Long lost pilot’s remains identified

CRESWELL, Ore. – The Department of Defense has identified remains found last summer in China as those of Roseburg native Robert Snoddy, who was piloting a spy plane shot down in November 1952.

His sister, Ruth Boss, of Creswell, got the news last week and says she will bring his cremated remains to be buried near their father’s grave in Eugene.

“We’re gonna all be together again,” said Boss, 81.

The investigation failed to identify remains from Snoddy’s co-pilot, Norman A. Schwartz of Louisville, Ky..

For Boss and her family, including Snoddy’s only child, Roberta Lee Cox of San Jose, Calif., born weeks after her father died, the discovery ends five decades of waiting.

Snoddy was 31 when he departed on his last mission, one that required the precision piloting for which he was known.

He was a decorated Navy pilot in World War II, shooting down two Japanese planes.

After the war, Snoddy and his wife, Charlotte, also of Roseburg, moved to Japan so he could fly for Civil Air Transport, the airline Lt. Gen. Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame had co-founded.

He flew passengers and cargo during the Chinese civil war. The airline flew thousands of Chinese to Taiwan in 1949, when the Nationalists fell. The following year the airline was sold to the CIA.

On the last flight, Snoddy and Schwartz left Seoul, South Korea, bound for a village in China, near the Korean border.

They carried two CIA agents, Richard G. Fecteau and John T. Downey.

On the ground in China, U.S.-backed operatives worked to establish a resistance network.

The plan was to use a pole-and-hook mechanism to lift one of them off the ground and into the plane to safety.

In a telephone interview with The Oregonian last summer, Downey said that as they descended, bullets pierced the plane, which belly landed in an open space.

As flames swept the fuselage, Downey and Fecteau escaped and were captured. The Chinese held them for two decades.

Officials told the pilots’ families they had died when their plane crashed into the Sea of Japan on a routine flight. Snoddy’s widow, who died in 1973, never learned the truth.

Finally, the Cold War began to thaw in the early 1970s and the Chinese freed Downey and Fecteau. Ruth Boss then learned what had become of her brother.

In 1998, the CIA honored Downey and Fecteau with the prestigious Director’s Medal. They had been imprisoned abroad longer than any CIA agents in history.

Three months later, for the first time, the government publicly acknowledged the pilots.

In 2002, the Chinese let U.S. officials search for the men’s remains and said their badly burned bodies were buried at the crash site.

An elderly villager who had helped bury the Americans directed investigators to the site, where they found enough evidence to return last summer for a full-fledged archaeological dig.

When Ruth Boss learned last week that bone fragments and two teeth found in the dig belonged to her brother, she called Snoddy’s daughter.

Cox knows her father only through stories, photographs, medals and other mementos she stores in a wood and glass case at home.

Cox and Boss plan to retrieve Snoddy’s remains from Hawaii, where government investigators and forensic anthropologists worked to identify him.

“It’s time that he comes home. He’s been gone way too long,” she said.