Bringing home the dead

The last time American soldiers were here, they were fighting for their lives during one of the fiercest battles of the Second World War, the Battle of the Bulge. Nearly 70 years later, the only immediate evidence of this, tucked into a hillside in Belgium's densely wooded Ardennes region, is a crater about the size of a backyard pool.

This was long thought to be the location where a twin-engine B-26 Marauder bomber called Bank Nite Betty crashed during the month-long battle to halt Germany's last major offensive of the war. But new information has led the US military to re-examine this assumption, and now the Americans are back. Instead of tanks and bombers, though, they're armed with metal detectors, shovels and sifting screens, searching for the remains of soldiers who didn't return home.

In a wooded area below the crater just outside Allmuthen, Belgium, a small town near the German border, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) is engaged in an expansive effort to find evidence of the six crewmembers who were on board Hunconscious, a missing bomber they now believe may also have gone down here in addition to Bank Nite Betty on Dec. 23, 1944.

The planes are believed to have exploded with such force that there is little hope of finding bodies intact.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/jpac-excavates-site-in-belgium-for-us-soldier-remains-a-846275.html