KRASNOYARSK, April 3 (RIA Novosti) Andrei Marmyshev - Fragments of a US bomber that crashed near the Russian city Krasnoyarsk in southern Siberia during World War II have been delivered to San Francisco, where they will form part of a memorial commemorating pilots who lost their lives in the war, a historian in Krasnoyarsk told RIA Novosti.
"San Francisco is planning to set up a memorial to pilots who died during the Second World War. The fragments of the Boston bomber will also be used," said Lt. Col. Vyacheslav Filippov, an aviation officer and historian.
"For example, they are going to use the plaque from the plane's cockpit that carries its serial number and production date," Filippov said.
The A-20B Boston bomber was sent to the Soviet Union by the US for their common fight against Nazi Germany under an allied wartime military equipment program, called Lend-Lease. The plane arrived via a secret route across the northwestern Pacific known as the Alaska-Siberia air road.
The plane crashed in May, 1943 just outside Krasnoyarsk. Its entire crew - Capt. Pyotr Stepanov, navigator Capt. Vasily Kravets, gunner and radio operator Sgt. Maj. Viktor Panov and technician Lt. Garif Shaikhutdinov - died in the crash.
Most of the wreckage was removed from the site in the Soviet period, but the operation to retrieve the remains of the crew had been ongoing for decades, before being eventually discovered and buried at a Krasnoyarsk cemetery several years ago.
American war planes were shipped along a route that stretched from Alaska across Kamchatka and Yakutsk in Russia's Far East all the way to Krasnoyarsk as part of the US program to supply allies with transport and attack aircraft.
A total of 7,000 planes passed through Krasnoyarsk on their way to the Eastern Front from October 1942 to October 1945. At least 119 Russian aviators died in 59 crashes during the transit flights.
