US Investigators Reach "Hot As Hell" Crash Area In India

AFP

NEW DELHI (AFP) — US investigators scouring India for remains of missing American World War II airforce personnel have stepped up the search in a remote region bordering China, defence ministry officials said Wednesday.

Experts from the US defence department's Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC) were in Arunachal Pradesh state's Damroh region to look for the remains of the crew of downed American B-24 bomber, named "Hot as Hell."

"Ten JPAC officials who were flown in from Assam (state) last month by the Indian airforce are now in Damroh where the wreckage was first sighted in 2006," a senior ministry official told AFP.

The details of the search by the JPAC team in the insurgency-riven northeastern state have been withheld for security reasons, he said, but added that the experts will camp in the area for at least a week.

The B-24 bomber crashed in the Damroh forests in Siang district in 1944. The wreckage was tracked down three years ago by a US-based private investigator Clayton Kuhles with the help of local guides, Indian war records show.

JPAC, which scours WWII sites worldwide, sent a two-member reconnaissance team to India last March following requests from relatives of the bomber's pilot, First Lieutenant Irwin Zaeta.

The actual search in an area that pilots called "The Hump" -- or the "Aluminium Trail" because of the number of crashes there -- began in September 2008.

"Besides the particular B-24, the Americans are also looking for other missing personnel in the Hump region," an official told AFP.

Arunachal Pradesh state, which borders China, was along the flight path used by US aircraft ferrying supplies from hundreds of Indian airfields to besieged allied troops in China.

They were forced to fly the perilous route in April 1942 when the Japanese army cut off the main road between Burma and China, and the operations continued until near the end of the war in 1945.

In all, Allied pilots ferried 650,000 tonnes of fuel, munitions and equipment over the mountains to supply the Chinese government and other anti-Japanese forces.

Several wreckages have been reportedly sighted by local inhabitants in Arunachal Pradesh in the past several years. The Americans believe more than 400 US servicemen and women were lost on the Indian side of the border.

China had recovered some remains of US servicemen on their side of what is a disputed stretch of the Sino-Indian border.