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Montanari , Francesco Antonio (F A)

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Photo of Montanari
Identity
Person No.
31978
Old ROH no.
2134
Service No.
P1/22053
Last Name
Montanari 1
First Name
Francesco Antonio
Initials
F A
Date of Birth
Unknown
Est. Birth Year
1919 (±1 yr) 583
Age at Death
32
Death Record
Date of Death
12 September 1951 155
Cause code
KIA 14,811
Killed in action
Cause of Death
Killed in action 14,686
Killed in action, in North American F-51 Mustang #351. Lt F.A. Montanari was leader of a flight of four Mustangs conducting an armed reconnaissance from Inchon to Majon-ni. While flying above cloud, he informed his flight that he was going below to have a closer look at a road. While flying down the side of a hill at 2000 feet, his aircraft was hit by flak, and immediately began streaming glycol coolant as he climbed again to 3000 feet. He flicked into a slight spin, recovered briefly and attempted to crash-land in a shallow riverbed, but his aircraft disintegrated on impact
Military Service
Branch
Air Force
Rank
Lieutenant
Regiment
2 Squadron 109
Corps
South African Air Force 3,524
Unit
Unknown
Defence Force
UDF 24,809
Union Defence Force
Location
Country
South Africa 23,879
Locality
Unknown
Cemetery
UNITED NATIONS PUSAN MEMORIAL 26
Grave Reference
Panel 13 23
Memorial
Approach walkways to the Wall of Remembrance, UNMCK, Busan. Photo: Bubbahotepblues, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wall_of_Remembrance,_UN_Memorial_Cemetery,_Busan,_South_Korea.jpg)
Names on Panel 13
Memorial
United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Korea (UNMCK)
Location
Tanggok, Nam District, Busan, South Korea
Address
woonam-ro 93beon-gil 93, Nam-gu, Busan, South Korea
Coordinates
35.12845, 129.09623 · OpenStreetMap
Panel
Panel 13
On the panel
Panel 13
Unit History
Part of
Rhodesian Air Force - Squadrons
Notes

ref. 85 years of SAAF

Research notes

Locality was wrongly set to "Gauteng" -- corrected 28 Aug 2026 (second pass, this time verified against Cemetery rather than AddInfo text, after the first AddInfo-based pass was found to be unreliable and reverted). This person's own Cemetery is unambiguously outside South Africa; several other people at the same cemetery already correctly show a blank Locality. Cleared rather than guessed at a specific region.
5 Sep 2026: Unit "2 Squadron" (a squadron, SAAF's regiment-equivalent) promoted to Regiment, per John's decision. Corps (South African Air Force) unchanged.
25 Sep 2026, Unit2 service-branch sweep: the stored Secondary Unit "Army" was CLEARED. It was not a sub-unit, it was a service-branch word, and it CONTRADICTED this record's own Branch, "Air Force". Across the roll 787 records carried such a contradiction; judged against Corps and Regiment -- independent of both columns -- the evidence backed Branch 744 times and Unit2 not once. Branch is therefore kept and the contradicting word removed. Nothing is guessed: this man's branch of service is already recorded, and his sub-unit, if any, is simply not known.

Citations
Unknown
External References
Stories 1
on 19 June 2001 · via source
Lt F.A. Montanari was leader of a flight of four Mustangs conducting an armed reconnaissance from Inchon to Majon-ni. While flying above cloud, he informed his flight that he was going below to have a closer look at a road. While flying down the side of a hill at 2000 feet, his aircraft was hit by flak, and immediately began streaming glycol coolant as he climbed again to 3000 feet. He flicked into a slight spin, recovered briefly and attempted to crash-land in a shallow riverbed, but his aircraft disintigrated on impact.
Dedications

No dedications have been added yet.