Over Himalayas and Internet, lost flights found

The Hump, American air crews called it. Or, when they were in a darker mood, the Aluminum Trail. The World War II supply route from India into China was dotted with their wreckage.

By whatever name, the route was critical, an aerial highway over some of the world's highest mountains, a path flown by hundreds of U.S. aircraft ferrying supplies to the Chinese Army so it could stay in the fight against Japan.

The cost in planes and lives was staggering. More than 400 U.S. aircraft carrying nearly 1,400 troops disappeared there during the war.

For decades, no one tried to recover their remains.

But now two men -- a self-financed Arizona adventurer and a Cary computer expert -- are fighting to make sure the U.S. government brings those missing fliers home.

And they may be winning.

Night comes suddenly to the Himalayas in winter, so at dusk Clayton Kuhles was ready to give up.

It was Dec. 7, 2006 -- Pearl Harbor Day -- and he had been rummaging for five hours among snow, shredded aluminum and bent propellers on the side of a nameless mountain nearly 2 miles up. He had found pieces of parachute, whole engines, even an intact landing gear retracted into a wing. Kuhles had not, though, found the one reason he had hiked to this remote corner of India: an identification number for the shattered World War II-era bomber.

The businessman from Prescott, Ariz., started hunting such wrecks almost by accident. On his way home from a mountaineering expedition in Nepal, he made a side-trip to explore Burma. A guide that Kuhles hired there noticed his interest in World War II sites and asked if he wanted to see a wreck. Sure, he said.

A reason to climb

Only later, after Kuhles got home, did he read up on The Hump. The number of wrecks, and the number of families who still didn't know what happened to their loved ones, surprised him and gave him an idea. Climbing just for the sake of bagging another difficult peak had begun to lose its luster. But here, he thought, was a way not only to feed his hunger for adventure but also do some good.

Before the 2006 expedition, Kuhles had identified four wrecks on other trips to the region. This time he hoped to find numbers that would lead to names, but he was having no luck. As he wrapped up his final fruitless inspection that Dec. 7, he knew the winter weather was about to force him out of the mountains for the year.

Time to go, he told the local tribesmen who had guided him to the site. The men started down the trail to their high camp for the night. They were hungry, cold and already thinking about the 10-mile slog the next day over frozen ridges and through jungle-clogged valleys to the nearest village.

Then Kuhles noticed another pile of wreckage beside the trail. One last stack of torn aluminum, one last chance to figure out who had died here. One last stab at an answer for aged brothers, sisters and widows back home who had wondered for six decades about the fate of the plane's crew.

He switched on his headlamp and began flipping over the panels.

Googling in Cary

Six months later, Gary Zaetz idly booted up Google on his home computer in Cary. On a whim, the IBM software technician typed "1st Lt. Irwin Zaetz" into the search field.

His uncle -- along with the rest of an eight-man crew that included Sgt. James Hinson of Greensboro -- had been missing for 63 years, but with the speed of a broadband Internet connection, that family mystery was about to end.

Up came Kuhles' Web site, www.miarecoveries.org, and with it a startling array of information. There were photos of scattered wreckage, the GPS-measured longitude and latitude of the crash site and a copy of the government form that Kuhles filled out in his concise, almost scientific style for the U.S. military unit that recovers missing remains.