Later, when Scannon tried to explain the feeling that came over him that day, the sense of duty and responsibility that would consume the next two decades of his life, that would bring him back, year after year, to swim and dive and hike and climb and fly small aircraft over the islands; when he tried to describe the sensation that gripped him as he gazed upon the wing, words would always fail.
“I just came around that bend in the coral,” he would say, “and I was a different person.”
—
BACK IN CALIFORNIA, Scannon found himself drifting to the islands: at work, at home, and in between, the questions always lingered. Where was the rest of the plane, and how many other planes were nearby? The guides had taken him and Susan to another site, four miles north, where a lone American propeller rested in water so shallow that during low tide its blade poked into the air like a thin, gray beacon. Four miles was probably too far for the propeller to have come from the same airplane as the wing, but as Scannon asked around—at the hotel, in dive shops, and among various guides—no one seemed to know where either part came from, or where the rest of either plane was. There didn’t seem to be any record of the lost planes on Palau.
Now that Scannon was home, he could see that there wasn’t much record of the air campaign at all. The ground and naval battles against Japan filled hundreds of volumes, from the intimate memoirs of Marines, to tactical studies of carrier battles, to popular histories of the island-hopping campaign by General Douglas MacArthur. For each of those battles, American men on ships and beaches were backed by a raging sky of planes, which pounded the earth and swooped low across enemy bunkers with a fusillade of bullets that blackened the midday sun. But the story of those fliers was always relegated to the margin, eclipsed by the gruesome infantry landings and the grandeur of the Navy fleet.
Then, too, Palau itself was missing from many accounts of the war. The islands were home to some of the most savage fighting in the Pacific, but most Americans had never even heard of them. Other island battles were much more famous but comparatively short. The horror at Tarawa extended for three blistering days; the fight for Iwo Jima, about a month; the battle for Okinawa dragged on for three months; and the eruptions at Guadalcanal, six. But the fight for Palau was spread across eighteen months of combat that dyed the white sand red. When historians did account for Palau, they tended to divide the battle into its constituent operations, like the naval strikes in March 1944, the Army Air Forces’ bombardment that summer, and the Marine invasion on the southern island of Peleliu in the fall. Yet on the ground those distinctions were meaningless; on the ground, the islands were simply at war—pummeled by ships and planes and landing vehicles, day after week after month, so that on the final day of the war, the north was still held by Japan and the south in Allied hands. No other Pacific island territory was contested so bitterly for so long. The fight for Peleliu Island alone was among the bloodiest engagements of the war. In his epic work The Pacific War, historian John Costello wrote of Peleliu, “The bloody, grinding warfare was to reach a savagery the 1st Marines had not encountered even in their long struggle on Guadalcanal.” At the National Museum of the Marine Corps, historians called Peleliu “the bitterest battle of the war.” And to veterans of Palau, the archipelago was simply “the Forgotten Corner of Hell.”
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 b
oarded 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?
THREE
AIRMEN
Most 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 shatter
ed 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.
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