Under a thick canopy of leaves in a quiet woodland of eastern Austria, a dozen Canadians rake at the ground with trowels and bend over suspended sieves, shaking dusty brown earth through the grilles. They’re searching for human remains, suspected to have lain here for more than 80 years.
From one side of the excavation site comes the sustained thudding of a pickaxe, clanging off stones as it slices through the forest floor. From another comes a shrill beeping, as a student volunteer runs a handheld metal detector along the edge of a trench.
Scattered everywhere here are fragments of the Second World War bomber that crashed on its way back from a mission, killing most of its American crew and pushing burning aluminum and glass into the ground. Some metal fragments are so small and thin that they’re barely distinguishable from the dirt. Others are the size of a motorcycle’s license plate, pocked with rivet holes, their edges curled inward by the force of the impact.
As Acadia University professor Aaron Taylor surveys the foot-deep trench, students stand expectantly around him. The metal detector, when run along one vertical trench face, is still picking up hits. “Let’s take that wall back another 20 centimetres,” he says, and a student moves in with a shovel. Where there is plane wreckage, there’s a possibility of remains, he reminds them. “Metal is proxy for bone.”
Acadia University professor Aaron Taylor says Canada should do more to recover the remains of those soldiers who were never recovered during the two World Wars. But doing so will mean battling a tangled web of diplomatic agreements and getting the government on board.
The archeology professor’s team of 10 students and a handful of other experts have been enlisted by the U.S. Defence Department to search for the remains of four crewmen who were killed when the plane crashed during the war. It’s part of a military program that aims to repatriate the remains of Americans lost in other countries.
But Prof. Taylor has another mission, too.
He is calling on Canada to do the same as America, and proactively investigate the remains of our own soldiers missing in action – and to do it soon. “Veterans and firsthand witnesses are dying. Families have been waiting 80 years. We can’t find everyone, but we can bring closure for some.”
There are still 27,000 Canadian service members with no known graves from both world wars and the Korean conflict, thousands of whom could be recoverable, Prof. Taylor says. He is working to launch a publicly funded initiative – to be called the Acadia University Recovery Project – that would conduct historical research to locate Canadian crash sites. Once found, he says he would then propose recovery missions to the government.
PhD student Dakota Taylor cleans a piece of warped metal found on-site.
“It’s not about guaranteeing that anything will be found, but about looking into every missing-in-action case and identifying those that have high potential for recovery.”
He’s not the only one eager to search. In Europe, the organization in charge of Commonwealth war graves gets hundreds of requests every year from archeologists and enthusiasts to begin proactively searching for remains, instead of just waiting for accidental discoveries to be made.
But for Canada, numerous barriers stand in the way.
Not only does the government not devote the kinds of resources such a program would require, but even if they did, it would mean clearing a tangled web of policy and diplomatic barriers, some installed for more than a century, as well as the practicalities of digging up a former combat zone.
Sarah Lockyer, head of Canada’s Casualty Identification Program – which seeks to identify the remains and graves of service members found abroad – says the department currently lacks the resources for a proactive program. But on a personal level, she agrees that it would be “a dream” to be able to find a way to do so in the future.
“I can only speak for myself, but it would be great if the program could grow toward that,” she says.
In the U.S., teams of historians and archeologists employed by the American Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency work to identify sites around the world where there’s a high likelihood of discovering remains, choosing dozens of them to visit.
The agency was formed in 2015 through the combination of three defence departments, but its origins date back to the 1970s, when the U.S. government launched an identification laboratory in Hawaii. Since the 70s, the remains of more than 3,000 personnel who served in the Second World War, the Korean War, the Cold War and the Vietnam War have been recovered.
The search starts with research: staff look through archives, oral histories and military records for clues to the possible location of human remains. If there’s enough evidence to link a site to an individual personnel member who was lost, they will send out a team to search for eyewitnesses, conduct on-site reconnaissance and scan for unexploded bombs.
If a dig is approved, forensic archeologists move in. As sites can range from an individual burial to a plane crash site the size of a football field, excavations can span days or years. Any bones found are sent for DNA analysis and matched to samples given by living relatives.
This is the third year of excavating at this location in Austria, though the results of the previous two years have been kept confidential. Under U.S. government policy, many excavation details can’t be disclosed until a project is officially complete, to spare families false hope and to guard the site from looters. The Globe and Mail agreed not to identify the precise location of the crash, the names of the deceased pilots or the type of plane being excavated for this story.
Canada – like most other countries – has no program to proactively search for missing military remains. Instead, the casualty identification program works to identify soldiers’ remains only when they are discovered accidentally or by researchers from other organizations, says Lisa Fiander, a Department of National Defence spokesperson.
These types of discoveries often occur during infrastructure or real estate development. When they do, researchers use both documentary and scientific analysis – including DNA analysis – to identify the remains.
The casualty identification program also works to identify soldiers buried in unmarked graves without exhuming the bones through a range of contextual evidence, such as war diaries and personnel files.
Isobel Leidl Wilson uses a metal detector to scan the trench for metal, while volunteers Bella MacQuarrie, Cameron Barnard and Dean Geggie look on. The dig site has been divided up into "units" with string, demarcating the areas of highest archaeological potential.
In part, the difference in approach between the U.S. and Canada comes down to resources. The American agency has 700 employees and, in 2024, expects to spend US$200-million. By contrast, as of 2024, the casualty identification program employed only about a dozen people and has an annual budget of just $100,000 for operations and maintenance, excluding salaries.
Running a six-week dig such as the one funded by the Americans in Austria can cost as much as $200,000, Prof. Taylor says. The tremendous cost of archeology is undoubtedly the largest hurdle to his goals.
