As I prepare to depart for Germany and the realization of a lifelong dream, I invite you to accompany me virtually back where my father, 1st Lt. Shannon Eugene Estill’s P-38 fighter plane was shot down in an East German farmer’s field on 13 April 1945. In 1993, I searched for and found the remaining members of my father’s WW II squadron. My 150 “adopted” dads took me under their wings and enabled me through their loving support and wisdom to pursue this quest. I was led to Germany and Hans Guenther Ploes, a specialist in recovery of crashed WW II planes, with whom I traveled throughout Germany in search of my father’s plane. With Hans Guenther’s incredible knowledge of aircraft and crash sites in conjunction with his willingness to engage with this pilot’s daughter in finding a P-38J that crashed at the end of the war, the site was identified in March, 2003. Next week, I will meet the excavation team sent from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command from Hawaii in the field in Elsnig, Germany, a village near Torgau where the American and Russian Armies met at the end of the war in their quest to defeat Nazi Germany. My father’s life ended with this last mission. It is my intention to recover his remains and his plane, and bring him home to rest in Ar lington Cemetery and Enid, Oklahoma.

The picture of the typist, circa 1957, is me in my early career as a foreign correspondent. In this spirit, I include you in the adventure in which I am the heroine, my father is the hero. This is how you will be able to follow this journey, post your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and sentiments.
Here we go………….

Greetings to everyone! By this time next week, I’ll be spending the night in London prior to leaving for Leipzig, Germany enroute to Torgau and Elsnig. My dear friend, Ernst Eberle, a member of the German team, will meet my flght and drive us to Torgau. The JPAC team is expected to begin the preliminary organization of the field on Monday, 15 August and we will arrive the evening of 17 August ready to do whatever is required on Thursday morning. The Der Spiegel television crew arrives the next week which means things should be pretty operational by the time they show up. On my prior trips, the local press has done daily stories about “The American Pilot’s Daughter” complete with front page photos and commentary Ernst will read to me upon request. This may well be my 15 minutes of fame or just a surreal experience. When I was there last time, I stopped at a local florist to order flowers for the beautiful cross one of the local farmers built and placed in the field. A picture of me holding a photo of my father was posted on the wall of the flower shop. It was a humbling moment in which I knew I was in the process of accomplishing the impossible. A lifetime ago, I worked for a private investigator in Indianapolis whose name is Chuck (Chuckles) Keenan. He always said, “the difficult will take a little while, the impossible takes a little longer.” This is a classic case of “a little longer” but it is definately happening!
For the map lovers among you, I have included a map of the area where the field is located. This might give you an idea of how remote this area is, how rural, and how far away from any major city except Leipzig, about an hour away by car, and Frankfurt, a full day’s drive. Shopping is minimal which is probably a good thing but there’s cool castle, a famous bridge, and a decent Italian restaurant. Hopefully, the weather will resemble Washington state in the summer. I love receiving your emails in response to this effort and I take comfort in knowing you are out there supporting this daring quest. I’ll be in touch and hope you are, too.

This is the field as I saw it for the first time in March, 2003. I thought it would be important to share the simplicity of the place that was forever changed on Friday, April 13, 1945. By the time I arrive there next week, the excavation preparations will be underway and the field will no longer look as it does in these photos. It is easy to see that the field has remained exactly as it was 60 years ago when a squadron of American fighter planes flew overhead enroute to their airfield. One of the eyewitnesses to the crash told me he was standing on the road in this picture when he heard and saw a squadron of fighter planes overhead. The next thing he knew, my father’s plane was billowing smoke and spiraling toward the earth. He learned later than an anti-aircraft gun was positioned on the railroad tracks in the distance and my father’s plane was the only target. He remembered wanting to run toward the burning wreckage but his father pulling him into a ditch for protection. They stayed there for hours until the explosions stopped. He cried as he told me how sorry he was that he couldn’t do anything to save my father. Until we met that day, he didn’t know who the pilot had been. I showed him my father’s smiling photo and he hugged me and apologized again for being “only a little boy” and helpless to do anything.

