- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite & the Lab .
I'm Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison
Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW-Extension Cooperative Extension.
And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
the Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again
for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight's a rather special occasion because
it's the 70th anniversary of the signing
of the Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri
in Tokyo Bay.
And I'm delighted that we're able to have
a special Wednesday Nite at the Lab commensurate
with that special date.
Tonight's speaker is Sam Soderberg.
He's a student here at UW Madison who just came back
from a week in July in France
looking at the possibility of being able to identify
a US serviceman who was killed in action
in May 27th of 1944.
Sam is from Mosinee, graduated from Mosinee high school,
and went into the Air Force,
is now with the Wisconsin Air National Guard.
And tonight, he's going to give us
the story of this trip to France.
And this story is one person,
but this person, I think, stands for the several thousand
US service members who are still missing from that war,
and I hope we can do something about that
here at UW Madison and in other places around the country.
Please join me in welcoming Sam Soderberg
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab .
- Thanks, Tom.
(applause)
Good evening, everybody.
I appreciate you guys all coming out.
This is my first time being here,
so I'm extremely excited to be an attendee
and a presenter at the same time.
So tonight, I'm going to be presenting on
the Missing in Action Recovery and Identification Project,
specifically, my trip and Jed Henry's trip to France
in July 2015.
Tonight, my goal is, this slide show will be
presenting facts to you all,
and my job is to really make this story come alive
as it did for me as I discovered
First Lieutenant Frank Fazekas' story
and went through the facts, and then
when I went to France, met the interviewees,
and saw where his crash happened.
It really, the story blossoms and you can't help
but be sucked into it.
So that's my job tonight.
So a few things I'm going to cover is myself
and my background, the background of the MIA project
here at UW, the government's findings
on Lieutenant Fazekas' case,
our findings on Lieutenant Fazekas' case,
and some differences and similarities and going forward,
what our plans are.
So that's me in 2010.
I always tend to think of myself as a little guy at the time.
Basic training.
I'm currently 23 years old.
As Tom said, I'm from Mosinee, Wisconsin.
A small town of 4,000 people, just south of Wausau.
My parents are both from Stevens Point,
and I have two younger knucklehead brothers.
(audience laughter)
January of my senior year of high school,
I joined the Wisconsin Air National Guard and have been
in that unit, the 128th Air Control Squadron,
for about five and a half years working on radio
and SATCOM equipment.
In November of 2011, I deployed to Al Dhafra Air Base
in the United Arab Emirates in support of the joint defense
of the Arabian Gulf in Operation Enduring Freedom,
and came back in May of 2012 and continued
my education here.
As I mentioned, the Air Force training is a big part
of my educational background, and then I'm also a senior
in economics here at UW,
scheduled to graduate in May, finally,
after six years of school
So, it took a little while.
I'm a member of an organization called V.E.T.S,
which, our focus is helping veterans of
the military transition from military life
to the education life, which, as I experienced,
is quite the transition.
So that's pretty important to us.
And then I'm also the secretary of Badger Aviators,
which is a club aimed at fostering relationships
within the aviation community here at UW.
I recently got engaged to my beautiful fiance,
Sarah, up here.
We got engaged back in June,
and we're planning to get married in July.
So, say hi to her, if you get a chance.
I'm hoping to fly for the Air Force as a pilot
after graduation.
Madison would be great, but F-16s are quite the challenge
to get into, so we'll shoot for that and take
whatever I can get.
So that's pretty exciting.
I'm hoping to stay highly involved
with the MIA project going forward.
It's been a life-changing organization for me,
and I want to give as much back to that as I can.
Then eventually, attend grad school.
So, my involvement with the MIA project started
last fall when Chuck Konsitzke and Dr. Josh Hyman
came to an MIA meeting, or excuse me, a V.E.T.S. meeting,
and they presented the case for their program,
and specifically, Private First Class James Gordon,
which I'm not sure if all of you know of him,
but he was kind of the first soldier brought back
by an outside of the DOD entity.
And Chuck and the rest of the Biotech Center
had a big part in that, as well as Jed Henry,
who accompanied me to France.
So they presented their case, and they were asking
for undergraduate researchers like myself,
specifically veterans, who would have a strong
stock in helping them.
So, it was really a natural thing for me to say
that I wanted to join.
