Local Man's Mission To Identify WWII Crash Sites Brings Results

Local man's mission to identify WWII crash sites brings results
By Cindy Barks, The Daily Courier

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Of the more than a dozen warplane crash sites Clayton Kuhles has visited in the past five years, the story of one has captured the imagination of the nation.

In December 2006, Kuhles trekked to the Himalayan site of a downed B-24 World War II bomber, the "Hot as Hell."

Little did he know at the time that his documentation would generate a flood of news accounts, a network of survivor communications, and - just this past month - a major investigative visit by the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

"The Hot as Hell propelled this onto the international front," said Kuhles, a Prescott resident who recently returned from his latest expedition into the mountains of India to find and document downed WWII warplanes.

After Kuhles' discovery, the saga of the Hot as Hell gained steam when Gary Zaetz, a North Carolina computer specialist, learned of it while doing a routine Internet search for his uncle, Lt. Irwin "Zipper" Zaetz,

After decades of mystery surrounding the fate of his father's older brother, Zaetz ran across Kuhles' website, www.miarecoveries.org, and finally was able to supply some answers for his 84-year-old father.

And this fall, Zaetz, 54, added another chapter, when he made his own trek to the crash site to honor the memories of the men who died there.

"It was almost a pilgrimage, in a sense," Zaetz said this past week in a telephone interview. While at the site, Zaetz conducted Jewish and Christian prayer services, which he said "represented another degree of closure."

Families soon could have the ultimate closure, if JPAC follows through on preliminary plans to conduct a recovery of the crash site.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry reported Friday that an eight-person JPAC team currently was on its way home from an exploratory mission at the Hot as Hell site.

After spending about three weeks documenting what is on the ground, the team would determine "what it's going to take to do a dig and recovery," Perry said by telephone from his office at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

Depending on the findings of the team, Perry said JPAC is planning a recovery mission in early 2009.

From early indications, he said, "We have pretty good evidence that this is one of the good sites to go back to. It's looking pretty positive."

For the survivors, including 90-year-old Prescott resident Verna Martin, that final step cannot happen soon enough.

"We tried to get them to do it sooner because of some of our ages," Martin, the sister of the plane's co-pilot, said this week. "Now they're saying 2009, and we're hoping."

Contact the reporter at cbarks@prescottaz.com