Idaho Statesman Article

U.S.- China deal aids family's fight: Quest to bring fallen pilot home gains steam

It happened almost 50 years ago, but Betty Kirzinger remembers vividly the pain of learning that her brother's C-47 airplane had disappeared from radar over the Sea of Japan.

It was the Korean War era, and Kirzinger hoped against hope that a mistake had been made about the presumed death of her brother, Norman Schwartz, an experienced pilot from Louisville who was two years her junior.

Her father replied sharply: "Don't ever wish our pain on anybody else, Betty," she recalled recently. "It's enough pain for us," he said.

Years later, after it was revealed that Schwartz had been shot down during a covert mission in Communist China on Nov. 29, 1952, the pain remained for the family, which has never gotten the opportunity to bury him.

"We didn't feel like we could put up a grave marker because we didn't have any parts of him to put there," said Kirzinger, 81, of Madison, N.C.

But that may change soon, with news this week that the Chinese government has granted permission for a U.S. team to travel to northeast China to search for the remains of Schwartz and his co-pilot, Robert Snoddy.

Photo by David R. Lutman

Norman Wigginton of Clarksville, IN, holds a portrait of his great-uncle, Louisville-raised Civil Air Transport pilot Norman Schwartz.

"This is the first time that China has permitted a search for remains linked to a Cold War case," said Staff Sgt. Sebastian Harris, a spokesman for the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii.

Schwartz spoke with an unidentified man in this undated Pentagon photo.

An eight-member team from the laboratory is set to travel to Jilin, China, on Monday and will take about three weeks to get to the remote crash site and investigate, Harris said.

There are no guarantees that any remains will be found at the site near the town of Antu, China.

But Kirzinger said her family already has achieved some degree of peace, just knowing that an effort is being made.

"I'm optimistic and . . . I think our government will do everything in its power to find them if they're there -- if they can be found," she said. And if they cannot be found, "Well then, they've done the best they can do, and we can't ask for more than that."

Kirzinger's son, Erik Kirzinger, who has been making inquiries with the government since the 1980s in hopes of spurring the release of Schwartz's remains and those of other fallen Americans, agreed.

Even if the search isn't successful, "For me, just the two governments working together to resolve what has to be a sensitive issue for both sides has been a wonderful sense of accomplishment," he said. "Of course, I'm hoping the siblings find closure in their lifetime, and that would be icing on the cake."

Schwartz grew up with his parents and six brothers and sisters in the Camp Taylor area, when it was largely farmland.

Besides Betty Kirzinger, he has two surviving siblings: a brother, Gene Schwarz, who lives in Louisville, and a second sister in North Carolina who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, the family said.

(Norman had a "t" in his name because of an uncorrected error on his birth certificate.)

There also are several extended family members, including Schwartz's nephew Norman Schwarz of Louisville and great-nephew Norman Wigginton of Clarksville, Ind., both of whom were named after him.

A few of the relatives, such as Ira Hancock, a 74-year-old nephew in Custer, Ky., are old enough to remember him.

From being an ace baseball player and golfer to a decorated Marine fighter pilot during World War II, "he was just my hero," Hancock said. ". . . He's just all-around American, really. . . . I always loved him."

At the time of his death, Schwartz flew for Civil Air Transport, an organization operated by Gen. Claire Chennault and Whiting Willauer after World War II that took part in secret missions to fight communism in Asia using surplus military aircraft, according to archival information from the University of Texas at Dallas.

On the flight that would lead to his death in November 1952, Schwartz was flying with Snoddy and two Central Intelligence Agency officers, Richard Fecteau and Jack Downey.

Their C-47, the military version of a twin-engine DC-3 airliner, was to pick up a nationalist Chinese agent in the Manchurian foothills by swooping in low so that a cable could be lowered to snatch up the agent.

However, Chinese soldiers were waiting to ambush the plane. A squad of soldiers threw back tarpaulins they had used for camouflage and fired on the plane.

"It really wasn't like a random shoot-down over the battlefield," Erik Kirzinger said. "The airplane was 60 feet off the ground, flying probably at maybe 70 mph when it was hit with machine guns and the plane just sort of pancaked in."

Schwartz and Snoddy died and reportedly were buried at the site. Fecteau and Downey were tried as spies in China and given 20-year prison sentences.

The United States initially issued a cover story, stating that the plane had crashed into the Sea of Japan during a routine trip between Korea and Japan; it listed the crash date as Dec. 3, 1952.

"It was just more than we could stomach," recalled Betty Kirzinger, who was married at the time and expecting her third child. "It was just horrible."

Yearning for more information about the incident, Betty Kirzinger wrote hundreds of letters in an attempt to find out what had happened to her brother. "I just wondered a whole lot of things because there's so much that goes on in the world," she said. "Who's to know? I was hoping for Norman, is what I was doing."

Then the family got wind of a conflicting account from Hancock, who'd seen a newspaper article overseas. "The Chinese reported that a plane was shot down over China and there were two spies and the pilot and copilot were killed, so then I realized we had a different story," Betty Kirzinger said. "Were we (the United States) telling the truth, or were the Chinese telling the truth?"

Details were not revealed until the 1970s, when Fecteau and Downey were released from prison and President Richard Nixon admitted the country's involvement in spying. China subsequently disclosed information on six incidents the U.S. government had been inquiring about, including this case.

"We had no definite closure on that until they finally admitted it," Betty Kirzinger said. "That was classified information."

In the 1980s, Erik Kirzinger began contacting various government agencies, hoping it would lead to a recovery of Schwartz's remains so they could be returned to the United States for burial, which he hopes will be in Arlington National Cemetery.

Permission to search for the remains was obtained through negotiations with China, according to the Central Identification Laboratory.

"The Chinese officials have been great in the negotiation process, and we are grateful they are allowing us to take a team in to investigate the area, as well as excavate sites in Tibet," Harris said.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said in a news briefing earlier this week that China decided to allow the search as a humanitarian gesture to promote friendship between the two countries, according to The Associated Press.

"I hope this is the beginning of a tremendous increase in humanitarian cooperation" between China and the United States, she said. "Whether or not they succeed in actually recovering the remains of the two pilots . . . it still is a significant breakthrough in that a serious effort will be made jointly between the two governments."

If remains are found, they will be brought back to the Central Identification Laboratory to be analyzed, Harris said.

Schwartz's great-nephew Norman Wigginton, chief of detectives for the Clarksville (Ind.) Police Department, said he's glad to see progress being made, but wishes it had come when more family members were living.

Wigginton, who keeps a flight suit and helmet that once belonged to Schwartz, said that when he was growing up in Louisville he heard a lot about his great-uncle from relatives and was inspired to learn how to fly. He obtained his pilot's license and toyed with the idea of becoming a professional pilot.

"I really think it was kind of the exposure to flight, and you know, seeing his picture and Chennault's picture and the scarves and such," said Wigginton, who now has a son in flight training and another who plans to attend the U.S. Naval Academy.

The other relative named for Schwartz recalled running around the house wearing his uncle's medals as a kid.

"We always thought that was a neat thing to have a hero in the family," Norman Schwarz said. "I just feel honored to be able to have his name."

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