Vanished (5 page)

As Scannon devoured histories of the Pacific, he began to realize that
the lost wing could only belong to one kind of plane. Most of the American aircraft over Palau had been small, tactical ships, like the Avengers flown by naval aviators and the Corsairs used by Marines. But those planes had a total wingspan of just forty to fifty-five feet, with a single engine mounted on their nose. The wing in the water had come from a plane twice as broad, with four times as many engines. As far as Scannon could tell, that left only one possibility: the B-24 Liberator. The Army Air Forces had flown Liberators over Palau at several points in the war, but the most notable period was in the late summer of 1944, just before the Peleliu invasion.

Not that Scannon could find a detailed history of those missions. The books in his collection that mentioned the Army Air Forces didn’t mention Palau, and most of the books on Palau didn’t mention the Army Air Forces. Even Dan Bailey’s book, which he now understood was by far the most thorough account of the campaign, with exhaustive detail on hundreds of Navy and Marine aircraft, included only a glancing reference to the B-24 missions that laid waste to the archipelago that summer, dropping more than a million pounds of ordnance and destroying “
the majority of above-ground buildings
and installations.”

Fortunately, Bailey himself was a font of information beyond the book. When Scannon asked what else he might know about the B-24 missions, Bailey passed along the phone numbers for two B-24 veterans’ groups that served in the campaign. Then he told Scannon about a photograph in his collection. It was taken by a military photographer on a flight over Palau, and it showed a Liberator plummeting toward the islands in flames. Bailey promised to send Scannon a print by mail.

When the photo arrived, Scannon stared in disbelief. It wasn’t just a photo of a B-24 crashing on the islands; it was a B-24 falling into the very same bay where he and Susan had seen the wing. Not only that, but the plane in the photo was in the process of losing a wing. There was only one problem: it was the wrong wing. The one the Scannons had seen on the islands was a starboard, or right-side, wing. The one breaking off in
the photo was a left wing. Everything else in the pictures was oriented correctly, so he knew the negative wasn’t reversed. But unless the plane had lost both wings within moments of the photo, he was looking at a second plane going down in the same spot. Was that possible?

In the morning, Scannon shut the door to his office at Xoma and began calling the reunion groups to track down B-24 veterans; at night, he disappeared into his home office to pore over old mission reports that oozed from his fax, scouring each document for any reference to a missing plane, while Susan passed down the hallway, rolling her eyes at him.

“
All of a sudden, he’s calling all these old guys
and just charging into it,” she said. “He just kept going and
going
.”

“I was possessed,” Scannon admitted. “I had no idea where it was heading, but the one thing I promised myself was that I was going to let it take me where it took me.”

Everything Scannon could find out
about the B-24s suggested that three, not two, had crashed near the southern bay. He could only assume that all three had been trying to bomb the same target, and had been shot down by the same well-concealed anti-aircraft guns in the hills. Of those three, it was easy to guess which one he and Susan had seen. It was the only one that had lost its right wing. The crash had been on August 28, 1944, two weeks before the Peleliu invasion. The pilot was a man named William Dixon. He’d gone down with a crew of ten.

The other two B-24s had each lost their left wing. One went down three days after Dixon. It was flown by a pilot named Jack Arnett. Then eight months later, a third Liberator went down with a pilot named Glen Custer at the helm. One of those two had to be the plane in Bailey’s picture, but there was no way to figure out which. The image showed no serial number or identifying marks. Scannon asked surviving airmen, but none of them knew, either. When a plane went down in enemy territory, they said, that was all you knew.

Scannon wasn’t satisfied. Three months after his return from the islands, he had dozens of wartime documents, but the collection was spotty
at best. There were random pages from mission documents; fragments of missing aircrew reports; and portions of the individual aircraft records that listed a plane’s equipment—but nearly all of the documents were missing pages, and there was no way of knowing how many other documents he didn’t have. Most of the records from the Army Air Forces in the Pacific seemed to be housed at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. That was two thousand miles away, and there was no guarantee that anything inside would point toward the missing planes.