I've always wanted to give back to the veterans
that came before me.
I think it's incredibly important to do so.
So I expressed an interest in joining the team,
met with a bunch of people involved in the spring,
and volunteered for the trip to Europe in July of 2015.
So my motivation, it's kind of interesting,
the motivation behind the project because
I'm not ashamed to say that when I watch
the documentary on Private First Class Gordon,
I cried four to five times.
I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff,
and that feeling is something that you can't forget,
and chasing that, I think, is part of all of our
motivations in the MIA project.
So, although I made some sacrifices when I deployed,
these men and women, especially the ones
that have not been recovered,
gave the ultimate sacrifice.
And on that note, the family sacrifice is just as important
to remember.
So, for example, when I left, when I got deployed,
I remember the look on Sarah's face,
and my mother's face specifically,
and then I also got to see the look on their face
when I came home.
But these men and women never saw that look.
So that's kind of my personal motivation in my head.
Something to shoot for as I'm
doing the dirty work and hiking through the mountains
and whatever it might be.
So it's something that is very powerful to the
behind-the-scenes motivation.
So, the MIA project here at UW,
many of you have probably heard about it.
Our current focus is on the recovery and identification
of World War II veterans specifically
in the European Theatre.
It's an interesting thing here at the UW
that we have the ability that many other organizations don't
in that we have everything that it takes
to recover and bring back missing-in-action soldiers.
Specifically, the four scholarly disciplines of history,
archaeology, forensics, and genetic analysis.
Here is a picture of Private First Class Gordon
right on the screen for you.
He was the first assisted recovery, as I mentioned.
And there are 73,000 more missing-in-action
US service members from World War II.
So this is exactly 70 years since the conflict ended,
and we still have 73,000 men and women overseas.
So there's plenty of work to be done, that's for sure.
So, this presentation is going to concentrate entirely
on First Lieutenant Frank A. Fazekas.
I like to think of Frank as a
personal role model to me.
I included his height and weight on there because
he's pretty much exactly me.
I thought that was kind of unique.
Frank is from Trenton, New Jersey.
He was married at a young age.
He died when he was about 22, and he was married to Theresa,
and they had a young son, Frank S. Fazekas.
I included the amount of flying hours he has on here
because I'm 23 and I have seven hours of flight time.
He was 20, and had 540 hours of flight time.
So this guy was the cream of the crop
and really knew what he was doing.
And the fact that he had 540 flying hours at age 20
is incredible.
But anyway, he was a P-47 pilot, which, as you can see there
on the screen, the P-47 for the 22nd Fighter Squadron
with the 36th Fighter Group.
And a bit of recent news, as in last night at about 9
to 10 PM, I was doing some research online
and we believe that we found Frank's son
and his nephew.
They're still out and about on Facebook,
and we reached out to them and are waiting to hear
back from them.
So it's pretty exciting to see it all come alive
in terms of their family.
So the crash account from the official side,
the government's.
So the IDPF is the Individual Deceased Personnel File,
and the MACR is the Missing Air Crew Report.
So every deceased person in a war, in World War II,
got an IDPF.
Every air loss got a MACR.
So the MACR is specific to the Air Force.
So, Frank crashed on May 27, 1944,
near Buyssheure, France.
Excuse my lack of pronunciation with that town name.
He was returning from a mission,
and he was hit by anti-aircraft fire.
He quickly lost altitude, went into a spin,
according to official reports,
and crashed with the bomb load exploding on impact.
So the bomb load exploding on impact is very critical
to our job because of details
that I will get into in a little bit.
The interesting thing from his copilot is that
Lieutenant Fazekas made no radio call
or attempt to exit the plane.
So that would kind of hint at the fact that he was either
killed while he was in the air or knocked unconscious.
So that kind of, later on, I'll introduce you
to our witness, and that kind of contradicts
the only eye witness account on files report.
So that's something that we'll touch on later.
A witness on the ground claimed the explosion sent debris
flying in a fire that lasted for several days.
So that fire is also key in the fact that it may have
cremated his remains, but there is a chance
that it did not.
So those are two important things
that we need to focus on.
So, some details in the IDPF and MACR.
You're going to be hearing the name a lot, Mr. Cooche.
So there's actually two Mr. Cooches.
