- Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at 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,
Wisconsin Public Television,
the Wisconsin Alumni Association,
and the UW Madison Science Alliance,
thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight's a special occasion
because it's December seventh, 2016.
This is the 75th anniversary of the attacks on Pearl Harbor.
And for that occasion, which was the entry
of the United States into World War II,
it's a special event to be able to have the topic
that we have tonight.
Pearl Harbor, granted, was in the Pacific
and our talk tonight is from the European theater,
but I think it's an appropriate way to mark the evening.
We'll have four presenters tonight.
I want to introduce first Leslie Eisenberg.
She was born in New York City, went to high school
in Long Island, got her undergraduate degree
at SUNY New Paltz, and got her PhD at New York University.
Second will be Charles Konsitzke.
He's the associate director of the Biotechnology Center.
He was born in La Crosse County, grew up near Camp Douglas,
went to high school in Tomah,
and got his undergraduate degree at UW La Crosse.
And the first person to speak tonight will be Ryan Wubben.
He was born in Champaign, Illinois, and grew up in Neenah.
Then he went back to the University
of Illinois to get a degree in archaeology.
Then he came here to UW Madison to get his MD degree.
He's one of the folks in charge of the Med Flight program
at the School of Medicine and Public Health,
and he's gonna start off our presentation tonight
on "Finding Lieutenant Fazekas."
Please join me in welcoming Ryan Wubben
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[audience applauds]
- Thank you, Tom.
Tonight I'll be starting off
with the first series of slides.
And basically what I'll be doing is I'll be setting
the stage for what comes next and how we found ourselves
in a cornfield in France.
Now imagine, if you will, it is the spring of 1944.
England stands alone against Germany.
And this is the view that someone in England,
an aviator in England, would see.
Basically, the Germans control
the entire European continental coastline from Norway
all the way down to the Spanish/Franco border.
You are a young 22-year-old.
You're a pilot.
You've trained over the last year.
And this is your mount.
This is a P-47 Thunderbolt.
You have spent the last year training,
basically starting out in essentially a Piper Cub
and working your way up through all the various types
of airplanes, to this, which is actually the biggest single
engine fighter used by any of the air forces
during World War II.
It is a massive beast.
Weighs about 20,000 pounds.
And you'll see here in the corner,
if it comes up, these are your weapons.
And those will become important later on.
There's four machine guns in each wing for a total of eight.
It's a single engine airplane, single pilot.
And the aircraft that we were looking
for is this aircraft right here.
But, overall, this is the situation.
England stands alone, but everyone knows
that there are plans afoot to invade the continent.
Germany tried to invade England
in the summer of 1940, which led to the Battle of Britain.
And there were big plans afoot to go from France
and invade England during the summer of 1940.
The Battle of Britain put a stop to that.
So the Germans had always assumed
when they were making their plans that they
were gonna invade England from this area up here,
which is the Calais region.
So the Germans had posted many units of their army up
here in the Pas-de-Calais region of France
and spilling over into Belgium.
And there was a huge movement afoot to try
and obscure where the actual invasion was gonna happen.
Patton had, General Patton, as you may know,
had phantom armies all set up in southern England
with inflatable tanks and all sorts of
spy craft was afoot
to try and obscure where the actual invasion
was gonna happen.
Even to the point of taking bodies by submarine
and dumping them on beaches in Spain with fake documents
and dossiers for the Germans to find and report back
to their high command, stating that the invasion
was gonna happen up here.
The actual invasion was down here.
This is Normandy.
And this, especially in this area right in here,
is where the actual invasion took place.
But the whole effort that was going on in the late spring
of 1944 was to try and obscure where the invasion
was actually gonna take place.
So the Germans had many units up in this part of France.
And there were daily raids going over into France
to try and pin down those German armies in that part
of France and gain control of the air from the Luftwaffe,
or the German air force, and sweep them from the sky
and basically prevent any movement of any troops
in that area.
So the Germans had to resort to doing any movement at night.
These P-47s that I showed you in the previous slide
were ranging far and wide on any good weather day.
And that is presumably what was going
on for our pilot in question.
This actually is a map, a German map as you can see
at the top there, from 1940, and we were fortunate
to get this from the Robinson Map Library here on campus.
So this, again, is the situation.
London is on the upper left corner up there.
This is London.
This is the channel front from basically
the Netherlands all the way down to France.
And the Germans had to keep armies, the Atlantic wall
in armies along that entire front to try and block
any invasion of the continent that they knew was coming.
So this, basically setting the scene, is all prior to D-Day.
And as we zoom in a little bit, this is the narrowest point.
This is the Straits of Dover.
Dover on the left, Calais on the right.
The Belgian border is very close, right in this area here.
So Lieutenant Fazekas was a member
of the 22nd Fighter Squadron which was a part
of the ninth Air Force.
The ninth Air Force was primarily
tasked with ground support.
They were ranging around all of Europe trying
to keep the Germans pinned down, looking for trains,
tanks, artillery, anything they could find
and put that out of action.
As you can see under the wing here,
that's a bomb right there, along with their machine guns.
And on any good weather day, they were sending fighters,
bombers, reconnaissance planes to take photos
for a variety of reasons, all crossing the channel
to keep the Germans on their toes and obscure
where exactly the invasion was going to come from.
Many people know who the Eighth Air Force was.
The Eighth Air Force were the heavy bombers going
all the way into Germany to strike at the heart
of German industry in Germany and Austria and so forth.
