Honouring the father she never knew

By MALUM NALU
AUSTRALIAN woman Elizabeth Buchanan was not yet born when her pilot father, Warren Cowan, was killed in a fight with the Japanese over Buna in Northern in 1942.
Yesterday, she made an emotional Anzac Day visit to the grave of the father she never met at the Bomana War Cemetery, in Port Moresby, with her husband, Chris Buchanan.
“I wasn’t even born. I was only in my mum’s tummy at that time,” she said.
Buchanan said she grew up without a father and only heard stories about him from family members.
“I only heard his stories from people who had known him,” she said.
Warren Frank Cowan was an Australian bomber pilot.
Her wife Betty was expecting their second child (Elizabeth).
They already had 15-month-old son named Blair.
When he failed to return from his mission of July 22, 1942, he was written off as a statistic.
No one knew what had happened to him.
The Australians never knew the magnitude of his final combat back then, but one enemy pilot did.
At yesterday’s dawn service at Bomana, outside Port Moresby, a special tribute was also paid to Cowan, whose feat that day won the respect of one of the Japanese pilots who attacked him.
Cowan, then 31, from Angaston, South Australia, was killed in action along with his crew.
They were navigator Pilot Officer David Taylor, 33, from Hobart,
Tasmania, and gunners sergeants Russell Polack, 24, of Summer Hill, New South Wales, and Laurie Sheard, 20, of Nuriootpa, South Australia.
They were the crew of a Lockheed Hudson on a solo armed reconnaissance mission.
What distinguished this action from many like it in the early stages of Australia’s war in the south-west Pacific, is the accurate account of what happened which came from the other side.
In 1997, 55 years after the incident, one of the Japanese pilots, Saburo Sakai, involved in the destruction of the aircraft, lobbied the Australian government to present Cowan with a posthumous award for his actions that day.
Chris Buchanan, husband of Elizabeth, said Sakai also wrote to Cowan’s widow and she found it very hard to open his letter.
Sakai also wrote to the Australian Minister for Veterans Affairs, Danna Vale, requesting that Cowan’s bravery be recognised.
The wreck of the Hudson and the remains of the crew were discovered in 1943 by a United States Army Air Forces search team.
The Hudson wreck was near the village of Popoga.
Australians recovered the remains of the crew in early 1945, which were subsequently interred in the Lae War Cemetery. They are now in the Port Moresby Bomana War Cemetery.