I like to refer to them as the wartime Mr. Cooche
and our Mr. Cooche.
So, the wartime Mr. Cooche is our Mr. Cooche's father.
He was the mayor in the town throughout World War II.
And within the IDPF, there is a letter written
by Mr. Hilaire Cooche, the mayor and the father
of our witness, that the plane was hit over the town
of Watten, two bombs exploded on impact,
and he states that the remains must have been scattered
into small pieces throughout the surrounding field.
It's a bit interesting that a small section of Frank's thumb
was reported to have been recovered,
but it gets a little wishy-washy in the reports
on what exactly happened with that,
and nobody seems to know now.
So, a summary of the government's reports.
Lieutenant Fazekas, according to those reports,
was killed or knocked unconscious.
That's a key fact.
Multiple bombs exploded on impact.
Like I mentioned, that's very important
to our recovery efforts because that adds the variable
of location to where his remains might be.
The only remain, like I said,
was the thumb that was recovered,
and another key piece is that the entire plane
is still at the crash.
So, again, we don't have to worry about the variable
of multiple different sections of the plane
being in other places and therefore, the remains
might be in other places.
So the official ruling by the government
in terms of Frank's ability to be recovered
was he was declared nonrecoverable on July 17, 1947.
So three years later.
The main factors in that were
the evidence and the eye witness statements
of the explosion of the bombs,
either cremating or separating his body into small pieces,
the scattered debris, the multiple day fire,
and the no remains found.
So, basically, what was going on at the time was
there were a lot of other things happening post-war
and an incredibly large task in recovering
the 73,000-plus missing in action soldiers.
So any case that got kind of difficult,
they tended to declare the soldier as missing in action.
So, you can understand it, but then looking back
70 years later, it's kind of like, well,
I want my son or daughter, dad or mom
to come home kind of thing.
So it's a bit of a tough situation that they're in.
But anyway, he was declared nonrecoverable.
Mr. Cooche, the mayor, had a very strong
position in the reports,
and he did not directly witness the crash.
He was at the town hall at the time and heard it
because it's within probably two miles of the crash site.
So he got his information from his son, Mr. Marc Cooche,
who, as you'll find out, is quite the character.
So there may have been a little bit of misinformation
happening in the 12-year-old to father discussion.
So, like I said, the massive task of recovering
all the soldiers was quite daunting and required
a lot of resources.
And with the onset of the Korean War shortly after,
a lot of things had to happen quickly
and sometimes didn't.
And, like I said, the ordinance explosions and fire
gave reasons not to pursue it.
And the Korean War had a big influence on things
being pushed to the side.
So now, onto the MIA project site reconnaissance.
So this is where the part in the story
where it really came alive for me.
It went from being the official government report
and names on the sheet to a person, a father,
a husband; everything that I could relate to in my life,
as well as a military member.
So Frank's name really started to jump off the page at me.
So, Jed Henry and I, who was kind of the main catalyst
in the Private First Class Gordon case
that I mentioned earlier, in bringing him back,
he is one of the main players in the MIA project here.
I volunteered to go to France with Jed
to scout a couple of different potential recovery sites
from July 1st to the 15th.
And we traversed a path that was quite physically
demanding, as you can see, with the mountains
in between France and Andorra and Spain.
And people often ask me, once I got back from the trip,
why I went.
Because it was voluntary.
I financed everything on my own.
It was not something that I needed to do by any means
but the way I describe it was the study abroad experience
of a lifetime.
It was something that, once it was brought
to my attention, that I couldn't pass up on
because I knew that the story could come alive
if I did the right things.
So it was quite an easy decision to make
the financial commitment and jump on board.
So we concentrated our scouting efforts
on three air loss sites:
the P-47 site of Frank
and then two other bomber sites that aren't discussed
in detail in this report.
And all of these sites were located in France,
primarily Normandy.
So, the efforts that we wanted to exhibit
when we went over there,
were we wanted a detailed, drafted map,
we wanted pictures of the site,
we wanted eye witness interviews from Mr. Cooche,
we wanted to do metal detection to find the exact location
of the plane, and we wanted to use GPS locating.
And the reason why we had all of those detailed efforts
is we wanted to create a report detailed enough
that if Jed and I were not there in the future,
Chuck or Professor Aylward, or whoever went back
going forward to do the actual recovery
wouldn't need us to point it out.
