The crash site, blackened and covered with rhododendron bushes and hidden in quiet woodland in eastern England, has been the final resting place of a missing American pilot for 80 years.
Now a team led by a British archaeologist is carefully sifting through tangled branches, soil and mud with a hopeful mission: to find the remains of a fallen World War II pilot and bring him home.
Their help came to a specialized division of the Department of Defense charged with locating the remains of tens of thousands of U.S. service members who died as prisoners of war or were considered missing in action.
According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), more than 72,000 Americans from World War II remain unaccounted for. However, that number is slowly declining as the agency discovers and identifies more remains.
“They are still trying to keep their promise to leave no one behind,” said Rosanna Price, a spokesperson for Cotswold Archeology, which leads the organization in Suffolk, eastern England. excavation work. “That’s very powerful for us.”
Ms Price said the group hoped to find enough answers to provide closure for the pilot’s surviving relatives. “That’s our motivation: to remember these people and tell their stories,” she said.
In August 1944, a pilot flew a B-17, a giant bomber known as the “Flying Fortress” carrying 12,000 pounds of Torpex explosives. Ms Price said the control systems failed and the plane crashed into woodland. The explosive exploded on impact.
Ms Price declined to name the pilot and said his body had never been found. She said local historians scoured the crash site for debris from the 1970s plane. The DPAA did not immediately respond to a request for more details.
Cotswold Archeology’s search, which began this month and will last six weeks, will be more extensive. The team will excavate a nearly 10-foot-deep crater at the crash site and will use metal detectors to search a nearby two-acre area divided into smaller grids.
She said about 60 volunteers, including current and former British servicemen, would help with the painstaking work of carefully sifting the soil in each grid to look for plane wreckage or human remains. (A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense confirmed that military personnel and veterans will help next week as part of an initiative for the sick and wounded.)
“We don’t want to miss anything,” Ms Price said. She said if the remains are found, they may be returned to the United States and the U.S. Defense Aeronautics and Space Administration will use DNA analysis to formally identify the pilot.
Since the excavation began, the team has discovered switches, tire fragments and pieces of aircraft fuselage.
Ms Price said searching the water-filled crater, filled with decades of sediment, would be a challenge. The force with which the plane hit the soft soil means critical parts could be deep beneath the surface, she said.
But despite these challenges, a colleague recently made a good point when she said, “The significance of this being an almost impossible endeavor is that we try to do it despite it all.”
According to the Imperial War Museum, at the height of the war, as many as 500,000 US Army Air Forces were stationed in Britain, flying and maintaining the fleet of aircraft that attacked Germany. About 30,000 of them died en route from Britain. Thousands of people were stationed at rural airfields in East Anglia, including Suffolk, many flying B-17s.
Other Ministry of Defense searches are also underway: A French team is searching for three missing pilots whose plane was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire during the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944.
This month, the DPAA said it had identified the remains of several World War II service members, including two young men who died after being captured in the Philippines.
