Finding Lieutenant Fazekas

[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Extension]

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, 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 S.U.N.Y.- 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.

[applause]

[Ryan Wubben, Medical Director, Med Flight, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health]

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.

[slide with the map of Europe in 1944 from an aviators view]

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.

[Ryan Wubben]

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.

[slide with a photo of a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt military airplane]

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.

[uses mouse to point to the machine guns located in the wings of the aircraft on the photo]

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.

[Ryan Wubben]

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 –

[slide with a map of the English Channel coast of France in 1944]

– 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.

[uses mouse to point out the Calais region on the map of the French coastline]

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.

[return to the map of the French coastline – uses mouse to indicate the Calais region on the map again]

The actual invasion was down here.

[uses mouse to indicate Normandy on the map of the French coastline]

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 – 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.

[uses mouse to indicate the Calais region on the map again]

And there were daily raids going over into France –

[Ryan Wubben]

– 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.

[return to the slide of the map of the French coastline]

And we were fortunate to get this from the Robinson Map Library here on campus.

[slide of a map of Normandy showing it, the English Channel and southeast England]

So, this, again, is the situation. London is on the upper left corner up there.

[uses mouse to point out London on the map]

This is London. This is the channel front from basically the Netherlands all the way down to France.

[uses mouse to point out the English Channel]

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.

[Ryan Wubben]

And as we zoom in a little bit, this is the narrowest point.

[slide of a map of the Straits of Dover]

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.

[uses mouse to point out the border between Belgium and France]

[slide with a photo of U.S. fighter planes in England in the 40s]

So, Lieutenant Fazekas was a member of the 22nd Fighter Squadron which was a part of the 9th Air Force. The 9th 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.

[Ryan Wubben]

As you can see under the wing here, that’s a bomb right there, along with their machine guns.

[return to the photo of the fighter planes]

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 8th Air Force was.

[Ryan Wubben]

The 8th 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 – the grunts doing the daily work of ground support.

The day in question is about nine days before D-Day.

[return to the slide of the map of the Straights of Dover, now with the flight path of Lieutenant Fazekas as a green line]

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 8th 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.

[Ryan Wubben]

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.

[return to the Straights of Dover map, using mouse to point out Kingsnorth on the map]

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 we – where he came down in Saint Omer, which is this area right here.

[uses mouse to point to Saint Omer in France]

Calais is right up in here.

[uses mouse to point out Calais on the map]

Dunkirk –

[uses mouse to point out Dunkirk on the map]

– 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.

[slide that has the facts of Lieutenant Fazekas disappearance]

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 V1 and V2 rockets that were being launched from this part of northern France and into Belgium.

[Ryan Wubben]

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.

[return to the slide of the facts of the disappearance]

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.

[slide with a photo of Lieutenant Fazekas and his vital information]

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.

[Ryan Wubben]

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, of – 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.

[slide of other facts relevant to the investigation of the crash]

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.

[Ryan Wubben]

The U.S. authorities investigated a short time later, and this was in the 1946, 1947 timeframe. 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.

[slide of more facts relevant to the crash]

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 D.P.A.A., that’s what this stands for, whose task is to go out and make an accounting of all- 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.

[Ryan Wubben]

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.

[Charles Konsitzke, Associate Director, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

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 – the eyewitness, who was 12 at the time. And now remember now, this is 80 – hes 84 now. And he confirmed the location. He – he walked both Sam and Jed to the site, confirmed the location.

[slide detailing the search activities in Summer of 2015]

Sam and Jed reviewed the area, and you can see kind of a – a decrease in the ground. So, it – 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.

[slide detailing the search activities in December of 2015]

So, fast forward, December 2015. We – planning commences and we start the recovery process, more of the administrative side of it. And we develop – 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.

[Charles Konsitzke]

So, we start planning the site. You can see here; this is the location that was described as the crash scene.

[slide with aerial photos of the crash site as well as a map with its location in France]

[slide with results of the investigation of April 18,2016]

So, it was a negative result. We were frantic. We were very frantic because we put a lot of time and commitment into this case. So, we reached out to D.P.A.A. 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.

