Page 4 - Torrence Saxe News Today

Sixteen Alaska Native men are being honored for rescuing the crew of a U.S. Navy plane shot down over the Bering Strait by Soviet fighter jets nearly 70 years ago. The plane made a controlled crash landing on Alaska's St. Lawrence Island. The Alaska Natives saw the crash and eventually got all 11 men back to the village of Gambell alive, where they were treated for their wounds before being returned to Anchorage. The Siberian Yupik Eskimo rescuers received letters, but family members over t...

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Sixteen Alaska Native men are being honored for rescuing the crew of a U.S. Navy plane shot down over the Bering Strait by Soviet fighter jets nearly 70 years ago.

Sixteen Alaska National Guard members have finally been honored for helping rescue 11 crewmembers of a Navy plane that was shot down in 1955 by Soviet jet fighters and crash-landed about 8 miles from Gambell, on St. Lawrence Island. Fifteen medals were presented posthumously.

Sixteen Alaska Native men were honored for rescuing the crew of a U.S. Navy plane shot down by Soviet fighter jets nearly 70 years ago.

GAMBELL, Alaska (AP) — Bruce Boolowon, then a lean 20-year-old, and a group of friends were hunting for murre eggs in a walrus skin boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait when they saw a crippled airplane flying low. “Something was wrong,” Boolowon, now 87, recalled of that day in 1955. “They […]

Bruce Boolowon, then a lean 20-year-old, and a group of friends were hunting for murre eggs in a walrus skin boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait when they saw a crippled airplane flying low.

“I’m glad we did our duty as a guardsman.”

In 1955, a U.S. Navy P2V-5 Neptune maritime patrol aircraft had been attacked at about 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) by two Soviet MiG-15 fighters roaring out of nearby Siberia.

Bruce Boolowon, then a lean 20-year-old, and a group of friends were hunting for murre eggs in a walrus skin boat on a remote Alaska island in the Bering Strait when they saw a crippled airplane flying low.