ELLISON, JOHN COOLEY "BUZZ"
Name: John "Buzz" Cooley Ellison Rank/Branch: O4/US Navy Unit: Attack Squadron 85, USS Kitty Hawk (CVA-63) Date of Birth: 16 December 1928 Home City of Record: Layton UT Date of Loss: 24 March 1967 Country of Loss: North Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 212500N 1065700E (YJ020693) Status (in 1973): Missing In Action Category: 4 Acft/Vehicle/Ground: A6A Refno: 0629 Other Personnel In Incident: James E. Plowman (missing)
Source: Compiled by Homecoming II Project 01 April 1991 from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews. Updated by the P.O.W. NETWORK 2004.
REMARKS:
SYNOPSIS: LtCdr. John Ellison was the pilot of an A6A Intruder jet aircraft that launched from the USS Kitty Hawk on March 24, 1967 on a combat mission over North Vietnam. Ellison's Bombardier/Navigator that day was Ltjg. James Plowman. The two were assigned to a strike force suppression mission against Bac Giang Thermal Power Plant in North Vietnam. They were to suppress surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites. The target was defended by SAM sites, light, medium and heavy anti-aircraft batteries, automatic weapons and small arms. After the "bombs away" call, the airborne Combat Information Officer tracked their aircraft about 11 miles north of the planed track. Radar indications disappeared in the vicinity of Ha Bac Province, North Vietnam. Although Ellison had radio contact with rescuers, he and Plowman were not rescued. Ha Bac Province is in extreme northern Vietnam near the border of China.
The families of Ellison and Plowman wonder what happened to their men that day. There is no indication that they died when their plane disappeared, and unofficial reports that they have been unable to verify suggest that one or both may have been captured. A photo of a POW in the front of a march conducted in China was identified by Navy officer and returned POW Robert Flynn who was released by the Chinese in 1973 as being James E. Plowman. Flynn also saw a photo of Ellison while held in China.
Plowman's wife identified him from a North Vietnamese photo just prior to December 1970, and his parents identified him from a 1967 North Vietnamese photo.
After Seaman Douglas Hegdahl was released from Hanoi in 1969, he told family members of Buzz Ellison that he had seen Buzz.
Ellison and Plowman were maintained throughout the war as Missing In Action. Even though there seems to be some doubt that the two died and that they may have been prisoners after all, their status was never changed, and by 1980, they had been declared administratively dead.
Although evidence existed that China held prisoners from the Korean conflict and the Vietnam war, the U.S. rushed towards friendly relations with that country, ignoring their best men. Today, there is evidence that Vietnam is holding hundreds of prisoners from the war in Vietnam, yet the U.S. is again signing the death warrants of her best men in the rush for normalization of relations.
======================== 05/28/2004 http://www.sltrib.com/2004/May/05282004/utah/utah.asp
Search for crew bears new clues
By Dawn House The Salt Lake Tribune
One family may have learned the fate of a bombardier whose plane crashed deep inside enemy territory in North Vietnam nearly four decades ago. A Utah family is still awaiting word on the pilot.
Capt. John C. Ellison, Layton, and Lt. James Plowman, Pebble Beach, Calif., were last heard from on March 24, 1967. That was the day their A-6A Intruder disappeared from radar as the low-level attack jet headed toward the Gulf of Tonkin near the Vietnam-China border.
The aircraft's last known position was over a densely populated area so far behind enemy lines that a rescue mission was impossible. The North Vietnamese never acknowledged capturing either man.
During the first decade of their disappearance, returning American POWs brought back word of their whereabouts, but the Navy discounted the reports, said the pilot's brother, Ted Ellison of Fruit Heights. Although the wreckage was finally found in 1996, it has taken years for the military to sift through the evidence.
The U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command recently released a report of the site excavation. Only a tiny bone fragment from Plowman was positively identified. Nothing from Ellison.
"We still only know what we were told 38 years ago," said Ted Ellison, an officer with the Davis County Sheriff's Department. "We only know for sure that his plane went down."
John Ellison, who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1952, deployed twice to Southeast Asia with the Attack Squadron 85 aboard the USS Kitty Hawk.
His second tour was voluntary. At the time that his plane went down, no other pilot had logged more time with an Intruder than had the 38-year-old Ellison.
One search came up empty. But In 1995, researchers at the Vietnamese National Library in Hanoi found a 1967 article of The People that documented the downing of a U.S. aircraft in the Ha Bac Province the same day that Ellison's aircraft went missing. It was the only U.S. aircraft lost in North Vietnam on that date, according to the report.
A second search team was dispatched in 1996 to the province, where two villagers remembered witnessing a crash and seeing fragmented human remains at the site. Although the site had been severely damaged by heavy rains and villagers scavenging for metal, the team recovered pieces of a plane similar to an Intruder and four bone fragments.
DNA testing linked the tiny fragments to Plowman, who was 23 at the time of the crash.
Researchers concluded that "at least one crewman was on board at the time of impact, and that the crash was non-survivable," according to the report dated in Oct., 31, 2003, and released to the families last week.
Families of the crewman will now have time to comment on the report's findings.
For his part, Ted Ellison said that without DNA evidence, "We don't believe my brother was in the aircraft at the time of the crash. There are many other possibilities of what could have happened."
John Ellison was survived by his wife, who did not remarry, and four children who live on the East Coast. The children's ages ranged from 14 years to 6 months when their father disappeared. "This week "This has been an emotional roller coaster for us," said John Ellison's youngest child, Andrew Ellison of Lynchburg, Va. "I can't describe the feeling of never knowing my father, of never knowing what happened to him. Few people can understand all the sacrifices, all the pain that families like mine have gone through."
Vietnam was American's longest running and arguably, its most divisive war. The number of GIs lost in the 1957-75 conflict stands at 59,229 -- with the latest name etched only two years ago on the polished face of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
More than 88,000 Americans are missing in action from all the nation's conflicts, according to the Pentagon. Of these, 1,859 are from the Vietnam War.