Arizonan Scales Peaks, Combs Forests to Find U.S. Plane Wrecks
By Rama Lakshmi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
SAGALI, India -- After trekking for five hours up steep Himalayan slopes, crossing numerous creeks and hacking a trail through bamboo forests, Clayton Kuhles and his guide reached the spot where a U.S. military plane had fallen more than six decades ago.
Out of breath and sweating, he rummaged through the forest-floor vegetation and excitedly pulled out rusted parts of an aircraft engine strewn atop a hill here in India's northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. His eyes scanned for clues as he sifted through the debris.
"It's a C-46 plane. It has two engines. Two sets of 18 cylinders. Four propeller blades are intact. Two landing gears. I can see evidence of fire," said Kuhles, a 54-year-old businessman from Prescott, Ariz.
The veteran mountaineer, dressed in a black T-shirt and green cargo pants, photographed the debris and wrote down the engine number on his notepad.
The journey Kuhles has undertaken from Arizona to Arunachal Pradesh is part Himalayan adventure, part historical quest and part humanitarian mission. In the past two years, he has climbed treacherous peaks and combed tropical forests to find the wreckage of more than a dozen U.S. planes that crashed in the Himalayan regions of India, Burma and China during World War II. More than 1,300 people went missing while flying in the area and were declared dead. About 415 people from 90 aircraft were lost over India alone.
By locating the wreckage, Kuhles has provided answers and mementos to the families of scores of missing American servicemen. "In 65 years, there has been no effort to investigate the sites of these crashes. So many lives were just written off and forgotten as if the men went into a black hole," he said. "The family members want answers till this day. They want closure. And that is what I provide."
The Himalayas formed part of a major resupply route during World War II, a mission that was dubbed "flying over the hump." Pilots flew the infamous route to avoid Japanese-occupied Burma, and it was the Allies' only option after the Japanese blocked the Burma Road.
The route -- which started at the eastern end of the Himalayas, wrapped over Burma and dropped down into China -- was hazardous because of cloud-knifing mountain peaks and turbulent weather, including gales, thunderstorms and freezing temperatures.
"Ice would often develop on the surface of the airplane, and it would become heavy and lose altitude," Kuhles said. "It was like a suicide mission."
Kuhles's passion is well-known in this remote Indian region of verdant, picturesque mountains. Unendingly energetic, he often leaves even his local guides panting in his wake as he ascends peak after peak. He has had several close calls with cobras and always carries a venom-suction kit, as well as lemon and eucalyptus bug spray. He has made seven trips to India, mostly paid for by himself, but he has not found the time to visit tourist sites such as the Taj Mahal. In many villages, he finds that salvaged aluminum from the planes has been turned into doors, roof panels and cooking pots.
So far, he has reached 14 crash sites in India and one in Burma.
"The word is out that there is an American on the lookout for plane crash sites," said Oken Tayeng, the tour operator who is Kuhles's point man for local logistics. "All kinds of people call me now, and I tap into my wide networks of cousins and friends for information. Some villagers mistakenly think there is big money to be made by letting us know of sites. Others fear that the American wants to hunt in their forests."
Kuhles's trips have also inspired a local documentary filmmaker.
"Clayton is depending on the local hunters' knowledge and memory to bring healing to the families in the U.S.," said the filmmaker, Moji Riba, of the Center for Cultural Research and Documentation. "The plane crash and its debris have been part of the local lore in villages for six decades. And now Clayton's rediscoveries will also be part of their continuing story."
Kuhles's most dramatic sighting was of a B-24 bomber, a four-engine aircraft nicknamed Hot as Hell that was lying more than 9,000 feet above sea level. After a perilous three-day trek with a tribal villager, he reached the site on Pearl Harbor Day in December 2006.
"I found four digits sloppily hand-painted inside the wing compartment. It turned out to be the construction number that was assigned to it in the factory while it was being built. That helped me identify it later," he recalled. "There were eight men aboard."
Kuhles brought home parts of the cockpit control panel, engine parts and a dashboard. He used a book titled "The Aluminum Trail," given to him by the China-Burma-India Hump Pilots Association, to identify the plane and the crew members. As always, he sent a report to the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii and posted the details on his Web site, http://www.miarecoveries.org.
Six months later, Gary Zaetz came across Kuhles's Web site during a routine Google search for information about his uncle, Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz, the navigator on Hot as Hell. Gary Zaetz, a computer specialist from Cary, N.C., teamed with other relatives of the Hot as Hell crew and lobbied Congress and the Pentagon for a full year to send a team to recover from the site human remains such as bone fragments.
Last month, Zaetz traveled to India to conduct a Jewish and Christian prayer service for the dead crew members at the spot where the plane was found.
"The Hot as Hell families had no idea what had happened to the plane," said Zaetz, 54, a member of World War II Families for the Return of the Missing. "Was it shot down? Did it collide with another plane? Did it crash into the mountain? Did it catch fire? Were the members taken prisoners? Did anybody survive? Where did it go down?"
Because of Zaetz's efforts, two Indian air force officers and an eight-member JPAC team -- including a forensic anthropologist, a medic and an explosives specialist -- are in Arunachal Pradesh to conduct a preliminary survey of the Hot as Hell site.
"The team will take a systematic sampling approach at one aircraft crash site in an attempt to determine the scope of the debris field," Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, public affairs director of JPAC, said in an e-mail. "This is especially important as each of these crash sites involves a large, multiple-engine aircraft and many crew members."
The findings will lay the groundwork for the recovery mission JPAC will carry out when it returns next year for a full-site excavation. Perry said the team will not bring back large pieces of wreckage. But small personal belongings -- rings, watches, identification tags and pieces of uniform -- will be returned to the families.
On a recent day, Kuhles met an 80-year old witness of the C-46 crash, Techi Takhi.
"It was a winter evening. I was hunting for birds when I saw a giant ball of smoldering fire in the sky," Takhi said, pointing to the eastern sky above the village of Karroi. "I saw many dead bodies strewn all around. One man was still alive. I looked after him for three days and handed him over to an American rescue team."
After a pause, he asked Kuhles, "Why has it taken you Americans 60 years to come here looking for your dead?"
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