|
Fathoming a flier's fate Oregonians search for a WWII bomber that crashed on a practice run
Sunday, November 28, 2004
MATTHEW PREUSCH
TULELAKE, Calif. -- Herman Vowell remembers the day well: Dec. 4, 1944. The sky was cloudless and the ground brilliant with 18 inches of new snow. The peaks of the Warner Mountains formed a white hedgerow off to the east.
Vowell was a young ranch hand on a horseback picnic with his wife, Betty, in the range country around Clear Lake. The couple stopped to watch a squadron of torpedo bombers from the Navy base near Klamath Falls.
The planes were preparing to dive-bomb a dummy target moored near the lake's northwestern edge, a flat called Fiddler's Green.
The lead plane, a 40-foot TBF-1 Avenger flown by Lt. Robert J. Pinz, descended toward the target but never pulled out. With a splash of water and a plume of steam, it disappeared into the lake.
"It was just like you'd drop a rock," recalled Vowell, now 88. "There was no rip or tear. It just dropped straight down."
The pilot and the plane were never seen again. Their disappearance eventually became the stuff of speculation and lore in the lower Klamath Basin's farming communities.
Now, six decades later, two men have made it their mission to provide answers to the pilot's last surviving relative, his 95-year-old brother.
John Prosser and Jerry Maxwell hope to do what the Navy hasn't: find Lt. Pinz.
Their search tools consist of a small aluminum boat, an electronic fish finder and long-handled rakes. Their only witness is Vowell, who returned to Clear Lake to show them where he believes the plane plunged into the water.
Vowell remembers that the other planes in the squadron completed their practice runs and then swarmed the area -- "just like a bunch of bees buzzing around" -- looking for their lost commander.
That evening, Vowell phoned the Navy base -- now Kingsley Field, home to the 173rd Fighter Wing of the Oregon Air National Guard -- to explain what he'd seen.
"They said, 'Oh, man, I'm glad you called. We had no idea what happened,' " Vowell said.
The Navy's official account of the crash differs from Vowell's recollections. Pinz appeared to try to pull out of his dive but was too low, a military report said, and when the plane hit the water, it "completely disintegrated on impact scattering wreckage over a large area."
The next spring, the body of Pinz's gunner, David Otto Herget of Talisheek, La., washed ashore. That was the only evidence of the crash that ever surfaced.
Prosser, a 53-year-old potato farmer, and Maxwell, a 74-year-old retired airline agent, began their search a year ago by digging up old Navy records and newspaper articles to get details of the crash and any search efforts.
They tracked down one of the officers who worked at the base then. He told them a search team camped for two weeks at Fiddler's Green until winter set in but had no luck. With the war on, the Navy apparently gave up the search.
Maxwell was 14 when the crash occurred, and both men grew up hearing stories of a plane lost in the lake behind the brown hills that border Tulelake, Malin and Newell.
Some people claimed to have spotted the tail sticking out of the lake at low water. Others supposedly had a relative or friend who had seen debris on the lakeshore.
"I've chased down every one of those rumors, and no one has ever seen this plane" since it crashed, Prosser said.
In the spring, Prosser and Maxwell began making the hour drive from their homes in Malin along the muddy and rutted roads leading to Clear Lake Reservoir. The shallow U-shaped lake -- covering about 17,000 acres -- is a national wildlife refuge and source of irrigation water for Klamath Basin farmers.
First, they scanned the shore for wreckage. Finding nothing, they began a methodical sweep of the suspected crash site, putt-putting along in Prosser's fishing boat, dragging oversized garden rakes along the lake bottom.
"It's just like looking for a needle in a haystack out there . . . it would be a miracle if we were to snag onto something," Prosser said.
The men contacted the Navy for help, seeking the use of ground-penetrating radar or other equipment to scan Clear Lake, which is a murky bowl of silt. But their request spent months wandering through the bureaucracy.
So far, they've made six trips out on the lake, covering about 40 percent of their square-mile search area, helped by a grid of moored buoys.
The only excitement came on an early trip when Prosser's rake snagged on something. He dived in with all his clothes on, expecting to find a piece of the Avenger.
"Man, I was going to get in there and grab the tail of this plane," Prosser recalled. His excitement turned to disappointment when he emerged holding an old fence post.
The men made their last trip to the lake earlier this month and don't expect to return until the spring thaw.
In the meantime, they're still working on the Navy. Their request currently rests with Tim Nicholson, assistant program director at the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery's Mortuary Affairs office in Great Lakes, Ill.
Mortuary Affairs, Nicholson said, handles the logistical side of death for the Navy and Marines. It makes sure the remains of servicemen and women from conflicts past and present get home. It also assists families with funeral services.
"We are very busy with Iraq," he said.
Nicholson said he wants to help find Pinz, but Navy protocol for recovering remains usually applies to overseas deaths and is of little use in this instance. "I'm still trying myself to get an answer on this case," he said.
That's small comfort to Pinz's brother, Morton Pinz, now living in a Los Angeles retirement home.
He isn't so much angry as he is weary of how the Navy has handled his brother's case. "I'm not upset with them," he said. "I think that they were derelict, derelict in not completing the job that they started."
His brother, he said, was a prelaw student at the University of California at Los Angeles when war broke out and joined the Navy, serving on the USS Wright, a seaplane tender based at Pearl Harbor.
Morton Pinz is grateful to Prosser and Maxwell for taking up the search.
"It's not a question of seeing his body," he said. "It's a question of completing the recovery so he can be buried were he should buried, not in a plane in the lake."
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
