Staff Sgt. Alvin Lenox had been dead for two weeks longer than his 66-year-old son, John, had been alive. The Army Air Force radio operator crashed with four others in a cargo plane flying a supply mission from Yantai, China, to Joraht, India, in August 1943. They went down in a treacherous mountain region known as The Hump, which swallowed about 600 U.S. planes during World War II.
Yet the fellow on the phone earlier this year, Gary Zaetz, wanted no money and sent Lenox to a detailed report posted online containing photos of the aircraft's remains, GPS coordinates and its tail number. There was even testimony from an Indian tribesman saying he'd seen the plane go down, scavenged it for metal for crude implements and buried the remains he found nearby.
Courtesy of Gary Zaetz
Staff Sgt. Alvin Lenox went missing while flying a mission for the U.S. Army in 1943 from China to India. Arizona adventurer Clayton Kuhles found the wreckage of the plane more than six decades later.
"The only concern I have is that one man walking on his own has found all the aircrafts," said Lenox, a retired financial manager from North Las Vegas whose never-remarried 92-year-old mother lives with him. "Why wasn't the federal government able to do something about it over the last 60 years? What was the problem? They knew these planes went down and knew approximately where they went down."
It's a question Kuhles asks constantly. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, more than 74,000 service members remained unaccounted for from World War II as of Sept. 30, far more than the 1,728 still missing from the Vietnam War, 8,037 from the Korean War and 127 from hot skirmishes that broke out during the Cold War. Many of those missing from World War II are presumed to be casualties in Europe buried by locals in unmarked graves or naval officers who sank to unreachable depths. But hundreds also perished flying supply and attack missions from Allied bases in northern India to southwestern parts of Japanese-occupied China.
A self-described adventurer and military history buff, Kuhles had never heard of The Hump until 2000, when a guide hiking with him through Myanmar mentioned that an American plane had come down in the nearby mountains. They went to the site, and Kuhles became "captivated by the fact that no one has ever made an attempt to find these aircraft."
He then learned that the Hump's icy air flow and cloudy, stormy conditions frequently made flying in the planes of the era -- without radar or proper navigational equipment -- deadly. In subsequent years, the married 55-year-old from Prescott, Ariz., has undertaken annual trips throughout the region and located 15 wrecks during perilous journeys through dense, trail-less, high-altitude jungle with hired local hands.
It takes days to get there, but Kuhles usually stays at a wreck for just a few hours, shooting photos, taking notes and picking up tiny plane scraps to bring back for relatives without disturbing the site. Human remains are sometimes evident, but often they have been buried under a top soil layer after all these decades. The local people, too, sometimes bury or burn them, scavenging the plane for what they turn into the only metal implements they have.
"I've seen more cobras than I ever imagined I'd see, I've had malaria twice, I've had dengue fever once, I've had infected leech bites that create big abscesses, all kinds of bizarre stuff," said Kuhles, a Chicago native and Army veteran.
Courtesy of Gary Zaetz
Gary Zaetz, wearing a blue shirt, stands at the crash site of a U.S. military plane that went down during World War II, in January 1944. Irwin Zaetz, Gary's uncle, was aboard.
When Zaetz found out his uncle's plane, named Hot as Hell, had been found, he and the survivors of his uncle's crew tried to get the attention of the Defense Department's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) but made little progress. The agency's 400-person staff spends $55 million per year to conduct expensive, high-tech and time-consuming investigations all over the globe. Its excavations result in the recovery of about 100 service members a year.
The Hot as Hell families say the agency initially told them that the case was not a priority, and that the Indian government was not giving them permission to visit the remote area where Kuhles had found the wreckage. But they kept pushing, urging members of Congress for help and taking their case to the media. Last fall, JPAC sent an expedition and returned to excavate the site in January but were snowed out. A third government-run mission is scheduled to depart his month, more than three years after Kuhles filed his report to JPAC.
"I do feel the U.S. basically closed the books on World War II MIAs around 1950 and only began looking at them again in the 1970s when the whole MIA issue became visible politically as a result of lobbying by Vietnam War MIA families," said Zaetz, 55, of Cary, N.C. "But as the years continued, the focus continued to remain solely on the Vietnam War MIAs, with token attention to the vastly larger number of WWII MIAs."
No law requires JPAC to respond within any length of time to credible information of MIAs' whereabouts, but a provision in the recently passed Defense Authorization Act does requires the agency to recover the remains of about 200 service members per year by 2015. What it doesn't include is any additional funding, said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense POW/MIA Personnel Office at the Pentagon, which is responsible for assisting JPAC with policy and diplomatic issues related to conducting searches and excavations on foreign soil.
JPAC's spokesman, Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, said the group welcomes the information Kuhles provided but that its tight budget requires it to plan out a year in advance which leads to investigate. JPAC has nearly 700 sets of remains to identify at its lab on Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, and priority for field expeditions usually goes to sites that are somehow threatened by physical turmoil.
"To those families, it's very important, but that mission is one of thousands for us," Perry said. "Unless that mountainside is going to be developed or something, there's not a reason for us to rush to go there."
John Lenox and the aging relatives of other World War II veterans disagree. His mother is 92, and he'd like the government to return her some remains for a proper military burial of her long-lost husband before she dies.
"I'm selfish, like everyone else would be, too," said Lenox, who has been told that JPAC planned to send a team to his father's wreckage next year. "They are definitely cooperating. We're just one on a list of people who have relatives that are missing."
As for Kuhles, he left Oct. 26 for another two-month mission to India, where he's following up on several leads. He said he's tried to get funding for these efforts, which cost more than $20,000 each, from the U.S. government, Veterans of Foreign Wars groups and such noted MIA/POW advocates as former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot. To date, he said, he's received only some donations from grateful survivors that amount to about half the cost of one mission.
"He is one of the nation's great humanitarians," Zaetz said. "He's been doing this on his own dime, he goes out himself into very, very difficult areas of the world, potentially very dangerous, where he gets bitten by cobras and stuff like that, and he does this out of a sense of obligation that the families of these men who went missing in that theater of war deserve some sense of closure."