I took the picture of the tracks with a clear view of the field. I was told that during the war the anti-aircraft guns traveled along the tracks all day searching for enemy aircraft. On the day my father’s squadron flew over the field in Elsnig, he was flying the only P-38 painted black in the group. I have speculated with members of his squadron if that was why he was selected by the gunner on the tracks. Whatever the reason, these photos depict the field and the tracks exactly as they were then which leaves little to imagine except what it would have been like to be that little boy walking back to the field with his father after lunch to finish the days work.

Sunday, August 14, 2005 This has been a week of amazing emails full of support and good wishes and with them, the reminder that my father’s story is universal and important. Among them was a Press Release from JPAC. They send them frequently to announce the repatriation of a former MIA or the deployment of recovery teams all over the world. Mostly, I’ve read them with passing interest always believing that one day they the news would be about my father’s recovery. When a JPAC Press Release landed among all the words of encouragement in my email box this week, I nearly missed it. “Release No. 05-29 August 12, 2005. JPAC Teams Deploy to Europe Hickam, AFB, Hawaii - Two recovery teams and one investigative team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command will deploy this week from Hawaii to conduct operations in five European countries to search for or bring home remains of Americans still missing from World War II. The first recovery team will deploy to Germany to conduct recovery operations East of Torgau, Germany and North of Hanover, Germany at two sites. One site is associated with a 1945 loss of a P-38J aircraft, while another is associated with a 1944 loss of a P-51D aircraft.”

One sentence - a flat fact that carries with it the implications of war across time. Behind that sentence is the grief of a young widow, a mother, a father, a younger brother and sister, and a young daughter who would make it her business to bring her father home from the war. As a little girl, people would tell me I had pretty red hair or something and I’d always reply, “Thank you but my daddy died in the war.” Not only was it my claim to fame but I was proud of my father’s sacrifice and I had this fantasy that he would show up one day. I would wonder if my mother would choose her husband, my adopted daddy, or my father. When I’d actually be foolish enough to ask her who she would choose, she’d give me that “look” no amount of insistence would result in an answer. Still, I liked to think of us being scooped up by my father who would, of course, have a plane to fly us to our new life. The fact is, when I stood on the crash site for the first time and the evidence was pretty clear that this was where he died, my fantasy died that day. I’ve spoken to many men and women whose fathers never returned from WW II and they report the same hidden dreams that maybe their dads aren’t really dead. Not difficult to understand considering the absence of evidence for many of us.

In lieu of waiting for my father’s return, I’m bringing him home another way. I’m doing the best I can to complete the circle and to honor my role as the only daughter of an darling and amazing man. I know him mostly through his incredible funny, loving, playful, and poignant letters to my mother. He illustrated most of them and gave her frequent advice about how to manage the baby (me) when HE (Mike) arrived. He began writing to her when they were in high school religion class and wrote his last letter to her the day before he was killed. In all, there are 3,000 pages of correspondence. In that last letter he wrote: “As soon as the cable came about our daughter’s birth, I took her little shoe out of the celluloid frame and tied it to the back of my helmet. Have carried it in my jacket pocket since my 10th mission and on the helmet since the 28th (I have 34 now). That is the cutest little boot - I’d love to see her in a pair just like it. You just stole my heart completely and never returned it, a fact for which I am so thankful. Sweetie, I guess I just love you too much. All my love to you TWO! Gener.” As I do whatever I am assigned in my father’s field, I’ll be on the lookout for a little bootie. You never know. This is the stuff of miracles.

When I board that British Airways flight tomorrow night, I won’t be alone. There will be a group of people with me who will remain unseen but who have walked with me every step of this journey. My parents gave me wings and taught me how to fly - it’s a family tradition to be tenacious, inquisitive, and to take care of each other. In that spirit, I have included a picture of my parents taken around the time they were married June 26, 1943. Weren’t they cute?

FYI: Today, there is one American missing from the Gulf War, more than 1,800 from the Vietnam War, 120 from the Cold War, more than 8,100 from the Korean War, and more than 78,000 from World War II.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 - London to Germany. I have three minutes to say that I am well on my way to Germany after having spent the night in London. I took the Underground into the city and once again loved the feeling of being in London and Harrod’s, of course. The Diana Memorial is incredible and powerful. I await my flight to Leipzig which will arrive later this afternoon. I hear from friend, Ernst, that the JPAC team is already there doing whatever it is that they do. I will continue to be in touch with everyone as I can. The adventure begins now.

