Body Found Believed to Be WWII Airman

[Paul Krumrei]

Unreal Story!

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - Two climbers on a Sierra Nevada glacier discovered an ice-encased body believed to be that of an airman whose plane crashed in 1942.

The man was wearing a World War II-era Army-issued parachute when his frozen head, shoulder and arm were spotted Sunday on 13,710-foot Mount Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park, park spokeswoman Alex Picavet said.

Park rangers and specialists camped on the remote mountainside in freezing weather for an excavation expected to take several days. The body was 80 percent encased in ice, Picavet said Wednesday.

``We're not going to go fast,'' she said. ``We want to preserve him as much as possible. He's pretty intact.''


The excavation crew included an expert from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, a military unit that identifies and recovers personnel who have been missing for decades.


Park officials believe the serviceman may have been part of the crew of an AT-7 navigational training plane that crashed on Nov. 18, 1942. The wreckage and four bodies were found in 1947 by a climber.


Some 88,000 Americans are missing in action from past wars, military officers said. Most of them - 78,000 - are from World War II.


The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command works on hundreds of cases a year, averaging two identifications a week, said spokeswoman Rumi Nielson-Green.


Finding bodies preserved in a glacier is unusual but not unheard of, command officials said. Two years ago, the unit recovered the body of a Cold War-era officer who died in Greenland.










http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story. ... tm&sc=1110

[Eureka181]

Wow! Very interesting!

Eric

[Paul Krumrei]

Here is some video of the find.

http://kstp.dayport.com/viewer/viewerpa ... _ID=163594


Looks like the soldier is from my neck of the woods here in Minnesota!

[spriso]

Frozen body may be cadet’s

By David Hawley
Knight Ridder Newspapers

ST. PAUL, Minn. — In the weeks after Leo Mustonen disappeared, telegrams arrived regularly at the Brainerd, Minn., home of his parents, telling Arvid and Anna Mustonen about efforts to find a training plane carrying U.S. Army Air Corps cadets that had vanished somewhere in the California hills on Nov. 18, 1942.

Last week, decades after Arvid and Anna took their grief to their graves, authorities announced that one of the airmen — his body intact, wearing a uniform and frozen in a glacier — has been found.

The young man’s identity may not be verified for months, but it is likely that he is Leo Mustonen or one of his three comrades, who disappeared into a dawn Minnesota sky nearly 63 years ago.

“Mrs. Mustonen never got over it, not to her dying day,” said Marjorie Freeman, who at the time lived near the family in one of Brainerd’s Finnish neighborhoods. Her mother-in-law, who spoke only Finnish, was Anna Mustonen’s best friend.

Leo Mustonen, born in Brainerd on March 1, 1920, was three years older than Marjorie Freeman.

“He was very nice looking, a slender fellow with light hair who was very particular about his dress,” she recalled. “He was kind of reserved — a typical Finn. I don’t know if he had a girlfriend or even dated.”

Leo Mustonen attended Brainerd High School, where he was in the German club and played in the band. He graduated in 1938 and then attended Brainerd Junior College — where, despite his Finnish reserve, he was a member of the debate squad — before transferring to the University of Minnesota.

But in September 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, Mustonen quit school and joined the Army, his mother later told a reporter.

“I think he did it because he had always been interested in flying,” Freeman said. “And he would have made it. He was very intelligent.”

On Nov. 18, 1942, according to military accident reports, Mustonen was one of three navigator cadets aboard a Beech AT-7 training plane that left a military airfield near Sacramento, Calif., on a routine training flight that was bound for Corning, Calif.

The pilot was Lt. William Gamber, 23, of Fayette, Ohio. Mustonen and two other cadets — John M. Mortenson, 25, of Moscow, Idaho, and Ernest Munn, 23, of St. Clairsville, Ohio — each sat at individual chart tables with their own navigational instruments.

The plane took off at 8:30 a.m., carrying enough fuel for a five-hour flight. At 1:30 p.m., a search began.

A year later, Anna Mustonen received a letter containing the uniform wings that her 22-year-old son would have received upon graduation from training. The letter also informed her that her son and the others were presumed dead.

In 1947, a climber scaling the Mount Mendel Glacier in Kings Canyon National Park found one of the AT-7’s twin engines in the snow at an elevation of 13,700 feet.

The crash site was 200 miles from the course that had been plotted. A search party found the second engine, scraps of clothing, a piece of dried flesh and Mortenson’s military dog tags. But the bodies of the four men had disappeared into the ice and snow.

A newspaper reporter broke the news to Anna Mustonen. “It’s been a long five years of waiting,” she said in a story printed Oct. 2, 1947, in the St. Paul Dispatch.

Last week, after 58 years, climbers found the body of a fair-haired airman exposed in the receding glacier. Removed from the glacier in a coffin of ice, the body was taken to Fresno, Calif., where it was carefully thawed.

On Monday, the remains were flown to Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, where the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command will conduct efforts at identification. The airman will be eligible for interment with honors in Arlington National Cemetery, according to military officials.

If the airman is Mustonen, no one remains in Brainerd to claim him, according to Freeman. Leo Mustonen had an older brother, Arvo, who moved to Florida shortly after World War II and died decades ago, she said.

His parents, however, rest in a Brainerd cemetery, where a local group, of which Freeman is a member, decorates their graves on Memorial Day.

“They had no other family around here, as far as I know,” Freeman said. “It was just them and Leo and Arvo. But I think they would be pleased to have him found.”

[tom d. friedman]

a touching story was done on nbc nightly news the other night. if it is proven, then the frozen fatality has 3 still surviving sisters looking for closure on their long lost brother. authorities are naturally trying to piece the clues as we speak.