Blog 3 - Article reflection

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080905/tts-png-australia-us-japan-wwii-airman-972e412.html

CANBERRA (AFP) - - The suspected remains of a World War II-era airman found dangling in trees in the jungle of Papua New Guinea have turned out to be just a moss-covered branch, the Australian military revealed Friday.

Hikers on the famed Kokoda Trail, site of a brutal 1942 battle between Japanese and Australian troops, reported they had discovered what appeared to be the suspended skeleton of a flyer tangled in parachute cords two weeks ago.

But the Australian Defence Force (ADF) said it had sent staff from Canberra's embassy in Port Moresby to inspect the remote site, only to discover that the suspected human skeleton was simply a tree limb tangled in vines.

"No remains were located," the ADF said in a statement received here Friday.

"While the location, near Kagi, is below a flight path that was commonly used by Allied aircraft during WWII sorties, the find has been confirmed by ADF staff as a moss-covered branch.

"It appears the branch has broken off the main tree and fallen across some vines, which from the ground, could have been confused with the body of an airman," the statement said.

News that the remains of a flyer had been discovered more than 65 years after his death in the heat of the World War II battle for the Pacific had caused a sensation.

"I couldn't make it out at first. It wasn't until the wind blew that you could really see it is in a harness," guide David Collins, who was leading the group of Australian hikers who spotted the tree-bound mass, said last week.

"There are goggles and it appears to be caught up in cables, so presumably it is an airman," he said.

The ADF immediately dispatched a team to check whether the find was actually a body and, if so, to determine the airman's nationality as Australian, US and Japanese planes overflew the area during the war.

The jungle in the area is extremely dense and hikers are warned not to stray off the Kokoda Trail as unexploded ordnance remains strewn in the area more than half a century after fighting ceased.

Some 600 Australian soldiers died in battle near the extremely rugged Kokoda Trail, which was seen by the Allies as a crucial point at which to halt the Japanese military's southern advance through the Pacific towards Australia.


The news article, about the supposed WW2 pilot found dangling in the trees above the remote , 96-kilometer Kokoda Track, has caused quite a sensation among people across the world, including me. I closely followed the news story (it didn’t help too that Yahoo News only made a short post about it) through various news channels such as ABC and BBC. Nothing much was said too in these news, so I was consigned to a long wait, occasionally typing “WW2 Flyer Found at Kokoda Track” into search engines on days where I was less busy. No news came by for a while, until finally the conclusion arrived to the mystery shrouding the Kokoda Track Flyer. Well, it turns out that it was just a moss-covered branch that looked uncannily like a human from far.

What a letdown, eh? During my occasional search for more information on this case, I encountered many comments from users who too have either chanced upon this story or follow it intently. I recall one comment saying something along the lines of “So why do we care about some dead guy that’s hanging from a tree anyway? We should just bring him down and bury him somewhere to put his soul to rest”

This set me thinking. WHY did I care so much about a pilot from a war that was over before I was born? He was not from my country, and neither have I been to Australia, United States, or Japan so I don’t have an attachment to any of these countries. In our society, we hear about deaths every day. Millions died in WW2, yet somehow the a single mysterious corpse raises my interest and thoughts more so than the mass memorials and graves dug in the honour of the many who died in the war.

I guess, it’s the single poignant story behind alleged pilot that drives my interest, and the life stories of millions is lost in the nameless blend of a mass memorial and grave. Who was the pilot? What army did he serve? How did he die? Who were his family?

I stopped to think that this was someone’s child. He could have had a brother, or a lover. If time permitted, he could even have had children and grandchildren. What we have here is not a single death, it is a web of pain stretching out through the ages, getting thinner but never quite disappearing. This person died for his country, and he believed in what he was fighting for. I hoped that with further investigation, the families of the deceased would be able to get closure at long last; an old man and his children could finally see what happened to his father who went missing over the skies of Papua New Guinea.

But then the results came out and it turns out that it was nothing more than a moss-covered tree branch after all. In fact the tree where it was found on only started growing after WW2 ended!

So well, after all there is a lesson to be learnt from this media sensation that so gripped my interest. Sometimes, the media speculation is not correct, and one can tend to jump to conclusions without any definite proof.