So we wanted to be as meticulous and detailed as possible.
So our goal was to collect specific data on the location,
layout, and logistics, and the main part was to determine
the viability of recovery.
Is this a good option for us to pursue
as the first outside of DOD entity
to independently recover a missing-in-action soldier?
It's a large question to answer, and it was something
that we needed to uncover every stone
in order to figure out.
So, Mr. Cooche, my personal favorite part in the story.
According to the reports and the eye witness,
we narrowed it down to the location
in the field north of the town,
which is the Cooche family field.
So Mr. Hilaire Cooche's son, the mayor at the time,
is still alive.
His name is Mr. Marc Cooche, he's 83 years old.
I really want you to picture this.
You're 12 years old, you're in the backyard of your house
that you've lived in for your entire life,
you've had a war going on for the past, at that time,
five years, and you're playing with whatever
the toys were at the time, and you hear an explosion
off to your right.
And he witnessed the crash firsthand from his backyard.
And he is the only verified eye witness
of the entire crash.
So he passes information to his father,
and I don't know about you guys, but when I was 12,
there was no way that my dad was listening to me
telling him some serious incident that happened.
For example, something, some ruckus on the playground
in middle school.
My dad's a principle and I always had to report to him
when I was in middle school so...
He didn't listen to me too much, I can tell you.
So we kind of have the suspicion that Mr. Marc
and Mr. Hilaire had a little bit of difference in opinion
on the events.
So, the reason that we are concentrating on
Lieutenant Fazekas' site is because it's a single seat
fighter crash.
That removes the
variable of the remains not knowing specifically
who they are.
You can figure that out if you know the plane,
and that's usually done by using the ID tags
on the machine guns that are from the fighters.
And this we know it was Lieutenant Fazekas' plane.
The other thing is the pilot is definitively in the plane
upon the crash.
If his copilot didn't see him jump, then we know he's there.
And this site had the best viability
of recovery to date for us.
The biggest thing is the Cooche family
are incredibly charming.
They remind me of any small town family from Wisconsin.
They are so passionate and so willing to help,
including donating the equipment from their
construction company.
And I'm sure Mrs. Cooche will provide more cookies
and coffee for anybody than they can handle,
as she did for us when we were there.
And because of their willingness to donate equipment,
it's the most financially realistic option for us
for our first recovery.
So the Cooche family meet-up.
We pull into this small town that they live in.
They reminded me a lot of my hometown.
Just a couple coffee shops, a few pubs,
and more pubs than churches, as is common in Wisconsin.
And we get to their house and the second I walked in,
it felt like walking into my grandparent's house
in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
Mr. Cooche, Mrs. Cooche, they were both there.
We were with the mayor.
It was an incredibly welcoming atmosphere.
And as soon as I met Mr. Cooche,
even though I didn't understand a lick of a word
that he was saying because I don't speak any French,
he speaks no English, so it was hand signals,
and we had a translator there with us to help,
I could just see that little twinkle in his eye
that he was ready to mess with his grandson kind of thing
and play a couple pranks.
Yes, sir.
- [Voiceover] I'm sorry, you mentioned the copilot.
He survived?
- He did survive this incident.
I'm not sure if he survived the war.
- [Audience member] Do you mean wingman or copilot?
- Excuse me, I've been saying copilot.
I meant wingman. My mistake, my mistake.
(audience member murmuring) - What's that?
(audience member murmuring)
So there are two separate P-47s.
So it was a single-seater fighter rather than
a copilot being behind him.
He was by himself in the plane,
and there was another plane with his wingman
who saw the incident.
My mistake, thank you for pointing that out.
(audience member murmuring)
So a few stories I wanted to tell that Mr. Cooche said
that kind of bring to life his story from World War II
is this one was incredibly emotional.
He was telling a story, he was out tending to his horses
with his family and his father,
and a squad of German soldiers pulled up
and had them at gunpoint telling them that they needed to
relinquish their horses to them for the war effort,
even though they were French citizens.
And Mr. Cooche was like absolutely not.
And he was around 10 at this time,
so he was sticking up to a bunch of big Germans
with guns in his face.
