Chapter 15
Reaching an end to grief is very hard for families whose loved ones are listed as missing in action. As has been noted, the army declared the lost serviceman or -woman killed in action if their remains were not recovered for twelve months following their initial report of loss. For Allan Knepper, that determination came on July 11, 1944. But an official military declaration, while somehow meaningful in itself, still left an open wound. A funeral, a graveside ceremony, and a coming together of the families was needed, and for these families, none of that could be truly meaningful without the recovery of their loved one.
And so the Knepper family continued to live through the bright sunshine of Lewiston with an emotional cloud of grief that would not dissipate. Allan’s father took his loss very hard. Allan was his firstborn, and they were evidently very close. Allan’s mother had passed away in 1938, making the loss all the more heartfelt for his father.
The recovery of remains for servicemen who had gone missing in action has been a relatively rare event. In the case of the Mediterranean Theater, a high percentage of the losses occurred over open water, with no possible recovery. Losses over land made recovery more feasible, but the possibility of finding the missing airmen was strongly influenced by the local topography and the events of the day.
Allan was lost on what was surely the busiest day of the war up to that time for the Allies, and equally busy for the Axis forces on Sicily. The rural Sicilians who may have witnessed a plane coming down or a pilot parachuting to earth were not well equipped to deal with a capture, a rescue, or a burial, and perhaps even less equipped to document the event or report it to local authorities. In Sicily on July 10, with General Patton’s army storming from the south and the British Army from the east, with the German army conducting a controlled retreat, and Italy surrendering to the Allies, the local citizenry could be excused if their only thought was to hunker down and hope for a quick resolution.
No record of Allan Knepper’s loss has been discovered beyond the Missing Air Crew Report that Captain Trollope filed on July 13; any chance of recovering his remains was slim. But, having recorded the events of Allan’s life—his joining the Army Air Corps, his completion of flight school and assignment to combat duty in North Africa—reaching a point of closure for what has come to be called the Allan Knepper Project has led to a fair effort to locate his crash site, hoping beyond reason to recover and repatriate his remains. Much more important than reaching a point of closure for his family was the clear realization that Allan himself, having given his life in service to his country in this most brutal war, deserved a faithful effort to recover him.
Having reached a point in the research where a recovery effort could be considered, the standard investigative steps were considered first, specifically, contacting local churches, cemeteries, and municipal governments to determine if any records existed from 1943. The first small step was made on June 29, 2014, when a letter was mailed to three churches in Mineo, selected for two reasons: Mineo is the closest town to the point where Lieutenant Knepper’s plane was thought to have crashed; and in Lieutenant Kocour’s letter to Allan’s sister, he mentioned that Allan’s plane went down next to a small church.
The initial inquiry resulted in one response acknowledging receipt, but no further word was received. At this point, it was decided to revert to the most powerful information-gathering technology ever developed—social networking. The reasoning was that even though the readers of social networking sites may not include eyewitnesses to the events of 1943, they may well include children and grandchildren of people who were eyewitnesses and who may have shared stories around the dinner table over the years.
In mid-April 2015 a quick Internet search of informational blogs within Sicily turned up several possible candidates for a social media campaign. Among them: BlogSicilia, a robust Internet platform with offices in six Sicilian cities and a network of correspondents and editors. BlogSicilia was contacted by e-mail on April 21, provided a brief background of the Allan Knepper Project, and asked if they believed a posting to their site would be appropriate and productive. The response from BlogSicilia was immediate. Mr. Francesco Lamiani, chief reporter for the blog in Catania, replied that a post would be made. Incredibly, the same day that the blog went live, a response was received from Salvo and Annalisa Fagone from Palagonia, Sicily: “This afternoon I talked with two people that remember this event. One of these is eighty-one years old, and he explained to me that he saw the plane falling into his garden. The second one is the son of a witness that is dead, unfortunately. He remembers that his father often told him about an airplane falling in that area. At the moment we have no information about the pilot, but we hope to find more information as soon as possible.”
Salvo with his wife and son visited the farmstead owned by Mr. Giuseppe Gulizia four days later, and reported: “Mr. Giuseppe Gulizia, the witness of the crash, told us that Allan Knepper was first buried close to the place of the crash by them [Mr. Gulizia’s family], and that one year later, more or less, the U.S. Army recovered the rest of the body. So, he confirms that the body is no longer in that place. As far as the aircraft was concerned, he told us that it was dismantled and all of the parts recycled by the residents. We hope to find some residual piece of the plane by using a metal detector, but for this we have to wait [until] the harvest.” Mr. Fagone also attached photos from his visit with Mr. Gulizia.
