Looking for the graves of St. Luke's

Three AVG pilots were killed in flying accidents while the Tigers trained at Toungoo: John Armstrong on September 8, Maax Hammer on September 22, and Peter Atkinston on October 25, 1941. All three were buried at St. Luke's Church of England graveyard on the southeast side of Toungoo, between the river and the moat that enclosed the native town. I searched for the graves when I visited Toungoo in December 1986, without success. (I was similarly unsuccessfuly in locating the graves near Mingaladon airport outside Rangoon, because the Japanese had leveled the grounds while expanding their facilities during the war; and again at Wujiaba airport near Kunming, because the Chinese authorities wouldn't let me search around what was regarded as a military base.)

More recently, the family of John Armstrong has mounted a more serious search to find and repatriate his remains. Through the kindness of people inside Burma (which the military junta prefers to call Myanmar) they learned that the authorities had made their quest infinitely more difficult: St. Luke's no longer exists, perhaps because it was destroyed during the war, and the graveyard has been turned into a housing development in the Southeast Asian fashion. In the process, the headstones were simply bulldozed to one side, as shown above. The remains evidently were moved to an entirely different site, "in a swamp and behind a dump," as Atkinson's neice explained in an email to me. Here's how the St. Luke's graveyard looks now:

The photographer's name can't be mentioned, for reasons obvious to anyone who's been following the antics of the Burmese junta with regard to cyclone aid from abroad. Interestingly, the photographer reported that there's still an Anglican church in Toungoo, built since the war, called St. John's. Inside the church there's a wonderful and evocative set of British military shields, probably dating back to the second Burma campaign. They include this Royal Air Force shield (left), with the RAF motto Per ardua ad astra ("Through adversity to the stars"). They appear to be wood, painted by hand. One wonders if some of them were once housed at the old St. Luke's church.

Matt Poole, whom I met long ago when he was trying to retrace the fate of a USAAF pilot lost over Burma, has put his redoubtable talents to work, hoping to pinpoint the exact location of St. Luke's. Click here for a screenshot of his latest best guess. And see below for what the St. Luke's graveyard looked like in the fall of 1941: