Treasured letter of love led pilot's daughter to his final resting place

After more than 60 years divers find the wreckage of a bomber in an Italian lake

ANNE STORM was only a year old when the birthday letter from her father arrived.Written on the eve of a mission in wartime Italy, it was the last that she would ever hear from her flight officer father.

In the years to come she read it over and over, fuelling a life-long quest to trace the bomber in which he and seven comrades died. This week, after more than 60 years, that quest seems close to fulfilment with the discovery of an aircraft deep in an Italian lake.

Mrs Storm's father, Flying Officer Bob Millar, went missing while flying in a Liberator bomber over Nazi-occupied northern Italy on October 12, 1944, to drop supplies to partisans. Six aircraft crashed in poor weather but the wreckage of five was located after the war.

Inspired to find the bomber by the tender lines written by her father, four years ago Mrs Storm visited the mountain villages where the partisans had been operating but could not find any leads.

She visited Neirone and Favale di Malvaro, villages in the mountains near Genoa, where the partisans had operated. "I spoke to the old men in the village squares, but they knew nothing about the fate of the Liberator - and in any case my Italian was not fluent enough," she said.

She turned to Harry Shindler, the representative in Italy of the Star Association, an organisation for Second World War veterans who fought in the Italian campaigns. He studied the flight plan and concluded that the bomber must have disappeared in a lake.

He pinpointed Lake Bolsena on the border between Lazio and Umbria and contracted a group of amateur divers to search it, resulting this week in the discovery of a "very large plane" 100m down. Mrs Storm, 62, from Marlborough, Wiltshire, hopes that the aircraft is her father's lost Liberator. "If it is we will be able to lay him to rest at last," she said.

Mrs Storm, who was born in Australia but now has joint British citizenship, said that her long search had been sustained by constant re-readings of the letter sent by her father in 1944 to mark her first birthday.

The 28-year-old airman was serving with the South African Air Force at Celone, near Foggia in southern Italy, as part of a Commonwealth bomber crew made up of British, Australians and South Africans. Their mission was to drop supplies to partisans in Liguria in Northern Italy as the Allies advanced up the Italian peninsula. The bomber, piloted by Major Selwyn Sanderson Urry, was was one of 20 carrying out the high-risk mission on the night of October 12.

When Mr Shindler traced the route taken by the Liberators, he concluded that it had failed to drop its supplies. "It seems it did not crash in the mountains, and the Italians have no record of such a plane crashing into the sea," Mr Shindler said. He contacted Romagna Air Finders, a group of Italian enthusiasts who track down Second World War aircraft and tend the graves of airmen who died.

The Times