Teams Seeking Remains Dig Back to World War II

By ELISABETH BUMILLER
NYT

BAULER, Germany — At the start of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, an American bomber was shot down by German fighter planes and sent into a fiery, nose-first crash in a cow pasture here. The pilot’s body was never found.

Almost 65 years later, on a recent late summer day, a 10-member Defense Department team was in the same pasture, searching through mounds of excavated mud for a trace of the airman. The group had already unearthed shreds of a parachute and part of a leather glove when one of the team’s forensic anthropologists, Allysha Powanda Winburn, found a crucial clue to the mystery: a small piece of what she called “possible osseous remains,” or potential human bone.

The real mystery, at least to the 77-year-old farmer who witnessed the crash at the age of 13, Hermann Reuter, was the group of Americans who had turned up in the pasture near his home in search of the pilot.

“Why after such a long time?” he asked, perplexed.

(More here.)