US brings home remains of WWII airmen, 70 years on

NEW DELHI — The likely remains of US airmen who went missing over the Himalayas more than 70 years ago during a daring World War II mission were finally headed home on Wednesday after a major search in an Indian jungle. The men were among the Allied pilots who flew the extraordinarily perilous route over the world’s highest mountains to deliver military supplies from hundreds of Indian airfields to Chinese forces from 1942. US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Wednesday oversaw a ceremony at an air force base in New Delhi as the remains were shipped to the United States, after they were recovered from the mountainous jungles of Arunachal Pradesh in India’s northeast. The remains, which are being flown to Hawaii for DNA testing, are the first to be recovered under an agreement with the Indian authorities. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), the US agency that deals with soldiers missing in action, sent a team to Arunachal Pradesh last September to try to locate the wreckage of a B-24 Liberator plane downed in 1944 with eight men on board. “They had to hike in for three days to get to the site,” said US Marine Corps captain Greg Lynch, a veteran of such searches. Once there the team, which also included Indian representatives, spent eight hours a day conducting detailed searches on a vertiginous slope, often roped together. They painstakingly sifted through the soil around the wreckage of the plane to try to locate the airmen’s remains, but the risk of landslides stopped them conducting detailed searches of the entire site. They found what they believe to be the remains of one or two of the eight missing airmen, which will be identified using DNA testing. — AFP