Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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 Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:23 pm Post subject: Pentagon seeking access to Chinese records on war MIAs |
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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/1023chinaUS-pows23.html
| Quote: | Pentagon seeking access to Chinese records on war MIAs
Robert Burns
Associated Press
Oct. 23, 2005 12:00 AM
BEIJING - U.S. officials have renewed a request for Chinese permission to search military archives that could yield clues to the fate of missing American servicemen who may have been held by China during and after the Korean War.
The matter was raised with officials of the Ministry of Defense by Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs, and his top Asia expert, Richard Lawless.
The Chinese officials gave an encouraging but not definitive response, according to an official familiar with the discussion who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly Rodman and Lawless were in Beijing last week with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was making his first visit to China since becoming Pentagon chief in 2001.
For several years the Pentagon has tried, unsuccessfully so far, to convince the Chinese government that its archives could provide important information about some of the 8,100 U.S. servicemen who remain unaccounted for from the Korean War.
When he visited Beijing as U.S. Defense secretary in July 2000, William Cohen pressed the issue, to no avail.
The Chinese military ran prisoner-of-war camps in North Korea after it intervened in the war in October 1950 to push U.S.-led United Nations forces back from the Yalu River separating China and North Korea.
The Pentagon also has information that China took some U.S. POWs into China during the war.
China repeatedly has denied it has any information about the fate of American GIs from Korea.
Among other cases, U.S. officials have questioned China for years about the shootdown of a Navy P4M surveillance plane off China in August 1956. The remains of two crew members were recovered by U.S. ships, and China returned the remains of two others. Twelve are unaccounted for, including Lt. James B. Deane of Grand Rapids, Mich. China has said it has no information about him.
China and the United States were allied against Japan in World War II, before the 1949 communist revolution in China. U.S. military aircraft, including C-46 transports, regularly flew "the Hump," the famous route over the Himalayan Mountains that U.S. airmen used to bring ammunition and supplies to Chinese troops fighting against the Japanese. Some U.S. B-29 and B-24 bombers also flew the route.
With China's encouragement, the Pentagon in recent years has searched sites in Chinese-controlled Tibet where some of those U.S. planes crashed during Hump flights.
Also, in 1999 a U.S.-Chinese team recovered the remains of two Americans whose B-24 bomber crashed into a mountain in Guangxi province in 1944 while returning from an attack mission against Japan.
More recently, the Pentagon identified the remains of an Air Force pilot, Capt. Troy "Gordie" Cope, of Norfork, Ark., whose jet crashed on Chinese territory in 1952 after being shot down during a dogfight with a Russian flying for North Korea.
It was the first time remains of a U.S. military pilot from the Korean War were recovered on Chinese territory, and U.S. officials saw the case as an important step forward in cooperation on MIAs.
In 1995, a U.S. businessman spotted Cope's name on a U.S. dog tag on display in a military museum in the Yalu River city of Dandong, China.
In 1999, during a search by Pentagon analysts of Russia's Podolsk military archives, documents describing Cope's shootdown were discovered. |
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