But resources aren’t the only barrier for Canada, Ms. Lockyer says. A significant one is a century-old agreement: the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Established in 1917 by England and later signed by Canada and four other nations – Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa – this agreement bans the exhumation of war graves and repatriation of remains, in part owing to the logistical difficulties of transporting so many corpses. The agreement was also passed at a time when DNA testing did not yet exist. When remains are found accidentally in Europe, commission staff that are sent in to collect them.
Today, a panel representing all countries has final say over any requests to dig proactively, and the organization receives over 100 per year to do so, says Stephan Naji, head of the commission’s Recovery Unit, France Area. Most requests are denied for lack of concrete evidence or justification for digging. Only a handful have been approved in the last century, and in those circumstances, the countries funded their own digs.
Despite this, other recovery digs have taken place without the commission’s authorization, which he says is illegal and potentially dangerous. Only now is the commission working on building a formal process to accept proactive search proposals, and says he is open to hearing from academics such as Prof. Taylor. But ultimately, he says, it would be up to the Canadian government to initiate a request.
Sean Kearney, a volunteer and Manager of Education at Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum, chops through the roots that extend through the site and make digging difficult.
There’s another problem, Ms. Lockyer says: Canadian airmen frequently flew on British planes with mixed crews – and any such excavation would need approval from all countries involved.
“It’s not as simple as just walking in and saying, ‘Canada’s here, we want to do this.’ There are intricacies,” Ms. Lockyer says. “There’s diplomacy in these things, and it adds a layer of complexity to the process.”
Aside from diplomatic difficulties, there are the practical ones, says Renée Davis, a military historian for Canada’s identification program. In addition to the risks posed by unexploded ordnance, and the challenges of finding usable DNA for testing, there is the fact that many remains were already recovered from conflict zones immediately after the wars.
“If they weren’t found, there’s a reason. The ones that are left are the very complicated cases,” she says.
But Prof. Taylor contends that the remains at bomber crash sites could have been missed during previous searches. “The planes went down so hard that the wreckage is fragmented. They didn’t look like human remains. That’s why they weren’t recovered.”
One advantage of searching where a plane crashed, he says, is that the remains are usually concentrated within the scatter of the wreckage, making them easier to find than in an open field. Prof. Taylor says that of the 27,000 Canadians unaccounted for, about 2,000 went down in bombers.
Prof. Taylor first proposed to the federal Department of Defence in 2022 that they launch a five-year pilot project to fund the research, but says that at the time he was turned down. Now, he’s hoping to take that work into his own hands at the University of Acadia. He already has his eye on two possible crash sites: one in Canada and the other in the Philippines.
Prof. Taylor is planning to bring on about a dozen student researchers, as well as a board composed of faculty and experts, to raise funds and do research. He also plans to embed research assignments into his forensic archeology classes and raise public awareness about his mission.
“It may be expensive, but I think of the price that those families paid when they lost their children, fathers, uncles and brothers.”
Back on the dig site, the air smells like pine and overturned soil. A member of the team has found something interesting in one of the sieves – a rounded piece of metal, clumped with dirt. It’s brought over to the table where such finds are examined, and PhD student Dakota Taylor (no relation to Prof. Taylor) begins using a small brush to knock soil and clumps of root from it.
Beside where Ms. Taylor works, already-cleaned finds from the week are kept in marked baggies: a button from an airman’s uniform, a radio box lid, dozens of bullets and casings.
As Ms. Taylor cleans, the volunteers continue their search. Many are driven by the emotional connections to the site.
In one of the trenches, Isobel Lidel Wilson, an artist from Nova Scotia, digs through a tangle of roots. Her grandfather was an aviator who trained Second World War bombers pilots, like those who crashed here. He, too, died in a plane crash. She’s here to honour his memory by helping others get closure.
“We had the luxury of being able to bury his remains. But the families of the pilots we’re looking for, they don’t have that,” Ms. Lidel Wilson says.
Elsewhere, Sean Kearney, who lives in St. Catharines, Ont., is busy with a pickaxe. He is in his early 30s, making him older than most of the men who flew these planes.
“These kids were given an unbelievable task. They were given the challenge of flying a massive aircraft to attack a heavily guarded target,” he says, swinging into the packed earth. “So, I don’t mind the hard work.”
Midway through the afternoon, a car pulls up to the site. Out of it comes Michael Schöll, a 96-year-old local resident who heard about the ongoing excavation from neighbours. Speaking in German through a translator, Mr. Schöll says that he was a witness to the crash eight decades ago. He saw the plane soaring overhead, on fire, being pursued by two German fighters, and then ran to where the plane went down to help search for survivors.
“The people in the village were in fear, and very agitated. We thought, the war has come to our town. We thought the fighting would come here, too,” he says.
Later, after Mr. Schöll leaves, Ms. Taylor has finished cleaning the find, and it’s recognizable now – a parachute buckle in a closed position. That closed position has special significance: it means it was possibly being worn at the time of the crash. A piece of life-saving equipment, never used.
Professor Aaron Taylor holds up a parachute buckle found in an excavation unit opened that morning.
It’s one of many such artifacts discovered over the team’s six weeks in Austria. But when the dig ends at the end of June, they have not found any bone fragments.
That doesn’t mean the overall project hasn’t yielded any such results: If human remains were found here in the previous two years, that currently confidential information will come out when the results from all three years have been assessed.
But regardless of what that analysis finds, Prof. Taylor feels he has done his duty: ensuring that no soldier has been left behind.
“Obviously, you want to find remains, but the mission is to provide the fullest account possible,” Prof. Taylor says.
“It’s about remembrance, letting these people know that their sacrifice was valued, and saying, ‘We will make an effort to find you.’ How do we continue that remembrance with our young people? This is how.”