[Charles Konsitzke]

And, you know, we – we were thinking, do we – do we have to cancel the project because we – we don’t know where the crash – crash site is? So, luckily, April 21st, three days later, D.P.A.A., searching archives, obtained an image from the National Collection of Aerial Photography out of Scotland.

[slide with an aerial photo from the Scottish National Collection of the crash site]

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.

So, 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.

[uses mouse to indicate the crash site on the photo]

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.

So, the project was back on pending excavation permits.

[slide of another photo with another aerial view of the crash site]

But I want – I want to give you an – 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.

[slide of the same aerial photo with a closer zoomed in view of the crash site]

This image was taken two days after the crash site. So, no negative outcome regarding the – the – the scan.

[slide of the aerial photo of the crash site with Google Earth and Google maps information superimposed]

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.

[uses mouse to indicate the crash site on the photo]

There’s a few things I want to point out here. Remember the – the eyewitness stated: Well, it was north of the road. He stated it was right here.

[uses mouse to point out location of crash on map according to witness which is incorrect]

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.

[uses mouse to point out that the crash site was north of different road that the eyewitness referred to]

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.

[slide detailing search information from June of 2016]

So, June 26 we continued our effort. However, we made, you know, we – 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, you know, environment.

[Charles Konsitzke]

I – I know how that protection is. However, we scheduled, we determined the start date to be July 24th.

So, early July I’m in northern Wisconsin on vacation and I’m on conference calls with D.P.A.A. and with Germany, our – with Danielle, our interpreter on July second and fourth. On the Fourth of July, ironically, the landowner, D.P.A.A., and the interpreter met, started negotiating, and the landowner that day gave acceptance to work on the field.

[slide detailing location efforts in July of 2016]

So, I sped home. [laughs] July fifth through the 10th finalized the permit, submitted it, and it was approved on the 13th.

[slide with dates of Madison departure (July 23) and the start of the project (July 24)]

[Leslie Eisenberg, Honorary Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison]

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.

So, we leave Madison on July 23rd, we get to France on the 24th –

[return to the slide with departure and project dates]

– 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

So, we all convened at the hotel where we were staying.

[slide of a photo of researchers looking at maps of the crash site]

So, 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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 –

[return to the photo of researchers with maps]

– there’s a scale on the map, which we came to find out was way off. What we did, ultimately –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– 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.

[slide with a photo of Ms. Eisenberg having a discussion with the survivor, Mr. Cooche]

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 70 – 72 years previous.

When you’re 12 years old, I think the whole world probably seems big to you.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide with a photo of the French landowner]

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?

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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 military – 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 know 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 had a fence at the entrance of the road –

[slide of a photo of the fencing on the road with an inset photo of French statutes related to permitting]

– 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

There’s also logistics you don’t think about.

[slide of photos of supplies in the back of a van with an inset photo of a portable toilet]

You need supplies. We didn’t bring shovels, trowels, buckets, tarps, wood to make screens with us from the U.S. So, we had the support of D.P.A.A. 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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,

[laughter]

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.

[return to the slide with the photo of the supplies and portable toilet]

And getting a port-a-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.

[laughter]

[slide with a photo of the landowner and a backhoe]

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 –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– 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 – 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 – the – 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.

[photo of Ms. Eisenberg in the field with her back to the camera in front of the backhoe in mud]

[laughter]

So, the – So, 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 U.S. or anywhere, you can point to a location –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– and the edge of their bucket will go right down at that spot. And so, 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.

So, we dug a bunch of these. And just to give you an idea –

[slide of a photo of several exploratory trenches on the field of the landowner]

– 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide with a close-up photo of one of the exploratory trenches]

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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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 –

[slide of a close-up of soil stratification in one of the exploratory trenches]

– 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide of a photo of researchers setting up a reference line]

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.

[laughter]

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide with photos of French newspaper articles related to the project]

So, clearly, someone drove by the entrance of the site, took a photo. The – the top article talks about looking for the traces of – of the American soldier. The bottom one says: American aviator dies 27 – May 27, 1944. His son would like to – to find him. So, to say there was no pressure.

[laughter]

[Leslie Eisenberg]

And the fact that this was a pilot program with the University of Wisconsin and D.P.A.A., 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.

