief among the old and demands for better answers from the younger generation.
“It’s been all those years and you still have a hole in your heart,” said Ruth Garmong, 83, of Vandergrift, Pa., who cried as she spoke of her first husband, Bill Fetterman, “my high school sweetheart and the love of my life.” He was shot down Dec. 1, 1943, 10 days after his 21st birthday, and six months before the birth of their daughter, Andria.
Now 63, Andria Fetterman Clarey is searching for her mother’s sake, she said: “It breaks my heart that after all these years she hasn’t got anything back.”
Con men, some with Web sites, can capitalize on such emotions, Ms. Phillips cautioned. “There are people trying to sell you bones, telling you it’s your uncle,” she said, or charging for free military documents.
Another factor is the rise of amateur adventurers, epitomized by Clayton Kuhles, the Arizona mountaineer who located the “Hot As Hell” in India.
“It’s a hobby,” said Mr. Kuhles, 53, a history buff who posts information on his Web site, miarecoveries.org. “Some people go to Las Vegas or take a cruise. I like to go on mountaineering expeditions.”
Tips from native hunters are crucial to such expeditions, and with new immigration, leads also surface in the United States. It was through a Burmese refugee that a report recently reached Joseph Huba’s family about a wreck bearing his plane’s serial number. But there were implausible details, like eight dog tags supposedly found at the site that did not match any missing war casualties.
Joseph’s nephew, William Huba Jr., a supervisory agent with the F.B.I. in Syracuse, already had unearthed some disturbing answers about his uncle’s fate, summarized in the minutes of a 1947 military board that abandoned recovery efforts for the plane’s crew of four.
The plane lost an engine, then radio contact. Three parachutes were later spotted not far from the wreck, caught in a canopy of 100-foot trees. Three of the crew had certainly perished in the jungle, the board concluded, and if one went down with the plane, his body probably had been dragged away by wild animals.
“My parents never saw that documentation,” said William Huba Sr., 73, who was in grade school when the telegram arrived. “Maybe in a sense it was better that they didn’t.”
Haunted afresh by Joseph’s death, he and his brother Frank sometimes talk through the night, they said, dispelling fearful images with lived memories: Joe, the high school student, delivering milk for $1 a night to help their immigrant parents make ends meet in the Depression; Joe, the young artist, designing window displays for Sears; Joe, “the best big brother,” who took the younger ones to the city to hear big-name bands, and when he worked late, always brought home a candy bar for them to share.
“I pray for him,” Frank Huba said. “And just to have somebody looking is very meaningful.”
February 3, 2008
Pg. 1
By Nina Bernstein
The military telegram arrived in Peekskill, N.Y., on a springlike day in February 1945. The parents put it down unopened, falling to their knees to pray. Three of their five sons were pilots fighting overseas, and they were afraid to learn which of their boys was dead.
Their firstborn, Joseph Huba, 27, was the one named in the telegram. His transport plane had crashed in the Burmese jungle. And like tens of thousands of other American servicemen who died in World War II, he remained officially missing — a fate that has haunted such families ever since.
“My poor mother would say, ‘If they could just find him so I could bury him — I don’t want the birds picking on his body,’” recalled Francis Huba, 84, who remembers Joseph as “the best big brother anyone ever had.”
But it was a nephew — born 15 years after his uncle’s plane went down — who combed military records, interviewed witnesses and is now weighing a third-hand report that Burmese hunters have stumbled on the wreckage of the doomed plane.
More than six decades after the end of World War II, the families of men like Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead. After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something much more personal.
The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.
“We owe these men for giving their lives — we can’t just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides,” said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group, World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006 to compete with organizations pressing for recoveries from the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea. “There’s that saying, ‘No one left behind,’ and we’ve left a generation behind.”
The search has its pitfalls, Ms. Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove more disturbing than ignorance. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the sheer challenge of identifying remains after so many years.
And some relatives have come up empty-handed after expensive private searches, like a Minnesota man who has spent thousands of dollars on underwater dives off Yap Island in the South Pacific without finding his uncle’s sunken B-24.
The numbers are daunting. Of more than 88,000 American servicemen missing in 20th-century conflicts, some 79,000 are casualties of World War II, and though many of them were forever lost at sea, the government classifies about 35,000 as recoverable. The unit responsible for all recoveries, the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command, identifies about 75 remains a year. Yet the unit’s forensic successes keep raising expectations.
Last year a sailor killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, and buried as an unknown in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, was exhumed, identified as Alfred E. Livingston, and reburied in Worthington, Ind., his hometown.
Similar identifications are now likely for some of the 47 “Okinawa Unknowns,” according to the Defense Department.
And in 2006, the recovery unit confirmed the identity of a World War I doughboy, Pvt. Francis Lupo, discovered in a construction site near Soissons, France, matching mitochondrial DNA from his bones with a niece’s saliva swab. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
“Things that weren’t possible for identification of remains 10 years ago are possible now,” said Gary Zaetz, 53, of Cary, N.C., who has been pressing the government for a recovery from a mountainside in northern India, where a World War II B-24 bomber nicknamed “Hot As Hell” was found a year ago by an Arizona mountaineer.
