Wreckage of Lost WW II Bomber Found in Russia

Investigators have identified the wreckage of a U.S. Navy bomber that crashed in World War II at a remote site on the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka, the Pentagon said Friday.

A team of Russian and U.S. investigators identified the wreckage as that of a U.S. Navy PV-1 Ventura patrol bomber that was missing since March 25, 1944.

Forensic specialists from the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii recovered remains assumed to be those of crew members. They believe that additional remains are at the site, the Pentagon said in a statement.

The specialists recommended a full-scale recovery operation next summer when excavation would be possible because the ice and snow would be gone, the Pentagon said.

A local Kamchatkan historian, Alla Paperno, gave officials the initial information on the crash site. Then investigators located the site by using archival research and interviews with Russian geologists who had been to the site 30 to 40 years ago, the Pentagon said.

The bomber was one of five that took off from the Aleutian Islands on a reconnaissance and bombing mission called the “Empire Express” over Japanese bases on the northern Kurile Islands.

Only one plane successfully completed the mission because of “extremely bad weather and hazardous flying conditions,” the Pentagon said.

One of the other planes crashed soon after takeoff, two discharged their bombs into the sea and returned to base, and the other disappeared until it was found this year on the slope of the Mutnovskiy volcano in Kamchatka, the Pentagon said.