That's the more famous units.
These were more the grunts doing the daily work
of ground support.
The day in question is about nine days before D-Day.
May 27, 1944, which was a Saturday.
And if you look that day up, there wasn't a lot going on
on that day in the European Theater.
There was a huge raid by the eighth Air Force the next day,
and there was actually the beginnings of a battle
in New Guinea on the far side of the world.
Now, keep in mind at this point the British
have been in the war for almost five years.
As Tom mentioned, we had only been in the war
for about two-and-a-half years, starting
this very night 75 years ago on December seventh.
But on this particular Saturday, it was a good weather day,
and our Lieutenant Fazekas, who was part
of the 22nd Fighter Squadron, which was part
of the 36th group, was in this area right here,
which is called Kingsnorth.
It's an airfield that doesn't even exist anymore.
It was a temporary airfield for fighters that
was constructed by the British for the Royal Air Force
earlier in the war and used by the Americans
because of its proximity to the channel coast
and the channel front.
And, as you can see, it's only 70 miles from Kingsnorth
to where he came down in Saint Omer,
which is this area right here.
Calais is right up in here.
Dunkirk, which is also a famous point of evacuation
for the British army four years before when they had
to evacuate France, is just about 20 miles
up the road here in Dunkirk.
Unfortunately, we don't know what the target was that day.
We've actually done some digging to try and find out
more details of what exactly happened that day,
but at this point we don't know.
There are a lot of suspected sites
that they may have been striking.
Saint Omer was a Luftwaffe fighter base earlier
that spring, but by that point they
had withdrawn back to Germany.
Also, and in parallel with the invasion coming,
the Germans were also building V one and V two rockets
that were being launched from this part
of northern France and into Belgium.
And so we don't know what the target was,
and I don't know that we ever will.
But what we do know is that on Saturday, May 27th,
about one o'clock in the afternoon,
from the reports the visibility was clear
or the skies were clear and the visibility was good.
A good flying day.
And Lieutenant Fazekas was with his squadron
striking targets reportedly in the post-bombing run.
And he had been hit by antiaircraft fire.
And basically all we had to go on were
these last sentences that are part of the missing
air crew report, which are a few sentences
which described what happened and that he
was flying at about 10,000 feet, presumably he
had already been hit, and he made a gentle
diving turn out of his formation.
He kept losing altitude, and suddenly his ship broke
into a tight spiral just before hitting the ground.
The ship exploded instantly, and he made no radio call.
And that's all we have to go on.
Lieutenant Fazekas, at the time, was only 22 years old.
He was from Trenton, New Jersey.
He had grown up in that area.
He was the son of Hungarian immigrants.
And he had just been married the previous year in 1943.
And he had a six-month-old son who was born
in December of 1943.
That will become important later when we meet
that six-month-old son a little bit further
down the line in the story.
Also equally important is that there was a 12-year-old
who was on his family farm in the little town
of Buysscheure, France, which is right outside Saint Omer,
a 12-year-old French boy who is on the back part
of his family's farm when he saw this airplane go down.
And we will learn more about him later as well.
In the aftermath of this, again, this
is only nine days before D-Day.
This is essentially behind enemy lines.
So there is not ability to go and investigate
by the allies what had happened.
He was one of just many missing airmen who went
over the channel, struck targets in France,
and never came back.
We do have a translated German report,
most likely from the flack unit that shot him down,
that they went out and investigated the site.
They found, quote, two to three machine guns.
And, again, this will become important later on.
There is descriptions of filling the crater back in.
But then nine days later the D-Day invasion came
and everyone's attention was focused on that,
both the Germans and the allies.
This part of France was actually only liberated
much later in the fall of 1944.
And after the war, the British and the Americans
were both going out to investigate crash sites
and try to make an accounting
of all of their missing airmen.
The British were the first at this particular scene.
They came on site.
They actually found parts there that
had American markings on them, so they signed off
and said, this is an American airplane, we're moving on.
The US authorities investigated a short time later,
and this was in the 1946, 1947 time frame.
Looked at the site, interviewed the witnesses,
and deemed this to be non-recoverable and moved on.
At that point, Lieutenant Frank Fazekas
of the 22nd Fighter Squadron was listed
as missing in action.
One of many thousands of missing airmen
and soldiers who had been listed as missing in action.
And, in fact, there is something on the order
of 80,000 missing soldiers starting
on December seventh, 1941, until the present day.
There is a Department of Defense unit
called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency,
and you will hear us use the term DPAA,
that's what this stands for, whose task is to go out
and make an accounting of.
Even though this particular case is 72 years old,
it's still on their list.
They sent an archeologist
or an anthropologist and a historian
out to the site in 2012.
They have a master list of all of the cases on their list.
They went out to evaluate the location,
scout the site, and interview the witnesses.
And this particular case of Lieutenant Fazekas
was placed on what they call their master excavation list.
And subsequent to that, because of a case
that volunteers here at the University of Wisconsin
had been involved in and has actually been presented
in this forum, I believe, in the past and resulted
in quite a bit of media attention,
there was a Private Gordon who was a soldier lost
in the Normandy invasion that people from,
that Chuck and others were involved with in 2013
and 2014, which led directly to our involvement
here at the University of Wisconsin.
And now we fast forward to the summer of 2015.
- Thank you for coming, everybody.
