Then Silence

From the airways of Europe, the U.S. and the cold Atlantic last week came a monotonous toll of the dead and the lost:

P:Bound from the Azores to Bermuda, a four-engined British South American Airways transport radioed an 11 p.m. "All's well." Then silence. At week's end, despite the greatest peacetime air search of the Atlantic, no vestige of the plane had been found. Aboard were a crew of six and 21 passengers, including Australian-born, battle-greyed Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, 52, who commanded the Allied tactical air forces at the invasion of Normandy.

P:Bound from Oakland, Calif., to El Centro, a chartered Immigration Service plane exploded over Los Gatos canyon, killed 28 Mexican deportees, a crew of three, a guard.

P:Bound from Istres, France to Udine, Italy, an American C-47 splintered against the 6,600-ft. peak of Cheval Blanc Mountain, killed the crew of four, three American wives and five children on the last leg of a journey to join husbands and fathers stationed in Trieste.

P:A searching B-17 plane spotted the crashed C-47, circled low. Then a wingtip brushed the mountain and the search plane crashed, too. Only survivor of a ten-man crew, Sergeant Angelo LaSalle of Des Moines, Iowa, was thrown clear, stumbled away from the burning fragments, fell unconscious in the snow. There he was found by Horst Kupski, a onetime Luftwaffe pilot working for an upland French farmer. Kupski wrapped LaSalle in a blanket, removed his own shoes, coat and hat to clothe the American, got him down the mountainside.

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