When Robert Burrowes received a phone call asking if he was related to Australian Air Force fighter Thomas Burrowes, he had no idea that an 82-year-old mystery was about to be solved. Initially, he assumed the genealogist from the Australian Defence Force (ADF) was simply conducting routine research.
“I thought, ‘Well they’re just being thorough’,” he told the ABC in an exclusive interview from his home in Melbourne. “She hadn’t given any hint at all.”
After more than eight decades, Robert Burrowes had nearly given up hope of ever discovering what truly happened to his uncle Tom, a Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) fighter who disappeared during World War II. Tom was just 16 when he joined the RAAF cadets but was unable to become a pilot due to a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. When the Pacific War erupted, Tom was called to serve as a wireless air gunner in Papua New Guinea.
The Fateful Mission
On the night of December 14, 1943, Tom embarked on his first bombing mission in a Beaufort Bomber A9-211, one of nine Squadron 100 planes involved in an air attack. “The mission was to fly over and bomb Rabaul, which at that point was a well-held Japanese base,” Robert Burrowes explained. However, the mission was plagued by adverse weather conditions.
“Only three [planes] made the target … two bombed alternate targets, four returned to base without even completing the mission,” he recounted. Tragically, one plane did not return to base. That ill-fated aircraft carried Tom and his fellow crew members, Flight Sergeants John Kenny, Arthur John Davies, and Murray Fairbairn.
Mystery of the Missing Plane
The aircraft was never located, and from that night, the whereabouts of Tom and his crew remained a mystery. This was particularly painful for Robert’s father, Jim Burrowes, Tom’s twin brother, who also served in Rabaul during World War II as a coastwatcher. Their older brother, Bob, died as a captured soldier on the Japanese prisoner-of-war ship Montevideo Maru, which sank in 1942 and was finally discovered in 2023.
When Jim passed away last year at the age of 101, Tom’s whereabouts were still unknown. “He was resigned to the fact he’d probably never find out,” Robert Burrowes said. “Well, as it turned out, if he lived one more year, he would’ve.”
The Discovery
In October, about a week after speaking with the ADF genealogist, Robert Burrowes received another call, this time from Group Captain Grant Kelly. The voice on the line explained that he had led a special RAAF unit focused on locating missing war casualties. This time, the significance of the call was clear.
“He was halfway through the third sentence, and I thought ‘Bloody hell, they’ve found the plane’. I started bawling immediately,” Robert Burrowes recalled. Captain Kelly recounted how he and a small team had led an expedition into the remote mountains of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea, after teenager Willie Flinn discovered the wreck while trekking through the bush in 2022.
It was not an easy mission; it took years of planning and a couple of false starts. “PNG is a complex place. And with the considerations of that remote site, it took us ’til October this year before we could complete that investigation,” Captain Kelly told the ABC.
“We don’t know what evidence is there, whether it’s complete. It’s 80 years old. It’s been subject to damage, disturbance, deterioration. The tropical jungle is not a friendly site or not friendly to wreckage … this was extremely torn apart.”
But in less than an hour of being on site, they had a breakthrough. “We were very lucky that within half an hour … we were able to discover a component plate, a modification plate that identified the aircraft as A9-211,” Captain Kelly said. For him, it’s a discovery that helps families, veterans, and the Air Force piece together the past.
“Every missing plane is a story that is not complete. And when we’re able to identify these planes, it completes the story.”
Stirring Emotions
For Robert Burrowes, discovering his uncle Tom’s final resting place has stirred up a complex blend of feelings. “They call it closure. I’m not sure that that’s quite the right word,” he said, sitting in a living room surrounded by pictures of his relatives. He gently wiped a tear from his eyes. “I feel very emotional. Yeah, it’s pretty upsetting, but it’s also good to know.”
Some of the details of the plane crash have been difficult to process. “It was in a nosedive, basically, and it burned on impact,” he said. “It’s not fun to imagine what it would have been like in those last terrifying moments as the plane is in a nosedive and presumably completely out of control.”
Mr. Burrowes also feels a deep sadness that his father Jim didn’t live to find out where his twin brother came to rest. “He only missed it by a year,” he lamented.
Bone Fragments Being Tested
For Danielle Baker, the granddaughter of navigator Arthur Davies, who also died in the crash, the discovery has helped answer questions she has been asking her whole life. “It’s always been in the back of my head,” she said. “Did he get shot down? Did he get picked up by the enemy? Did he ever suffer?”
But now, she feels a sense of peace knowing the likely cause. “But now we’ve sort of got this peace of mind that they hit the mountain because the weather was so tragically horrible. And probably it was very quick.”
A small amount of bone fragment, which could be human remains, have been found at the site and will undergo forensic testing. Ms. Baker thinks they could belong to her grandfather. “There had been some burnt remains found at the front of the plane,” she said. “With my grandfather being the navigator, he was probably up the front end of the plane … technically, I’d probably think that’s grandad.”
If that is proven, she knows exactly what she will do. “It’d be great if we could get a bit of that home so I could bury him or put him next to his wife and his daughter,” Ms. Baker said.