Summer of 2015, July one through the 15th,
we sent a scouting team to Buysscheure, France.
Actually one of the scouts is here today, Sam Soderberg.
And they connected with Mr. Cooche, as the eye witness,
who was 12 at the time.
And now remember, he's 84 now.
And he confirmed the location.
He walked both Sam and Jed to the site,
confirmed the location.
Sam and Jed reviewed the area,
and you can see kind of a decrease in the ground.
It looked like a highly probable successful recovery.
And then, as Ryan stated earlier,
Sam presented this September second, 2015,
here at Wednesday Nite at the Lab,
if you want to watch that video.
So, fast forward, December 2015.
Planning commences and we start the recovery process,
more of the administrative side of it.
And we put a team together, which is roughly
about eight individuals from the University
of Wisconsin Madison, that includes faculty, staff,
students, as well as two students
from the vets organization on campus here,
as well as our Belgian World War I, World War II historian
interpreter Danielle Roubroeks,
who was a definite crucial individual for this case
because she put a lot of her own time
and commitment into this.
A lot of money was spent on her end,
and she didn't ask anything from the University
of Wisconsin Madison.
She was an absolutely great volunteer for this case.
And then the application process begins.
So we start planning the site.
You can see here, this is the location
that was described as the crash scene.
So it was a negative result.
We were frantic.
We were frantic because we put a lot of time
and commitment into this case.
So we reached out to DPAA regarding our outcome.
They were as frantic as we were because this
was probably one of their first cases
of working with academia on a case as such.
And, you know, we were thinking, do we have
to cancel the project because we don't know
where the crash site is?
So, luckily, April 21st, three days later, DPAA,
searching archives, obtained an image
from the National Collection of Aerial Photography
out of Scotland.
This is an absolute resource.
If you love history, I would say go to this website.
They have thousands of aerial images
from almost every conflict.
However, I just want to show you.
There were three images of this area taken.
This is one of them.
If you see right here, that's the crash site.
It was right on the edge of the film,
and if you look at the other two films, it's even closer.
So we were lucky that it was just
by chance that this happened.
The project was back on pending excavation permits.
But I want to give you an image, a full view image,
so you can see it up closer,
and then I'm actually gonna zoom in a little bit closer.
This image was taken two days after the crash site.
No.
A negative outcome regarding the scan.
What we did is we took the image,
and we actually overlaid it on Google Maps
and got coordinates via Google Earth.
And you can see right here is the crash site.
There's a few things I want to point out here.
Remember the eye witness stated it was north of the road.
He stated it was right here.
Well, with the train line coming in right here,
many, many years, so time erases, you know, many types
of historical thoughts, as well as changing
in fields and roads even here, it was north of the road.
So he was correct, but the road had moved sometime
in between that point in time and the current point in time.
And you can see how we overlaid the map
to get an idea of where the location was.
June 26 we continued our effort.
However, we made, you know, we got past one road bump
and then the next road bump, access to the field.
It was a little difficult.
They're farmers.
They had crops planted.
Farmers are very protective of their lands.
I grew up on a farm environment.
I know how that protection is.
However, we scheduled, we determined the start date
to be July 24th.
Early July I'm in northern Wisconsin on vacation
and I'm on conference calls with DPAA and with Germany,
with Danielle, our interpreter on July second and fourth.
On the Fourth of July, ironically, the landowner, DPAA,
and the interpreter met, started negotiating,
and the landowner that day gave acceptance
to work on the field.
So I sped home.
July fifth through the 10th finalized the permit,
submitted it, and it was approved on the 13th.
- Good evening, everyone.
I have had the honor to work
with an incredible group of people on this recovery.
I am, by training, an archaeologist
and a forensic anthropologist.
But I've never worked on a military crash site.
But I have to say that archaeological principles we all use,
whether we're terrestrial archaeologists,
maritime archaeologists, or military archaeologists.
The principles are all the same.
We leave Madison on July 23rd,
we get to France on the 24th,
and we start in the field on the 25th
after meeting with the team.
We had students coming in from Hawaii.
We had students from UW Madison.
So we all convened at the hotel where we were staying.
Being an archeologist, you learn
to think in three dimensions.
And what we had before we left for France,
we didn't have a whole lot of information,
and it's not really the best way to go
into a field situation.
But what we did have were the maps that Charles just showed.
But once you get into the field, things are no longer
in two dimensions.
You have to start thinking in three dimensions.
And we had a map.
You can see here, there's a scale on the map,
which we came to find out was way off.
What we did, ultimately, to relocate that crash site
that you saw on those aerial photos was to triangulate
from an existing building at the time of the crash
that's still on the landscape today to get us
to the area where we thought we needed to be.
And hopefully, as a good archaeologist,
I'm also a good anthropologist,
which means you speak to people.
And the person I'm speaking to here is Mr. Marc Cooche,
who was the 12-year-old witness at the time.
Incredible how viable and pliable his memory
was from 72 years previous.
When you're 12 years old, I think the whole world
probably seems big to you.
So you take information from folks maybe
with a little grain of salt.
You think maybe their memories have faded over time,
or memories get magnified.
So I was taking in everything he was telling me
in French and hoping at least 50% of it panned out.
Incredible gentleman.
Very welcoming to me and the entire team.
Here is the landowner, who, on Independence Day,
gave authorization for us to go work in his field.
He lives down the road from Mr. Cooche, the initial witness.
And just to give you some sense
of scale because archaeologists are.
