John “Skip” Bailey

15.1
Keith Manson Rundle

F/Lt. Keith Manson Rundle [46]

Keen on sports and ruggedly handsome, Rundle well met the popular image of an adventurer, but in reality was seriously restricted by chronic asthma. “Unfit for flying, he nevertheless joined the Royal Australian Air Force in July 1940 for administrative duties and was soon working with RAAF Casualty, a unit that obtained details of deceased or missing airmen, notified next of kin, managed personal effects, and deferred pay, pensions and the like.”

Commissioned as a pilot officer in 1942, he served most of World War II in northern Australian bases but was working in Casualty again when the war ended. A huge task lay ahead as some thousand deceased and missing airmen were unaccounted for in the South-West Pacific Area. In November 1945 Rundle was put in charge of the RAAF Searcher Party in New Guinea. Rundle was tenacious in his task to discover the whereabouts of missing aircrews in the Pacific theatre. Setting up a mobile base in the converted trawler Merrygum, he began work at Rabaul. There he discovered a mass grave of thirty Australians and Americans and arranged proper burials. It was the first of many gruesome finds and helped to explain why so few downed airmen had survived and was contrary to what the Japanese had said about many prisoners being on ships that were sunk on their way to Japan. [47]

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[46] Pacific Wrecks
[47] Australian Dictionary of Biography