|
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.”
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
