US military dig up Essex field to try and find remains of missing WWII airman

Tim Baker2 September 2019

The American military has dug up a field in Essex in a bid to find the body of a missing World War Two airman whose plane crashed and exploded just before D-Day.

Members of the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) have been carefully sifting through the dirt to see if they can recover the man’s remains.

Agency officials have decided not to name the missing person out of respect to the airman’s family.

The US aviator went missing after the plane he was in crash landed just two days before D-Day.

A marker points in a field near to Stansted Airport in Essex
PA

The B-26 Marauder took off from RAF Stansted Mountfitchet - now London Stansted Airport - and suffered a catastrophic engine failure on June 4 1944.

The bomber fell from the sky and ploughed into a field with 4,000lbs of explosives inside.

Four of the six crew members escaped from the burning wreckage while one died at the scene when the volatile cargo exploded.

The sixth member of flight team was never found, and 75 years later the American armed forces were hoping they could bring another comrade home.

The DPAA decided not to release the exact location of where they were digging to try and keep treasure hunters away.

Pictures show vast amounts of shrapnel and ammunition have been recovered from the dig.

Items found by members of the United States Department of Defence
PA

And Sergeant First Class Peter Holderness has confirmed the excavation successfully recovered “possible osseous material”, or bone matter.

The samples will be sent to The Agency’s base in Hawaii to see if they belong to the missing airman.

If the remains turn out to belong to the unaccounted for crew member, they will be returned to the United States and - if the family so wish - buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia with other fallen service men and women.

The meticulous dig was carried out by a team of 23 people and wound down at the end of August.

Brian Seymour at an excavation site in a field near to Stansted Airport
PA

Agency staff used a “wet screening tent” to sift through the debris and gently remove anything of interest using hoses.

Anything that looked like it was bone or other personal evidence - such as dog tags - was sent to the testing facility on Hawaii 7,300 miles away.

If the missing person was not found by the dig team, the agency could apply for a licence to carry out further digs.

This search was the first operation carried out by the Defence POW/MIA Accounting Agency on UK soil.

Most of their work looking for the 82,000 missing American personnel overseas has taken place in south-east Asian countries like Vietnam and Laos since the agency was established in 2015.

Sergeant Holderness said the agency's mission is to "find and retrieve our nation's fallen service members and account for as many as possible".

Despite an annual budget of around $130 million, the agency only identified 206 people overseas last year.

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