We live by scale and how big something
is in relation to something else.
So you can see Mr. Carteau was not a small gentleman.
The corn was even taller than he was.
Okay?
So there are a couple of things we needed to do initially.
One is to secure the location because you don't just
want anyone walking in.
There are safety concerns.
The fact that this was a potential military crash site.
And you also don't want to expose the site
to potential vandalism.
Any time.
I grew up on the east coast in an urban environment,
but I've lived in Wisconsin long enough
and have practiced archaeology in Wisconsin long enough
to known that you don't have to be in a community
for very long before everybody knows you're there
and everyone knows what you're there to do.
So, we have a fence at the entrance
of the road leading to the area we ultimately excavated.
And we also had a post in French their statutes
saying that you can't excavate here without a permit
and you cannot do metal detecting here without a permit.
So we fulfilled our due diligence in terms
of the French archaeological system
who issued the permit to us to do this work.
There's also logistics you don't think about.
You need supplies.
We didn't bring shovels, trowels, buckets, tarps,
wood to make screens with us from the US.
So we had the support of DPAA in the form
of Master Sergeant Hudson who came
with a military historian, Dr. Michael Dolski,
from a base in Germany with all the equipment we
would ever need or almost all of it.
And you don't think about it until you've been
in the field and you've looked for a tall bush
or a big rock, but when you have a team on site
and you know you're gonna be there for three weeks,
you really need to think about the crew's comfort.
And getting a porta-potty on site was one of those things.
I never thought my French would come in handy
to need to order a porta-potty, but it worked.
[laughs]
Here we are on the afternoon of day one in the field.
You see all this corn, the corn stalks that are down?
We started to do that using Charles' farm technique
of taking long sticks of wood and just walking
and pushing the corn down.
And at a certain point we said, this is crazy.
We know the heavy equipment operator is gonna be here
in two hours, why don't we just let him do it?
So that's what we did.
So, where are we so far?
We're in an area where, according to the maps,
we believe the plane came down.
72 years have passed.
We learned from the early records that there
was a crater that was created as a result of the crash.
And what we also know is that the Germans filled
in the hole, and in speaking to folks, the Germans
wouldn't even let the villagers get close to the hole
to see if they could assist with the pilot's recovery.
We know that the landowner, over the years,
had filled in that hole even more than the Germans had.
And we knew that this field had been farmed
for years and years and years.
So it's not like we'd go out there
and still see a big hole or see any kind of burning.
We just didn't know how deeply we would have
to go to recover, to locate the area
and how deep we would have to go to ultimately recover
what we came to do.
Not the best view, but that's always the view
that people take of me in the field.
[laughs]
The best way to do this, really,
is to dig some exploratory trenches.
And we did that with the assistance
of a very skilled backhoe operator.
If you've ever worked with these guys in France
or the US or anywhere, you can point to a location
and the edge of their bucket will go right down
at that spot.
And the idea was to skim dirt off to see
if there was any evidence of a soil color change.
And what that means to us as archaeologists
is that when you see a soil color change
there's been some disruption.
Whether it's cultural, made by humans,
whether it's a rodent burrow, a rodent going
through the soil, anything, we were looking
for something to tell us we were in the right place.
We dug a bunch of these.
And just to give you an idea, do you see these raised mounds
of dirt here, here, there?
And there are two open trenches up there?
The raised mounds of dirt represent trenches we
had filled in after excavating
because there were no soil color changes.
And I'll show you what the stratigraphy looks
like in a second.
The soil profile, as we call it.
Every archaeological site tells a story.
Some sites tell lots of stories.
A site may be created by a one-time event.
One episode.
Like Pompeii.
It may be created by successive occupations of a site.
In this case, we knew we were looking for one episode,
and that's the crash of the P-47
with Lieutenant Fazekas aboard.
This is one of those exploratory trenches
that we dug to see if, in any of the walls of the trench,
we saw any soil disruption or a difference in color
from what the normal soil profile
or stratigraphy looks like.
And the deeper you go, obviously, the earlier something is.
The closer you are to the surface, the more recent it is,
unless the soil gets disrupted by something,
like a plane crash.
And we know from the description that if the plane
went into a spiral, it may have gone down
in a very acute angle.
When I first saw that image of the plane crash taken
two days after the plane did crash,
it kind of looked like there was a debris field.
And so at that time we were kind of talking it over,
does that tell you anything about the trajectory
of the aircraft as it came in?
To me it looked like maybe less of an acute angle,
but you'll see as we go that the impact was almost vertical.
And here, what you have here, this brownish-gray soil
on top is the normal plow zone or the tillable land,
and underneath it in almost every one
of the exploratory trenches we dug was this heavy,
yellow clay, which really didn't make me feel too great.
This was the beginning of the excavation,
and if you've ever tried to dig in clay, it's not fun.
You know, there are certain things you have to do to start.
You need to set up a reference point
from which everything gets measured.
Like at a crime scene, if you watch
those programs on television.
So what we do is set up a reference line.
Everything is referenced to that line, east or west of it,
and where along that line, if you find something
along a north/south line, which is what this is.
These, by the way, are two of the students
who came from University of West at Oahu.
So if we thought we had jet lag coming from the Midwest.
[laughs]
They were in a bad way for a few days,
but they smiled throughout all of it.
So, as I mentioned, when you're working
in a small community, within short order everyone
knows you're there, and they know why you're there.
