"Look at me," Bruce Fenstermaker says. "I'm
55, wear glasses, smoke cigarettes, walk slowly and drink a lot of water. "I'm
no Indiana Jones!" But what he does may be more romantic - and
is certainly more noble - than whip-cracking Indy's carryings-on.
Fenstermaker, who lives in Victorville, works
for Yellow Freight. During his spare time and on vacations, he researches and
discovers the planes of Americans missing in action during World War II, chiefly
in remote areas of Malaysia, Indonesia and the South Pacific. The Joint POW/MIA
Accounting Command, based at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, estimates that
of the more than 78,000 Americans unaccounted for from that war, the remains
of 35,000 are still recoverable. Fenstermaker got hooked on finding MIAs while
salvaging aircraft. And he got into salvage because he had always loved planes.
The grandson and son of airplane enthusiasts, Fenstermaker grew up in Chino,
seven miles from the Chino Airport.
As a boy, he'd ride over on his bike, wash
the planes and chat with the men who owned WWII-era aircraft. "I was flying
before I got my driver's license," Fenstermaker says. "My dad managed
a DMV office and wouldn't let me drive until I was 17. "But when I was
going to Damien High School in La Verne, I had my own account at the flight
school a mile from the school. "To pay for flying lessons, he worked at
a grocery store, did yard work and delivered newspapers. During the Vietnam
War, Fenstermaker enlisted in the U.S. Army's helicopter program. "I
and one brother were in the Army stateside," he says, "but
my two other brothers went to Vietnam with the Air Force. "I remember
telling my brother Gary, 'If you get lost, I'm going in to get you.' "
In 1983, dissatisfied with his job, Fenstermaker asked his wife,
Linda, "What do you think of my salvaging airplanes?"
She replied: "You'll never know if you don't try it." His original
intent was to recover and restore Japanese aircraft and parts, then sell
them to aviation museums and movie companies. Nearly four decades after WWII,
all the most accessible aircraft had been discovered, so he decided to concentrate
on the more difficult sites. "Before my first trip," Fenstermaker
says, "I did research at
the Los Angeles Library."
A round-trip air ticket to the Solomon Islands
cost $700. He also brought $600 for three weeks of expenses. Working his
way west from Guadalcanal as far as the Shortland Islands, he discovered
a number of planes. "Wherever I went, people treated me like family," Fenstermaker
says. "But the Solomon Islands' national government prohibited me from
salvaging the planes. "Most countries don't allow salvage, to
preserve wreckage as relics and also as a tourist draw."
Finally, after four years of negotiations,
Indonesia gave him permission to salvage aircraft from that island nation.
Fenstermaker learned to speak two of Indonesia's 700 dialects and recovered
four Japanese planes from Irian Jaya (the Indonesian half of the island of
New Guinea). One day, in the cockpit of a P-38, Fenstermaker found the skeleton
of an American pilot - and his priorities changed forever. "It
was a real shock," he says. "I'd thought that everyone had
been found or had gone down with a ship somewhere."
He began taking the
money he earned selling aircraft parts and using it to discover the bodies
of other American MIAs. "I start with a preliminary investigation of the
Missing Aircraft Report," Fenstermaker says. "Then, because place
names change, I study maps printed during World War II. "Finally, I recreate
the flight of the missing plane." This requires knowledge of weather
conditions; aircraft and pilot performance; reliability of a plane's radio
equipment; maybe even the silting of a river.
"Plus high-school math to compute time, speed and distance," Fenstermaker
says. "The Internet is a great help. When I first started in the 1980s,
my monthly fax charges came to $500, and there were all those collect calls
from Indonesia. "The Internet and DNA are miracles for people working
to recover MIAs." To
date, Fenstermaker has surveyed more than 200 crash sites and found remains
at 26.
"In many cases, local religious scruples had helped to protect a site," he
says. "The
other bodies may have been buried by villagers." He reported those 26
coordinates to the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii
(CILHI), but so far the Army has recovered only one body, Fenstermaker says.
That was
Lt. Wynans Ellis "Flip" Frankfort, whose P-47D
42-75940 went down on Biak Island, just off Irian Jaya, at 4:30 p.m. on
May 27, 1944. With help from the local people, who fanned out in V-shaped search
patterns, Fenstermaker discovered Frankfort's plane northwest of Makabo, a
village of three or four families, on June 17, 1990.
Returning to Biak in the
spring of 1991, he found Frankfort's body and notified CILHI. After further
investigation, the remains of the 21-year-old graduate of Virginia Tech were
returned to his hometown, Franklin, Va., and buried on Sept. 16, 1995. Fenstermaker
says that he has found Japanese dog tags and contacted the Japanese government,
but he has received no response.
Of the 15 MIA cases Fenstermaker
is working on now, he says that of C-47B
43-48308 is by far the most difficult.
On May 16, 1946, the C-47 took off from Rangoon, Burma, en route to Calcutta,
India, 630 miles away. The next day, the plane went missing.
On board were a
pilot, a co-pilot, a radio man and eight passengers, plus the caskets of 38
Americans who'd died in a Japanese POW camp in Rangoon. One of the dead was
2nd Lt. Joseph Rich of Portland, Maine, who served with the 308th Bomb Group,
373rd Bomb Squadron.
According to his great niece Lisa Phillips, of Windham,
Maine, the B-24 bomber of which Rich was the navigator was shot down on Nov.
27, 1943. Rich spent the next 10 months in solitary confinement, underground
in a wooden cage. When he died on Sept. 13, 1944 - of disease, starvation and
daily beatings - he weighed 80 pounds.
As he was dying, Rich passed his wedding
ring to a friend, who tied it to a string and hid it in a crack in the wall. "A
guy with a photographic memory would memorize the name of each new POW and
also the date that he died," Fenstermaker says, explaining how these
details could be known.
Hoping to bring her great uncle home, Phillips sought the help
of Fenstermaker and many other experts, including Robert Ballard, the oceanographer
who discovered the wreck of the Titanic. Thanks to the Freedom of Information
Act, they obtained the Missing Aircrew Report, the Accident Report and weather
maps for the exact day the aircraft went missing.
According to Fenstermaker,
Rich's C-47 had last reported in when it was 55 miles from Calcutta. So on
May 16, 1946, the Army began searching south of Calcutta, in the Bay of Bengal.
But the day before takeoff, the pilot had mentioned that - because of an approaching
storm and because he didn't like flying over water - he was going to hug the
coast of Burma and what is now Bangladesh. This would make his flight 770 miles
long instead of the 630-mile direct route.
On May 18, 1946, a search crew spotted
a dye marker, but no wreckage, in the sea south of Bangladesh. "I believe
the C-47 crashed on land in Bangladesh," Fenstermaker says. "But
I must prove beyond a doubt that it isn't in the water." By congressional
law, an MIA's next-of-kin have the option to repatriate a body. "There
should be no American MIAs buried in cemeteries overseas," Fenstermaker
says. "But some people don't want bad memories brought up again, and
so they want the bodies left where they were found.
Fenstermaker is also a contributror to PacificWrecks.com website
which has profiles on the aircraft he is involved with, photos fronm his collection,
and an interview about him.