And the ultimatum that they gave him was that
he could keep all the rest of the horses
but only if they shot his personal horse
because they figured out who his personal horse was.
And when he said that, the tears came from him.
It was pretty sad.
But on a lighter note, my favorite story
from the entire trip was Mr. Cooche sneaking
a German rifle from the sentry post.
So, he's 12-years-old with his buddies causing trouble,
there is a German sentry down the road
guarding a main intersection of the road.
He and his buddies go out at night,
probably, I think he said 10:30 at night,
and they go walking up to this German sentry.
And Mr. Cooche is walking with a limp.
He's perfectly fine, he just decided to walk with a limp
for a specific reason.
And they walk past the German sentry
because they had seen them a couple times,
and the Germans were like,
"Oh, that poor French boy must have gotten hurt
"on the farm or something."
And Mr. Cooche is telling the story
with the biggest smile on his face, just loving it.
And he said he walked by the German sentry,
went to the camp where the other sentries were sleeping
that were off-duty, kind of looked around,
made sure nobody was walking, and snuck into their stuff
and stole one of their rifles.
So the reason that he was limping was on the way back,
he stuck the barrel of the rifle into his pants,
the butt of the rifle up around his shoulder,
and he's 12 so the rifle is about as tall as he is,
and he goes walking back past the sentries
doing that limp again, and the Germans are like,
"Oh, there's that boy, we should get him some help
"or something."
So we're sitting at the table,
and his eyes just light up and he's like,
"Oh, I have something to show you guys," to me and Jed.
And we're like, "All right, let's see it."
And he goes, through the translator now, he goes,
"I have a German bomb to show you."
And me and Jed are like,
um, this could get a little interesting.
So, we don't know if it's live or if it's a bomb
or what it is.
So he says he's going into his bedroom,
walks into his bedroom, grabs this long sack,
and I'm like that's a weird looking bomb.
I've never seen one that looks like that.
And he reaches in and he pulls out the rifle.
And we were like, phew, okay,
we're going to make it home, so far,
unless the plane crashes.
So that just kind of speaks to Mr. Cooche
and his personality and the spirit that he had
as being a troublemaker.
And, like it says on the slide,
I didn't understand a word he said the entire time,
but he really wanted to get to know us.
And there is Mr. Cooche and I.
You can kind of see his little devilish smile that he has.
(audience laughing)
He's quite the guy.
And for being 83 years old, it's remarkable,
he moves around great.
He was doing little dances and getting all excited
with the coffee that his wife was giving us.
It was pretty entertaining.
This is Mr. Cooche, Jed Henry and myself.
Jed is the guy that accompanied me on the trip,
who I mentioned earlier.
So, Mr. Cooche's account.
So, we're sitting at the table after all the funny business
gets over with the rifle.
We ask him what he saw.
So, like I mentioned, he was 12 years old.
He was playing the backyard of his family home.
He saw Frank's plane get hit to the west of him.
It was at about 10,000 feet,
and he watched Frank come down.
And as Frank was coming down, he saw him drop
the external gas tank that all P-47s had.
So the interesting fact about the P-47s
is their motor is so big, and they use so much gas
that they often didn't have enough gas to hold in
the wing tank.
So they had an external gas tank that sat
underneath the fuselage.
So even on normal missions, they would come back,
drop the gas tank so that they could land normally
or else it would hit the ground, potentially,
and cause an explosion.
So he saw Lieutenant Fazekas drop that gas tank,
which, to me, is a conscious decision.
I mean, that's a switch that you have to pull
in order to drop the tank.
So, he, Mr. Cooche thought that he was going to
attempt a belly landing in the field
where he ended up crashing, but as he was coming down,
he didn't see the power lines that were in front of him,
eventually noticed them, pulled up quickly,
and didn't have enough power from his engine,
which was damaged, to escape,
so he quickly went up, came into a stall,
and nosedived right straight down into the field.
So, some consistencies there with the official report,
but a little different in the fact that he wasn't in
a flat spin and he dropped the external gas tank.
So, he believes strongly that the pilot was alive
when he crashed.
He either thinks that he dropped the gas tank
in order to belly land or
Frank thought he could make it back to base
and was trying to lose weight in order to
work with his damaged engine.
So the biggest point in Mr. Cooche's account
is that he is adamant that no bombs exploded on impact.