Still, Scannon went. On December 9, 1993, he boarded a flight to Alabama with two changes of clothing and an artist’s sketchbook filled with huge white pages and bound in hard black covers. As he crossed the country at thirty thousand feet, he cracked open the book to the first page, writing in tiny letters at the top:

“
This is the opening of my log
on World War II. I am interested in the period of February 1944 to March 1945 in the Palau area for several reasons: It is an almost forgotten campaign. This is the 50th year after the air battles. The AAF involvement has been totally neglected. Other areas of the Pacific have been covered extensively: Guadalcanal, Truk, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. But I’m not interested in the scale of the operations. I am interested in how individual crews, albeit in a lesser campaign, came under intense fire, lost their lives, and have, by necessity, been forgotten. Some of the crews remain in water where they impacted 50 years ago. It is time someone acknowledges their efforts and perhaps lays to rest the outcome for their family members.”

At Maxwell, Scannon passed through a small entry station and made his way to a brick research building, where he signed his name into the guest book, listing his organization as “self.” He posed for a visitor photo in his pressed white shirt and blazer; then he asked a librarian to bring him every document related to B-24 missions over Palau. Waiting at a row of Formica tables, Scannon glanced around him. Air Force officers were paging through arcane battle summaries, and Russian authors and scholars examined stacks of loose paper, and for a moment, he suppressed
the instinct to bolt from the room. But as the boxes began to arrive on wheeled carts, he squared his shoulders and popped open the first one.

Hours ticked by in the small archive as Scannon ground through the tedium of research. His eyes glazed over, his ears began to buzz, he shook his head and stretched to stay clear. Each time he found a reference to a Liberator crash, he would race to the copy machine and add another page to the stack piling up beside him. The sun fell. The building closed. He crashed in a motel. Then he was back to pick up where he left off. Consciously, Scannon still had no idea what possessed him. He simply read, and copied, and collected documents on instinct alone. “It took two days,” he said later, “and nine million dimes.”

With each document, Scannon’s understanding of the war became more clear. In a folder on the Custer crash, he found the same picture Dan Bailey had sent him, along with three others, all showing the plane on its descent toward the southern bay. In a folder on the Dixon crash, he found two photos. One showed the plane’s right wing plummeting toward a small island, where he and Susan had seen it fifty years later. The other showed Dixon’s fuselage coming down in a trail of smoke that raced across Koror Island to the northern shore.

Finally, in a third folder, Scannon found a report on the Arnett crash. Flipping through the pages, he felt his heart rate jump. There weren’t any photos, but there was something even more specific: two witness statements that described parachutes floating through the air as the plane corkscrewed down. “Two crew members were seen to bail out and their chutes open before hitting the water,” one witness wrote. There was even a map of the archipelago tucked into the report, with the big island of Babeldaob (
bobble-dop
) at the top and Koror near the center, and in the narrow channel between them, two small Xs. Beside one of them, someone had typed, “
Plane down here
.” Beside the other, “Crew member down here.”

As Scannon packed up his files for the journey home, he felt sickened by the crash reports and everything they described: more than thirty men
trapped on those planes as they swerved through a burning sky toward the enemy below. But Scannon no longer had any doubt what he planned to do. No one seemed to know where the wreckage of those planes lay: not the commanders who sent out search teams for them, or the veterans who spent sixty years wondering what had become of their fallen friends. Now he would find the answers. He would bring the photos and map to the islands and find those missing planes. He would honor those airmen, and leave behind a record of where they lay.

He’d already found the Dixon wing, and he had a photo of its fuselage streaming toward the north shore of Koror. For Custer, he had four photos showing the plane’s trajectory toward the bay. And for Arnett, he had a map prepared just a few hours after the crash. It was too small to provide exact coordinates, but the X on the channel was unmistakable. A B-24 was a colossal machine, sixty-seven feet long and twice as wide. It weighed thirty-six thousand pounds empty. It was resting on the bottom of a narrow passage, in water less than one hundred feet deep.