And so while we did not want to give interviews
and Mr. Cooche, the original witness, didn't want
to give interviews or the landowner, Monsieur Carteau,
didn't want to give interviews, we still made the papers.
Clearly, someone drove by the entrance of the site,
took a photo.
The top article talks about looking
for the traces of the American soldier.
The bottom one says, American aviator dies May 27, 1944.
His son would like to find him.
So to say there was no pressure.
[laughs]
And the fact that this was a pilot program
with the University of Wisconsin and DPAA,
if for some reason the plane wasn't there,
we were gonna do our best to document that.
We were hoping for the other alternative,
which was to locate the plane and, if we could,
any remains of the pilot.
So any kind of soil discoloration is something
that perks an archaeologist's attention.
And here you can see a darker area.
And I'm trying to clear back to see how wide it is,
how far it travels, and what the shape of it is.
Because we were still, we had little information
on the crash.
We knew that the plane didn't crash in the field
across the road where the ground penetrating radar
results came up empty.
So we were hoping we were in the right place.
I don't know that you can distinguish the soil color
change here, but it's really abrupt through here.
What we came to find out was that that soil discoloration,
which has very clear borders here, actually represented
one of the drain tiles that was in the field.
So while it was a cultural change to the soil,
it wasn't the right one.
And, as Tom told me as we were going over the presentation
that this was an agricultural feature.
[laughs]
Here's a close up.
And what I'd like to call your attention to here
are these blue flecks, both within the soil color change
and outside of it.
We began to see these blue flecks almost
everywhere we worked.
We didn't know what they represented.
There was no clear pattern to how they
were deposited or how they were patterned.
Here's the drain tile.
And we came across more of these discontinuities,
but, obviously, if you can use the trowel
and the buckets as scale, this was not our crash site.
So we did our best to keep the floors of the excavation
units clean because that helped us notice
if there were any soil color changes.
And it's what archaeologists do best.
[laughs]
And at the end of every day any area that we thought that
might have promise as representing the crash location,
we tarped whether or not there was rain in the forecast.
We had a short period of time in the field.
And, as I said, no pressure.
[laughs]
But we also didn't want the site to be vandalized,
and often that happens when word gets out.
So in this area there's lots of that blue stuff.
More concentrated.
We still didn't know what it represented.
And, Kevin, this slide is for you because
the shovels are pointed in the right direction.
And here's a close up of some of that blue stuff.
It was almost like an ice blue color.
Almost looks like a glacier.
But it was friable.
It was everywhere.
There were pockets of concentrations.
And we still didn't know what it represented.
We had a lot of dirt to move in a very short period of time.
Not all of it could be moved by the heavy equipment operator
because we needed, in some areas, to maintain more control
over how much dirt was removed at one time.
So this was a red letter day.
We had a bucket brigade here.
People were working really hard.
And when you're digging through that clay it's a lot
of work, but we all had one focus and that was
to find the crash site.
And then there was a day when Charles came up
to me with a bone.
His face was kind of white, even though the sun
was shining brightly, and he kind of sheepishly
hands it to me.
And it turns out it was animal bone.
We found quite a bit of animal bone and other debris
in the fill of what ultimately turned out to be the crater.
So people don't throw clean dirt to fill in a hole.
They throw in whatever they have in the field
or whatever they want to get rid of.
So we had broken ceramics.
We had fragments of a Dutch pipe.
And we started also coming across large pieces of aluminum.
Nothing diagnostic yet.
And you can see on that tarp to the lower right
of the photo, there were many, many,
many pieces of fragmented aluminum.
Some with rivets, some with rivet holes,
and so that kind of keeps you going.
This is Claire Steffen, by the way,
who is a UW graduate now in graduate school in Colorado.
And behind Claire is Danielle, who did
all the leg work for us.
She's from Belgium.
And also worked with the landowner to make this happen.
So everything that came out of the soil we excavated
got screened, and you'll see more photos
of the screening operation later.
But at the end of every day, folks on the team would
go through everything that we collected to look
for anything diagnostic that would help us identify
the plane, anything diagnostic in terms
of what could have been personal effects.
And so it's a slow, tedious job.
And there was lots of stuff, the military DPAA
isn't interested so much in the plane parts,
like us they were interested in finding enough
to document that this was Lieutenant Fazekas'
plane and perhaps Lieutenant Fazekas.
So this is just a very small sampling
of the spent cartridges, 50-millimeter cartridges
that came from that site.
And I don't know that we weighed all of them,
but there were a lot.
A lot.
And then some.
And then, one day, we're probably about two meters down,
and we found some pieces of rubber that seemed
to have a pattern on them.
And Ryan, who was a pilot and very interested
in aircraft from this period of time, had brought
with him some books from the US.
He had just been to the EAA show in Oshkosh
and picked up some books on the P-47 aircraft,
the Thunderbird.
And we compared the tread pattern on this
and some other pieces of rubber, and it matched exactly
the tread pattern on P-47 tires.
So, you know, every day it was like this carrot
hanging out there.
Every day there was more information
to keep moral up, to keep us going.
And so we start finding larger areas of soil discoloration.
Until we get to this area and I wish we could fool
with the lights because this area is very dark
and greenish brown.
And I had never, as I mentioned, never worked
on a military crash site, but it looked all the world
to me like fuel.
You know, that greenish-black stuff.
And when you get really close to it,
it really smelled like fuel.
