Plane of WWII Flyer From London Found IN Himalayas

London Madison Press - OH, USA

Saturday, March 7, 2009

By Jane Beathard
Contributing Writer

Sixty-five years after his plane went missing over northern India, the mystery of what happened to a Madison County airman from World War II is likely solved.

In recent days, surviving relatives of U.S. Army 2nd Lt. John W. Funk Jr. learned that a nonprofit organization founded by Arizona businessman Clayton Kuhles located the wreckage of Funk’s long-missing C-87 transport last fall on a jungle-covered mountain in India’s Arunachal Province.

Kuhles is the founder of MIA Recoveries and conducts annual expeditions to Burma, India, Bangladesh and China in search of aircraft lost while flying “the Hump,” an infamous air route over the Himalayas that claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Allied airmen during World War II.

On Oct. 3, Kuhles’ party discovered remnants of a C-87 cargo plane believed to be Funk’s. They were led to the wreckage by area villagers who remembered walking to the crash site and burying the plane’s five crew members more than a half century ago.

According to the MIA Recoveries Web site, the plane disappeared on a flight from Yangkai, China to Jorhat, India in August 1943. Aside from Funk, who was the plane’s navigator, crew members included Captain Tom Perry, the pilot; Lt. John T. Tennison, the co-pilot; Staff Sargent Alvin J. Lenox, the radioman; and Corporal Donald A. Johnson, the crew chief.

As was military protocol at the time, Funk’s family received nothing more than a letter of notification about the disappearance. Funk’s name appears on the Madison County Veterans’ War Memorial at the courthouse and in the records of Ohio’s Memorial Forest Shrine in Ashland County.

A report filed with the federal government’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) in Hawaii in recent months said Kuhles interviewed elderly residents of Donli village. Those residents said they witnessed the crash and spent five days walking to the scene, which is more than 8,000 feet above sea level. They buried the dead airmen and scavenged the plane’s metal fuselage to make pots, pans and trays.

Pictures of the crash site and household articles crafted by the villagers are available online at miarecoveries.org, along with Kuhles’ completed archaeological site report form.

Kuhles said it is now up to JPAC to bring the remains of the fallen airmen home. His organization, which is funded through private donations, has worked since 2001 to locate plane wrecks in “the Hump.” Thus far, he has documented 15 crash sites and the remains of more than 100 men. The information he obtained was turned over to surviving families and JPAC for further action.

“All five families (of the C-87) have now been contacted,” Kuhles said. “They have put together a form letter that friends and family members can send to their Congressional representatives, encouraging the government to recover the remains.”

He noted that JPAC spends about 90 percent of its resources on recovering U.S. soldiers lost in Vietnam, with only about 10 percent focused on those from World War II. He said it generally takes intense media and family pressure to influence government action on recoveries from that earlier war.

Kuhles said he’s always been interested in the history of Southeast Asia. A few years ago, he learned about the dangerous missions that were flown by Allied planes over “the Hump” to resupply General Chiang Kai-Shek’s army during World War II. Records of those missions, now largely lost to personal recollection, can be found in “The Aluminum Trail” by Chick Marrs Quinn. The book lists more than 700 U.S. aircraft lost in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. Since most planes had multiple crew members and carried passengers, the number of personnel killed was much higher.

The U.S. Department of Defense said in 2004 that more than 500 U.S. aircraft and 1,200 crew members were still missing in the China-Burma-India Theater from World War II.

Kuhles said it is an area and subject long neglected by the U.S. government because it generally involves remote crash sites and sparse native populations. However, he’s had little trouble finding many of these sites through research and a network of local contacts.