As mentioned in Salvo’s e-mail, the harvest was soon to commence in the region of the crash site. With crops high, and the farmers not willing to have them threatened, a sweep of the area using metal detectors had to be delayed.
On April 30, 2015, Salvo was supplied with Lieutenant Knepper’s Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) and other military maps of the region dating to that time period. It was apparent that there was a strong correlation between what Mr. Gulizia had reported to Salvo and what was contained in the U.S. military records. In Missing Air Crew Reports, witnesses to the loss are identified, and supplemental information about the location of the event is included. In Lieutenant Knepper’s MACR, a witness statement was provided by Capt. Richard Decker that included a simple map showing the approximate location of the crash sites for Lieutenants Bland and Knepper. The straight-line difference between the site pointed out by Mr. Gulizia and the estimate based on the MACR map is less than 1 mile.
On May 2, Salvo delivered an additional discovery: “A [piece of] good news is that Mr. Giuseppe Gulizia has a brother, one year younger. Mr. Giuseppe didn’t [tell] me this because in the past he had words with him. I’ve just talked with his brother, Mr. Raimondo Gulizia. He remembered very well the crash, and he indicated to me the [location] of it. It corresponds exactly with the place that his brother pointed out. I want to underline that they don’t talk to each other, and this is very important because they indicated the same place.”
It was becoming clear that the event of July 10 was well remembered by at least two eyewitnesses, and that the location as indicated by both corresponds very closely to the location mentioned in the MACR. Intriguingly, there is an important discrepancy with regard to the young lieutenant’s remains. While Giuseppe Gulizia believed that the body had been removed by the U.S. Army, his brother Raimondo believed that the remains were still located in the original gravesite.
Salvo also confirmed that the harvest was beginning, and that on the following day he was planning to visit the cemetery located in the nearby town of Mineo, searching for whatever additional information could be discovered there.
At this point, there appeared to be enough corroborated information to confirm—at least tentatively—that an airplane crash had occurred on or about July 10, 1943, and with a provisional location. There was still no confirmation that it was a P-38 crash site, and certainly no evidence to suggest that it was Lieutenant Knepper’s plane that the Gulizia brothers were referring to.
Between May 8 and 10, 2015, the University of Catania and several private Sicilian companies were contacted to inquire into the feasibility of conducting ground penetrating radar (GPR) sweeps of the suggested crash site. After several e-mail exchanges, it was apparent that it would not be feasible to use GPR to locate Lieutenant Knepper’s remains. The cost was steep. One company offered to rent our team the necessary equipment at a cost of 1,000 euros per day, along with a whopping deposit of 15,000 euros. Other firms submitted proposals whereby the sweep would be conducted by their personnel, at a cost that was also prohibitive.
It had also been suggested that GPR might be a suitable technology for locating the airplane remnants, but not the remains of the pilot. Dr. Alessandro Monacchi at CIS Geofisica advised: “If your need is to find the remains of the aircraft . . . this is simple . . . but it is difficult to find human remains buried in an agricultural land after seventy years. Very difficult, especially if the person was not buried in a real tomb or closed before in a case of metal or wood and then buried within in the casing.”1
A leading U.S. expert was contacted to clarify the point made by Dr. Monacchi. Dr. Jim Doolittle, a research soil scientist with the National Soil Survey Center, confirmed Dr. Monacchi’s opinion, and noted: “[In using GPR] the radar operator will look for ‘anomalies’ on radar records. Anomalies are reflections or patterns that are different and stand out from the rest of profiled materials. Detection of the burial will depend on its contrast with the surrounding soil matrix. As the officer’s body was not placed in a coffin, detection will be more difficult. With the passage of time, features weather and become more similar to the surrounding soil matrix; this results in lower contrast and radar reflections with lower amplitudes. I concur with your feelings that the use of GPR will be unproductive and ineffective.”2
With this information, by mid-May it had become apparent that the only affordable technology that held out any possibility of progress was metal detection. Concurrently, Salvo made a follow-up visit to the Gulizia farm, accompanied by the younger Gulizia brother, Raimondo. Salvo later reported: “He told me about the crash. He remembers that it happened in the afternoon, that his father [ran] toward the crash site immediately after the crash, hoping to find someone still alive, but the fire was too strong, and he couldn’t. When the fire [was] extinguished, the airplane was shattered. He doesn’t remember [anything] about the body.”3
Importantly, during this visit to the site, Salvo discovered that the location of the crash appeared to be on two properties, not just one. A property adjacent to the Gulizia farm was owned by Mr. Salvatore Sipala and contained a citrus orchard. Mr. Sipala extended permission to Salvo to enter the property for this project. Having concurred that GPR was not feasible, on May 17 Salvo brought his own metal detector, a system capable of reaching 50 to 60 centimeters into the soil to identify medium-size objects. Salvo also mentioned a metal detectors club in Sicily that could possibly provide advice and on-site assistance in the coming days and weeks.
