Lost Eagles: One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars by Blaine Pardoe (review)

Book Reviews 117 Blaine Pardoe. Lost Eagles: One Man’s Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Pp. 256. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $32.50. While conducting research in China in the summer of 2006, I was contacted by the U.S. military’s Joint Personnel Accountability Command (JPAC), an organization tasked with finding the missing remains of Americans lost in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. A JPAC spokesperson asked if I would keep my eyes open for U.S. military artifacts at the many small museums I was visiting, artifacts that might be traced back to U.S. airmen lost more than half a century ago. Little did I know at the time that the roots of JPAC’s mission could be traced to the efforts of a single meticulous Michigander named Fred Zinn. His life and calling are described in Blaine Pardoe’s book, Lost Eagles: One Man’s Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars. A native of Galesberg, Michigan, Zinn graduated from the University of Michigan and joined the French Foreign Legion in 1914 as a means of getting into World War I. He soon sought relief from the trenches by joining the Lafayette Flying Corps as a flight observer/gunner, befriending many of the original members of the famed Lafayette Escadrille. As the war ended, Zinn took it upon himself—without any prodding from headquarters—to begin searching for the remains of missing American airmen, many of whom were his friends. Zinn’s work took on the nature of a holy quest; he invested his heart and soul into the hunt for each one of the two hundred missing airmen. His searches often took interesting twists as well; for example, soon after the war he befriended the famed German ace Ernst Udet, who helped Zinn by serving as his pilot while the American scoured the countryside by air looking for crash sites. Zinn also began writing columns for magazines in the United States, which created great interest and led to a cascade of pleas from the family members of lost servicemen. Painstaking almost to a fault, Zinn soon developed a method for conducting investigations that was tedious, laborious, and—more often than not—successful. In fact, it was his technique that gave birth to the Missing Air Crew Report, a methodology adopted by the U.S. military and used tens of thousands of times in later conflicts. During World War II, Zinn again worked to find the remains of missing airmen, doing so incognito as an agent of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), but that war’s massive size and 118 The Michigan Historical Review scope and his own advanced age relegated these efforts to a mere footnote. Pardoe’s research is comprehensive, making use of the Lafayette Flying Corps’s best data repositories, as well as Zinn’s own trove of information. The book’s organization is novel, as Pardoe alternates chapters, covering a segment of Zinn’s life in one, then recounting the history of one of his searches in the next, and so forth. The book also includes a generous number of helpful photographs, although maps of Zinn’s target areas would have been a helpful addition. Nevertheless, Pardoe has done us a great service in sharing with readers the life of Fred Zinn. In the midst of the carnage that was World War I, there is something redemptive and humanizing about the life of a man who was well-nigh obsessed with doing the gut-wrenching work of finding comrades’ remains, not only to bring a sense of closure to the surviving families, but also to dignify those remains with a proper burial. Colonel John D. Plating U.S. Air Force Academy Claire Puccia Parham. The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project: An Oral History of the Greatest Construction Show on Earth. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2009. Pp. 353. Bibliography. Index. Notes. Photographs. Cloth, $34.95. The construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway (1954-1959) is one of the greatest engineering feats in history. Built upon the St. Marys Falls Ship Canal...