And so what you have here for an archaeologist,
this is like gold.
This is a deposit that's not been exposed for 72 years.
Anaerobic conditions, no oxygen so it's well preserved,
and the vapors were enough to knock you over.
So anyone working in this area could work there
for about 10 minutes, maybe 15 minutes,
and then someone else had to come
in because the vapors were just overwhelming.
And so this is the area of the fuel-soaked area.
And down there, we're down about three meters already.
And this kind of looks like a war zone photograph,
but the terracing you see all around is required.
Like OSHA here has deep trenching regulations,
in France as well, as you go down two meters,
you have to go out an equivalent amount
so that the walls don't collapse on you.
And so that's what we had to do.
The deeper we went down, the more we had
to open up the excavation.
And we did that, thankfully, with the help
of our very skilled backhoe operator.
Again, the area that's fuel-soaked, it's starting
to get very, very moist, not from the fuel
but from water bubbling up
because we're now down fairly far.
We're in clay soil.
And so there's no place for the water to drain.
Again, this is much darker, where Morgan is excavating.
Very, very dark.
And we're not finding much in it.
And let me just go back.
From this area, there was an area up at the top
of the slide and an area over this way where two other teams
of two people were excavating.
In the area where Ian and Kevin, who's here this evening,
were excavating, and it was not easy excavating.
They began to find a cache of machine guns from the plane.
Okay?
So what you have is a central area that's fuel-soaked,
very dark in color, and on either side of that, I guess,
what do you think about 20 meters?
Or less?
10 meters.
On either side of that dark stain, members
of the team are finding guns from the plane.
So, at that point, we're all starting
to feel really, really good.
But at the same time we're all starting
to feel really, really good, there's this feeling
that we're there, and this is a grave site
Anyone who excavates burials or works with human
remains would not be human if they didn't
have that sensibility about them.
There was a lot of dirt to remove to get the guns out.
Six, ultimately six of the eights guns originally
on the plane were recovered.
Four on the side that Kevin and Ian were working
on and two on the opposite side.
Ian's a strong guy, and Kevin, on the right-hand side,
looks fairly impressed with Ian's lift.
[laughs]
But these guns weigh about 70 pounds apiece.
Okay?
I learned a lot on this excavation,
and one of those things is that each
of these guns is numbered.
And the numbers correspond to a particular plane.
Okay?
That's Ian on the left and Ryan on the right.
They are doing their best to try
and figure out where on that gun those numbers
might be located.
And so because we work in a connected world,
Dr. Michael Dolski, who is a military historian provided
by DPAA, sent an email to Washington to find out
where we should start looking on each of these guns
for the numbers.
We got the information.
And here's one of those numbers.
And, Ryan, you can help me out.
918056 matches with Lieutenant Fazekas' plane.
And there were other numbers that
were cleaned off using a high power.
Thank you.
Pressure washer.
But that would not obliterate the numbers on these guns.
So, at that time, we were able to recover two
of the numbers.
We didn't spend more time cleaning off the other guns,
but we knew we had equipment from the plane,
we had this fuel-soaked soil area.
And let me finish my piece of tonight's presentation
by introducing my colleague, Dr. William Belcher,
who worked for a previous iteration of DPAA in Hawaii
who now teaches at the University of West Oahu
and also works under contract from time to time to DPAA.
His training is the same as mine.
He is an archaeologist and a forensic anthropologist.
And because a handful of us were leaving on August 11th
and the rest of the team wasn't leaving until the 15th,
he came to our site in France by way of plow Hawaii,
where he lives, probably enough time to do his laundry,
then he got on another plane to take the reins
from me at the Fazekas site.
- I too am not an archaeologist.
I'm a plant pathologist.
I've worked in dirt before, but not this way.
My role was to help be the UW person
responsible after Charles and Ryan and Leslie left.
And being a responsible person kind of made me laugh,
but you had faith in me.
If you hear somebody chuckling in the back, it's my wife.
[laughs]
So here we were on Tuesday, August ninth.
This is gonna be a transition and a time table.
Bill Belcher is arriving.
Frank Fazekas, Jr., is arriving that afternoon also.
Charles, Leslie, Ryan, and Sam will be leaving the site
on August 10th, flying home on August 11th.
Saturday, August 13th, is our last full day
of digging because on Sunday, August 14th,
we have to document the site, backfill it,
and close it down.
Now, originally, we were hoping to dig through the 16th,
but there was this little thing called the Feast
of the Assumption, which is a huge summer holiday in France.
And so we realized, well, we won't be able
to go beyond the 14th of August.
So that's the time frame that we're looking at.
And on Tuesday we knew we had machine guns
with serial numbers.
It was the right plane.
Will we be able to find any human remains?
On Tuesday, here was the advice that Leslie gave us.
And I wrote it down in my little Wednesday Nite
at the Lab notebook.
And she said, go carefully and slowly today.
Everything at this level could have a human bone
attached to it.
It might only be fragments of bone.
You can also look for fragments from a flight suit
or a personal effect such as a wallet.
And watch out for the fumes from the fuel.
The hole is getting deeper and muddier,
but we're getting closer to.
You know, when there's four machine guns on one side
and four machines guns on the other
and you got a fuel patch in between,
even a plant pathologist can figure out
this is doing pretty good.
These things were amazing to me.
I'd never seen these before.
They're like swing sets.