Realizing that the search for Allan’s aircraft, and possibly his gravesite, was now entering a phase that would be more intrusive on the landowner’s private property, letters of introduction and thanks were sent to the three key individuals contacted by Salvo: Giuseppe Gulizia, his brother Raimondo, and Salvatore Sipala.
On May 27, initial contact was made with the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Division to ask if there was a central point where unidentified remains were taken on Sicily. This question related to Mr. Gulizia’s statement that, in his recollection, the U.S. Army had come one year after the plane crash to remove the victim’s remains. A referral was made to Mr. Greg Gardner, who confirmed that any remains of unknowns from Sicily were consolidated into the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, run by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). The Allan Knepper Project was referred to that cemetery, and to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA). Mr. Jason Blount, the assistant superintendent of the ABMC cemetery at Nettuno, was consulted.
In a very cordial and informative conversation, it was learned:
Lt. Knepper’s name is included in the Tablet of the Missing at Nettuno, indicating that either his remains had not yet been recovered, or that they had been recovered but were unidentified.
The cemetery itself has 7,861 gravesites, each holding remains—both identified and unidentified.
It is possible that Lt. Knepper’s name is included in the Tablet of the Missing, but with his unidentified remains interred in a gravesite.
Remains, when recovered, were assigned an “X Card,” on which was recorded information related to the recovery of the remains. Apparently the information was quite variable, and somewhat limited.
Concurrently, with the increased energy that his early findings generated, Salvo confirmed that he was intending to involve the local metal detecting club in his search of the crash site.
The next day a “blind” call was made to Mrs. Martha Sell at the ABMC office in Arlington. An extremely helpful and well-informed resource, Mrs. Sell referred the Knepper Project to Mr. Joshua Fennell of DPAA, and to Mr. Kyle R. Charrington, director of the U.S. Mortuary Affairs office for Europe. An e-mail was sent to Mr. Fennell on May 28, which brought an immediate reply and a phone conversation on May 29. Mr. Fennell confirmed that the DPAA was the correct office to work with, and further confirmed his strong interest in the project. As a result of this conversation, the photographs taken by Salvo on May 23 were forwarded to Mr. Fennell, together with other background information on the project and army materials related to Lieutenant Knepper’s service and loss. On June 1 Josh Fennell indicated that he would also be doing a search for any after-action reports for the 14th Fighter Group and the 49th Fighter Squadron.
Subsequent contact was made with Mr. Joshua Frank, a DPAA research analyst assigned to cases in Italy. Mr. Frank had been referred to the Knepper Project by Mr. Fennell, and confirmed that the search for Lieutenant Knepper looked “promising.” On June 9, he mentioned that a crash site had been reported in 2007–2008 by DPAA’s predecessor organization, at coordinates 37.285623, 14.620299, roughly 4 miles from the crash site indicated by the Gulizia brothers. It was his opinion that this crash site could have been Lieutenant Bland’s aircraft. He also reported: “I have done a quick comparison of unknowns that were recovered in the area, in an effort to see if Lt. Knepper’s remains could be buried as an unknown in either Nettuno or Florence. I do not see any indication that this is the case. There are no unknowns that could be associated with a pilot that were recovered within 25 miles of the crash area.”
About this time, Salvo reported that Mr. Sipala had begun to show some concern about further searches on his property. The orchard is equipped with an underground irrigation system, and Mr. Sipala was unwilling to jeopardize either his trees or his watering system. The search was halted for what was initially hoped would be a few days, but which stretched into many months.