[slide of a photo of Ms. Eisenberg with a trowel looking at a large area of soil]

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.

Cause, we were still –

[slide of another photo of the soil discoloration close-up]

– we had little information on the crash. We knew that the plane –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– didn’t crash in the field across the road where the ground penetrating radar – 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 –

[return to the slide of the photo with the soil discoloration close-up]

– but it’s really abrupt through here.

[slide of a photo of the researchers digging in the soil]

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 agri-cultural feature.

[laughter]

[Tom Zinnen, of microphone]

Youre welcome, folks.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

Here’s a close up.

[slide with an even closer look at the soil discoloration with blue flecks to the sides]

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.

[slide with a photo of the old drain tile in the middle of one of the exploratory trenches]

Here’s the drain tile.

[slide with a photo of more soil with discoloration amid buckets of soil]

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.

[slide of a photo of a student brushing the soil amid various trenches]

So, we did our best to keep the floors of – of the excavation units clean because that helped us notice if there were any soil color changes.

And it’s what archaeologists do best.

[laughter]

And at the end of every day any area that we thought that might have promise –

[slide of a photo of a blue tarp covering an exploratory trench]

– 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.

[laughter]

But we also didn’t want the site to be vandalized, and often that happens when word gets out.

So, in this area –

[slide of a photo of students in front of a trench that has plenty of blue splotches in it]

– 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.

[slide of a close-up of the blue substance in the soil]

And here’s a close up of some of that blue stuff. It was almost like an ice blue color. Almost looks like a – a glacier. But it was friable. It was everywhere. There were pockets of concentrations. And we still didn’t know what it represented.

[slide of the excavation site with workers digging in trenches and mounds of dirt]

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 – its a lot of work, but we all had one focus and that was to find the crash site.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide of photos of animal bones found at the excavation site]

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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide of a photo of a student holding up a sheet of aluminum at the excavation site]

And we started also having – 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 was – did all the leg work for us. She’s from Belgium. And also worked with the landowner to make this happen.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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-

[slide of a photo of the workers screening debris from the excavation site]

– 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 –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– the military D.P.A.A. 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.

[slide with a photo of rusted out and spent 50mm cartridges in a bucket]

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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide with a photo of a small piece of patterned rubber in the soil]

And Ryan, who – who is a pilot and very interested in aircraft from this period of time, had brought with him some books from the U.S. He had just been to the E.A.A. 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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 –

[slide with a photo of large trenches with soil discoloration surrounded by workers]

– larger areas of soil discoloration.

[slide with a close-up of a worker working in an area of large 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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

And when you get really close to it, it really smelled like fuel.

[slide with a photo of a close-up of the dark, fuel smelling soil]

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.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide with a photo of the trenches in the fuel-soaked area with red dots indicating highest concentration]

And so, this is the area of the fuel-soaked area. And down there, we’re – were 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 O.S.H.A. here has deep trenching regulations, in France as well, as you go down two meters –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– 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.

[slide with another look at the fuel-soaked area being excavated by workers]

Again, the area that’s fuel-soaked, it’s starting to get very, very moist, not from – 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.

[slide with a close-up of a worker digging the fuel-soaked area of the trenches]

Again, this is much darker, where Morgan is – is excavating. Very, very dark. And we’re not finding much in it.

[slide with a close-up photo of one of the machine guns from the plane]

And let me just go back.

[return of the slide with Morgan digging in the fuel-soaked trench]

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.

[return of the slide with the close-up photo of the planes machine guns]

In the area where Ian and Kevin, who’s here this evening, were excavating, and it was not easy excavating-

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– they began to find a cache of machine guns from the plane. Okay?

So, what you have is a central area that – 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.

[return of the slide with the photo of the planes machine guns in the soil]

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 –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– 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.

[slide of a photo of a worker, Ian, holding up one of the planes machine guns]

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.

[laughter]

But these guns weigh about 70 pounds apiece. Okay?

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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.

[slide of Ian and Ryan cleaning the machine guns found at the excavation site]

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 D.P.A.A., sent an email to Washington –

[Leslie Eisenberg]

– 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.

