Some corner of a foriegn field...

The bone collectors: The search for lost heroes of WWII

The bodies of some of the thousands of allied airmen shot down in Germany during the Second World War have been recovered thanks to the extraordinary work of Uwe Benkel and his team. Tony Paterson reports
Published: 16 January 2006

A fist-sized block of glass sits on top of a stack of files in Uwe Benkel's sitting-room. It looks like an expensive crystal paper weight that might have been bought at Harrods. Yet the block has a more poignant history. A few weeks before Christmas it was retrieved from a 15ft pit hidden deep in a forest in Germany's Rhineland Palatinate district near the French border.

The block once formed part of the bulletproof windscreen of an American fighter bomber flown by 21-year-old Ronald Potter, whose P47 "Thunderbolt" plane was shot down 61 years ago during a Second World War dogfight with a German Messerschmitt.

Yesterday, Uwe Benkel, a mild- mannered social security office manager in his forties, presented the chunk of windscreen and other bits of retrieved plane wreckage to Kerry Potter, the 62-year-old son of the pilot of the American plane. He travelled to Germany from Alaska for what was an emotional ceremony.

"Kerry Potter is deeply moved," Mr Benkel said. "He told me on the phone from Alaska that this will finally connect him with his father. He said he had given up hope of finding out much about him. Until now, nobody really knew how he died. He was simply listed as killed in action and his body was found in a mass grave."

The event will be another milestone in Uwe Benkel's remarkable part-time career. Since 1989, he and the 14 other voluntary and unpaid members of his Research Group for the Missing have recovered the remains of 80 British, American and German wartime aircraft shot down during the Second World War and recovered the bodies of 28 pilots listed as missing.

"It is more of a calling than a hobby," Mr Benkel said last week, "We just think its right to give these lads a decent burial and explain their fate to their relatives. We don't give a damn whose side they were on. Most of them were hardly out of their teens," he added.

The fate of US Air Force Lieutentant Ronald Potter is typical of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 pilots shot down over Germany during the Second World War. Shortly after his plane crashed, his body was found by local German officials and simply dumped in a mass grave. After the Allied invasion of Germany, US officials found the body, identified it, and returned it to America for military burial. But Ronald Potter was just one of the thousands of US pilots killed in action.

However, Mr Benkel's team of crash-site excavators was able to discover the exact circumstances of his death. "We asked local people who remembered witnessing the dogfight. Then we actually found the pilot of the Messerschmitt who shot down Lt Potter's plane. He is still alive!" Mr Benkel said.

Finding the wreckage of the plane then became comparatively easy. A forester took them to what he believed was the crash site and the team started digging. Sections of a bullet-riddled tail section were pulled from the clay floor of the forest. It emerged that Lt Potter had baled out and that German witnesses who first arrived at the crash site found his body propped up against a tree. "A syringe was lying next to him and we think that he had injected himself with morphine from his first-aid kit to deaden the pain he must have been suffering from his injuries. The German pilot saw him bale out and hit the tail of the plane as it crashed," Mr Benkel said.

Rumours abound in villages near the crash site that Lt Potter may have been clubbed to death by zealous Nazi officials acting on orders from Air Marshall Hermann Goering, who decreed that no Allied pilot should be left alive on German soil. However, Mr Benkel insists that hundreds of other Allied airmen were spared such a fate by ordinary Germans who intervened on their behalf.

Good luck to them, and may everyone eventually come home.

"You're on your own. Good luck."

A new version of Twilight 2000 is to be released next year!

Twilight: 2013. Looks promising.

For those not familiar with the game, the title of the post is the final message from the commander of the US 5th Infantry Division (Mechanized) on 1 July 2000, as a Soviet force that somehow managed to find enough fuel to run all its tanks shattered the last functioning NATO force in central Poland. This was three years after a limited strategic exchange had knocked most governments out of commission.

T:2K was a great setting, and a unique game in that there was a clear goal for the players who were running the rag-tag survivors of the NATO forces after the final attack: Get home! Much of the early part of the campaign involved escaping the Soviets, getting to Krakow, and from there to the Baltic coast. along the way there were various adventures to be had, from fighting river pirates on the Vistula to finding the Black Madonna. Players could join in the tearing down of civilization or aid in building it back up.

In one campaign, I played a Corps of Engineers officer from the Louisiana National Guard. My character ended up staying behind to help rebuild Bremenhaven. It was interesting for me, since it was one of those RPG moments where what I wanted conflicted with what the character would do.

Work stuff.

Today was good, especially when I had a few minutes to visit my sister and Kylie the Wonder Baby (who can now sit up all on her own! Yay!!!!)

The day started way too early with a meeting. Evidently, we are going to hire three new drivers, and go to a four day week, with ten-hour days. This is workable for me, since when you're driving the day goes quickly anyway. The newbies would be driving Saturdays, meaning that I'd have weekends again. Three day weekends, at that! This a Good Thing.

Also in the Good Thing category, we've won the Lunch War.

A few weeks ago, it was announced that we had to take a half hour lunch. An unpaid lunch. Ladies and gents, I'm in a big-ass truck all day. The list of places I can stop for a half-hour is limited at best. Also, the schedules tend to be so tight that stopping would put me behind. So what happened is that drivers would finish their days, and sit around the warehouse for 30 minutes before clocking out. Since I have a tough enough commute as it is without waiting for rush hour to really get going, this annoyed me no end.

I checked the law on lunch breaks (we were told that this was a legal requirement) and found that I could opt out in writing. I mentioned this to several of the people up the chain of command. Today, we find out that we're now getting paid for lunch. Basically, the higher-ups realized that there was no way for us to track breaks, and it was easier to tacitly admit that we were not going to sit around for 30 minutes twiddling thumbs.

We're also getting at least one new truck to go with the new drivers. More coming, and these are different models. Air brakes and air ride, so my days of being a human ping-pong ball in the cab may be coming to an end (Seriously, on some of these roads I'm hitting my head on the cab ceiling. Not just annoying, but dangerous.)

KPIG really needs to get a reliable transmitter in the Santa Clara Valley. I lose the 107.5 FM signal when I come back over the mountain from Santa Cruz, and the AM signal is pretty weak down here.