The hunt for Magpie 91 SIAN POWELL June 20, 2009
www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25660613-5018553,00.html
"IT WAS A fine night for flying. No storms, gentle winds, and nothing but thin cirrus clouds above 6000 feet.
Flying Officer Michael Herbert, from Glenelg, had already flown 198 missions for the RAAF in Vietnam, and his tour would be over within weeks.
He was a conscientious and experienced pilot, with an abiding love for planes and flying. Awarded his civil pilot's licence when he was just 16, if he wasn't in the air, his idea of a good time was reading flying magazines. His navigator, Pilot Officer Robert Carver, from Toowoomba in Queensland, had only been in Vietnam for a couple of months, but he had impressed his superiors at the Phan Rang airbase as being alert and enthusiastic, and developing "extremely well" as an officer.
Their plane, Canberra bomber A84-231, was an ageing but reliable workhorse. Their mission was later described by their flight operations officer as a "most routine sortie". Herbert and Carver took off from Phan Rang on the evening of November 3, 1970, and some time later made radio contact with the U.S. radar officer who was directing them to the target.
It was an uneventful flight. In Magpie 91 - the Canberra's call-sign - they flew over the jungle-matted hills and deep ravines of the enemy-held territory near the Laotian border. At 8.22pm, six bombs were dropped on the target and the plane headed for home. "That was an excellent run, sir," said the U.S. radar officer. "It looked real good down here, and we enjoyed working with you and see you again another day." Herbert replied briefly: "Magpie 91."
Exactly 70 seconds later, without any warning, Magpie 91 suddenly vanished. Dozens of intensive search-and-rescue missions carried out over the next 72 hours by both Australian and U.S. aircraft failed to find any trace of it. A court of inquiry held in Vietnam in subsequent days could not find a reason for the disappearance. The weather was fine, Herbert had been flying above the range of anti-aircraft artillery, and there were no known North Vietnamese missile launch sites near the flight path.
Herbert and Carver were simply gone, lost without a trace in the black Vietnamese night. They were both 24. They were never heard from again.
The loss left their families distraught; caught for years in a grey twilight zone of grief and hope. Herbert's mother, Joan, dreamed of him roaming the jungles, and wrote letter after letter to political leaders in Vietnam and in Australia, hoping for any news of her boy. Carver's father, Sydney, eventually had his son's name engraved on the Toowoomba War Memorial, and looked at it every time he passed by.
Then, nearly four decades after the plane dropped off the radar, the Australian Defence Force announced that the wreckage of the Canberra bomber had been found in inhospitable jungle in central Vietnam's Quang Nam province. In April this year, Major Jack Thurgar, from the Army History Unit, and RAAF Squadron Leader John Cotterell told how they had trekked through the jungle to the crash site and found various items of equipment which determined, definitively, that the wreckage was from the plane of the last two Australians missing in action in Vietnam.
The search for A84-231 had been hampered by political apathy and language and cultural barriers, blocked by restrictions on classified material, and finally hamstrung by the sheer impregnability of Vietnam's jungle-covered mountains.
It took 12 years for the first humans to lay eyes on the crash site. Sometime in 1982, three hunters found the wreckage in the jungle of the Truong Son range near the Laotian border. The hunters, from the KaTu people of the mountains, couldn't read or write and spoke little mainstream Vietnamese. News of their discovery wasn't reported to anyone. For decades the mountain crash site quietly mouldered, visited only by dirt-poor villagers who made off with wire to use in snares, and various bits of metal to sell.
Finally spurred into action by veterans, particularly Jim Bourke from Operation Aussies Home, the RAAF decided to forge ahead with an attempt to find the lost officers and their bomber.
Bourke had been central to the 2007 discovery in Vietnam of other Australians missing in action, and he had written an exhaustive report on Herbert and Carver. He never let up.
Thurgar was made lead investigator by the RAAF. He went back over all the paperwork, the court of inquiry report, the voice transcripts of the radio transmissions between the plane and the radar officer, the service history of Carver and Herbert, the U.S. records, and the data from a five-man Australian delegation of diplomats and military personnel who visited Quang Nam in 1984 in search of information in a brief and fruitless expedition.
Thurgar went to Quang Nam in January this year to talk to the local people and to the commanders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army stationed in the vicinity in November, 1970 - he finally tracked them down following extensive research.
"The Americans wouldn't tell me what the target was; it turned out it was a classified mission," he says. "I needed to get accurate information." Le Ngoc Bay, then a lieutenant in command of the reconnaissance platoon of the North Vietnamese 141st regiment, (he's now a senior colonel), told Thurgar he remembered the plane that had dropped six bombs near their hidden mountain headquarters in November of that year. He was one of three North Vietnamese Army soldiers who told Thurgar they heard the bombing and saw the flashes.
The bombs came close to knocking out the BT44 military command unit, where the North Vietnamese had earlier transmitted on a 15-watt radio, thus revealing their position to U.S. forces and setting them up as a target for Carver and Herbert's bombs.