How hard could it be to find?

AIRMEN

M
ost men facing a B-24 did not share Scannon’s enthusiasm. With its square walls and blocky nose, its skinny wings poking out, the Liberator looked less like an airplane than a freight car pierced by a missile.

Stepping on board the plane did not improve the impression. It was designed to deliver a heavy payload across long distances, but it rattled and shook the whole way, lurching and bobbing in the crosswinds, while its crew shivered in the back under a howling wind that pierced the seams. When a B-24 was hit by enemy artillery, it tended to catch fire, yet the corridor that ran down the center of the plane was so cramped that a pilot wearing a parachute could not squeeze through to escape. Especially for men accustomed to the sturdy B-17, the new bomber seemed like a cross between an insult and a joke. Some men called it “the Pregnant Cow.”
Others, “the Flying Coffin.” One navigator on Guadalcanal drew a cartoon of the Liberator with the caption “The Army’s New B-24—
Will the B-24 Ever Replace the Airplane
?”

By the onset of the war, in 1941, the B-24 had been in production for two years, but most American commanders didn’t want it. Nearly all the early models had been shipped to the French and British, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was only
one B-24
on the adjoining airfield, which had reached the base just two days earlier on a secret photographic mission and was promptly blasted to pieces in the Japanese attack.

Even as the United States advanced into Europe, many American commanders remained skeptical of the Liberator. None were more vocal in their objection than General Jimmy Doolittle, who commanded the Twelfth Air Force in North Africa, then the Fifteenth in the Mediterranean, before taking the helm of the legendary Eighth in England. In a letter to the Air Forces’ chief of staff, Doolittle made his critique of the new plane clear. “Upon being put into operations in the European Theater,” he wrote, “it was found that
the armament and armor of the B-24 were inadequate
, and in order to operate without prohibitive losses it was necessary to make emergency modifications immediately.” Doolittle beefed up the Liberator’s plating and installed additional guns, but this “substantially increased the weight, reduced the aerodynamic characteristics and, although increasing the firepower, eventually unacceptably reduced the overall utility of the aircraft.” For those units where Doolittle was required to maintain a few Liberators, like the Third Air Division, he tended to fly them as a separate wing near the back of the formation, where their wobbly flight path wouldn’t jeopardize his B-17s. Being in the rear, of course, only added to the plane’s disadvantage: by the time the Liberators reached a target, the enemy was alert—and the planes took an extra beating, which only confirmed their bad reputation.

On long flights, the B-24 fared better, but it would always fall in the shadow of the B-17, and a handful of spectacular failures would tarnish
its record forever. The worst of these was the raid on Nazi oil refineries in August 1943. Situated near Ploesti, Romania, the refineries were more than a thousand miles from a major Allied airbase, which was beyond the usual reach of the B-17 and gave the B-24 a chance to prove its utility. On the morning of August 1, a formation of 177 Liberators departed from Libya, sweeping over the Mediterranean and up the western coast of Greece, past Albania and Yugoslavia, to reach the Ploesti refineries. But as the 1,700 fliers approached their target, they ran into a heavier defense than anyone expected. As a hail of anti-aircraft fire lit up the sky, the B-24s shattered and dove through smoke and flak, airmen leaping to their deaths in the burning refineries below. With 660 fliers lost, it was the deadliest mission in Air Force history, known as Black Sunday. Yet the impact on the Nazi machine was negligible. According to an intelligence committee at the newly built Pentagon, the Ploesti raid accomplished “
no curtailment
of overall product output.”