[slide with a picture of a close-up of the military numbering on one of the machine guns]

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 –

[Ryan Wubben, off microphone]

Pressure washer.

[Leslie Eisenberg]

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 –

[return of the slide of the photo of the military numbering on the side of the machine gun]

– we had this fuel-soaked soil area.

[slide with a photo of Dr. William Belcher using surveying tools at the crash site]

And let me finish my piece of – of tonight’s presentation by introducing my colleague, Dr. William Belcher, who worked for a previous iteration of D.P.A.A. in Hawaii who now teaches at the University of West Oahu and also works under contract from time to time to D.P.A.A. 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 – at the Fazekas site.

[Tom Zinnen, Outreach Specialist, Biotechnology Center, University of Wisconsin-Extension]

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.

[laughter]

So, here we were on Tuesday, its Tuesday, August 9th. This is gonna be a transition and a timetable. 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 –

[slide with the timeline of events at the crash site from August 9th to the 14th]

– 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?

[slide with the timeline of the crash site on Tuesday, August 9th, 2016]

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.

[coughs]

The hole is getting deeper and muddier, but we’re getting closer to, you know, when 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.

[slides with photos of the large excavation site and workers doing screenings in quick succession]

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 brigade and you put the bucket in there and then you shake-shake-shake, shake-shake-shake, shake your –

[laughter]

– table.

[Tom Zinnen]

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.

[return of the slide with the photo of workers screening for debris at the crash site]

And this is also a place where there’s some comradery going on with the shaker table.

[slide with a continuation of the timeline at the crash site on August 9th, 2016]

[slide with a photo of Frank Fazekas at the crash site]

So, Frank arrives at three o’clock in the afternoon on August 9th. 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 –

[Tom Zinnen]

– 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.

[slide of a photo of Frank Fazekas looking on as two workers, Ella and Claire, do screening]

Here’s Frank looking at that table with Ella and Claire, right and left, or center.

[slide with a photo of Frank Fazekas and the eyewitness holding a toy P-47]

This is Frank, Jr., with Monsieur Cooche. He – 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 his little – this little Glenn Garrett type cap.

[Tom Zinnen]

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,

[slide with the timeline at the crash site from Wednesday, August, 10th, 2016]

– luckily, we woke up to rain and more, and by the time we left the hotel at 9 to drive to the site, we got there, and it was too wet. So, we go – 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.

[slide of a photo of the excavation party at a caf in France]

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.

[points to a beer in front of Charles in the photo]

[laughter]

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. Whoo.

[slide with a photo of a French newspaper with the headline: On the track of an American soldier]

You saw this before.

[Tom Zinnen]

That’s what I was reading at that cafe.

[return of the slide of the French newspaper]

On the track of an American soldier.

[slide with a photo of a very, very muddy boot in a very, very muddy excavation site]

This is what we got to go back to the site to work with.

[slide with a photo of two of the workers working in a very muddy trench]

It got deeper and muddier.

[slide with a photo of the excavation site set up with a quadrant system]

And the other thing that Bill introduced when he arrived is this two by – 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.

[uses mouse to point out one meter rod in the photo]

[slide of a photo of workers screening at the crash site]

The key thing in this picture is right there.

[uses mouse to point out a high-speed train in the photo]

That is a Trains Grande Vitesse, T.G.V. 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.

[laughter]

[Unidentified speaker]

Four times an hour.

[Tom Zinnen]

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 T.G.V. had a big impact on the story that we’re telling you tonight.

And we go deeper.

[slide of a photo of Frank Fazekas looking over parts of the aircraft at the crash site]

And here’s a bunch of the aircraft stuff that Frank, Jr., is looking over.

[slide of a close-up of the debris that Frank Fazekas was looking at]

[photo of a slide of Sam, Ryan, Leslie, Frank and Charles at the City Hall]

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.

[slide with the timetable of events at the crash site on Thursday, August, 11th, 2016]

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.

[slide with a photo of the excavation site]

This is Bill. This is Dennis. This is me and my coat. That’s how I can tell that it was raining.

[slide of a photo of large puddles in the excavation trenches at the crash site]

And that’s what happens when it rains.

[slide with a photo of buckets filled with mud and dirt]

That’s our friend, the buckets. We have to screen every one of those. 15 minutes a bucket.

