Aborigines buried missing Japanese pilot

A Japanese fighter ace thought to have crashed in the Timor Sea after his plane was hit during a World War II raid was actually buried by an Aboriginal tribe who found his body hanging from a parachute stuck in a tree.

Japanese officials were this week led to a mangrove swamp near the coastal town of Broome in Western Australia, where archaeologists believe Osamu Kudo was buried after his Zero fighter was shot down in March 1942.

Silvano Jung, an archaeologist who specialises in the discovery of missing wartime aircraft, said he was confident the site was the grave of the missing pilot.

Nine Japanese raiders, at first mistaken for Australian air force planes, swooped on Broome, destroying a fleet of moored flying boats carrying Dutch nationals.

At least 80 people died, many of them taken by sharks that roamed Roebuck Bay. The raiders also destroyed 20 Allied aircraft at Broome airport.

The Zeros, which had flown east from Japanese-occupied Timor, all escaped except for the aircraft flown by Kudo. A Dutch pilot on the ground grabbed a machinegun and fired – the aircraft was last seen trailing smoke and going down, never arriving back in Timor.

The Zero disappeared into the history books until recently when an elder of Broome’s Yawuru Aboriginal people, assisting Jung on a separate research project, asked if he wanted to view a Japanese pilot’s grave. The elder, Jimmy Edgar, told Jung the tribe had found and buried the pilot.

‘‘The parachute could be seen for years later and that’s what Jimmy remembered, seeing the parachute still in the tree in the 1950s,’’ Jung said.

‘‘I asked him how come the site wasn’t reported earlier and he said no-one had asked the Yawuru people.’’