Vanished (21 page)

From his position in the top turret, Jose stared into the waist window of the 453, where Johnny Moore leaned on a .50 caliber gun, searching the sky for something to shoot. “I was right on top of him,” Jose said. “They were to my left, flying forward, and I could look right down in the plane. I saw the whole thing.”

As the five-plane squadron pulled over Palau, the sky went dark. Jose would later write in his journal that the shells came in “400-round bursts—heavy, intense, accurate.” Explosive shells ripped through the wings, floor, and cockpit of the five planes. “There was just a ton of it coming up at us,” Jose said. “There was nothing you could do.”

As Jose watched, the first blast struck the 453. It tore into an engine on the left wing and there was a flash of light as shards of metal flew into Jose’s plane. “That one just blew the hell out of stuff,” he said.

As the left wing of the 453 burst into flames, Art Schumacher reacted—pressing the bomb-release lever to jettison the munitions and reduce weight. In the cockpit, Arnett fought for control, feathering an engine on the right to compensate for damage to the left, and making a long, wide arc to the east.

“He was slipping right to keep the fire away from the fuselage,” Jose said. For a moment, it seemed to work, and the 453 eased over Toachel Mid as if it were coming in for a landing on southern Babeldaob. Then the left wing folded back. Then it snapped off.

Al Jose felt a weight in his gut.
Now it’s over
, he thought, watching the wing float down as the plane torqued out of balance and tumbled toward the water. A parachute popped out. Then another. Then the fuselage snapped in half, and there were two great splashes below. Al Jose gritted his teeth. The squadron stayed close. They passed through the worst of the anti-aircraft fire and made a wide loop. When they returned to the crash site, they descended to four thousand feet. The anti-aircraft artillery in the hills blasted fire in their direction. Some of Jose’s crewmen were already injured. One was bleeding from the gut. Another plane in the squadron was riddled with more than one hundred holes, and had lost its hydraulic system, navigator’s telescope, intercom, and left gas tank, while in the back, the waist gunner had flak from two seventy-five-millimeter projectiles lodged in his stomach. Still, the squadron stayed low over the wreckage. They circled for ninety minutes, looking for survivors.

“It was crazy,” Jose acknowledged. “They don’t even make movies like that.”

But the only thing they would see was a lone Japanese patrol boat speeding away from the wreckage toward the shore. There was no way to know for sure whether a captured airman was on board.

Back on Wakde that night, one man wrote in his journal, “Went to Palau today. One of the planes was hit and broke into flames. Two men jump out and Jap speed boat pick them up. Hope they get along okay.
Palau is hell
.”

BREAKTHROUGH

B
entProp was growing. After ten years on the islands, both the team and the mission were changing. Scannon had begun the search with a list of three B-24s. Now he knew of
at least four others
, plus a medley of smaller planes. He no longer traveled with the Lamberts and Bailey, but came with the skydivers each year—and each year, they drifted farther from the Arnett channel.

On their first day, they would stop at the Palau Historic Preservation Office, a low concrete building on Koror, where the national archaeologist, Rita Olsudong, would issue them a permit to search for wartime wrecks. Scannon had first reached out to Olsudong at Bill Belcher’s request. Having the permit gave BentProp the sheen of legitimacy, and once his papers were in order each year, Olsudong would pass along the coordinates of any newly discovered wrecks. With her endorsement, he
was also welcome at the highest levels of Palauan politics. From time to time, the president of Palau, Tommy Remengesau, would summon Scannon to the capitol for a personal update on the search.

At the same time, Scannon’s relationship with the military lab was deepening. Each year he delivered a typed report on his latest mission, including maps and photos and archival documents to explain what he’d found. With two wars brewing, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reports sometimes traveled far beyond the lab. For a man heading to Mazar-e Sharif or Kunduz, to Basra or Fallujah, the knowledge that someone, somewhere, would never let him disappear made the daily face of combat a whisper less grim. In 2002, the commandant of the US Marine Corps, Jim Jones, wrote Scannon a personal note:

“
I want to express my sincere gratitude
to the BentProp Project for your altruistic quest to locate the servicemen who fought in World War II and have been declared missing in action in the jungles and waters surrounding the Republic of Palau. For more than half a century, the fates of hundreds of these men have remained concealed beneath sand and silt, encrusted in coral, or shrouded by leaves and vines while loved ones have lived with the pain of not knowing. Through your tireless efforts, the families and friends of many of these brave airmen have finally achieved closure.”

