The Danish daily Politiken, Wednesday the 12th of April 1950.
This selection of Danish newspaper clippings come from a scrapbook I bought some years ago in a Copenhagen antiquarian bookshop. They concern the search operation for a US Navy Privateer plane shot down over the Baltic Sea near Latvia on the 8th of April 1950 by Soviet aircraft. There’s a brief account of the event at spyflight.co.uk.
In 1956 the United States accused the Soviet Union of holding a number of airmen prisoner from the crew of the US Navy Privateer shot down in 1950 and from the crew of an Air Force B-29 list in the Sea of Japan on June 13th 1952 (see TFR 27-86 here). The Soviet Union denied this (see TFR 27-8).
In 1975 the Pentagon acknowledged the plane was on an intelligence mission, not a training flight as originally claimed. AP reported US Navy officials as saying that there was ‘no credible evidence’ that any of the crew escaped the plane and ended up in Soviet prison camps.
Speculation revived in June 1992 after comments by Russian President Boris Yeltsin to NBC News that American prisoners of war from Vietnam were sent to Soviet labor camps and some might still be alive. Later that month US envoy Malcom Toon in Russia following up reports of missing Americans expressed doubt about Yeltsin’s comments, but in November 1992 Russian emissary Dimitri Volkogonov presented a letter from President Yeltsin to the US Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs stating that the USSR under Stalin had executed some American prisoners after World War II, and forced others to renounce their citizenship. Dimitri Volkogonov also talked of more than 730 US airmen being imprisoned in the Soviet Union, some of whom were executed.
The lost crew were Jack Fette, Howard W Seeschaf, Robert D Reynolds, Tommy L Burgess, Frank L Beckman, Joe H Danens, Jack W Thomas, Joseph J Bourassa, Edward J Purcell, and Joseph N Rinnier Jr.
Here’s a 1956 news story on the reaction of the remarried wife of Howard W Seeschaf to claims that he might be alive.
And here’s a 1994 story on Jane Reynolds Howard, remarried wife of Lt Robert Reynolds, who was told in 1958 that her first husband was still alive by a man who said he was a former cellmate of Reynolds’ in a Soviet psychiatric hospital. And another from 1997, still searching.
