Remembering the crew of PB4Y-2 Privateer

10 crewmen of PB4Y-2 Privateer 59645 were the first to be MIA during the Cold War. It is the official position of the United States Government that all or some of these men were captured and held in the Soviet Gulag.

According to a report at the Cold War Museum, on April 8, 1950, a version of the wartime Liberator bomber, the PB4Y-2 Privateer 59645, operated by a Navy detachment based in Morocco, became the first casualty of the missions to probe the boundaries of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The aircraft took off from Weisbaden in West Germany and headed north toward the Baltic Sea, with a goal of gathering intelligence on Soviet naval activity along the Latvian coast.