By the fall of 2003, Belcher and the recovery lab were planning a large-scale return to the islands. They would arrive on a C-17 filled with equipment for a monthlong dig of three sites that Scannon had found. First they would excavate the mass grave site on Police Hill, then they’d move to the wreckage of a Corsair in a harbor near Koror, and finally, to the ruins of an Avenger scattered over a hilltop on Peleliu.

For Scannon, the prospect that the lab might finally bring home the lost men of Palau was a source of exhilaration and deep regret. After hundreds of hours on Toachel Mid, he had all but given up on the Arnett plane, and the decision to focus on smaller craft seemed a necessary step. But the B-24 would always hold a special place for Scannon. No other
plane came close to the time and energy he had spent looking for the Arnett Liberator, and no other airmen haunted his imagination like the Arnett crew. The sight of Tommy Doyle’s powerful frame shaking at the Long Ranger reunion as he described the painful rumor that his father had abandoned him would forever be a reminder to Scannon of why he came back to the islands. Now that he had the full support of the US military and the island government, his failure to locate Arnett seemed all the more glaring.

There was a photo of Jimmie Doyle and the crew taken two months before the crash. They were lined up before the
Babes in Arms
on Los Negros airfield. Many of the men in that picture were still a mystery to Scannon. He had never been contacted by the families of Yoh, Price, Stinson, Moore, or Coorssen, and he had promised the military that he wouldn’t contact them. Thirty years of MIA recovery had made the lab cautious. Johnie Webb and the staff knew how explosive a situation could become if a family’s hopes were raised and nothing was found. The lab never revealed details of an investigation until it was complete. For Scannon, it was a frustrating way to work. He would have liked to keep families informed, and to hear back from them. There were times when he found himself staring at the picture of Jimmie and his crew, searching each man’s face for some clue to who he was. There was Johnny Moore, like a young Elvis with a single lock of dark hair dangling over his eyes. There was Ted Goulding, his face grave, with an odd satchel attached to his hip. There was Earl Yoh, his skin as soft and pure as a young girl’s, his belt buckle as shiny as the day he got it. Scannon wanted to call their families and learn more about those men. He would have liked to draw on their hope to keep his own alive. Instead, he felt himself turning away from the photo, and losing faith that he would find the men.

At the same time, another BentProp member was beginning to fixate on a different kind of photo. Flip Colmer was a former Navy fighter pilot and an avid skydiver. He’d first met Scannon through the SkyDance school in 2001, and joined the missions to Palau every year since. Colmer
was an inexhaustible presence on the islands. Whether standing in mud up to his hips or snorkeling through a pounding rain, he seemed happiest when the conditions around him were worst, and he was content to subsist for weeks at a time on a diet of Spam and Oreo cookies.

Colmer’s experience as a fighter pilot got him thinking about mission photos. During his years in the Navy, it was common to send a second plane after a bomb run to shoot pictures of the damage. Those photos were known as bomb damage assessments, or BDAs, and they were often taken a day or two later. In fact, they were sometimes taken by another unit, and would not appear in the original mission report. To find them, a researcher would have to guess that they existed, and then sort through a second set of records. “
The bulb went off
,” Colmer recalled. “Even if there weren’t photos in the mission report, there could be photos in the BDAs.”

With just four months left before the 2004 mission, Colmer called the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. He couldn’t be sure that World War II pilots had done bomb damage assessments, or that they would have been called by that name, but he tried to explain to a researcher what he meant. “Do you have anything like that?” he asked.

“Sure,” the archivist said. “Come on down.” There was a warehouse full of aerial photographs in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. If Colmer put in a request for them at the front deck, the archival staff would retrieve as many canisters as he wanted to see. Colmer called Scannon right away with the news. By the time they hung up, they were ready to book the flight to Maryland.

Scannon had been to the archive in College Park many times, but he wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d missed something important. It was the largest archival building in the world, with two million cubic feet of records, and it was still relatively new. The facility had been completed in 1993, and many of the World War II documents in places like Maxwell Air Force Base were still being transferred in. Along the way, there were inevitable glitches in the system. For an obscure place like Palau, you
might find records filed under “Peleliu,” “Micronesia,” “Western Carolines,” or even “Philippines.”

The lobby of the archive was a soaring modernist space filled with light, and Scannon hurried toward the elevators for the photography floor. Colmer had flown in to join him, along with a man named Reid Joyce, who had first joined Scannon on the Arnett channel in 2000. A small, gentle figure with glasses, Joyce had recently retired as a psychologist after working with the military’s human-engineering labs, and he brought to BentProp an organizational sensibility that surpassed even Scannon’s. He was building an online database to digitize the team’s research files.

