SHIMAMOTO, KEIZABURO
Name: Keizaburo Shimamoto
Rank/Branch: CIV/Newsweek Photographer
Unit:
Date of Birth: CA 1937
Home City of Record: Japan
Date of Loss: 10 February 1971
Country of Loss: Laos
Loss Coordinates:
Status (in 1973): Missing, Presumed Dead
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Uh-1
Missions:
REFNO: X001-0-04
Other Personnel in Incident: Four photographers: Larry Burrows, 44, of Life
magazine; Henri Huet, 43, of The Associated Press; Kent Potter, 24, United
Press International, and Keizaburo Shimamoto, 34, of Newsweek, a South
Vietnamese army photographer, two senior officers and the four-man crew.
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews.
REMARKS:
[ap0322.98 03/22/98]
Laos 1971 Crash Scene Searched
The Associated Press
By RICHARD PYLE
BAN ALANG, Laos (AP) - A team of nine Americans and some 80 Laotian
workers dug deep into a steep mountainside Saturday where a helicopter
was shot down 28 years ago, killing four news photographers covering the
Vietnam War.
After four days of excavation, the search produced many small aircraft
parts, two battered and burned steel helmets, and several scraps of
35-millimeter film - the type the journalists carried - but no human
remains.
"Finding the film really guarantees that we're looking in the right
place," said Lisa Hoshower, an American anthropologist supervising the
archaeological- type project.
Army Capt. Jeffrey Price, commander of the Hawaii-based search team,
concurred, calling it unlikely that a helicopter on a strictly military
mission would have carried such items.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail in the Laos panhandle bordering Vietnam was
heavily defended by Hanoi's forces and attacked incessantly by American
aircraft.
While few pathways are now visible, the area is still studded with bomb
craters, old gun positions, wrecked trucks and unexploded cluster bombs
that were dropped to render the terrain unusable.
The South Vietnamese helicopter was shot down over the trail on Feb.
10, 1971. Witnesses said it exploded in a fireball, killing all 11
aboard - the four newsmen, a South Vietnamese army photographer, two
senior officers and the four-man crew.
The journalists were covering Operation Lam Son 719, a massive
cross-border invasion by U.S.-backed Saigon forces to cut the jungled
trail network that fed men and arms to North Vietnamese forces in the
south.
Their U.S.-built UH-1 Huey helicopter and three others became lost
while accompanying a general's tour of the fighting area. Two were shot
down within minutes by hidden anti-aircraft guns.
The four photographers were Larry Burrows, 44, of Life magazine; Henri
Huet, 43, of The Associated Press; Kent Potter, 24, United Press
International, and Keizaburo Shimamoto, 34, of Newsweek.
Burrows, a Briton, and Huet, who was French-Vietnamese, were among the
top combat photographers of the war. Both won the prestigious Robert
Capa Award, named for another photographer killed in the French
Indochina war.
The Philadelphia-born Potter's U.S. citizenship qualified the case for
investigation by the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting, a Pentagon unit
created by the Pentagon in 1992 to seek remains of Americans still
missing in Indochina. Forty-one civilians are among the 2,099 still
listed as unaccounted for. The total includes 449, mostly fliers, in
Laos.
The crash site, accessible only by helicopter, was located last year
after two other spots were ruled out. Analysts used an aerial photo
taken the day after the crash to help pinpoint the site.
The team flew to the site on March 14 from this base camp on old
French-built Route 9 west of the Laos-Vietnam border. They chopped away
thick bamboo, collected dozens of the still-dangerous, baseball-sized
bomblets, and marked the area off in grids for a systematic search.
Workers, recruited from local villages at $24 a day, used the cut
bamboo to build platforms where dirt is screened for physical evidence.
Others collect bucketfuls of brackets, bolts, shards of plastic and
aluminum, and the film, its emulsion ruined by nearly three decades of
heat and monsoons.
Any large pieces of metal that survived were scavenged by villagers
years ago, American team members said. The two helmets, crushed by
impact but sturdy enough to withstand the elements, were found in a
ravine. Their owners were not known.
Hoshower, 41, ordered the search concentrated in the ravine after scant
results on the upper hill indicated that over time, much debris had
become "slope wash," trapped under rocks and soil in the gully.
The effort was hampered some days by extreme heat, up to 120 degrees.
Dozens of forest fires and smaller blazes flaring on nearby hills
created a smoky haze and prompted Price to set up an emergency
helicopter escape plan for his team.
Hoshower said efforts would continue until remains were found or it was
determined impractical to expand the search.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Richard Pyle was AP Vietnam's bureau chief at the time
of the crash.
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