Southern Italy 1943: Connected writing 3

Coincidences never fail to disappoint me. How about this one. As usual, it is about a missing airman.

In this case, I had been up in the hills around a place called Teora, in the province of Avellino, Campania region, southern Italy. I was looking for traces – hearsay or tangible – of a P-40 Kittyhawk fighter plane that had last been seen in this area on September 19, 1943, “in flames” after taking a hit from a mobile German ack-ack gun positioned at an important nearby intersection.

I spent the whole day scouting around countryside, stopping off at isolated hamlets and farmsteads, and even stopping to chat to old chaps tilling the ground or pruning the vines. Nothing, Niente. Nobody had even seen or heard of any plane coming down in that area, nor any pilot ejecting from his aircraft.

Fast-forward about 10 years and I am contacted by a Canadian purporting to be the nephew, on his mother’s side, of the pilot of said plane, who went by the name of Wilfred Brown. He had been trying to find information about the crash site for years, and would I help him?

I searched back through my records. The only possible reference I could find was the wreckage of a P-40 plane that had been found near a village called Laviano by a local metal-detector group, some years previously but about 10 km as the crow flies from where my P-40 had been last spotted. Furthermore, there was not enough evidence to confirm that this wreckage was actually a P-40, since this plane shared a number of similar features with other planes from that period. Besides, there were at least two other crash sites in the vicinity, both of Allied bombers. Initially there was no local memory of any body having been recovered.

it did seem to me, however, that a plane that had been hit above Teora, might possibly have impacted on that mountainside near Laviano, even at such a distance, since there were no intervening heights that would have interfered with that trajectory.

At around the same time, the metal-detector group discovered a local witness that spoke of a badly-burnt and decomposed body being recovered from the crash site and taken to the local cemetery where it had been interred until removed after the war. It was believed that this body had belonged to one of the aforementioned bomber crews, despite the fact that it was given a separate burial. Upon removal after the war, this body was re-buried in the US Military cemetery in Nettuno, near Rome.

We felt that there was a good chance that this crash site was in fact, that of Wildred’s P-40, and that probably the body that was now in Nettuno was also Wilfred’s.

Together with representatives from the village, Laviano, and from the metal-detector group, Wilfred’s family decided to make the trip over from Canada and to lay a plaque on the spot where the P-40 wreckage had been found.