The Pacific, of course, was a different battle, and sometimes seemed a different world. By the middle of 1942, the Japanese empire swept across the ocean in
one of the largest imperia
of human history. The expansion had begun in the 1860s, when the Meiji Restoration inspired a military surge in Japan, but the impulse to extend the empire seemed to accelerate with each decade. Between 1894 and 1910, Japan fought two wars with Russia, seized the Korean peninsula, and occupied Taiwan. Then, as World War I broke out in Europe, the Japanese captured German territories in the Pacific, and by the end of the war, the empire stretched from the edge of Siberia to the Caroline Islands and around the belly of Indonesia. And it was still growing.

To modern eyes, Japan’s push into mainland China in the 1930s may seem savage, and by modern standards it was. The Japanese atrocities in Manchuria and Nanking still resonate among the great horrors of modern history. Yet it was difficult for Allied countries at the time to object on principled grounds.
The American conquest of the West
, which dominated the preceding century, spilled no shortage of blood in the name of
political destiny, while the British Empire sprawled across a quarter of the globe.

What the Japanese saw in China was not just opportunity. They saw a resource they could scarcely live without. Japan’s population had been growing since the turn of the century, until the home islands were filled with
more than four hundred people per square mile
. At the same time, the country’s military economy was faltering, and the American stock market collapse had eviscerated the demand for high-dollar exports like silk. The combination of a growing population and a sinking economy was devastating. With labor strikes mounting in Tokyo, and food and land in short supply, Japanese political leaders gazed achingly across the sea toward the lush, fertile, and largely open Chinese mainland. As Iris Chang explained in
The Rape of Nanking
,
“
China was twentieth-century Japan’s manifest destiny
.”

But with the Japanese assault on China came a defensive mandate: the greatest threat to the imperial project was not Chinese resistance but the massive US naval fleet parked on the Pacific. To American leaders, the Japanese expansion represented both a military and an economic threat, and by the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the carnage may have been shocking, but the war itself was not. US commanders had been planning for it all year, flying spy missions over the Japanese islands, patrolling the region with submarines, and fortifying US bases in anticipation of trouble. All of which made the strike on Pearl Harbor seem sensible to Japan: if war with the United States was inevitable, then the best option was to strike first, strike hard, and keep striking, so the Americans stayed on their heels.

The Japanese advantage held into 1942, as imperial forces followed Pearl Harbor with a race across the Pacific: northeast to the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska near Alaska, southeast to Tarawa and the Solomon Islands, and southwest across a constellation of larger islands—Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Celebes, New Guinea, and the Philippines, which together comprised about twice as much land as Germany, France, and
Italy combined. Some of those captured islands were rich with natural resources, while others, like the diminutive atolls of Truk, Yap, and Palau, served mainly as a strategic buffer. Within six months of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese controlled a radius of three thousand miles in some directions, across a string of disparate islands. Any effort to restrain the empire would require American forces to beat a path through those islands and the garrisons stationed on them.

Suddenly, the clunky, clumsy B-24 was essential. Whatever its flaws, the Liberator was the only heavy bomber capable of crossing the vast distances between many Japanese islands. As US forces prepared to push across the Pacific, production of the B-24 surged like never before. Soon there were assembly plants in San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Tulsa—but none would symbolize the rise of the Liberator like the facility near Detroit known as Willow Run.

Managed by the Ford Motor Company, Willow Run was in some respects a greater engineering feat than the planes it produced. It was
the largest factory in the world
, spread across 3.5 million square feet, with 28,855 windows and 152,000 fluorescent lights. The assembly line traveled so far that, when it reached the edge of the county, designers built a fifty-foot-diameter lazy Susan to rotate the line and avoid paying extra taxes. As American forces drove into the Pacific in 1943, the pace of production at Willow Run doubled, then doubled again. In January 1943, the plant produced 31 B-24s. In February, it was 75. In March, 104 and rising.

