60 Years Later, Military Is Giving Remains a Proper Burial

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60 Years Later, Military Is Giving Remains a Proper Burial

By KOMO & KIMA News Staffs (TV stations in Yakima & Seattle)

Kittitas County -
Deep into the Cascades at the end of a forest service road high above Cle Elum, a group of military experts start their daily and grueling 2 hour climb on foot.

On a tight military budget, it's the only way to reach what's left of a Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bomber.

On Feb. 15,1945, it carried Ensign Matthew McFarland and Lt. Jesse Battenfeld to their deaths as they vanished on a routine flight from Sand Point Naval Air Station.

The wreckage was found 7-months later but 60 years later the wreckage and the remains of the two men are still there.

So for the first time in Washington state, the same military teams that bring MIA remains home from Cambodia and Vietnam are in Cle Elum to bring these men home too.

"My father was in the military for 23 years, in the Army, in the infantry," said William Belcher, PhD., the lead forensic anthropologist on this JPAC (Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command) Team. "It helps me sort of pay back the debt I have to him and his generation."

"Because if it was me I would want somebody to do it for me," said Maj. Charles Gatling, the ground commander for this mission. "And so that's the torch I carry when I go up the hill. If I was up there I would want somebody to go up and get me."

Way Up On A Steep Slope

The remnants of the plane rest at roughly 5,700 feet on a steep 40-degree slope.

JPAC teams first surveyed the site last year but they weren't the first to find it.

Bits of hacksaw blades and 1950's era cans of Liquid Wrench litter the site. Scavengers have taken portions of the fuselage and presumably the surviving gauges and cockpit instrumentation -- salvage that the Navy says is illegal.

But of most interest to the JPAC team is a gravesite about 75 feet away from the crash.

When the plane was first discovered seven months after it went down, the remains and personal effects of the two men were placed in a small grave.

Their names were hand-engraved on the flat surface of a boulder, a cross was carved in the base of a large tree, and two stainless steel crosses with names engraved on them were placed at the gravesite too.

"This is a beautiful area and this is technically a grave, but I think it was always meant to be a temporary grave," said Belcher. "I think the right thing to do is to recover these guys, ID them positively or as well as we can, and then bury them in a place of honor."

Military Connection

In the first few minutes of the archeological dig of the grave and the airplane debris field, the team uncovered the first connection to McFarland and Battenfeld. Sifting the soil through screens, they found a religious medallion: a Catholic St. Benedict medal buried with the two men those 60 years ago.

"If it wasn't for them, there'd be no us," Gatling explained of the military connection between himself and the two men he was searching for. "That's how it works."

And to help on this dig, Army Reservists from the 737th Transportation Company in Yakima volunteered. They returned from a year in Iraq just this past February.

"It needs to be done, " said Capt. Gilbert Moxley. "This is a noble cause and we're more than happy to volunteer our time and come out here and lend a hand."

They lend that hand knowing that even if 60 years goes by, another soldier in uniform will do his or her best to make sure no one is left behind.

"The guys that are on the battlefield now in Iraq and Afghanistan in the back of their mind if they know what we do," said SFC Michael Henshaw. "They know that we're gonna come after them."

"When you get to a point that you want to quit, the motivation to keep going is you do need to pay back that debt, that obligation," added Belcher.

And so each morning, they march those two hours on a 2,000-foot elevation gain over the course of a mile to keep that obligation and keep that promise to bring two more men home.

The JPAC team will spend about a month at the Cle Elum site. Then they will search a second crash site near the Canadian border and North Cascades National Park. That's where Lt. Kenneth Ambrose crashed in a P-38 Lightning in 1942.

Hikers discovered the crash in 1998 but this will be the first JPAC authorized archaeological dig at the site.

Leaving No Stone Unturned

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command's mission is to achieve the fullest possible account of all Americans missing as a result of past military conflicts.

JPAC teams search for, recover, and identify remains of MIA's from World War II through the Gulf War.

One soldier is still missing from the first Gulf War, 1,800 from Vietnam, 8,100 from the Korean War, and a staggering 78,000 still missing from World War II.

On average JPAC teams identify 74 POW/MIAs each year.