Malaya Historical Group president Shahrom Ahmad says the search for the wreck began following an email from the nephew of F/Sgt Donald Dellis.
August 2, 2010 | By SAGER AHMAD
The wreck of a British bomber is scattered in bushes and bamboo thicket at the Malaysian-Thai border. The fate of its eight Royal Canadian Air Force crew remains unknown – after 65 years. SAGER AHMAD reports.
A WORLD War 2 bomber wreck was found deep in the jungles between Baling in Kedah and Betong in Thailand last week.
This was 65 years after it disappeared on June 6, 1945, during a supply drop mission intended for Force 136 guerillas.
It is a Royal Air Force B-24 Liberator with the tail number KH 326 from the Number 357 Squadron based in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The plane might or might not have attempted an emergency landing at an oval-shaped ground the size of a football field; the Liberator smashed into the left side of the descending terraced slope with the debris scattered all the way to the point where the ground levelled off.
The site is dotted with clumps of bamboo with small trees and creepers. The two wings, nose section and tail fins were found there.
Last year, I was part of the team which went digging away near Langkap in Negri Sembilan, where another B-24 (with the tail number KL-654/R) crashed on Aug 23, 1945.
That experience made the task of identifying most parts of this wreck at the Malaysia-Thai border somewhat less arduous.
This one is different in many ways as it hit the ground while flying horizontally, while the one in Langkap nose-dived after hitting a tree on a ridge about 1,000m above sea level, smashing almost all of the nose and wings.
Here both wings were 5m apart, seeming like just across the street, and both bore burnt marks where only the giant struts and wheel hubs that would lift and fold the two large tyres under the wings during flight, were found. At times, they look like the bones of a (dead) dinosaur.
There were lumps of metal pieces melted by the intense heat.
All four engines were found, thrown far apart. The one closest to the wings was heavily rusted bearing signs of having been on fire.
Sadly, all the engine aluminium cowling covers and the four prized propellers were missing.
It was evident that the wreck has been cannibalised.
Shahrom Ahmad, president of the Malaya Historical Group (MHG), an association dedicated to researching aviation and war history in Malaysia, said this B-24 was a jumbo; the fat cigar-shaped fuselage was 19.6m long, almost the length of two school buses, and had a wingspan of 33.3m, making it ideal for very long-range missions. The KL 654/R came from Cocos Island in the Indian Ocean near Australia.
The only intact part of the “cigar” was the very tip, the size of a Kancil car, where the front gunner and bomber would sit.
It was an anti-climax as we had hoped to find bigger and more intact chunks of the plane.
Shahrom said the search for the KH 326 wreck began after he received an email from Gerald Howse, the nephew of the second pilot, F/Sgt Donald Dellis, requesting for help from MHG. He then got in touch with several people, including American researcher Matt Poole and Col (R) Blair Agnew in England.
He said 10 years after the crash, on June 16, 1955, when the country was fighting the communist terrorists of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) during the Emergency (1948 – 1960), a platoon of British soldiers from the Royal Scots Fusiliers found it while escaping attacks from a swarm of hornets.
They were returning after failing to locate a large CPM camp that could hold 800 people in the area.
“The platoon commander, Lt Blair Agnew, said in his report that the plane was fairly intact, had broken into three parts and the middle section burnt.
“Using helicopters, they removed 27 stand guns, 2,000 rounds of ammunition (that had survived the crash) in 11 sorties to Ipoh. They also found personal items like flying jackets and boots but no bones. Only after the ‘adventure’ did they find the camp — abandoned with their parade ground, food dump and prison intact.
“An RAF team that flew in from Singapore reported that the flight deck and all the instruments were intact while the control was on auto-pilot.”
He said the British kept good records as he not only managed to contact Blair, but also got original map from him.
Clash with ‘kings’ on a tough trek
THIS was the toughest trek we had undertaken so far — up and down hills, crossing rivers countless times lugging our heavy backpacks stuffed with all our clothes, rations, camping material and equipment.
We had to avoid herds of wild elephants and saw remnants of their “camps”.
This group comprised members of the Army Museum from Port Dickson, the 2nd Royal Rangers Regiment from Ipoh, Malaya Historical Group, Bumi Baling Adventure Club and local guides.
This was the third attempt to locate the KH 326 since August 2007 using different routes.
The mission was endorsed by the army headquarters at the Defence Ministry.
The night in the jungle was cold and it drizzled at times throughout the five-day trek and, collectively, we had “donated” litres of blood to leeches that attacked by day and night.
Part of the journey was on five four-wheel drive vehicles on slippery logging tracks and we had to carefully avoid a dozen “San-Tai-Wong”, 16-wheel-drive monsters hauling logs out of the jungle.
They were the “kings” and had their own traffic rules.
Hoping to give 8 good men a proper burial
WAR is a cruel thing. The eight good men from the Royal Canadian Air Force sacrificed their lives to help end the Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War 2 (1941 – 1945) by delivering supplies to the Force 136 guerillas who operated from camps in the jungle throughout Malaya.
Force 136 worked with the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army — that later became the CPM — and it was partly effective in making life harder for the Japanese.
The war ended with the Japanese’ unconditional surrender in Tokyo on Aug 15, 1945, after atomic bombs were dropped on two cities — Hiroshima on Aug 6 and Nagasaki on Aug 9. They surrendered in Singapore on Sept 12, 1945, and in Kuala Lumpur the next day.
Shahrom said checks all round, including with Japanese sources, drew a blank as no one had heard about the KH 326 crew.
He sent an email to the Canadian Air Force Association on this find and is still awaiting a reply and he is sure they will be delighted.
The crew’s family had expressed hope that Canada would send a team to carry out an extensive search for their remains so that they could be given a proper burial.
Evidence of poachers
WE encountered numerous campsites at different parts of the jungle in the three previous trips we made searching for the wreck since 2007.
There were discarded food wrappers with Thai lettering and our soldiers were deployed along the border to prevent illegal activities that include poaching and smuggling.
The poachers are known to search for anything valuable, including the prized gaharu resin (fragrant eagle wood, aquilaria malaccensis) used to make perfumes.
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