Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:34 am
A man on a mission: Finding WWII remains
BY BILLY COX
At age 79, Bryan Moon isn't sure how many more shots he'll get at the haunted jungles of Papua New Guinea.
He thought he'd bought the farm in 2006 when one of the native tribes drew a line at the base of a mountain and threatened to kill anyone in his entourage caught trespassing. Less intrepid explorers might've taken that as a warning not to tempt fate again.
But a year later, this professional artist and former corporate vice president for advertising and sales promotions with Northwest Airlines appears to be gearing up for his masterpiece, detailed at www.miahunters .com.
Touting what "may result in ... potentially the largest discovery of lost aircraft and MIAs since the end of the last world war," the British-born adventurer is using newspaper ads to recruit teams of strangers to join the hunt.
For $10,250 apiece, adds the part-time Sarasota resident, fellow travelers will explore the crash sites of 10 warbirds unseen by Western eyes in at least 60 years. And perhaps they'll even lay the groundwork for repatriating the remains of fallen airmen to the United States.
"These are sacred sites, and it can be an extremely emotional experience," says Moon, who claims to have recovered the bodies of 57 World War II flyers over the course of 19 expeditions. "These people are heroes, and they need to come home."
Moon's project -- scheduled to dispatch volunteers to Papua New Guinea in two-week increments in May and June -- is also likely to illuminate long-standing tensions among U.S. military investigators, the civilian amateurs it calls "wreck hunters," and rivalries among adventurers themselves.
The scope of America's missing-in-action rosters from World War II is staggering. According to Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii, 78,000 U.S. soldiers have never been accounted for. (By contrast, the fates of 8,100 troops from the Korean War and 1,800 from Vietnam are unknown.)
The South Pacific island of New Guinea hosted some of the war's most brutal campaigns, its skies streaked with doomed Allied and Japanese aircraft. But many losses were elemental; in 1944, the U.S. Fifth Air Force lost 37 bombers in a single day when a fleet of B-24s was ambushed by a violent frontal system in the mountains.
"PNG (Papua New Guinea) is the size of California and has arguably the most airplane wrecks of any place on Earth," says researcher Justin Taylan of Hyde Park, N.Y. "Asking the locals if they know about any aircraft wrecks is like asking an American if there's a McDonald's nearby."
Not surprisingly, there's a market for some of those rusting derelicts.
"Those planes have become icons," says freelance journalist Carl Hoffman, author of "Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Search for the Lost Aircraft of World War II" in 2003. "It's Rosie the Riveter, grandmas in the factories, piston engines -- the pinnacle of analog technology. They represent the last great war and America's industrial might at its height."
A pilot for an Illinois stunt team of vintage T-34 trainers called Lima Lima, John Rippinger tracks the demand for ancient warplanes.
"A P-51 today is probably worth one and a half million, rebuilt, on the open market," says Rippinger from Schaumburg, Ill. "A well-restored P-38 could probably get two to three million. A P-47, one and a half to two million."
But the president of seven insurance companies called the Rippinger Financial Group isn't into the salvage end of the warbird phenomenon. He lost a Navy pilot brother years ago in a training exercise off Florida, and the body was never recovered.
That's why, in 2006, he accompanied Bryan Moon and a handful of like-minded volunteers to Papua New Guinea. The mission was to slog through the frontier and identify a WWII crash site reported by native trackers. The journey was grueling, perilous, and culminated in an unscripted helicopter airlift because a tribe of hostile aboriginals refused to let the Americans venture back into their territory.
But the journey was a success. The plane turned out to be an A-20 bomber. In accord with Moon's policy, the troupe did not dig for human remains. Instead, they photographed the site, recorded serial numbers recorded, logged GPS coordinates, and forwarded the information to U.S. authorities.
"We're not there to disturb the graves. But we do want the remains to come home, and this is the first step," Rippinger says. "Bryan's really on a mission, because there's nothing in it for him. He's probably the most altruistic guy you'll ever meet."
Moon, a Royal Air Force veteran who became an American citizen 30 years ago, founded his nonprofit MIA Hunters Inc. in 1992. He says he's repaying an emotional debt dating back to WWII, when American pilots invited him on base for ice cream shortly after his home was blown to smithereens by Nazi bombers.
Moon's novel life has led him to exotic locales, such as remote Pitcairn Island, where descendents of the 1789 mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty live today. The Southampton College of Art alumnus and member of both the British and American Societies of Aviation Artists has also lived in Africa to do research on "Born Free" conservationist author George Adamson. And he's ventured into the wilderness of the Arctic and the Antarctic.
