Re: B-24 Bomber Discovered in Pacific

Date: March 07, 2004

"Palau yields a history of heroes
Plane wreckage tells of bloody battle

By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In the 60 years since war ravaged the western Pacific nation of Palau, population 17,000, the placid string of islands has become a tourist destination for scuba divers lured by the turquoise ocean, coral reefs and white beaches.

But in the jungle hills and the shallow waters of the atoll, the ghosts of World War II remain.

In 1944, the Navy and Marine Corps battled an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan on these islands for two savage months in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Pacific Theater.

The Americans suffered 1,285 killed in action and more than 6,000 wounded; nearly all of a Japanese force of 11,000 died. At least 200 U.S. aircraft of all types went down here, and their wrecks litter the ocean floor near the main islands of Koror and Babelthuap.

The planes and their crews, many still listed as missing in action, are not forgotten.

Patrick Scannon, 56, a San Francisco physician and research scientist who grew up in Wilkinsburg, and Reid Joyce, 62, a retiree and longtime diver and pilot in Butler County, are among a group of adventurers making sure of that.
Their "BentProp Project," founded by Scannon to locate wrecks and pay tribute to missing airmen, recently returned from a six-week expedition to Palau, where team members found an Army Air Forces B-24 bomber shot down in September 1944 off Koror, the capital.

They'd been looking for it for eight years.

"You can hardly imagine how interesting it is and how caught up in it you get," Joyce said last week at his home off Route 8 in Valencia. "Looking for long-lost MIAs is pretty important stuff."

The remains of eight crew members are buried among the pieces of coral-encrusted fuselage in 70 feet of water. Three other airmen who parachuted out were executed by the Japanese a day before the Sept. 15 Marine invasion of Peleliu, one of Palau's southern islands and at the time the location of a Japanese airstrip.
Joyce, a bearded, soft-spoken former research psychologist who serves as BentProp's webmaster, is emotional about the mission.

"You'll forgive me if I'm a little red-eyed and introspective for a while here," he wrote on the Web site Jan. 26, the day of the discovery. "I've just come back from a long-lost grave site -- the final resting place of some young guys who made the ultimate sacrifice for me ... when I was 3 years old. I didn't appreciate it then, but I damn sure do now."

On Feb. 6, the president of the Republic of Palau, Tommy E. Remengesau Jr., dove on the wreck and declared it a memorial.

"This piece of history must be preserved for both the Palauan and the American people," he said. "It is through such dedication and persistence that these wreck sites are discovered. The people of Palau will protect and honor the sites with that same level of devotion."

In the annals of World War II, the Battle of Peleliu has been obscured by such famous Pacific engagements as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, but it's considered the most tragic because it might not have been necessary.
As U.S. forces advanced across the Pacific in 1944 to recapture the Philippines, Adm. Chester Nimitz thought it necessary to take the island to protect Gen. Douglas MacArthur's flank from air attacks launched from Peleliu, one of 243 Palau islands.

But Adm. William Halsey, whose fleet was pounding the Japanese throughout the western Pacific, recommended the invasion be canceled in favor of stepping up the timetable for the Philippine assault.

Nimitz stuck to his plan, thinking Peleliu would be useful as an air base and relatively easy to take. After bombardment, he and the Marine commanders estimated, they would secure the island in a few days.

But that assessment was based on faulty intelligence and deceptive aerial photos that indicated the island was flat. In fact, it is dominated by the Umurbrogol Mountains, a ridge a few hundred feet high.

When the Marines splashed ashore Sept. 15, they discovered that the Japanese were hiding in the mountains inside an interlocking series of concrete-reinforced caves protected by camouflaged steel doors. The Japanese would emerge from the caves, open fire on the Marines, then disappear again.

To make matters worse, Marines in some areas weren't able to dig into the hard coral to protect themselves.
The Marines eventually prevailed and moved inland, burning the Japanese with flamethrowers or sealing them in their caves. The fighting, described by veterans as some of the worst in the war, dragged on for two months.
But in the meantime, MacArthur had landed at Leyte Gulf in October to utter his most memorable line: "People of the Philippines, I have returned."

Peleliu, it turned out, had not been critical. The invasion is now seen by many historians as a costly mistake, not only for the Marines but for airmen, too.