To keep the plant humming, Ford hired workers in unprecedented number. When there weren’t enough local men, they recruited throughout the region, and when the region came up short, they offered moving incentives to men as far away as California and the Deep South, building dormitories to house them and a shopping mall to serve them. When there still weren’t enough men, the plant began hiring women, and at the same wage. Soon, there were twelve thousand salaried women on the line,
and the plant’s output continued surging: to 400 planes a month, then 500, then 650.

Pilots and crews would arrive at the factory, wait for a plane to come off the line, and then climb aboard and fly the eighteen-ton behemoth off to war. The most famous pilot in the world stopped by from time to time. Charles Lindbergh had, like Henry Ford, opposed American involvement in the European war, and he was regarded in many circles as a Nazi sympathizer. He had resigned his own rank in the Air Corps to protest US intervention, but in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he had been calling for an assault on the “
Asiatic intruder
.”

Unmatched as a pilot, Lindbergh toured American airfields and manufacturing plants to offer advice on everything from airplane design to combat tactics. “
The Willow Run factory is a stupendous thing
,” he wrote in his journal after a visit to the plant. “It is a sort of Grand Canyon of a mechanized world.” As for the lumbering B-24, Lindbergh was less enamored. “I am not overly impressed with the qualities of this bomber,” he wrote. “When I flew it for a few minutes in the air, I found the controls to be the stiffest and heaviest I have ever handled. Also, I think the gun installations are inadequate and the armor plate poorly installed. I would certainly hate to be in a bomber of this type if a few pursuit planes caught up with it.”

Yet as the war with Japan raged on, production of the B-24 would outpace not only the B-17, but all other planes. No other multi-engine aircraft had ever been manufactured in such numbers, nor has any since. Though assembly of the Liberator ended with the war, in just five years of high-intensity production, more than
18,000 models were built
. By comparison, fewer than 13,000 B-17s were manufactured, and fewer than 4,000 B-29s. In forty years of production, only about 1,500 Boeing 747s have been assembled.

A 1945 advertisement for Ford boasted of Willow Run: “Raw material went in one end, planes came out the other.” A newsreel crowed,
“
Relentless. Unceasing. On time
. As methodical as a great river fed by its tributaries.”

By the dawn of 1944, it was a river rushing toward the Pacific, and tiny islands like Palau.

—

W
ITH SO MANY BOMBERS
coming off the production line, the Army needed more men to fly them, and engineers in Nevada set about revamping a sleepy airfield in Tonopah into a massive B-24 training school. With $3 million in new runways, roads, barracks, and hangars, it would be the job of Tonopah to manufacture airmen as quickly as Willow Run produced planes.

They arrived in Tonopah from all across the country, having finished specialty programs like the navigation school at Selman Field, Louisiana, or the gunnery school in Laredo, Texas. But it was in Tonopah that a cluster of ten random men became a crew, bringing their skills together for the first time. Day after day, they roared across the Nevada desert in training. They learned to fly close, in a box formation called “javelin-down,” while spitting bullets from the guns in their nose, tail, waist, ball, and top turrets. After a day of flight, they would find their way back to base by triangulating from the nearby mountains, or by following a lone radio signal, or by charting the night stars.

For many of the men, those stars were the only familiar sight. Born in the 1920s, they had come of age in an endless depression, and many had never left home before or had any idea where they were going. Their uniforms would be their first suits; their barracks, their first homes with lights and plumbing.

At twenty-five, Jimmie Doyle was one of the oldest men in his crew. He came from the flatlands of West Texas, raised by a single dad who’d left his mom and four siblings in Arkansas years earlier, heading across the High Plains with only Jimmie at his side. Growing up in the heart of the Dust Bowl, Jimmie had gone to work with his father—helping to lay
stone walls and build fences on the Llano Estacado caprock. They spent one summer pouring a road base for Route 180 between the towns of Lamesa and Snyder, staking the shoulder with wooden rails and pouring in stone and crushed lime, then hitching up horses to drag a chain across the top. At night, they bedded down with the animals, cooking over a campfire with the other men.