We asked him multiple times, and he was absolutely certain
that no bombs went off.
And he not only saw but he also heard the crash
right in front of him.
It's not more than probably 50 meters away.
So, that was a big contradiction and useful information
for our recovery efforts as compared
to the official accounts.
The only thing he said he heard was ammunition
from the machine guns cooking off.
So, he stated that oftentimes,
if it was German wreckage, a plane that got shot down,
the Germans would come and recover whatever they could
from the site.
But if it was an American loss,
as long as the crew members were no longer living,
they didn't care about it and will often
just leave it alone.
So he stated that no major parts of the plane
or remains were taken besides that small section
of thumb that disappeared.
So the Germans did cordon off the site
for a couple of days immediately after,
but because he was the mayor's son, the eye witness,
and it was on his family's property, he got to go see
and physically look into the crash site crater
a couple of days after.
He stated that the plane, you could tell that, that's
definitely where it was.
The engine was still relatively intact,
the main block of it was.
And just to wrap up his story,
I was very taken aback by the passion
that Mr. Cooche has.
His desire for the recovery to happen
is very, very evident.
He's really bothered by the fact that I'm here presenting,
not specifically me here, but that I'm here
presenting about recovering this crash site 70 years later.
That really bothers him.
And I think
Chuck and Jed and I and the rest of the MIA project
really want to make this happen before
Mr. Cooche passes away, which could be 15 years from now;
it could be very soon, we don't know.
But that's one of our main goals.
And his love for Americans and his wife's love for us
was very strong, and that was very much so appreciated
by us even though we were there relatively on business.
So that was very touching to Jed and I.
So, here we have the modern day site layout.
This mouse isn't going to work for me here.
There it is.
So if you guys follow my cursor here, right here
is the Cooche family home.
So Mr. Marc Cooche, the son, the eye witness,
was right here.
This is their family construction business.
A high speed rail line is running
northwest to southeast here,
and this is the field in question,
and specifically right here is where the crash
was believed to have happened.
So this picture is the modern layout,
map layout, in the background,
with an aerial photo from 1949
taken and laid over the top.
So if you look closely, here's the house.
The business was not there in '49,
but if you look closely,
this access road right here was not there in 1949.
But it runs kind of parallel to this section line
in the field.
And if you look closely, you'll see this little
discoloration here, and that's where we believe,
and it coincides with Mr. Cooche's account,
that the crash site is.
The little circle down here, that's just watermarks
from the processing of the photo.
But it's interesting to note that discoloration
in the field.
The description of the site specifically,
it's located in a small hayfield, like I showed on the map.
It's directly adjacent, not 50 to 70 meters
from the Cooche family residence.
It's easily accessible on foot,
and even more so by equipment and cars,
which is very important to our recovery efforts.
There's an approximately eight-foot-wide gravel path
that leads just south of the site,
which is even more convenient for us
in terms of equipment.
You don't have to trudge through mud or ruin any
of their crops that they might have planted.
The soil is used for agriculture,
so there's not a lot of big boulders in it.
It can be easily excavated and moved around.
And the field is about 110 by 85 meters.
So it's not the biggest field in the world,
but it's a nice landmark
for us to start our excavations.
So, a couple of pictures.
This is from the entrance to the dirt access road.
So we are looking northeast currently.
And over here, you can see, Jed took these photos,
I'm standing right there, and then Mr. Cooche
and the mayor and his son are out there,
directly in front of the crash site.
And then this barn over here is the site
of the next picture.
So this is from the barn, and directly behind us
from the viewpoint is the Cooche family home and business.
And there we are again out surveying the site.
This is looking southeast.
This is the draft of the site that I drew up.
We used a lot of range finding equipment.
We used GPS locating,
and then pieced it all together, basically.
And, if I'm being honest, I drew this in the passenger seat
of a car on a French highway, which was quite the experience
because motorcyclists get pretty active out there.
So here it is, here it is in paper form
with the family residence over here,
the SAS Cooche business, the barn,
and then the MACR 9835 crash site, where we believe
Lieutenant Frank Fazekas is located.
So this is a direct view of the crash site.
Obviously you can't see a whole lot as things stand now.
