Remains of a War: American planes lost in WWII are still being found in Arunachal Pradesh
Pertin could never shake off the story his father had told him as a child. The elder Pertin was hunting the Mishmi takin—an elusive goat-antelope species—on the perilous heights of the Eastern Himalayas when he chanced upon the debris of a crashed aircraft. Years later, as the younger Pertin was finding it hard doing shifting cultivation at Damro village near the Yamne River in Upper Siang district in Arunachal Pradesh, that story came back to him as a business idea. Why not retrace his father’s steps, find the fabled plane, salvage some metal and sell it in the bustling Pasighat market, roughly 60 km downstream?
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In the early 1980s, Pertin set out with a fellow villager to find the spot. The journey took 17 arduous days before they stumbled upon the wreckage perched on a hillside. On their next journey, a three-day trek, they returned with around 15 kg of salvaged “bhanga singa”—scraps of iron, brass, aluminium and other metals. “I made about `6,000 from my share,” Pertin, 66, tells ET, flashing a mischievous smile and switching between broken Assamese and the Adi dialect.
Pertin, however, knew little else about the aircraft—until an American mountaineer, Clayton Kuhles, reached his village with a mission in December 2006. Hiring Pertin as a guide and porter, Kuhles set out to locate the wreckage. Upon reaching the site, at an altitude of 9,400 ft, Kuhles made a remarkable finding—the wreckage was of a B-24J Liberator, a World War II bomber, bearing the serial number #42-73308. Nicknamed
