Sao Yotkantha was ten years old and was helping his father in the paddy field when he heard the boom of a plane very close. He looked up and saw a twin-engine plane crashing less than a mile away and bursting into flames.
It was World War II, and the crash of the American plane was the biggest event in the history of the small village of Baan Mae Kua, in northern Thailand.
“I heard a roaring sound and saw a flying boat, which is what Thais called planes back then,” said Sao, who is now 87 years old. “It was very close to us. It wasn’t like any other sound I had ever heard before. I saw the plane go down.”
The plane, a P-38 Lightning, was on a reconnaissance mission, flying over Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar), when it was likely struck by lightning and fell from the sky. A heavy rain doused the flames.
Sao and her father rushed to see the disaster, but the only thing left of the pilot was his torso. Sao said it was the first time he had seen a foreigner and he was intrigued by the man’s auburn hair.
In March, 77 years later, in yet another important event for the small community, a team from the US military arrived to excavate the probable site of the plane crash, in Lampang province, in the hope of finding enough human remains of the pilot to confirm your identity.
Nine Americans from the Army, Air Force and Navy, as well as civilian professionals, worked alongside 30 Thai contractors in the village to convert the site into an archaeological dig. Before completing the excavation in April, they found fragments that surely belonged to an American aircraft and bits of what might be a human bone.
A metal plate found read “Army Air Corps”, a precursor to the Air Force. A piece of another sign read “Aviation Corporation” and “New York, NY” but offers no further clues.
“I’m very hopeful,” said civil archaeologist Mindy Simonson, who oversaw the excavation. “The things we’ve found so far are all good evidence.”
The search for the pilot’s remains is part of a US effort to recover the remains of missing military personnel and fulfill the military’s promise to bring everyone home. More than 72,000 people are reported missing in conflicts abroad, mainly in World War II.
The Hawaii-based Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is responsible for identifying the last location where a missing person was seen, conducting excavations and identifying remains. The process can take years. With an annual budget of US$ 131 million (R$ 633 million), the agency has already identified more than 1,200 missing military personnel since 2015.
With its characteristic double tail, the P-38 crashed on November 5, 1944 in a forested area beside Baan Mae Kua. The village had only a few hundred inhabitants. There was no electricity, and none of the residents owned a car or motorcycle. The local school only reached third grade because there was no teacher available for fourth grade.
Metal was valuable scrap metal, so the villagers took most of the plane’s wreckage away in carts pulled by buffaloes. It was unclear what was done with the pilot’s torso.
The place where the plane crashed turned into a rice paddy. The village’s older inhabitants call it Campo do Trunco ​​do Defuntos; the younger ones began to call it Field of the Fallen Plane.
Since the war the village has modernized, but life hasn’t changed much. Today Baan Mae Kua has 2,000 inhabitants. They grow rice and cassava and raise cattle. Many of the families have lived in the village for generations.
One-story houses or two-story houses are hidden behind concrete block walls lined up alongside narrow alleys. In the backyards you can see banana, papaya, mango and tamarind trees. Today the village school goes up to the sixth grade, and there is a secondary school five miles away. Some students go to college and then come back as professors.
Older residents of Baan Mae Kua say they grew up hearing stories about the American plane.
“I’ve heard about this plane for as long as I can remember,” said Bai Norkaew, one of the villagers who was paid $12 a day to help excavate the site.
With the help of a metal detector, the team planted hundreds of little white flags on the ground to mark points where there was possibly wreckage from the plane. The excavation revealed variations in the soil layers, indicating an impact crater. Using water to sift through the dense clay, the team looked for bits of metal, glass or bone, however small, that might have come from the fallen device. The temperature went over 38 degrees centigrade at times.
Wearing a gray T-shirt wrapped around her head, leaving only her eyes visible, Bai, who is 70 years old, was glad to have the job. “I’m still strong,” she said.
The per diem she was getting was better than the US$9 (R$43) a day she earns to work in the cassava plantations, and the same applies to the working conditions, with hourly rest breaks and a less daily work. Also, Bai liked being able to do a good deed for the deceased.
“It makes sense in a traditional Thai way,” she explained. “Recover the body to earn merit and create good karma for the pilot.”
The pilot who would have crashed had a reputation for taking unnecessary risks. Historian Daniel Jackson wrote in his 2021 book “Fallen Tigers” that the pilot, surprised by a storm, may have been flying at low altitude to better photograph enemy targets.
The location of the plane crash was well known to residents of the village, but it only came to the attention of the American agency in 2018 thanks to three history buffs: Daniel Jackson; Hak Hakanson, American resident in Thailand, and retired Air Force Marshal Sakpinit Promthep, historian at the Royal Thai Air Force Museum.
Last week, the agency held a repatriation ceremony at the Utapao airbase, before sending the objects recovered from the excavation to its laboratory in Hawaii. The agency said confirming the pilot’s identity will require a detailed analysis and could take months.
“It’s good to know there are pieces of an American plane here,” said Air Force Captain Jenavee Viernes, who directed the search operation. “But we still don’t know if it’s the plane we’re looking for.”
