“Our organisation started a large investigation,” says chairman Johan Graas. The crash site was first discovered in 1996 when local fishers hauled up a motor, pulled off the serial number and brought it to a museum run by the Stichting Aircraft Recovery Group. “The goal of this national programme is to find missing airmen, to give them a grave with a name, and to give their relatives closure.” “The main mission of my team is to establish the minimum number of individuals: three crew are unaccounted for, and it is up to us to look whether we have remains from the three people,” he said. Jonker said that DNA tracing is unlikely to be used. They will be taken to the Dutch military laboratories, the BIDKL, for further analysis and the Guardian understands the decision about the future of bodily remains will pass to the Ministry of Defence and British Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The salvage operation, which will also defuse explosive material, is expected to last five weeks as the aircraft’s remains are revealed at a rate of 20cm a day, sifted through a mechanical sieve and sorted by hand. “It’s early days … but there is no doubt that the remains we have found come from one of the missing airmen.” At the moment, we can’t say any more than that. “We have found the first skeletal remains.

The bodies of four men washed up within days and were eventually buried in the Netherlands but, to this day, three are officially registered as missing: 27-year-old flight engineer Arthur Smart 23-year-old mid-upper gunner Charles Sprack and 21-year-old wireless operator Raymond Moore.Īt the site, where the water has been pumped out of a huge metal box mounted in the middle of the artificial lake, Dutch experts confirmed they had found skeletal remains presumed to be those of the missing British fighters.Ĭapt Geert Jonker, the commanding officer of the recovery and identification unit in the Royal Netherlands Army, told the Guardian.

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