As the three men gathered in the archives, they sifted through a byzantine catalog of photos, ordering every canister that seemed to have a marginal relationship to Palau. By the end of the day, they had filled out dozens of orders for overnight delivery. They spent the night in a nearby hotel, and returned early in the morning to wait anxiously as the staff wheeled out a cart stacked with tall, black canisters marked with details like “Intelligence, Photographic Division.”

Scannon, Colmer, and Joyce slipped on cotton gloves. They each removed a canister and cracked open the lid. The stench of developing chemicals flooded into the room, and it dawned on Scannon that the film had not been viewed since the end of the war. He carefully removed a translucent sheet and rested it on a light box. It was a massive twelve-by-twelve negative with the shapes of islands and coral heads clearly visible against the water. In the foreground, there was a huge white silhouette of a bomb falling toward the ground. Scannon worked his way through the images in the canister, then a second canister, then a third, when suddenly Colmer called out, “Here’s the reel from September first!”

Scannon and Joyce spun around. They stared for a moment in silence. They had come to find bomb damage assessments taken after the mission, but these were photos taken the same day. All three men gathered around Colmer’s light box to examine the film.

There were only ten negatives in the series, all taken from plane number 101. It was the plane that had suffered the most damage that day, and it was a miracle to think that the photographer on board, with shells ricocheting through his plane and slicing into the stomach of a waist gunner just a few feet away, had the presence of mind to stand by the window taking photos of the mayhem below. There were no obvious signs of the Arnett plane in the pictures. They showed the southwestern coast of Babeldaob, a few coral heads offshore, and a pair of tiny white dots near the waterline.

“
What do you think these are
?” Scannon asked, pointing at the dots.

Colmer and Joyce shook their heads. There weren’t any buildings in the photo, so it wasn’t a bomb damage assessment. But the specks were too small to be the plane.

Then the realization hit Scannon. It
was
the plane. In the frantic moments over Koror, the cameraman must have taken a few extra seconds to get the shot. By the time he began shuttering images, Arnett was nearly down. Those tiny white dots were the wing and the fuselage, but they were thousands of feet below.

Scannon looked at the last two photos in the series. The spots were in different places, moving in a line across Babeldaob toward water. In fact, they were heading toward the place where he and Susan had seen the propeller on their first day of diving, ten years earlier, right after they left the Dixon wing. Scannon had been back to that propeller countless times. It was old and weathered, and he’d never been able to measure the blades precisely. Without the measurements, he couldn’t be sure what kind of plane it came from, but he’d always wondered if it was a B-24.

Suddenly Scannon remembered a Graves Registration Service report written in 1947. It described a B-24 crash in the same area. He had dismissed that possibility years earlier, when he learned that the airplane listed in that report had been found somewhere else. Now he realized that the GRS was right: there was a B-24 in that area, just not the one they thought. It was the 453.

The memories kept coming. He thought of an interview two years earlier with a Palauan elder named Ricky Speis, who said he’d seen a bomber go down in the same position. At the time, Scannon had gone directly to the site and spent a few days diving. But when he found nothing, he returned to the channel.

Staring at the new photos, Scannon’s heart leaped and sank. Two things were clear. After ten years of searching for Arnett, he had just come across the most promising clue yet. And for ten years, he had been searching in the wrong place.

—

T
HE JOURNEY TO
P
ALAU
was always tinged with magic for Scannon. As the trip drew closer, he began to dream of the warm tropical air, the fusty familiar aroma of the jungle, and he would find himself closing his eyes to imagine the moment he would step down from the plane onto the islands. But the 2004 mission would be unlike any other. For one thing, Scannon knew he was closer to Arnett than ever before. For another, he knew that BentProp wouldn’t be the only team searching the islands. The military lab was scheduled to begin a full-scale excavation of Police Hill that year: even as Scannon dove for Arnett, Belcher would be two miles away, digging for evidence of the mass grave.

For weeks, Scannon spent his nights preparing. He packed and repacked his bags, ordered and reordered equipment, and by the time he boarded a flight from San Francisco International, with an apple pie from Susan tucked into his carry-on bag, his check-in luggage was stuffed with 120 pounds of photographic equipment, computer drives, and an endless array of scuba gear, and he’d mailed himself two large boxes with a printer, history books, research files, an old machete, and videotapes of earlier missions.

Settling into his seat on the flight, Scannon tried to calm his mind. He ordered his usual tomato juice without ice and dropped a CD by the Hawaiian band HAPA into his portable player. Then he opened his yellow
waterproof notepad and, for the first time in years, let his thoughts and hopes pour out.