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ZINN THE SEARCHER He seeks for those he sent out and who never returned. He asked that he might do it. If you talk to Captain Zinn about it, you know why he made the request. You know how he feels about what he is doing. There is no mawkish sentiment about Captain Zinn. He doesn’t talk in hushed tones of the ›yers who went away in the air and did not come back. Like as not he will tell you some little anecdote about them while he relates the known details of their last ›ight. But deep down within him, Captain Zinn feels he and no other should go out on the mission that now engages him. He has an interest that is intimate and personal. One knows after talking to Captain Zinn that it is meet that he who sent the missing men of the Air Service to their squadrons and their ships now should want to go to them where they died and do for them that which should be done for them. —Stars and Stripes, March 28, 1919 Captain Zinn’s appointment to the Berlin Commission at the end of the war was an open-ended assignment. His proposal had been worded vaguely enough to give him a great deal of latitude. He proposed that the two hundred missing American airmen could be found and that he should make the effort. There were no rules for this assignment, no guidelines to follow. No one could mentor him on this task. In past wars, when bodies were located , an attempt was made to identify them by what was on them . . . but no one had proposed going out and looking for missing warriors and investigating their fates. He would be breaking new ground, creating new techniques. He would have little in the way of resources other than his determination, zeal, and wit. With the conclusion of the war with a signed Armistice, the role of the army and the U.S. Air Service had changed dramatically. Zinn reported to Brigadier General H. H. Harries on March 16, 1919.1 Getting into Berlin was tricky. The German government had melted away with 109 6 the cessation of hostilities. Units posted to the front simply abandoned their positions and left. Many had taken up the “red ›ag” of communism and had openly revolted against their commanding of‹cers. The abdication of the kaiser had made the government a frail puppet. Years of rationing and the loss of the war had led to rioting and general chaos across Germany. The Allied victors had no desire to stabilize the German government and allowed Germany to suffer with its internal strife. The Berlin Commission was more formally known as the American Section of the Permanent International Armistice Commission (PIAC), but most reports referred to it as simply the Berlin Commission. It was formally founded to repatriate prisoners of war, help in the relief of the Russian POWs held by Germany, and ensure that the terms of the truce were adhered to. The Russians had suffered from being deprived of food and medical care, and the U.S. Army assumed responsibility for helping these people. Some of the American POWs had simply been released in the overall mayhem unfolding in Germany. Some sought medical help from the Germans; others trickled back to where their units or squadrons had been posted. Many more Americans were still held in POW camps, where commanding of‹cers had not received instructions as to what to do. German society was breaking down, and the Americans were stepping into the middle of the chaos in Berlin in an effort to ‹nd their people. While his of‹cial mission was to be looking for missing airmen, he also had a secret assignment. The GHQ in Chaumont brought Captain Zinn in for an intelligence brie‹ng before he left for Berlin. The Americans had heard rumors that the Germans had ‹fteen thousand undestroyed aircraft they were hiding, awaiting a time when the Allies would leave. This underground air force, if it existed, was considered a serious threat to future peace. Fred Zinn was asked to spy on the Germans and learn if they did indeed have this potent cache of weapons.2 Regardless of his spy mission, Zinn’s focus was on the search for the lost airmen. The analytical side of his brain, that of the civil engineer, had to de‹ne some standards for the missing airmen. For Zinn...

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