LOST MEMORIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26350, 3 January 1947, Page 4

LOST MEMORIES

"COMPLETE FALLACY” SEARCH FOR MISSING AIR CREWS “A great many people are disturbed by thoughtless suggestions that there are hundreds of men wandering about the Continent with lost memories. That is a complete fallacy, and we have not known of a single case in the air force of a lost memory,” said Group Captain R. Burges, 0.8. E., R.A.F., the Air Ministry, London, in an interview in Wellington recently. Group Captain Burges was visiting this country to discuss and report on the progress of the Royal Air Force Research and Inquiry Service for Europe and the Far East. During the war he was chief of the Air Ministry casualty section. Group Captain Burges has already reported to the New Zealand authorities the results of a widespread tour of the battle areas, and on his return to England he will report to the Director of Personal Services in the Air Ministry. He did not expect, he said, that the work of covering the areas involved in the search would be completed before the middle of 1947. The object of the service is to identify unknown graves, and to discover what became of aircrew where there are no graves and where aircraft are unaccounted for. Many men who went 'missing were accounted for by the enemy, and a great many graves were found, but many men just disappeared, largely in the Far Eastern theatre, where very rugged country combined with unwillingness on the part of the Japanese to provide information. Japanese reports, in fact, were practically nil, and nearly everyone who went missing in Pacific war theatres had to be searched for. “In the Burma and Malaya theatres the mountains are jungle-covered, and where a man crashes, if the natives do not happen to see and locate him right away, then he is worse off than in the sea,” said Group Captain Burges. ‘‘The vegetation grows up swiftly, and disintegrates the aircraft.” On returns up to July, out of approximately 40,000 British Commonwealth airmen missing and unaccounted for, the search organisation had disposed of about 8000 cases, he* said, either by identifying unknown graves or deciding on strong circumstantial evidence that after the crashes had occurred there were no remains. “In previous wars you could rely on the grave service, and provided you were victorious the army walked over the ground and you knew where to look for the people who were missing,” said Group' Captain Burges. “ Just About Anywhere ” “After the Second World War, when air operations were carried out on a scale never before known, the casualty branches of the nations of the Commonwealth were faced with the problem, of an air force scattered over continents. All we knew in many cases of the aircraft which was missing was that it .had left its home base. It might be just about anywhere. “ Even the fact of knowing its target and the route taken was of little use. because if the aircraft were under attack or driven off its course by bad weather it might be anywhere. So we had to start absolutely from the ground floor and build up our searches M After D Day it was found that the public all over the world wanted to know a great deal more about missing personnel than the air force could tell them, and thousands of inquiries were received by the various air force organisations. At the same time, those organisations were getting bits of information from the countryside as the fighting front advanced, such bodies as the French Red Cross, S.H.A.E.F., and the French registry of births, deaths, and marriages oc-operating willingly. Group Captain Burges described the setting up of the search organisation and its work in liberated and conquered countries, and gave some idea of the methods adopted to identify graves and crashes. A certain amount of actual information as to crashes was received from various sources, and although much of it was wild, some of 'it was useful. In most places the civil authorities were issued with questionnaires, and the local mayors co-operated in obtaining the answers from residents. Comprehensive Figures ' Areas to be searched were decided by convenient geographical divisions and, if the nature of the country made ijl possible, parties visited all small villages in the area after the questionnaires had been issued and specific inquiries completed. Although most of the information so obtained was redundant, much was useful and fresh. In some cases it was necessary to exhume remains for identification purposes, and here such small details as laundry marks, cuff-links, and the qualitv of cloth were frequently the deciding factors in identifying the victim of the crash. As far as possible graves were concentrated in recognised, air force plots in military cemeteries, but the isolation of the site of some crashes on occasions made this impossible. "I don’t think we shall find more than about 50 per cent, of the bodies or graves of the 40,000 who were reported missing, because so many of the machines must have gone into the sea,” said Group Captain Burges. “That applies particularly to the South-west Pacific because, the more sea there is and the smaller the land areas the aircraft are fighting over, the more likely they are to go in the water. . , , “ In my opinion there is not a ghost of a chance of anyone turning up alive at this stage.” he concluded.