They're shaker tables with screens, and you run a bucket
and you put the bucket in there
and then you shake-shake-shake,
shake-shake-shake,
shake your...
[audience laughs]
...table.
And you're looking for little stuff.
And you don't know what you're looking for.
Charles found some big bones.
Even I recognized them as big bones.
They looked like Brontosaurus to me.
But this, along in here, we start finding these little bitty
bones, and we're wondering what are these?
They're rodent bones.
And that was real helpful to me as somebody
who didn't know what was going on, to be able to say,
wow, you can see little bitty bones,
and you can recognize them without
having been previously trained in that.
And this is also a place where there's some comradery
going on with the shaker table.
So Frank arrives at three o'clock in the afternoon
on August ninth.
We didn't know Frank.
We didn't know how he was going be like as a person.
Didn't know much about him.
The whole things was when he arrives we're gonna give him
some time just to be at the site.
We all kind of withdrew, and he got
to have a moment on his own there.
Frank proved to be one of the most splendid people
I've ever met, and that's one
of the great stories of this project.
Here's Frank looking at that table with Ella and Claire,
right and left, or center.
This is Frank, Jr., with Monsieur Cooche.
Frank gave Mr. Cooche a model of the P-47 Thunderbolt.
And in this little drawer right here, Mr. Cooche later
pulled that out and showed me
this little Glenn Garrett type cap.
That was his dad's army cap from 1916 when his dad
was in a heavy artillery unit during the Battle of Verdun.
So keep that in mind.
Where we are is one of the most heavily fought over
pieces of ground in that neck of the woods,
and they've had lots of wars.
Wednesday, August 10th, luckily we woke up to rain and more,
and by the time we left the hotel at 9:00 to drive
to the site, we got there and it was too wet.
So we had to go and hang fire at the Cafe Marcel
starting at 10:00 AM.
That's down in the town of Buysscheure.
When things let up a little bit, we went back to the dig,
and in the drizzle and the mud we got
to screen the slop and the glop.
This was the best part.
This is Charles here.
And this.
Let me see.
There it is.
This is Charles.
This is Cafe in France.
[laughs]
That's Frank, Jr., the mayor, Ryan, the server,
I'm looking at a newspaper, this is Leslie,
and Sam Soderberg.
Sam, can you raise your hand again.
Way to go.
You saw this before.
That's what I was reading at that cafe.
On the track of an American soldier.
This is what we got to go back to the site to work with.
It got deeper and muddier.
And the other thing that Bill introduced when he arrived
is this two-meter by two-meter quadrant system.
So, with this system, we started going down
with walls defined by those strings.
And you can see here is a one-meter rod put
in the picture to help with the documentation.
The key thing in this picture is right there.
That is a Trains ? Grande Vitesse, TGV.
That's going about 190 miles an hour.
It's about a hundred yards from the site.
At least four of those ran by every week.
Kind of like high speed trains here in Wisconsin.
[laughs]
What did I say?
Every week?
Well, I blew that joke.
Sorry.
Four every hour.
And when you first get there, it's like,
wow, look at that, that's cool.
But the big thing is, think how close
that came to obliterating this site.
Think what that meant because that moved that road.
It changed the ownership of the land.
The building of the TGV had a big impact
on the story that we're telling you tonight.
And we go deeper.
And here's a bunch of the aircraft stuff
that Frank, Jr., is looking over.
And this is Wednesday evening at the city hall,
and Charles and Frank, Jr., and Leslie and Ryan
and Sam are preparing to say goodbye.
Frank stayed and the four folks from Madison went home.
It didn't rain much on the 11th,
but we had lots of mud and then we had sun and mud.
And being from the Midwest, I thought we would
then have sun and dust, but we didn't have that.
We kept carving down in the two-by-two-meter quadrants
We're down to our last three days.
The bucket brigades are going.
We're doing a lot of screening.
This is Bill.
This is Dennis.
This is me and my coat.
That's how I can tell that it was raining.
And that's what happens when it rains.
That's our friend, the buckets.
We have to screen every one of those.
15 minutes a bucket.
And this is what screening looks like.
These gloves were remarkable.
I had one pair.
I used them for the whole 12 days I was there.
It's great screening glop.
That's your happy site until then you got to go down
and dig some more and do another bucket brigade.
And that's what that looks like.
And that's bringing the buckets back up out
of the hole to screening area.
And on some days and some places,
that's what we got to screen.
And that's the look you get when you have somebody
pour a bucket of glop and slop in front of you.
[laughs]
I can hardly wait to get another one of those.
But you don't know what you're gonna find in there.
So here's Frank Fazekas, Jr., working
on the dig site of Frank Fazekas, Sr.
I don't do this much.
As a matter of fact, N equals one.
But this was one of the remarkable things
about this project is having the son of the pilot present.
I don't think we've talked much about Frank, have we?
So Frank was six months old when his dad died.
He grew up to be a United States Air Force pilot himself.
He flew C-130 Hercules in the Vietnam War.
And to get to have a beer with Frank Fazekas, Jr.,
is one of the great pleasures of one's life.
And this is now Friday.
It's our second to last day.
And Friday, in the morning,
is when at one of the screens we found
what we think is probable human remain.
And this is a very big deal because, as the folks told us,
you came, you didn't know exactly the right place.
You figured that out.
You dug.
You figured out where the crash site was.
You found the machine guns.
The machine guns lined up with the serial numbers.
And now, on Friday, you have found probable human remains.