In five air campaigns until the end of the land battle, the United States lost more than 200 planes, including fighters of all types and three B-24s. Many of them were reported shot down without ever being officially located.
For more than 10 years, Scannon and his team have been trying to correct that, spending thousands of dollars of their own money on air fare, equipment and guides.

He and his friends have found 15 wrecks since 1993, when Scannon first traveled to the islands as part of the expedition that found the armed trawler that then-future President George H. W. Bush sank in July 1944 as a young Navy fighter pilot.

Scannon had already located the other two B-24s, but the last one became a kind of holy grail because it had proved so elusive. Finding these old planes requires the physical stamina to dive and climb through the jungle day after day, but it also takes good detective work.

"We knew roughly where it had gone in from pilots that we interviewed and after-action reports from that mission," said Scannon, chief researcher at Xoma Corp., a San Francisco biotechnology firm. "I had spent the first few years tracking down what I learned from the veterans. But last year, we did an intensive search of the National Archives."
The archives, in Maryland, turned up canisters of photos taken by crewmen on other B-24s to assess bomb damage on Koror.

Some of them revealed telling clues, such as bombs splashing in the water in clusters. That pattern meant a plane had been struck by anti-aircraft fire, because the crews were trained to dump all of their bombs at once if the plane was hit.

In some of the photos, the searchers could also make out pieces of a burning plane falling to earth, allowing them to calculate where the debris might have landed.

BentProp members thought the B-24 had gone down on the southern side of Koror, but the photos convinced them that it actually crashed off the other side.

The group's native guide, Joe Maldangesang, then started asking local spear fisherman if they knew of any wrecks in that area. One said he'd seen a propeller near a coral head and showed the BentProp team. Under the propeller was another, and below that, other parts of the plane.

The divers didn't look for bone fragments or uniform remnants, but they never do.

"When we think we're on a site where there could be human remains, we kind of back off," Joyce said. "This obviously hadn't been touched."

Identifying remains is the job of another group, with which BentProp works closely, called JPAC, or Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, based in Hawaii.

JPAC researchers recover what they can and take it to their forensic lab, the largest in the world, to do DNA analysis and other tests to identify MIAs. Until that's done and the families are contacted, the B-24 crew will remain unidentified, including the men who were executed.

Scannon and Joyce said they knew who the men are, but that they wouldn't discuss identities or even the day the plane was shot down because they don't want to intrude on JPAC's work.
This kind of respect for veterans permeates BentProp, whose members see their yearly missions to Palau as more a noble crusade than a hobby.

Of the 100 planes in shallow enough water to be located, about 85 are missing and some 65 airmen are still listed as MIA.

"Nobody else is looking for these people," Joyce said. "Our feeling is that if you have the resources available, you ought to go beyond just remembering."

Despite their Pittsburgh connections, Joyce didn't meet Scannon until 1997, when Joyce's son-in-law, Greg Kovacs, an electrical engineer at Stanford University, introduced them.

The two men hit it off. Scannon, whose father landed at Normandy and whose Hungarian mother spied for the Allies, had a keen sense of military history that appealed to Joyce, a military aviation buff. Joyce was fascinated by Scannon's treks to Palau.

"I was just hooked," he said. "Pat's a very compelling guy. He's soft-spoken, but very intense. From that point on, I felt I would like to be part of this."

Joyce said he pestered Scannon for several years to go on a trip. When he learned that Kovacs was going in 2000, he asked to tag along. The expedition didn't turn up any wrecks, but Joyce now shared Scannon's obsession. His wife, Beth, doesn't go along -- "She's not a diver or a climber," Joyce said -- but he plans to return every year for as long as he can.

"The assumption is that we'll keep doing this until we can't do it anymore," he said.
For Scannon, finding planes is a way of showing appreciation. After he and his wife, Susan, accompanied the 1993 expedition to find the ship Bush had sunk, they hired a guide to find other wrecks. One of them was the wing of another B-24.

"I can't tell you the emotion of how I felt looking at this wing that nobody knew anything about," he said. "It made me want to find out what happened to the crew, not only of this plane but all the other airmen who disappeared. Our goal is to recognize that these airmen sacrificed their lives for their country, and someone should remember it."
On the day of their most recent discovery, the BentProp team conducted a flag ceremony aboard a boat to honor the B-24 crew 70 feet below.

They held up the U.S. and Palauan flags, and Scannon quietly read part of "For the Fallen," a 1914 poem by Lawrence Binyon:

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
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