Thursday, August 18, 2005, First day in the field - This is incomparable work. It is as I imagined it would be yet, as I arrived at the site, I was momentarily overwhelmed by the reality of the marker flags, the equipment, the busy team, and the purpose of their industry. Today’s work was educated and organized deductive guesswork - preparing for the excavation so the digging is accurate and purposeful. From what I can see of the archeological strategy it is a tedious and hopefully precise project. The intention is to locate and impact crater which lies perhaps three meters below the surface. Therein lies the richest store of artifacts and remains.

Ernst and I arrived at the field around 10 am. A row of cars, vans, and bicycles were lining Butterstrasse Road and a television crew was filming in an adjacent field. The site was splendid with little red, yellow, and lime green flags, indicating metal below the surface. Nine team members, including an archeologist/antropologist, a munitions expert, a medic, a photographer, several mortuary affairs guys, and a team leader, were busy measuring and setting flags. Everyone is military except the archeologist/anthropologist. The team leader, Captain David Emmons, has just returned from a difficult excavation in Viet Nam.

The media wanted stories and pictures but only a few are authorized to interview members of the JPAC team. The Torgau paper was represented by Nico Wendt, a reporter who has provided wonderful press coverage of our search and discovery of the site in early 2003. A reporter from Morgen Post in Leipzig came by on his motorcycle hoping to set up an interview next week. The documentary film company der Spiegel TV arrives on Monday for the week. It looked like a small circus had arrived waving their festive banners. Someone, not a fan of Americans, drove by and suggested we go home. That is the exception rather than the rule. The Germans are, as they have always been on my previous visits, gracious and welcoming.

It was also a day for P-38 model airplanes crafted by two local men and brought to the site for my inspection. One was at least an arm-span wide and is used in remote control plane competitions. The other was a tiny version of the standard silver model complete with Ninth AAC markings.

Ernst and I were invited to Herr & Frau Thiel’s home for afternoon coffee. Frau Theil’s family owned the field where my father died until she sold it a few years ago. Mrs. Thiel’s father, a German officer in WW II, was killed in Romania in 1944. Today she showed us his photograph and told us that when she visits the cross on my father’s field, she also does it for her father.
She has never been able to travel to Romania to see her father’s grave so we share this one. This is an amazing spirit of the German people I know in this area. They are incomparable.

As I left the field late this afternoon, I glanced back at the day’s work. Tiny flags were flying hopefully in a light breeze - a field of tulips. Surrounding the field now is ominous yellow and black tape posted with warning signs Betreten der Baustelle verboten! Eltern haften fur ihre Kinder! I think it is to dissuade unsupervised visitors. The team leader tells me they sometimes hire guards for the sites to avoid interference by relic hunters. Although that is not necessary in this case, it is a grave site and the preliminary work is tedious and important to the final success of the excavation.

So it begins. There is talk of sifting and sorting and evaluation. Some plane parts have already emerged along with a few bomb fragments and a tractor spring. Most of the stuff beign sifted indicates whether it is worth digging under that flag. Tomorrow work begins at 8 am. Permission has been granted to begin digging which was a separate permission from marking the field. The team expects this to take all of the alloted 20 days to complete the work. Whatever happens, I will be there. It is a time of attending to my father in the only way I can. He would have done it for me.

(When I figure out how to post photos the German way, they will appear.)

Friday, August 19, 2005. Logistical issues have prevented me from posting the events of the day until this moment. It is a matter of obtaining the proper power cords, finding a place with Internet capabilty when no Internet Cafe supposedly exists in Torgau. Ernst to the rescue once again! He found a local pub that offers a few computers in the very back of the place behind the bar but near the pool tables. The atmosphere is smoky but it works!

Our victory was short-lived. Day two of the excavation began with the glorious and impressive construction of two pieces of sifting equipment resembling backyard swing sets. Each swing set is hung with rectangular screens made of mesh wire and framed in plywood. Each is supended with four canvas straps. No swings and slides. The screens swing back and forth and dirt from the survez trenches is dumped into the sifting screens. The dirt is sifted, evaluated, and discarded. I hauled buckets from the blue tarp where the dirt is shoveled in a process that awakened in me the strong desire to the the wiry little kid I was in the typing photo.

