Dozens of RCAF pilots still missing in Canada. Inside the 71-year search to bring one home
CBC
The B.C. nephew of a long-lost Cold War-era airman with the Royal Canadian Air Force is appealing to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Department of National Defence for financial support so a group of Ontario volunteers can work at locating his remains this spring.
Flight Officer Barry Allen-Newman, 24, was presumed dead on June 10, 1952, after his P-51 Mustang plunged into Lake Ontario during a training exercise off Point Traverse near Picton.
A declassified RCAF report into Allen-Newman's death that was written that summer, and obtained and reviewed by CBC News, said it's believed "anoxia" — or a severe lack of oxygen — may have contributed to the young pilot's death. His body has never been recovered.
"I think it left a large hole," said Mike Allen-Newman, 50, who is now pushing for the federal government and the military to help bankroll a search for his uncle's remains on Lake Ontario this spring. Up to this point, the search has been done entirely by civilian volunteers in their spare time.
"We basically have the gravestone with no body," Mike said, noting his uncle's loss must have been particularly hard for his grandfather. "He was a World War One vet, so for him, I don't know how he dealt with it."
Allen-Newman, who is in Victoria, said he plans to write Trudeau later this month, detailing his uncle's story and the 71-year search for his remains.
Unlike the U.S. military, Canada doesn't actively search for remains of service personnel.
"Canada does not actively seek its war dead," DND spokesperson Lisa Fiander told CBC News in an email. Instead, she wrote, DND "becomes involved as appropriate when remains are discovered."
Founded in 2007, the Canadian Armed Forces' casualty identification program has identified the remains of 35 Canadians. It is believed 28,000 Canadians died overseas in the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War with no known resting place.
On Canadian soil, it is believed there are still dozens of lost air personnel in the Great Lakes region alone who died in training and whose remains have never been recovered.
Instead, the job is left to organizations like the Tillsonburg, Ont.-based Canadian Harvard Aircraft Association (CHAA). The group is named for the bright, canary-yellow aircraft associated with training hundreds of British Commonwealth and RCAF pilots throughout the Second World War era at air bases across southwestern Ontario.
This spring, volunteer divers with the group hopes to recover the fuselage of Mustang 9555, the aircraft Allen-Newman was flying when he died and is believed to still contain his remains.
"Our hope is to find the fuselage of the aircraft and we would be close to, hopefully, his remains," Walther Irie, the lead diver for the recovery team, told CBC News on Monday.
In 2020, his team managed to find a debris field at 105 feet (32 metres) below the surface, and from it recovered a fuel tank liner. Volunteer researchers looked up the serial number and it checked out — the tank liner belonged to a P-51 Mustang.
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