After doing a bit of cleanup on one of the components found in his first sweep, Salvo found that one of the items appeared to contain numbers and letters. Serial numbers are critical in crash-site investigations. Aircraft contain dozens of components that are marked with serial numbers, and they can be used to trace back to the manufacturer of the component, and to the type of aircraft in which the component was installed.
On June 21, Salvo returned from another sweep of Mr. Gulizia’s farm lot and forwarded images of items he had found, including a trailer ball, what appears to be a brake component, several fragmented pieces, an intriguing bearing plate, and a spent cartridge casing. The shell casing caused some interest within the Knepper Project, with speculation that it may have come from the aircraft.
These photos were also uploaded to Josh Fennell and Josh Frank at DPAA. As it happened, Josh Fennell confessed to having been “noodling around” with cartridge headstamps for a few years. On the basis of photos that clearly showed the headstamp “K1940 VII,” and reflecting the breadth of competence within the DPAA, Josh was able to confirm that this round was made by the British firm, Kynoch, in 1940. It is a casing from a .303 caliber round, possible dropped by a soldier in the British Eighth Army as he passed through this region in the first half of June 1943.
Important news came on July 14, 2015, when Josh Fennell reported the results of a review conducted by DPAA’s aircraft analysis laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base: “They made a connection between two of the parts that Salvo found. In picture DSC01552, the circular part on the far left and the metal block slightly to the right of center frame were matched, respectively, to a cooling system flange mount and a connecting rod bearing cap. Both parts would be found on an Allison V-1710 engine, such as the ones used in P-38 aircraft. Without knowing more specifically which engine it is, we can bear in mind that the same power source was used for the P-39, P-40, and P-51 aircraft. But the site Salvo has found is almost certainly a U.S. airplane, and, given that there is a known P-38 crash in the vicinity, the circumstances would seem to suggest he is uncovering a Lightning.”
Over many months, Salvo continued to meet with Mr. Sipala, attempting to determine if there were any conditions under which permission to continue the surface search on the Sipala property could continue. After careful negotiations, in May 2016 Salvo received approval from Mr. Sipala for a limited search on his property. A limit was imposed on the depth to which Salvo and his team could search, and with great care the metal detection search continued.
Salvo and his team returned with their metal detectors and were quickly rewarded with an astonishing number of metallic components. Photos of the components were sent to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, and in June Joshua Frank confirmed that the images had been forwarded to appropriate army and air force experts, and were being reviewed.
Salvatore Fagone and associates conducting metal detection sweeps at the location believed to be the site of Lieutenant Knepper’s crash in 1943.
FAGONE
Metallic artifacts discovered by Salvatore Fagone and associates at the location believed to be the site of Lieutenant Knepper’s crash in 1943.
FAGONE
By December, the results of the analysis confirmed that the new metallic components uncovered by Salvo and his team on the Sipala property were that of a British Spitfire. It was definitely not Lt. Knepper’s crash site.
Back in Lewiston, Allan’s half-sister Shirley Dawn (Knepper) Finn is coordinating family efforts that could one day provide conclusive evidence of Allan’s remains. DNA samples have been obtained and forwarded to the Army’s Casualty and Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Ft. Knox where they will be stored in the event that remains are discovered at the crash site in Sicily.
On December 19, 2016, DPAA’s Josh Frank advised that the agency had recently added new research personnel, and that new information was emerging from the National Archives, including documents related to captured German Flak reports concerning the events of July 10. This new data suggests what might be very productive additional field investigations in the vicinity of Caltagirone, southwest of Palagonia.
Mr. Frank has announced that he and his DPAA team will visit Sicily in February–March, 2017 to conduct new field investigations. All parties are hopeful that these new efforts, led by experienced DPAA professionals, and aided by Salvo Fagone and his team, will uncover critical information about both Lieutenant Knepper’s and Lieutenant Bland’s crash site, as well as other potential crash sites in the vicinity.
This recovery and investigative work being done in Sicily goes beyond professional interest. And neither can it be explained as a hobbyist’s curiosity. The personal and professional commitment to recovering the remains of servicemen lost in World War II is a continuing passion for the men and women involved. This passion, when married to DPAA’s exceptional resources, could very well lead to a final and successful resolution to the question of what happened to Lt. Allan Knepper.