With the information provided by the North Vietnamese military officers, and knowing the plane had been lost within a couple of minutes of dropping the bombs, Thurgar zeroed in on the villages closest to the crash site. At his request, Vietnamese officials visited the villages of Thon Vinh and Ta Bhing, and three elderly KaTu men stepped up to say they knew of a place deep in the jungle, in Czun Canyon, where they had found remnants of a plane many years before.
"The KaTu are Montagnards, hunters; they use crossbows and blowpipes to this day," Thurgar says. "They have their own culture, their own language. These three gentlemen can't read or write, but they confirmed they had taken wire from the site to make snares."
One young KaTu man volunteered to trek to the crash site and bring pieces back for examination. Thurgar told him to bring something with numbers, if he possibly could, and take photographs with a camera supplied by a Vietnamese official. The young man returned three days later bearing two crumpled bits of metal, and a ruined camera (it had rained heavily in the jungle and the camera was slung around his neck).
One of the pieces of metal was a warped air-position indicator made by Kelvin and Hughes, which had to have been either from a Canberra bomber or the almost identical U.S. B57 plane. There were no records of lost B57s in the region. "I was quietly confident we had found them," Thurgar says.
He took the rusting indicator back to the RAAF Museum in Point Cook, near Melbourne, where director David Gardner decided it was 99 per cent certain it was from a Canberra bomber, probably A84-231. The fog obscuring the fate of the pair of 24 year olds, lost for nearly 40 years, was gradually clearing.
Both Michael Herbert and Robert Carver were volunteers. Herbert was a natural for the RAAF. Flying mad from a boy, he joined the Air Training Corps at 13 and earned his private pilot's licence three years later. Squadron Leader Arthur Barnes, 2 Squadron's operations officer in Vietnam, told the court of inquiry about Herbert's obsession.
"I saw Herbert reading flying magazines in the crew room on the afternoon of the 3rd of November, 1970," Barnes said. "He spent most of his non-flying working hours in this pursuit, rather than joining in the activities of the other junior air-crew members. He flew at every opportunity. Most of his contemporaries believed he stayed in the crew room to get any extra flight which occurred from time to time."
Nearly 40 years later, identification of a crumpled and rusting air position indicator was enough for the RAAF to approve a large expedition to the jungle crash site, to begin preliminary excavations and bring back to Australia yet more evidence.
Accompanied by two Australian scientists, two Australian military officers, 10 Vietnamese officials and 30 KaTu porters, Thurgar set out on the trek in April this year. Old army trucks were hired to take them part of the way into the jungle, to A'Buong Number 4 river, where two canoes were used to ferry everyone across.
"We struck out up a creek line, and another creek line," Thurgar says. "In all, we went up the sides of four waterfalls, around cliff edges. It is a very densely vegetated area."
It took six hours for all 45 people in the expedition to trek into the tangled jungle site where the plane had blasted into the side of the mountain. Nothing was left of the plane except parts with no commercial value, or lumps of metal that were too heavy too move.
But the team soon found pieces of tyre, Dunlop type IX, which were only used by Canberra bombers, not the B57s, and pieces of metal with red paint, also only ever seen on Canberra bombers. Then a 9mm shell, exploded from heat rather than from being fired. Only Australians carried 9mm pistols.
Then, the proof positive. A battered club badge from the Phan Rang Ugly Club. There were only 13 members, and each member had to produce his badge on request, or buy a round of drinks as forfeit. Herbert, the only member who was an officer, had produced his badge the afternoon of the fateful flight.
The other 12 members, Thurgar says, still had their badges. One of these Ugly Club members, Frank Hodges, a telecommunications technician during the war, now lives in Townsville. He remembers the day Herbert and Carver were lost. "It was like losing a brother, a member of the family," he says.
Despite all the proof found at the site, it remains uncertain whether Carver and Herbert were in A84-231 when it crashed into the jungle. They had ejector seats, and although no mayday call was heard, they theoretically had enough time to abandon the bomber. Yet when an ejector seat was deployed, a distress beacon would automatically begin transmitting, and although the search and rescue teams heard several beacons in the vicinity they were all discounted as being the wrong type.
Thurgar is convinced the men were in the plane when it went down, and he profoundly hopes their remains will be found when the site is excavated next month. A secondary aim is to try to find out why the plane went down. Could it have been a series of equipment malfunctions? Could it have been a bomb hang-up? A missile attack?
Jim Bourke believes a bomb hang-up can be conclusively ruled out for technical reasons. Maybe, he says, the plane was brought down by a North Vietnamese radar-guided missile or maybe by errant friendly artillery fire.
But it's an academic question, says the man who did two tours of duty in Vietnam, who was shot through the jaw, and who has never given up on the Australians who went missing while fighting in a strange land.
"My aim is to fully account for Herbert and Carver, and hopefully see them brought home," he says. "It's our sacred duty to these men who gave their lives. I think we, as a nation, have a moral obligation to their families. That's how I see it, and that's what's driven us. We're doing it for the families."
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