[slide with a photo of another screening session at the crash site]

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.

[slide with a photo of muddy bucket stacked at the excavation site]

That’s your happy site until then you got to go down and dig some more and do another bucket brigade.

[slide with a photo of two workers filling buckets with soil at the crash site]

And that’s what that looks like.

[slide with a photo of workers starting a bucket brigade at the excavation site]

And that’s bringing the buckets back up out of the hole to screening area.

[slide with a photo of a screening area and screen filled with mud]

And on some days and some places, that’s what we got to screen.

[slide with a photo of a worker screening mud]

And that’s the look you get when you have somebody pour a bucket of glop and slop in front of you.

[laughter]

Boy, I can hardly wait to get another one of those. But you don’t know what you’re gonna find in there.

[slide with a photo of a worker working in the mud at the crash site]

[slide with a photo of Frank Fazekas, Jr. working at a screening site]

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.

[Tom Zinnen]

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.

[slide with a photo of people working at the excavation site]

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 remains.

[Tom Zinnen]

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.

[slide of a photo showing the lead professor showing Frank Fazekas, Jr. part of the plane]

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 –

[Tom Zinnen]

– 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.

[slide of the excavation site close-up to where the engine block might be]

So, this is what it looks like now going deeper.

[slide of the ceremony with the mayor and deputy major on that Friday night]

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, –

[Tom Zinnen]

– 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.

[return to the slide with the photo of the ceremony]

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.

[Tom Zinnen]

Saturday was the last day to dig and screen.

[slide of the timeline of the last day of the dig, Saturday, August,13th, 2016]

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-

[Tom Zinnen]

– we never found the – we did not yet find the engine block. And the good thing is it was really sunny and gorgeous –

[slide of a photo of the excavation site followed by a slide of the screening area dismantled]

-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.

[Tom Zinnen]

This is signifying in some ways that we’re done here. The next day, the – a few of us drove to Cassel, the big town nearby to go to the Gendarmes.

[slide with the timeline from the last day Sunday, August 14th, 2016]

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 U.S. has its own forms, and we have metal seals with numbers punched in them.

[Tom Zinnen]

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.

[return to the slide of the timeline from that last Sunday of the project]

And it’s amazing to be able to be part of that kind of project.

[slide of worker making final measurements at the excavation site]

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.

[slide with a photo of a blue tarp over the excavation site]

The put a blue tarp down to delineate the – 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.

[slide of a photo of two backhoes filling in the excavation site]

And then Marcellin came with Cedric with the two backhoes and they did the backhoe ballet, and they filled that place in.

[slide with acknowledgements]

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.

[Tom Zinnen]

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?

[Charles Konsitzke]

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.

[return of the acknowledgement slide]

At D.P.A.A. Dr. William Belcher, Dr. Michael Dolski, Master Sergeant Dennis Hudson. Jaime Martindale from the Robinson Map Library within the Department of Geography.

[slide with photos of the Mayor and two backhoe operators]

From the town of Buysscheure, France, Mayor Marc Deheele, who is right here, and Marcellin and Cedric. I cannot pronounce their last name.

[Unidentified speaker]

Vandienste.

[Charles Konsitzke]

Thank you.

[slide with a photo of Mr. Cooche and his wife]

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.

[slide with a photo of the translator, Ms. Danielle Roubroeks and Mr. Fazekas, Jr.]

Ms. Danielle Roubroeks, our World – 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.

[slide of a panoramic photo of the excavation site]

And the site.

[slide of Sam Soderberg at the screening area]

And then just images of everybody.

[slide with a photo of Claire Steffen at the excavation site]

[slide with a photo of Ian Thomasgard at the excavation site]

[slide with a photo of Kevin Scheidt at the excavation site]

[laughter]

[slide with a photo of Morgan Fernandez and Ella Axelrod at the excavation site]

[return of the slide with Dr. William Belcher and Mr. Frank Fazekas, Jr. at the excavation site]

[slide with a photo of Dr. Mike Dolski at the excavation site]

[slide of Master Sargent Dennis Hudson at the excavation site]

[slide with a photo of the entire excavation team]

Thank you.

[applause]