UPDATED INFO
[h=1]Human remains recovered from legendary WW2 airman Jack Zimmerman’s last flight[/h]
August 1, 2012
[h=1]
Divers are lifted back onto the deck of the ship The Grapple off the coast of Longue-Pointe de Mingan, Que. Wednesday, July 25, 2012.The mission is to search and recover the remains of five American crewmen of a U.S. Air Force PBY-5A "Catalina" seaplane that sank off the coast of the small village on the North shore of the St. Lawrence River in 1942. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson For Randy Boswell (Postmedia News). 07-31-CRASH-PILOT[/h][h=2]
Photograph by: Paul Chiasson , THE CANADIAN PRESS[/h]
EDS: Handout photo of Jack Simmerman’s biography book cover, 1942 newspaper clipping from the Toronto star about Simmerman’s deadly seaplane crash and photos of underwater discovery of U.S. Air Force PBY-5A Catalina seaplane.
By Randy Boswell
Postmedia News
The recovery of human remains this week from the Canadian crash site of a Second World War U.S. seaplane has turned a spotlight on the remarkable career of the man who piloted the doomed aircraft — the so-called “Million-Miler” airman Col. Jack Zimmerman, a pioneering American aviator who was so well known at the time that a biography detailing his exploits was published just months before the November 1942 tragedy off the Quebec coast.
Zimmerman, 37, was one of five U.S. servicemen who died when the amphibious PBY Catalina went down in the Gulf of St. Lawrence during a mission from Maine to what was then a newly-built Allied airfield in the eastern Quebec village of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan.
Local residents were watching as the so-called “flying boat” attempted a takeoff on Nov. 2, 1942 but foundered in rough waters after hitting a wave. Fishing boats were dispatched to the scene and four American airmen were rescued before the Catalina sank to the sea floor with Zimmerman and four other crew members trapped inside.
Killed in the crash, according to the online database warbirdcrash.com, were Zimmerman, engineer Sgt. Charles Richardson, assistant engineer Pvt. Erwin Austin, assistant radio operator Pvt. Peter Couzine and passenger Capt. Carney Lee Dowlen. Radio operator Pvt. James Click and passenger Capt. J.B. Holmberg were injured but survived, while co-pilot Sgt. Bernard Peterson and gunner Cpl. Robert L. Ashley were rescued without injury.
The aircraft remained there, undisturbed and in a remarkable state of preservation in the Gulf’s frigid waters, until it was found by Parks Canada archeologists during a 2009 underwater survey near Mingan, just north of Anticosti Island.
The Parks Canada team contacted the U.S. government to report the discovery of the seaplane and the fact that it was a possible war grave. And earlier this month, after three years of planning, a 50-member team of divers and other recovery specialists from the U.S. military’s Hawaii-based Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC) began probing the aircraft in search of the five men’s remains and associated artifacts.
This week, JPAC officials reported the discovery of unspecified body parts and a host of objects — including an aviator’s glasses, legible pages from a crewman’s flight log and a bottle of mouthwash — still intact after 70 years under water.
“It still smelled like Listerine,” an astounded U.S. Army Capt. Russell Grigsby, JPAC’s mission commander at Mingan, told Postmedia News on Tuesday.
Zimmerman had been the subject of a laudatory biography published in early 1942 by U.S. author John R. Tunis. The book — featuring a portrait of a uniformed Zimmerman on the cover — was titled Million-Miler: The Story of an Air Pilot, in recognition of the record-setting distances flown by the Ohio-born aviator during his distinguished career.
Zimmerman, in fact, was credited with logging at least two million miles — 3.2 million kilometres — after he began flying in the 1920s. Among his achievements were flying the first tri-motor and the first Douglas aircraft, piloting the first scheduled commercial plane to land at New York City’s LaGuardia airport and setting a coast-to-coast speed record for transport aircraft in a Boeing Stratoliner.
Zimmerman, a senior pilot with TWA before the war, also was among the first aviators entrusted to fly mail for the U.S. Postal Service. And by the time the U.S. entered the Second World War in late 1941, he had flown across the Atlantic Ocean more than 100 times.
Not surprisingly, he was assigned to organize U.S. transatlantic aviation at the outset of the war.
He is also known to have piloted planes for secret FBI missions, including several occasions on which he ferried the agency’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover.
http://www.canada.com/Human+remains...Jack+Zimmerman+last+flight/7024844/story.html
