There is much anticipation of the repatriation of the POW/MIAs from North Korea as a result of the Singapore Summit. As of the time…
There is much anticipation of the repatriation of the POW/MIAs from North Korea as a result of the Singapore Summit. As of the time of this post, none have been returned, but coordination is still underway as stated by the U. S. State Department.
But, it must be understood, the KGB, now FSB, maintains files on many American military personnel that in fact ended up in Soviet military hospitals as well as various gulags. To date, Russia for the most part, not only denies this, but the evidence remains not only from the conflict of North Korea, but Vietnam as well.
In June 1951, Lois got a telegram telling her Moore had been shot down while piloting an F-51 Mustang over the South China Sea, off the coast of North Korea. He was reported as missing in action.
On Dec. 31,1953, the Air Force notified Lois that Harry was presumed dead and was listed as killed in action.
Lois decided she had to move on. She moved to California. She connected there with Harry’s brother, Bob. They reminisced about Harry and grew closer. In 1954, they married. Bob raised Jana as his own daughter, and he and Lois had a daughter of their own, Nancy. They owned a medical-manufacturing business, and in 1996 retired to Star, Idaho.
In August 2002, Lois received a Federal Express package from the Air Force.
In it, a July 19,2002, memo to the Air Force Missing Persons Branch from the Department of Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office read: “(I)t is possible that Capt. Harry C. Moore survived his shoot-down incident and may have been interrogated by Soviet officials. His fate afterwards remains unknown.”
The Moores were shocked. “We thought, goodness gracious, there is still hope he could be alive,” said Bob Moore. “For 50 years we had closure.… Now we have uncertainty. He may have been suffering for all that time in some Russian prison.”
In March 1954, the U. S. Air Force asked the CIA for assistance in finding U. S. servicemen in Communist custody. More here.
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Related reading: The ‘1205 Document’: A Story of American Prisoners, Vietnamese Agents, Soviet Archives, Washington Bureaucrats, and the Media
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Mark Sauter began doing some lengthy research on his own for others.
Sauter, whose findings inspired him to co-author a book and start his own blog, was further inspired after the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the U. S.–Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs in 1992. For the first time, U. S. officials were given access to Russian archives and former Soviet military personnel, some of whom appeared to confirm that U. S. pilots had indeed been taken prisoner in Russia. While Harry Moore was never named specifically, the commission reportedly turned up potential clues.
One former Soviet airman recalled hearing of a captured U. S. pilot with a similar physical appearance to Harry Moore’s who went on to become an instructor for Soviet recruits. An Estonian witness said in 1993 he remembered a Captain “Harry or Gary Moore” who was shot down in the summer of 1951 and had been interrogated by the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps. Perhaps the most shocking piece of evidence came in 1997, when U. S. representatives interviewed Aleksey Alekseevich Kalyuzhniy in Ukraine. Kalyuzhniy claimed to have piloted the MiG-15 that took down what may have been Harry Moore’s plane on June 1,1951, and that he witnessed it land less than a hundred feet from shore.
“[T]he F-51 pilot appeared to be in complete control of the aircraft as it gently landed on the sea,” Kalyuzhniy said, adding that he believed the pilot could easily have survived the wreck. More here.
