JPAC team searches for WWII pilot’s remains

Seventy years after his World War II plane capsized and sent him to his death, a storied Fremont pilot’s remains may finally be recovered from the wreckage near a remote Canadian village.

The Joint Prisoners of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, a federal agency that works to recover members of the military who are missing in action, began an operation Thursday with Parks Canada to search the amphibious plane’s wreckage for the bodies of Fremont native Jack Zimmerman and four others who were aboard the craft, said Marc-Andre Bernier, chief of Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeological Service.

Zimmerman, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps, was a local hero and a pioneer in the commercial aviation industry. He flew the first scheduled flight into LaGuardia Airport the day it opened in New York City, earned the nickname “Million Miler” and flew military missions in Northern Europe during World War II, according to Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center records.

The day he died — Nov. 2, 1942 — Zimmerman had flown military officials to a U.S. military base at the small village of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan in Quebec so they could assess construction on an airfield. The location was important because the Allies used the route to send troops, supplies and aircraft to Northern Europe, Bernier has said.

As the group got ready to leave that evening while snow was falling, the plane, a two-engine Catalina, sprung a leak after two failed takeoffs and sunk into the icy waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Divers and representatives from JPAC and Parks Canada plan to spend a month diving on the plane wreckage to potentially recover bodies and any personal items, like watches or military tags, that might have belonged to Zimmerman and the crew, Bernier said.

Remains recovered would be taken to JPAC’s base in Hawaii to be identified and ultimately returned to the families of the dead, said U.S. Army Capt. Russell Grigsby of JPAC. Any personal items the recovery team finds also would be returned to the families, said Grigsby, who was at the recovery operation scene on Thursday.

“It will be closure for some of the families and for the people of Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan,” Bernier said. “At that time, the presence of the American base had a huge impact (on the village).”

Back then, Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan had about 200 residents, and the base added a hospital and opportunities to go see movies, he said. There are 10 village residents still alive who saw the plane crash.

“They remember the accident very clearly,” he said. “To see the Americans come to recover their own is quite touching.”

The plane, lying on its wing and partially buried in sand, will remain at the bottom of the gulf. The agencies do not want to do anything that could compromise its interior, Bernier said.

“It would be quite the operation to try to recover that,” he said.

Parks Canada discovered the plane’s wreckage in 2009 while in the area looking for shipwrecks. Longue-Pointe-de-Mingan residents who remembered the crash discussed its location with archeologists and prompted the search.