The one thing that we did notice when we were there
is there's a small dip in the soil,
which isn't the most conclusive form of evidence,
but it's interesting to note that where Mr. Cooche
thinks the crash happened, where the discoloration
on the map is, and where we noticed a small dip
in the level of the soil all coincide to relatively
the same position.
So that's a good sign for us.
A quick picture of the soil here.
This is just on the edge of the field.
That's my leg standing there.
You can kind of see that it's not full of boulders,
and it's been actively farmed.
It was actually filled in two months after the crash
because in the wartime, they needed to continue using
the field for food.
So once they realized that the Americans weren't coming
for an extended period of time to recover,
nor were the Germans, they made the call
to bring in some dirt, fill back in the field
and continue growing crops there.
So the soil is important for Professor William Aylward,
He's the archaeologist on our team,
and he was interested in getting a picture of that
so he knows what he's getting himself into in terms of
an actual excavation.
And he's worked throughout the Mediterranean on
centuries-old, millennium-old sites.
So this shouldn't be a problem for us
in terms of an excavation.
So now to cover the differences in the reports
and the agreements in the reports.
The inflight reports, what the plane actually did
and what happened to it, tend to be in agreement.
Both the wingman and Mr. Cooche's report
say that Lieutenant Frank was hit by anti-aircraft fire
at about 10,000 feet.
He came down,
was trying to avoid the power lines.
The flat spin and the not flat spin are different
between the two accounts.
Went into a stall that he tried to pull up,
and crashed nose-first into the field.
Post-crash there's agreements that no plane parts
were taken, no significant remains were recovered,
and that the fire burned for a couple of days,
which are all pretty important things to note.
Now for the conflicts in the separate reports.
The biggest question that we have,
both for the recovery and our safety, is,
was there an ordinance explosion on impact?
The official reports claim that they did occur.
Mr. Marc Cooche, the son, is adamant that they did not.
So that's pretty critical to the recovery of our remains.
It can create a variety of problems
because we may need to hire a professional
bomb disposal team.
The interesting thing to think about is that
if Lieutenant Fazekas was returning from a mission,
a bombing mission, that it would make sense
that he didn't have the bombs still on the plane,
at least in my opinion.
Something that's less important necessarily
to our recovery, but extremely important to the family,
if I was the family,
is was Frank alive on impact?
Was he still fighting for his life,
or was he taken out in the air?
He did not attempt radio calls, and he did not attempt
to jump, which point at him not being alive.
But he did drop that external gas tank that I mentioned,
which is a conscious decision.
You have to choose to do that, it doesn't just happen.
So that's kind of something that is important
to the family, if I were them.
So, my opinion of the whole story.
I think that Frank knew that he was in trouble,
and he either wanted to make it back to the base
or he wanted to attempt a belly landing
and hope to escape before the Germans got there,
or at least survive and hope to survive
in a POW camp throughout the war.
So I think the reason he didn't make a radio call
is because he was concentrating on flying the plane.
He had a long way to go to get home,
and it's not easy to land a plane with no power.
As I've quickly learned in my pilot training,
sometimes your instructor will drop the power on you,
and you need to quickly scan and find a field
or some sort of place where you can get yourself
out of trouble.
So I think when Frank was hit, he immediately recognized
that he needed to follow his training,
saw the field, and thought that's where I'm going for
if I need to crash.
If not, it's directly in my flight path to home.
So, I think that he was descending
and was coming down to the power lines,
saw them at the last second, pulled up,
stalled because he didn't have as much power as he thought,
and once he realized that he wasn't going to make it
when he hit that stall, he didn't have time to jump
or to call for help or radio to his wingman.
And then the other thing that I mentioned
why there might be some conflicts is
when it passed from Marc to his father,
like I said, when you're 12 years old,
you don't get a whole lot of credit for your account
of the story.
So there definitely was a chance for there to be some,
you know, the telephone game kind of thing happen,
where information is misrepresented or misunderstood.
And then also, once the mayor, Mr. Cooche,
passed his son's story to the Germans,
you're running into some language barriers there as well.
So there's plenty of room for information to be
misconstrued.
So, the logistics of our recovery.
So the Cooche family's willingness to help is huge.
It saves us a lot of money financially
in rental of equipment.
The soil is easily accessible.
We can get down to the level, which is said to be
around 10 meters, of the plane.