Mr. Zaetz’s uncle, First Lt. Irwin Zaetz, 26, known as Zipper, was the navigator on that plane when it disappeared in January 1944, with a crew of eight. Like Joseph Huba’s plane, it flew war supplies from India over the Himalayan peaks known as the Hump to Chinese forces resisting the Japanese. It became part of an aluminum trail of 500 wrecks — aircraft felled by icy storms and engine failure as much as by enemy fire. Few who bailed out were ever seen again.
After stumbling on a Web page that featured the “Hot As Hell” debris and listed its crew, Mr. Zaetz tracked down descendants through genealogical Web sites, enlisted many in his campaign, and drew coverage in hometown newspapers from Burlington, Vt. to Concord, Ga.
“One big concern of relatives of the World War II missing is that their families are really at the bottom of the totem pole,” he complained. “The focus has been overwhelmingly on recovery of M.I.A.’s from the Vietnam and Korean conflicts. We’re just looking for some parity of effort here.”
The government created a military recovery unit in the 1970s in response to an outcry after the Vietnam War, but its mission was expanded to all wars in 2000. “We’re doing our best to be as fair as possible, with frankly limited manpower, limited resources,” said a spokesman, Troy Kitch.
The government’s graves identification effort after World War II was enormous, he noted, citing 280,000 remains recovered worldwide between 1945 and 1954, more than 171,000 of them returned to the United States for burial.
The rest were buried in cemeteries around the world maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission — places like the Cemetery of the Pacific, where sweeping vistas draw millions of visitors, and memorial tablets record the names of “comrades in arms whose earthly resting place is known only to God.”
But such collective memorials do not satisfy searchers like Ms. Phillips, head of the World War II families’ group, who has consulted meteorologists and aviation experts about wind currents over Bangladesh, trying to pinpoint the site of a 1946 crash during early recovery efforts. The plane was carrying the remains of dozens of men, including those of her great-uncle, Second Lt. Joseph Rich of Portland, Me.
In those days, she said, survivors “didn’t question the government — they accepted what they were told.” But like Mr. Zaetz, when Ms. Phillips traced and recruited the kin of others missing in the crash, she found unresolved grief among the old and demands for better answers from the younger generation.
“It’s been all those years and you still have a hole in your heart,” said Ruth Garmong, 83, of Vandergrift, Pa., who cried as she spoke of her first husband, Bill Fetterman, “my high school sweetheart and the love of my life.” He was shot down Dec. 1, 1943, 10 days after his 21st birthday, and six months before the birth of their daughter, Andria.
Now 63, Andria Fetterman Clarey is searching for her mother’s sake, she said: “It breaks my heart that after all these years she hasn’t got anything back.”
Con men, some with Web sites, can capitalize on such emotions, Ms. Phillips cautioned. “There are people trying to sell you bones, telling you it’s your uncle,” she said, or charging for free military documents.
Another factor is the rise of amateur adventurers, epitomized by Clayton Kuhles, the Arizona mountaineer who located the “Hot As Hell” in India.
“It’s a hobby,” said Mr. Kuhles, 53, a history buff who posts information on his Web site, miarecoveries.org. “Some people go to Las Vegas or take a cruise. I like to go on mountaineering expeditions.”
Tips from native hunters are crucial to such expeditions, and with new immigration, leads also surface in the United States. It was through a Burmese refugee that a report recently reached Joseph Huba’s family about a wreck bearing his plane’s serial number. But there were implausible details, like eight dog tags supposedly found at the site that did not match any missing war casualties.
Joseph’s nephew, William Huba Jr., a supervisory agent with the F.B.I. in Syracuse, already had unearthed some disturbing answers about his uncle’s fate, summarized in the minutes of a 1947 military board that abandoned recovery efforts for the plane’s crew of four.
The plane lost an engine, then radio contact. Three parachutes were later spotted not far from the wreck, caught in a canopy of 100-foot trees. Three of the crew had certainly perished in the jungle, the board concluded, and if one went down with the plane, his body probably had been dragged away by wild animals.
“My parents never saw that documentation,” said William Huba Sr., 73, who was in grade school when the telegram arrived. “Maybe in a sense it was better that they didn’t.”
Haunted afresh by Joseph’s death, he and his brother Frank sometimes talk through the night, they said, dispelling fearful images with lived memories: Joe, the high school student, delivering milk for $1 a night to help their immigrant parents make ends meet in the Depression; Joe, the young artist, designing window displays for Sears; Joe, “the best big brother,” who took the younger ones to the city to hear big-name bands, and when he worked late, always brought home a candy bar for them to share.
“I pray for him,” Frank Huba said. “And just to have somebody looking is very meaningful.”