More than 80 years after taking off from an airfield in China, a U.S. Army Air Force pilot is returning home.
Lt. Franklin McKinney’s path back to the United States was long, but it was paved by his final report as a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Friendship of Thai Air Force Officers. Surprisingly vivid memories of a villager in his mid-90s. The curiosity of American expatriates. And unbelievably, there was massive flooding in Bangkok.
The U.S. Embassy in Bangkok said the body recovered from a rice field in northern Thailand was confirmed to be that of McKinney, who disappeared on November 5, 1944 while flying an F-5E, a reconnaissance version of the twin-engine, twin-tailed P-38 Lightning fighter.
The military declared McKinney dead in March 1946, but the Providence, Rhode Island, man’s body or the crash site had never been located.
But decades later, the U.S. military still maintains its “sacred promise to leave no one behind,” as the embassy said in a statement.
chance and effort
The discovery dates back to 2008. Dan Jackson, then a cadet first class at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, sought help from Sakpinit Promthep, then director of the Royal Thai Air Force Museum, while researching his senior thesis on the history of a Chinese-based fighter squadron that fought over Thailand during World War II.
The two kept in touch.
In 2010, Jackson published his first book, Forgotten Squadron. This book chronicles the exploits of a P-38 squadron that flew as part of the Flying Tigers, a famous American volunteer force formed to provide China with an air force to fight Japan before the United States entered World War II.
By 1944, the Flying Tigers were under American control, but they still flew from airfields in China, including the one in China’s Yunnan province where McKinney was based.
Jackson’s research was assisted by Richard Hakanson, an independent American researcher in Chiang Mai, Thailand. According to Jackson, he “loves solving mysteries.”
When the book was published, the pair wanted to know the fate of several American pilots lost in combat in Thailand, including McKinney. However, there were few clues as to where the McKinney plane crashed.
That was until 2012. Curious, Jackson contacted the museum’s Sakpinit to ask for any information Thailand might have regarding the November 5, 1944 crash of a US military plane near Chiang Mai.
Sakpinit said her first reaction was “no,” but then she recalled the strange discovery she made during a flood at an archive in Thailand in 2011. The flooding was so bad that they had to take a boat through the building’s passageway.
“I was worried that the humidity would destroy the old documents I had stored, so I sat down to try and sort it out… and it turns out I found the report,” he said in a Facebook video.
It was a phone call sent from the Thai Air Force wing commander to the commander in Bangkok after local police investigated the crash site of a P-38 photo-reconnaissance plane.
“A human skull was found. The cause was listed as an aerial lightning strike,” Sakpinit said in the log.
Franklin McKinney didn’t like his job, Jackson wrote in another book, 2021’s “Fallen Tigers.” He would have rather been behind the yoke of an aircraft armed with a gun and not a camera.
Unarmed reconnaissance pilots had to flee quickly when the enemy approached. That wasn’t McKinney’s style.
“He hated having to fly high and fast and run home when he encountered enemy aircraft,” Jackson wrote.
McKinney’s unit with the 35th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron noted that McKinney would return from a mission with photographs taken from as low as 19,000 feet, within range of enemy interceptors and well below the normal operating altitude of 30,000 feet for photo reconnaissance.
At 10:15 a.m. on November 5, 1944, McKinney took off from Beitan Airfield in China’s Yunnan Province on a mission to photograph Japanese positions in Uttaradit and Chiang Mai provinces in northern Thailand and Burma. That would be his last takeoff.
According to Jackson’s book, that night, McKinney’s best friend and roommate, Lt. Sterling Barrow, wrote in his diary: “Mac was late at 4:15. No word on him yet. God, I hope he’s okay – please!”
As the days passed with no word from McKinney, Barrow “began to suspect that an enemy fighter had caught the daredevil too low and shot him down,” Jackson wrote.
However, 2nd Lt. Arthur Clarke, the intelligence officer who sent McKinney on the mission that day, had speculated about what might have happened. The pilot died due to bad weather.
Jackson said Hakanson, an expat mystery buff, had spent years exploring northern Thailand using wartime reports recovered from Sakpinit’s flooded archives, but the villages they named were too small to even be included on a map.
Then, in 2017, when she met von Inma, then 94 years old, she remembered the events of November 5, 1944.
The meeting between Hakanson and Fung was enough for Jackson to travel to Thailand to hear the explanation himself. In 2018 he met her in person.
Jackson recorded her memories in a book and a report she wrote for Chiang Mai City Life magazine in 2019.
That afternoon, Mae Kwa village was hit by a severe thunderstorm, Fong recalled.
Fong, who was 21 at the time, said he first heard the plane, then an explosion and saw smoke rising from the crash site.
“The first people to arrive at the scene said that only the upper body of the pilot was left, without any legs or arms. The authorities and villagers started a fire on the spot and burned him,” Phong told Public Radio of Thailand in a 2021 documentary.
According to Jackson’s account, Fung said her father, the village chief, removed large debris from the crash site and buried McKinney’s body at the scene.
Fung told Jackson that the crash site was a forest in 1944, but was later excavated for rice cultivation. Still, landowners continued to discover pieces of the wreckage for years.
Jackson plans to return again in 2019, this time bringing with him representatives from the Hawaii-based Defense POW and MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which is responsible for finding missing U.S. soldiers.
The search for McKinney’s remains began in earnest in 2022, when nine DPAA experts arrived at the crash site and began exhumation.
“The excavation was carried out like an archaeological excavation, stripping away the topsoil layer by layer and sifting the soil through screens sprayed with water to find aircraft parts, personal effects, bone fragments and anything useful that could lead to the identification of the missing pilot,” Sakpinit said in a Facebook video.
“In the end, we found a small amount of bone fragments.”
That alone was not enough to positively identify McKinney.
Sakpinit said the DPAA team returned for about a month each year from 2023 until the beginning of this year, scouring several yards of soil each time and narrowing the search area a little bit.
In March, more bone fragments were found that could positively identify McKinney, and a repatriation ceremony was held at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, he said.
In a Facebook post this week, Mr. Jackson lamented that Mr. Sterling and Mr. Clark, the two men who saw Mr. McKinney off from an airfield in China in 1944, have passed away and have not heard from them of their return.
However, he noted that McKinney’s associates lived long enough to hear Fong’s account of the crash.
“Her story brought them some closure,” Jackson wrote.
Sterling “told me he wished he could have had a beer and talked to Frank about it,” Jackson said.
“I think they’re drinking that drink now.”
Jackson, now an instructor at the Air Force Academy, pointed to the intergenerational ties in the military that “leave no one behind.”
“After almost 82 years, Frank McKinney is home again. America has kept its promise,” he wrote.
McKinney’s name is on the missing persons monument at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. McKinney is one of 36,286 service members who went missing or were never recovered during the Pacific War.
Now that his identity has been positively identified, a bronze rosette will appear in his name, along with the more than 500 others whose bodies were discovered after the war.
According to the DPAA website, when it began its current mission to identify World War II missing persons in 1973, it had a list of 73,690 names worldwide, of which 71,712 remain.
