Memories resurface at famous pilot’s crash site

The recovery of human remains this week from the Canadian crash site of a Second World War U.S. seaplane has turned a spotlight on the remarkable career of the man who piloted the doomed aircraft — the so-called “Million-Miler” airman Col. Jack Zimmerman, an American aviator who was so well known at the time that a biography detailing his exploits was published just months before the November 1942 tragedy off the Quebec coast.

Zimmerman, 37, was one of five U.S. servicemen who died when the amphibious PBY Catalina went down in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on a mission from Maine to what was then a new Allied airfield in the Quebec village of Longue-Pointe-de-mingan.

Local residents were watching as the so-called “flying boat” attempted a takeoff on Nov. 2, 1942 but foundered in rough waters after hitting a wave. Fishing boats were dispatched to the scene and four American airmen were rescued before the Catalina sank to the sea floor with Zimmerman and four other crew members trapped inside.

The aircraft remained there until it was found by Parks Canada archeologists on a 2009 underwater survey near Mingan, just north of Anticosti Island. And this week, the U.S. military’s Hawaii-based Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command reported the discovery of unspecified body parts and a host of objects still intact after 70 years under water.

Zimmerman had been the subject of a laudatory biography published in early 1942 by U.S. author John R. Tunis. in recognition of the recordsetting distances flown by the Ohio-born aviator.

Zimmerman, in fact, was credited with logging at least two million miles after he began flying in the 1920s. Among his achievements were flying secret FBI missions, including several with director J. Edgar Hoover on-board.