In 1990, Moon and his son, Chris, traveled to China, where they located one of the famed Jimmy Doolittle B-25 bombers that crashed after the 1942 raid over Tokyo. That marked the beginning of Moon's obsession with locating the wrecks of WWII warplanes, from Sicily to the Pacific.
Although Moon says MIA Hunters has identified the remains of German, Italian and Japanese airmen, "I haven't found any Brits yet," he adds. "But I know where the remains of two sunken Spitfires are, and we plan to visit them someday."
Moon has testimonials from Americans grateful for his efforts to provide closure on their MIA relatives, but getting the U.S. government to corroborate his work is another issue.
Most of Moon's mission files are at his home in Randolph, Minn. But the three MIA names he supplied to the Herald-Tribune for official comment evoked a cagey assessment from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hawaii's Hickam Air Force Base.
Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green confirmed Moon had passed the information along to JPAC. But she says the military already knew about two of those sites before receiving Moon's reports (a contention Moon disputes). All three cases remain officially unresolved today.
With a budget of $47 million to finance some 35 MIA recovery missions this year, JPAC says prioritizing missions involves detailed analyses that tend to focus "on more contemporary losses."
Nielson-Green declined to comment specifically on the recovery efforts of Moon or any other private group. She said some of those outfits have track records of destroying forensic evidence, soliciting money from families, and damaging American relations with host nations by misrepresenting themselves.
"I don't want to characterize the efforts of hobbyist or amateur groups as good or bad," she says. "But these are issues that have been raised."
A controversial recovery made headlines in 2006, when an American group called Aero Archaeology dismantled a B-17 that crash-landed in a Papua New Guinea swamp in 1942. Government officials impounded the Flying Fortress in September before it could be exported.
Researcher Taylan, whose www.pacificwrecks.com Web site has an extensive WWII database, says increasing interest in PNG crash sites has contaminated local residents with mercenary ambitions of their own.
"When you're offering $10,000 bounties for wreck tips to people who used to be happy to receive a $100 donation for school books, it sort of breaks your heart," says Taylan, who adds he has visited more than 300 PNG crash sites. "And there's no guarantee they won't take you to a site that's already known and say they just found it."
Moon concedes that commercial projects have complicated his MIA efforts, but he resents being lumped into that category. He estimates his Web site gets one request a week from WWII MIA families, but he never solicits money from them.
Furthermore, Moon says he's doing field work that U.S. authorities can't or won't do. And he's doing it with a sense of urgency, because eyewitnesses are dying off.
"What I really resent is this (government) notion that we're unskilled but well meaning," Moon says. "After 19 missions, I don't feel particularly unskilled."
Moon, who enters Papua New Guinea as a tourist, says he not only pays trackers for leads ("They only do it if I pay them to"), he also donates supplies to their villages to show good faith. He says his relationships paid off in a big way late last year, when guides reported discovering 10 and perhaps as many as 13 crash sites.
"One is literally up in a tree," he says. "The natives won't go near it because the bodies are still there. They think it's haunted."
Consequently, Moon is assembling five, eight-person teams who'll investigate two sites apiece this summer. Twenty-one Minnesotans have already signed up, and he needs a similar number of Floridians.
"This is just the sort of trip I've been wanting," says Dave Norton, a Tampa resident and Northwest Airlines customer service agent who recently signed on with Moon. "I'd get a lot of satisfaction if I could help find some of our patriots and bring them home. And I'm very impressed with Bryan's organizational and managerial skills."
Unlike last year, Moon will likely monitor and coordinate logistical support from a base camp. A diabetic and a heart attack survivor, Moon was forced to lag behind during an arduous foray onto a mountain in 2006. He managed to complete the hike, but he admits he reached the outer edge of his physical limits.
"It's hard work," says Moon's wife, Cicely, who accompanied him to Sicily years ago to find the remains of a pilot whose A-36 was shot down after dive-bombing German trucks. "When you go on a trip with Bryan, you don't go shopping."
Mon Feb 19, 2007 9:29 am
Mon Feb 19, 2007 9:45 am
I don't understand why PNG has such a fuss
Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:13 pm
I don't understand why PNG has such a fuss when someone recovers an aircraft wreck on their "soil".?
Mon Feb 19, 2007 11:27 pm
Brett wrote:I don't understand why PNG has such a fuss when someone recovers an aircraft wreck on their "soil".?
Absolutely. They should follow the much more enlightened approach adopted by the US Navy.
Cheers,
Brett
Tue Feb 20, 2007 11:26 am
Ztex wrote:I don't understand why PNG has such a fuss
$$$$$