The area is free of obstructions.
It's easily accessed.
There's a high speed rail line.
There's multiple highways and roads running by.
We can easily get there.
The equipment can be quickly deployed down
that dirt access road.
So there's a strong chance that this can happen.
The single seat fighter plane recovery.
Like I mentioned, there's no discrepancy
of who each person is, the remains.
We scouted another site
while we were in France of a bomber that split in half.
The tail went one direction and the fuselage went the other.
So you have tail gunners and waist gunners
and people that could have been in the middle,
and it's much more difficult to figure out who is who
when you find a human remain in the soil.
So, the fighter pilot aspect of it
helps us greatly in determining who it is.
When we get there and we start digging,
I would imagine that we will locate the engine first,
and because, as a single engine fighter pilot,
you have the engine right in front of you,
if we find the engine, which is the biggest hunk of metal
there is, with metal detection,
go down and carefully scan the Earth around it,
we're going to have a good shot at finding
some remains of Frank,
if they haven't been cremated or if the bombs
didn't go off.
The other big thing that I mentioned is the plane
did not disintegrate in air, in midair.
So we know where it is or we know the general
location of it.
We don't have to look in a mile wide radius
or something like that.
A few obstacles that we need to address
and are currently addressing is the field directly south
of the indicated wreckage is not owned
by the Cooche family.
So when we asked if that would be a problem,
there was a slight bit of hesitation,
but generally, in small French towns,
the mayor runs the show.
So we had the mayor with us, and he was pretty confident
that the owner of that field to the south
would be willing cooperate with us.
So that was good to hear.
The contradictions in the reports lead to questions
of the live ordinance.
Like I said, Mr. Cooche claims there's no bombs.
The official reports say there are,
so we may need to hire an explosive ordinance disposal team,
something of that sort, or just be incredibly
careful in our excavation.
A few other obstacles.
The Cooche family reports oil, aviation fuel,
and other chemical smells are present
throughout the past 70 years when they've been
actively farming.
He mentioned they were having a barbeque once,
and this smell kind of overpowered the chicken,
which I thought was kind of funny.
So, that's both an obstacle and something that
is kind of evidence that the plane is where we think it is.
But there are going to be toxins there,
so we have to be careful with that while we're excavating.
And the other big thing is this is the first time
someone outside of the DOD has attempted
an independent recovery.
So we're kind of on the leading edge,
which is pretty cool coming from Wisconsin
and the university, kind of being the spearhead on this
because there's a lot of room for improvement
in bringing missing-in-action soldiers,
but there's also some room to get kickback
from the Department of Defense,
which isn't the end of the world but it's something that
we need to be aware of.
So, our future recovery plans.
We want to do this and we want to do it quickly.
So, October 2015, this coming October is our target date.
We're planning to send over a squad of six
UW faculty members and students
in order to do the excavation.
We're actively raising funds to
cover our airfare, lodging, recovery equipment needs,
whatever other expenses come up,
and we estimate it to be around $20,000.
And the last line on here was shocking to me
when I first found out.
If you take the amount of soldiers,
if you take the budget of the DOD for recovery
of missing-in-action soldiers,
divided by the number of soldiers that are actually
brought back per year, which is around 100,
they average $2.5 million per recovery,
and we can do it for around $20,000, maybe a hair more,
and much quicker.
So there's some definite room for efficiency improvement,
and we're confident that with the group of people
that we have here, that we can do that quickly.
Chuck and Jed and some of the other members
have been in discussions with the Department of Defense.
They don't have a mechanism that can directly contract us
as a non-government organization to work for them
in terms of where the funding flows,
but we are working on it, and there's some hope there
that we may be able to figure something out going forward
in terms of working together rather than
as separate entities.
So that's all I have for you today.
I want to thank all of you so much for coming.
I hope my goal was achieved when I presented
the facts on the slide show,
and then told the story and wanted it
to come alive for you.
Mr. Cooche is an incredible man,
and learning about his story and all of the funny things
that he did at the risk of being shot
was quite the experience.
And learning about Frank as a role model for me,
as hoping to become a pilot and bringing him home
to his son and his nephew that we just found
and are hoping to be in contact with shortly
is something that is very powerful
in terms of motivation.
So, thank you all, and I will take any questions
that you might have.
(applause)