That's what you came to do.
And we didn't have a whole lot of days left.
This is Bill showing Frank, Jr.,
a piece of pretty intact stuff from
what we think is from the cockpit.
Now, this is a big deal because there's nine big things
that are likely to survive a crash, correct me if I'm wrong
the engine block and the eight machine guns.
And we'd found six of the eight machine guns,
and the Germans took the other two.
So the fact that we're finding things from the cockpit
meant that we might be, might be getting close
to the engine block.
And if we're getting close to the engine block,
we might be getting closer to probable human remains.
So this is what it looks like now going deeper.
And Friday night, even though we had
found probable human remains, that was something
that we thought we should keep within the group.
And this is the ceremony with the deputy mayor,
the mayor, Frank Fazekas, Jr., and Danielle.
And he gave a remarkable, grateful speech.
I'd like to thank my high school French teacher,
Jim Higby, because I could read this speech
and realize, as a former speech writer,
this guy has given a pretty darn good speech.
Danielle translated it for the Americans there.
And then Frank rose and gave his speech in gratitude,
and Danielle translated that from English into French.
So this is a pretty powerful testimony for how the folks
in this little village and this region and in France
still hold great appreciation for people
who came to their aid.
Saturday was the last day to dig and screen.
We were tired.
I'd only been there 13 days.
Other people had been there 22, 23 days.
You had a high point from finding
what you thought was probable human remains.
It's your last day, you're tired,
but you don't know what you're gonna find yet.
And you can still keep digging deeper.
I don't think we ever-- We never found the--
We did not yet find the engine block.
And the good thing is it was really sunny
and gorgeous, and it's a lot easier.
This is a sad photo.
So for 10 days I looked at this swing set
and it was all set up and it was always ready to go.
We never took it down, and at 3:30
on Saturday afternoon we cut the straps.
It's like breaking your weapon.
It's like smashing your tool.
This is signifying in some ways that we're done here.
The next day a few of us drove to Cassel,
the big town nearby to go to the Gendarmes.
And there we transferred the ammo, the machine guns,
and the possible human remains to the Gendarmes.
It's very interesting the provenance, the keeping track
of all this stuff, because the US has its own forms
and we have metal seals with numbers punched in them.
And we wrote all that stuff down, and then we also said,
okay, now the French, what do you need us to sign?
And they gave us their French forms,
and their sealed their stuff with sealing wax.
I've never seen it except for in the movies.
You know, you light a candle and the red wax comes down
and you press that thing in there and it's, like, wow.
And Cassel is a castle; It's geologically a cliff.
It's a promontory.
It's way up high.
And you can see this huge sweep
of French Flanders and into Belgium.
That's where General Peyton had his headquarters
in 1914 and 1915 in World War I because he
had such a great view of the landscape.
And it's a pretty good place to get a good sweep
of history too.
You're not that far, at Cassel, from Agincourt
and 1415, which we just marked 600 years ago last year.
And it's amazing to be able to be part
of that kind of project.
On Sunday afternoon, Bill made the final measurements
and took the drawings so that we could
have a good idea of what we're leaving.
The put a blue tarp down to delineate how far we'd gone,
that way when we cover this back up and if we ever go back,
we'll know that we got to get real careful
when we run into the blue tarp.
And then Marcellin came with Cedric with the two backhoes
and they did the backhoe ballet, and they filled
that place in.
And so I'd like to end there with acknowledgments.
I do want to point out, though,
there are two 12-year-olds in this story.
One is a 12-year-old Marc Cooche, who, in 1944,
watched this plane go down.
And in 2016, there's 12-year-old Cedric,
who is a Mozart of the craft.
When Cedric in 72 years is 84, that'll be 144 years.
And as an 84-year-old, he'll be able to go back
to 2016 to Monsieur Cooche who would go back 72 years.
It's a remarkable two-generation span of direct history
that that young man, someday we hope will be an old man,
will be able to share with the folks in his town
and in his family.
And Chuck, Charles, do you want to do the acknowledgments?
- I just want to acknowledge everybody
who participated with this project.
Sam Soderberg, if you.
Claire Steffen is in Colorado.
Ian Thomasgard, I was hoping was going to make it.
He is just about ready to ship out
for officers training with the Marines.
And, actually, Sam Soderberg just finished training
to be an Air Force pilot here in Madison.
So I'm happy to see him back.
This is the first time I've seen him since he left.
Kevin is a student still here.
Could you put your hand?
Thank you, Kevin.
And then from the University of Hawaii West Oahu,
Ella Axelrod and Morgan Fernandez.
At DPAA Dr. William Belcher, Dr. Michael Dolski,
Master Sergeant Dennis Hudson.
Jaime Martindale from the Robinson Map Library
within the Department of Geography.
From the town of Buysscheure, France, Mayor Marc Deheele,
who is right here, and Marcellin and Cedric.
I cannot pronounce their last name.
Thank you.
Acknowledgments of the Cooche family, Mr. and Mrs. Cooche.
As Tom and everybody stated, they were absolutely wonderful.
With open arms every day.
They allowed us to eat on their patio,
and they gave us drinks and, you know, cookies.
Ms. Danielle Roubroeks, our civilian World War I,
World War II historian and interpreter
as well as our photographer.
That's why she wasn't in many of the pictures.
She was taking a lot of the photos.
And the site.
And then just images of everybody.
[laughs]
Thank you.
[audience applauds]