Ex Japanese capture, taken over by Indonesians.

http://wp.scn.ru/en/ww2/b/50/79/0/1

It is the badge of the aircraft construction company bearing their emblem or logo. Usually a lapel badge/brooch. Often enamelled or brass and silvered. Issued to and worn by company employees.

Thanks Tangmere and James.

🙂

Some relevant points there to be considered PP, but if the family approve any recovery efforts, their wishes should be respected on the small chance that remains can be found.

Yes but there is another ethical concern, although the family, according the article have given permission.

In order to discover if it is Smithy’s aircraft the wreck, if it is an aircraft wreck, it has to be seriously disturbed. That part of the world saw some fighting in WW2. It may not be Smithy’s aircraft but in the attempt to find out you will disturb what may be the grave of someone else.

Therefore what does one do?

Arabic numbers eh ….. then it’s probably an Osama Bin Biplane.

Sorry 😮

I will go now I promise.

🙂

Sheeeesh!! So does that mean we can all shake hands and go away now?

I’ll think about it :confused:

Oh OK then 🙂

Actually it was an interesting discussion, but don’t tell anyone I said that or my reputation will be shot to pieces 😉

My concerns are much similar to those of James. But there is an extra consideration as far as I am concerned which is that I have been a professional archaeologist. It took a lot of hard work as you may guess to get those qualifications. Also you must also remember that any professional in a field that requires the degree of effort and sacrifice that archaeology requires just to get to the point of being a professional, there is a sense of committment that leaves one very concerned if there is move towards somehow lessening standards and allowing excavation by people who are not qualified. Call it professional concern, call it a regard for ethics or whatever but it exists, and put simply although I am now retired from the work I still hope that it will continue to develop.

Now that is not a criticism of any respondent here, but as an archaeologist and historian I note increasing signs of a dumbing down of the public’s attitude to the study of the past and to history. One need only consider that we have a rise in religious fundamentalism which is seeing our educational establishments being pressured into teaching that non sequitor “creation science” a collection of myths taught as truth and which flies in the face of the work of two centuries of research in geology, history, archaeology, palaeontology and astronomy. As a professional I have very very deep concerns about that dumbing down when I consider the problems our society is going to face in this century.

My constant aim in this thread has been to get to the intellectual roots of wreck recovery, its methodology, the training and commitment of its practitioners. So far ( edit: with some exceptions), anyone who has raised these very basic ideas has been insulted for being qualified, dismissed with silly jokes or been told that if you weren’t there you couldn’t understand as if it was some terrible battle, when in fact it was simply digging a hole. As a professional I understand that people can be moved by finding human remains but, and what many fail to understand, the fact is that a professional in any area which involves examining or finding human remains must put that aside and concentrate on their part of the job of analysis.

Also no one seems to be able to even suggest when a site moves from being a source of plane parts to a site that requires the excavation skills of the properly trained professional. No matter the emotion, the human remains are secondary to the wider picture. That is how a professional must see it otherwise they are not doing their job, so how about looking at this issue less from emotion and more from a scientific aspect, because if not those people who are interested in wreck recovery will see that permits will require formal qualifications and all the other impedimenta that is required of any conventional archaeological dig.

(And to answer Tangmere – you need look no further than the silly response when I suggested that recovery was a political matter, because it is a government decision. All I got was nothing but extraneous emotion).

Edit: I, like James, thank Cees for his detailed replies on the state of the subject in his country.

Now that we have properly moved back to the original topic of the thread the discussion raises another interesting point.

Recovery of skeletal remains from a grave is difficult enough even though the body was usually buried in a complete condition either originally fleshed or in some cases after exposure to deflesh then only the bones collected and buried.

A crash site creates a number of extra logistical problems. If it remained on the surface and was not badly damaged then any bodies could be removed at the time. However as noted in the thread previously if the aircraft has violently contacted the ground and burnt or buried itself then crew who were in the wreck will most likely be fragmented or burnt. The remains if recovered today would be fragmented and eroded skeletal parts. Identification of these would be difficult – larger parts would be less of a problem but small fragments could well be missed and in the case of crashes in agricultural settings you run the risk of the soil already containing fragmentary non-human animal parts. Properly speaking, although I suspect that cost alone would preclude it, each recovered bone fragment would have to be tested to determine if it is human or non-human.