It is one of those jobs where you must be wary of the sun but remain in it all day. Germans like their drinks warm thus there is no way to fill an ice chest or to keep water cold so the work is hot and we all talk a lot about ice. The rhythm of the digging, filling, sifting, sometimes saving what was sifted, and hauling buckets to be filled again, consumed most of the morning. Ernst and a local man were measuring the premeter of the field nearest the road against measurements taken in a 1945 aerial photograph of the site. There was discussion about oblique distortion and of the shifting possibility of road improvements. Ernst is an engineer and the calculations were in his capable hands.

At midday, we headed back to Torgau to arrange for a team dinner at the oldest Italian restaurant in Torgau, Pizzeria Napoli. That accomplished to the obvious delight of the restaurant owner, we completed our errands including the purchase of warm mineral water and headed back to the site.

The afternoon was devoted to trench digging. This will enable the team to eventually find the crater which is point of everything. Everyone digs, no one complains, and the medic promises 800 mg of Motrin to all. He calls it vitamin M. I mostly watch this part (I know my limits) but it affords me opportunity for taking photos and asking lots of questions. Soon it is 4 pm and time to pack the equipment for another day. Ernst and I get into his car and notice a truck headed down the road. The driver is irate and signals to Ernst that he wants to speak with him. The man is the proprieter/owner of this field and he says no one has his permission or that of his brother, also an owner, to dig here. I noticed two things as I observed their interaction - Ernst looked concerned and the wind picked up in an ominous way.

For nearly an hour, things looked grave. The team linguist approached them but the man waved him away. Finally, the man returned to his truck and Ernst conveyed the bad news. The man said he carries the resentment of his ancestors for all the oppression and suffering of his family. Hence, he was denying permission for us to continue. This was not the mood in which we anticipated to enjoy our dinner that evening.

I returned to the hotel to worry and realized that I wanted to write a letter to the offended farmers. I would write it and then ask Ernst to translate it for me. The truth was, I felt powerless, unable to speak for my cause, and fearful that this might end here and now. Add that to the fact that everyone believed all permissions were granted. Was this a cosmic joke? A smíling photo of my father, stuck to the mirror above the desk in my room, provided no answers.

Through the realization and shock at the abrupt change of fortune, I sought to understand the historic suffering of the farmer. His lived experience included these resentments and we were not perceived as friends but as adversaries. What he was expressing in denying us permission was his only power over what had been decades of being abused by powers greater than himself. I wrote my letter. I told him of my journey to find my father and I apologized for whatever circumstances led to his anger. I implored him to allow us to continue the excavation.

For now, the work is stopped. All we can do is wait for the next move. If it ends here, I will be sad and I will leave Germany without my father’s remains. The field will be restored to its original condition either way but I vote for the scenario wherein the field is no longer a gravesite.

I write this in the spirit of reporting events. I remain unconvinced that it ends here, nor am I certain we can convince a rightfully angered German farmer that a group of Americans should be allowed to finish their work. By the time you read this, we will have resumed working in the field or we will be packing to return home. It is just that simple and just that complicated. Hauling buckets of dirt to be sifted sounds like a good thing to be doing for the next few weeks. With love from your faithful reporter from her field of dreams.

Hanging from the cliff - Saturday, August 20, 2005 It is a strange thing to realize how ironic life can be. Some days the dragon wins but this wasn’t one of them. There are a few heros in this story. Among them, the Buergermeister, Herr Grossman, Ernst, JPAC’s willingness to go to all lengths and make all amends, and the farmer-owners themselves. Herr Grossman arranged a 2 pm meeting for the team leader, the archeologist, the linguist, Ernst, moi, the farmers and Burgermeister himself in his office. My letter had been written and translated and set aside in case of fire. We gatherd in the meeting place and waited for the brothers to arrive. They shook our hands in turn and the elder brother began speaking. Ernst would translate but the message was the same - he was not inclined to give permission to continue the dig.

