Lt. Frank Fazekas comes home

WTOP reports that Lt. Frank Fazekas will be laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery this week after years inside his P-47 Thunderbolt in the French field where he came to rest after succumbing to German anti-aircraft fire 74 years ago.

“When the plane fell, there were still bullets exploding” from the plane’s .50-caliber machines guns, recalls Marc Cooche. He was 12 then; at 86, he’s still haunted by memories of that afternoon.

In Cooche’s recollection, the plane veered to avoid some electric cables, maneuvering in the air for two or three minutes before plummeting nose first. The crash left a deep crater in a field of beets. Flames fed by the plane’s fuel licked the sky, and the hole burned for days.

The boys and their father wanted to rescue the pilot. Cooche’s father “came with horses and barrels of water to put out the fire,” he says, but Germans had arrived at the site and turned him away.

For years, the crater filled with debris and the farmers got back to work until four years ago when a team of British, looking for their own pilots discovered parts from the Lieutenant’s aircraft and notified Americans. After years of fruitless searching, they caught a break;

Department of Defense officials searching the archives found aerial images of the area taken two days after the crash. Konsitzke took the image and overlaid it with a current aerial photo — and they found the exact location.

“It really was dumb luck,” says Leslie Eisenberg, a Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologist who also worked on the project.

Cooche’s memory had been tricked because the road moved years ago to make way for the train, which was only 100 yards from the crash site.

The searchers included volunteers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, burning up their personal vacation time, along with students from the University of Wisconsin and University of Hawaii and Defense Department personnel. They ended up going twice to the site, in 2016 and 2017, digging a 10- to 15-foot deep hole in the hard clay.

They found six machine guns. They found the plane’s engine. And they found some bones of Frank Fazekas Sr., and his dog tags.

The son who never met his father will welcome him home Wednesday;

Frank Fazekas Jr. was just six months old at the time, living with his mother in a tight-knit Hungarian community in Trenton, New Jersey.

Fazekas Jr. would pore over letters written between his mother and father, focusing on his father’s signature. “I would practice signing my name like he did,” he says.

Because his dad flew, he loved airplanes. He got a degree in aeronautical engineering and became an Air Force pilot, serving in the Vietnam War. He later worked with Department of Defense contractors and now, at 74, he’s in his third career as a tour business owner in New Hartford, New York.

“For a lot of years I felt like I was trying to complete something for him … the whole aviation thing, the flying, it was all cut short, I mean so abruptly at age 22.”

Frank, Senior will join his wife Theresa in their shared casket at Arlington.

Category: We Remember