It’s a fitting activity for Memorial Day.
The U.S. Defense Department has called out for help from Cotswold Archaeology to uncover the remains of a pilot officially listed as missing since his B-17 Flying Fortress bomber went down in East Anglia, England, in 1944.
“We’ll be working at an exceptionally special site for the next six weeks,” the company wrote in a Facebook post last week. “This woodland is the final resting place of a WWII B-17 pilot whose plane came to earth when the controls failed in 1944.
“The Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency have tasked us with recovering remains of this young man, termed MIA after his load of 12,000lbs of Torpex exploded on impact,” the post explained. “This excavation will not be easy — the crash crater is waterlogged and filled with 80 years’ worth of sediment, the trees and undergrowth are thick, and all soil must be meticulously sieved to hopefully recover plane ID numbers, personal effects, and any human remains.”
“We’ll take you with us over the coming weeks, as we do what we can to return him home,” the post concluded.
The area became the headquarters of the Allies’ “Bomber War” to defeat Hitler’s Germany in World War II, according the website of the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.
“‘This is an almost impossible endeavour and the significant thing is that we try, despite that’ said Lead Archaeologist, Sam Wilson, and he couldn’t be more right,” the group wrote in a Memorial Day post.
“There are 30 of us on our B-17 site today, a third are US citizens including our downed pilot,” the post said. “We’ve needed to shovel out the debris and bucket most of the crater water by hand, to avoid losing or damaging any fragile remains, and (as you know) it seems to have done nothing but rain, at times entirely negating our efforts.”
Will this pilot be brought home?
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Despite having plenty of hard work to do, the team was planning a moment to remember those men and women who gave everything they had to keep our two nations — the U.S. and U.K. — safe and free.
“At 3pm today we’ll be switching off the pumps and generators, and downing tools, as we take a moment of silence on Memorial Day to reflect on lives lost,” they wrote.
Images accompanying both posts showed just what a challenge the team faced, including several feet of accumulated muck and mud through which team members had to search.
The name of the pilot Cotswold is searching for has not been released, but more than 72,000 World War II service members have yet to be accounted for, CBS News reported Tuesday.
CBS reported that another team with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency was working in Normandy, France, to locate another three missing airmen whose plane went down on D-Day after being hit by anti-aircraft fire.
“It’s a real honor being here on this recovery mission,” Air Force Master Sgt. Raul Castillo said of that mission, which he was leading. “It’s a humbling experience, and I’m happy to help bring the full accounting of the missing to their families.”
If there’s a more fitting activity for Memorial Day, I don’t know what it is. Let’s pray that these boys will be located and brought back home, where they belong.