Having dug sites where there are human burials and where non-human remains are in the soil and in fairly close proximity – farming communities tend to be like that then ideally identification of stray bone fragments necessarily should be the job of appropriately trained pathologists or physical
anthropologists. That is quite obvious.

But having noted the complexities involved, albeit simply, how and when do we draw the line at a site being a war grave or not. If the body is removed in its entirety then the site is not a grave but simply a crash site. However in the all too common circumstances where the force and nature of the crash has fragmented, burnt or otherwise disarticulated the body how do we determine that all parts have been removed. The parts can be distributed over a wide area by several natural actions. To name just a couple there is the results of an explosion or if parts were taken by animal or insect scavengers, and then there is natural movement in the soil.

So what I am driving at is how do we determine if the body has been recovered – a body is a finite thing. The recovery team through constraints of time and budget which, less face it, are the forces which over rule any idealistic or scientific objections in the end may simply dictate that we have recovered as much as we can, while other bodily parts are still left unrecovered. We cannot forget that the recoverers are human and have limits, and that there is no automatic system that sifts soil in a block so that everything is recovered.

In the case of fragmented remains – many of those coffins we see containing long dead MIAs contain in reality little more than a few teeth and a few of the larger bone fragments. The rest is still in the ground somewhere around the site.

In our worthy desire to give the dead service personnel a fitting funeral we are in reality only interring part of them, unless the crash site was such that the body was contained intact within a confined and structural sound space. In most cases the impact forces would have shredded both machine and any person still within it at the time of impact.

So it follows that the natural result is that we are forced to declare a cut off for when a site ceases to be a war grave even though it is entirely likely that body parts will still remain at the site. It is a complex matter and one that can only be resolved I suggest by having an arbitrary guideline that allows the removal of war grave status at a certain point in the recovery of the remains, otherwise cost considerations would step in to force the removal of war grave status. Otherwise we could wind up with large numbers of areas off limits quite unnecessarily. Land use has to continue for economic reasons into the future, and the greatest killing grounds in western Europe the WW1 battlefields which contain millions of unrecovered partial remains have long returned to agriculture and development.

Oh, on the contrary Malcolm.

You see, I’d say that if you didn’t realise that the whole scene was a set up stunt then…..well….I think our Jeremy can probably rest his case.

Dear me – does this cheap shot indicate that you have run out of righteous indignation. Of course one realises it was a stunt, however the highly entertaining Mr Clarkson is not, as I recall, anything other than a motoring journalist with a good team of writers (whom I thank for the endless enjoyment) and a captive audience. He is not as far as I am aware an archaeologist, now I could say much the same thing about motoring journalists as he says about archaeologists but as he is very entertaining and I like the show that would be unkind and childish. Really quite as childish as posting that particular comment (which I have seen before and had a good chuckle over) in this thread. It is along the lines of your Ark and Titanic comment, that bought a chuckle too.

It seems to me Tangmere that you have conclusively demonstrated to us all that you have managed to back yourself into a corner, while keeping your head in the sand. That is no mean feat and you are to be applauded for it.

Perhaps if you read back through this thread you will see that

1. I agree that proper graves should be provided for the war dead,

2. I have no objection, and neither should I, to remains being bought back to their home country, but

3. As the lone voice of reason I seem to be subjected to abuse because I suggested that any such decision is to be made by your government and therefore by definition it is political. I can’t help saying it as it is, but that is the way it is Tangmere and Maple 01. If right now I could order your government to bring them all home from that British auxillary serving under under Hadrian right through to the present day casualties in the certainty that the government would follow my orders, I would. However I don’t have that power so kindly go and take out your frustrations on those who can affect the outcome you want.

Now to bring a little peace to this thread I offer my humble apologies for ever acquiring my professional qualifications in archaeology, for ever taking part in real excavations of prehistoric sites and for failing to recognise that people who have no formal qualifications in archaeology are so much better at it than us incompetent professionals with our useless book learning and such. In fact it makes me really cry with shame that many years ago on my first dig I didn’t go up to the director (over-qualified ******* he was) and tell him there and then that we were not fit for the task and really they should replace us with these brilliant impassioned amateurs with a JCB. But alas too late now, so you will just have to accept my apologies, and I will send all those nasty degrees back to that unthinking university that awarded them to me with a sharp reminder not to do it again.

There are you happy now?