In the midst of the conversation (understood by half of us but body language and tone of voice is telling and I get an A in interpreting both!) Ernst took out my letter and began reading it to the farmers. Though I understand none of the words, his reading was somehow powerful and moving. The brothers listen attentively and then the Burgermeister proposed a private conference with him. They returned to the table and announced they would put aside their objections. They now had the feeling they were dealing with a person and not an anonymous institution. They were willing to do this for me as a result of my letter. Both brothers looked directly at me for the first time. The JPAC team offered profuse and sincere apologies for any offense they may have caused and assured the owners their field would be properly restored.

We all shook hands and I wanted to hug them both but refrained from such an American gesture. They touched my heart with their willingness to hear my story. I connected with them in my willingness to hear theirs.

Tomorrow is a work day at the field in Elsnig. I had a dream about my sister last night when I didn’t think I was sleeping at all. She was sitting in my hotel room laughing. She said, “oh ye of little faith..I told you not to worry so much about small stuff.” She was right. She wanted to be here and had taken vacation this week so we could do a sistah trip. Guess she got here from heaven. So, that is my story of drama in the field which I will be happy to do without from this moment forward.

96 meters of trench, all in a Sunday’s work, 21 August 2005: It threatened to continue raining this morning but stopped and gave us blessed cloud cover for a few hours. While the JPAC team dug trenches in a grid, I sat in one of them and smoothed the bottom with trowels and scooped up the dirt in buckets. The trench dirt is tossed onto blue tarps surrounding the field to be sifted later. We had the usual onlookers and Ernst is always gracious in meeting and greeting them. One of the eyewitnesses brought a basket of beer but this isn’t work that is best done with a cocktail.

We began finding some interesting parts but the best stuff was discovered in the afternoon. As we find parts and pieces, and if they are not ordinance material (bullets exploded or unexploded), everything is tossed in a black bucket for inspection by Dr. Fox, the archeologist. It felt a bit like a treasure hunt with emotional attachment. Someone uncovered a large piece of the skin of the plane which I can easily identify by the rivets in a row. I took it with me to my room in all its sixty year old glory. It was the outside of my father’s plane and therefore a worthy relic.

We broke for lunch in the shade which was growing narrow by noon. I was happily dirty which reminded me of playing outside as a kid and stopping for a flattened peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread. The afternoon’s work revealed a stash of parts in one trench that was interesting enough for another trench to be started across it. The field from the air must look like a Scrabble board. In fact, I’m curious enough about the topography of the field and in seeing what my father’s sqadron saw that day in 1945, that I’ve decided to find someone to take me flying over the field. Linda, the team photographer, will request permission to accompany me. I think it will only become a more interesting view as the days pass.

Because the stuff we were finding in the extended trench looked like cockpit pieces, we all began sifting leaving the archeologist to prepare the trench for careful excavation tomorrow. Six of us took over sifting screens, one of the guys loaded dirt into the screens from a wheelbarrow, and we separated the dirt from the rocks and ACS (AirCraftShit), as they say. In nearly every shovelful of dirt, some small or medium size piece emerged. Several small bones were found but they may not be human.

We ended the day at 4:30 and met at Herrr & Frau Thiel’s for coffee and beer. Coffee and beer was platters of meat sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, pickled cucumbers and onions, a cheesecake, brownies, cheeses, and Vodka for desert.

So, 96 meters of trench and it is possible we have the site of one of the engines and/or the cockpit. Tomorrow we will know. Dr. Fox and I sat on the edge of the last trench and examined the ACS. He looked them over and tossed them back in the bucket and told me to take them if I wanted them. I am now the proud owner of another bucket full to the top of my father’s plane and miscellaneous crockery. Among the pieces is one that I kept in my pocket most of the day. We think it’s a toggle switch that would have been on the instrument panel - a switch my father would have touched hundreds of times. Funny what becomes important in this business of recovering history.

The work resumed smoothly after our brief hiatus on Saturday wherein we were all reminded how much we want to do this and to find my father. This was a great day of physical labor unlike what most of us do on a regular basis. The reward is to look at the transformed field at the day’s end and to know the possibility of miracles and the value of sweating the the sun and liking it.

We can find an airplane missing for 60 years but no one seems to know how I can download my photos from my laptop to this site. I believe we will also be victorious over the photo dilemma and soon you will be rewarded with visions of amazing accomplishment and effort. Seeking a shoulder and back massage and a beer.