Norman listened to the familiar rumble of engines as the 453 rolled down the coral taxiway, turning at the end to face the open runway, then surging forward to sweep into the sky in a formation of six. Through the window, he could see the other five planes in the squadron fanned out against the horizon, and beyond them, two other squadrons, for a total of eighteen planes from the Long Rangers, plus another formation of the same size from the Fifth Bombardment Group, which was stationed a few miles south on Momote Airfield.
Together, the Liberators climbed through the clouds until they reached the open sky, looking down on pillowy cumuli that seemed to rest upon deep black water. The hours crept by, the horizon unchanging. Norman Coorssen waited. When the formation finally drew close to Yap, the planes circled above a nearby island, Sorol, pulling into a tight box formation for the bombing run.
Leaving Sorol, the 453 was near the back of the formation. Norman watched as the Fifth Bombardment Group led the way toward Yap. As the first squadron approached, a swarm of Japanese Zeros leaped from the airfields toward them, zipping around the Fifth bombers and dancing in the air above them, swooping down like knives to slice through them, rattling them with machine-gun fire, and then looping overhead again to drop phosphorus bombs that exploded into tentacles of white-hot liquid dripping down the clouds.
It was like watching sailboats in a storm. The artillery pumping up from the ground filled the sky with a haze of shells, and there seemed no way for the Fifth planes to avoid being hit. Within seconds, one was streaming down, a thick plume of yellow smoke trailing from its right wing as it swerved across the enemy islands with two Japanese fighters chasing it. Norman watched as they sprayed the Liberator with an endless torrent of fire.
On the radio, he heard the pilot of the wounded Liberator call out. The damage was too great. He would have to ditch the plane. The bomber sank toward the water. It skirted the whitecaps at 150 miles per hour, and for a moment it seemed to stabilize, but then a slight wobble tipped the right wing too low, snagging on the water’s surface and bowling the whole airframe forward on its nose. A geyser shot up as the wing broke off. Then the fuselage folded and snapped in half. There were five more Zeros bearing down. They tore through the air above the wreckage, spattering it with machine-gun fire.
Norman felt a drop in his belly as his own plane lifted. They were over the enemy position and their bombardier was beginning to drop the payload. The 250-pound bombs plummeted toward the ground. From the cockpit, Norman could see explosions on the runway below. The first bomb struck the shoulder of an operations area, and the rest walked north toward the taxi loop, where a collection of parked planes dissolved in black smoke.
Norman felt another surge and now the plane was dropping. The pilot had the controls forward, diving to 5,000 feet, then 3,000, then 1,200, then they were just 250 feet above the water, scooting over the surface in search of the downed plane—but there was no plane, just fragments of wing and landing gear sinking into a yellow stain of foam, while a lone survivor floundered madly in the oily surf. There was a commotion in the back of the 453 as crewmen tossed a life raft through the rear door, but there was nothing else they could do, no way to land or help. They turned the Liberator back toward Los Negros for the journey home.
Night was falling as Norman climbed down to the white coral runway. He made his way back to camp, disappearing inside his tent. In the morning, he would have to return to the airfield. He would have to return to those islands. He would lead his crew on a mission that he knew they could not yet imagine. They had missed his first day of war, just as he would miss their last.
SIX
ARNETT
Arnett. Scannon stared at the name. It was the last B-24 on his list, but like the missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle, it made the whole project feel incomplete. The more Scannon studied the islands, the more mysterious the Arnett plane seemed.
For one thing, it was the only one for which he had no pictures. According to the mission report, there had been six aerial photographers flying on other planes that day. Their job was to document bomb strikes, but during the Dixon and Custer crashes they turned their cameras to record the planes going down. In fact, some of same photographers who shot the Dixon crash had been on the Arnett mission three days later. So why did they photograph the first crash and not the second?
It was also curious that the mission documents placed the Arnett wreckage between Koror and Babeldaob. Now that Scannon was more familiar with the islands, he knew how improbable that was. The narrow channel, Toachel Mid, was not just any passage. It cut between the two primary islands in the chain and served as one of the busiest throughways of the archipelago. Hundreds of boats passed through Toachel Mid on any given day, and it was striking that, over half a century of regular traffic, no one had ever caught a glimpse of the Arnett wreckage, and no stray line had ever snagged it, and no fisherman’s sonar pinged it.
Other aspects of the report were equally bewildering. The witness statements were only a few words long, and they made no effort to describe the crash in detail. Staring at the fifty-word summaries, it was tempting to read between the lines for clues, but Scannon had seen firsthand on the Bush trawler how dangerous that could be—how easy it was to imagine hidden meanings that weren’t there. The men who wrote those wartime reports had done the best they could, but with the benefit of time and distance it was clear how much they’d left out. Scannon would never forget that the Bush report listed the wrong atoll, and he knew that if he wanted to find Arnett it wouldn’t be enough to keep searching the same old documents for details. He needed new documents, new information, and new witnesses—but where?
At night, he punched in phone numbers, following a trail of connections that began with veterans in the Long Ranger reunion group and bounced through their friends and crewmates, until sometimes he wound up calling a flier he knew only by a nickname. Occasionally he would get through and discover that the man had recently died. Other times, the man would pick up but have no memory of the war. With each conversation, Scannon heard the tick of time on the line, as if the last memory of the Arnett crash might vanish at any moment. He kept calling.
In the summer, he flew to a reunion of the Long Rangers, milling through a crowd of old men with slicked white hair and name tags clipped to their Hawaiian shirts. He choked down plates of warmed-over chicken and gobs of mashed potatoes, asking everyone he met whether they had been in the unit during the summer of 1944. When someone said yes, he would sit rapt for hours, absorbing every story the old airman could recall—how members of the group snuck off one night, on a base with dirty water, to dig up the plumbing supply of a nearby Australian unit and tap a branch line for themselves; or how, on the endless flights over enemy territory, they often had no better place to empty their bowels than the boxes their lunch came in, which they would drop whenever they crossed a Japanese island, laughing at bombs away.
Even in the bright, bland light of the hotel conference center, Scannon felt a strange intimacy with the Long Rangers. All his life, his friends and family had known him as intensely private, given to long interior spells lost in thought. He had always been more interested in contemplating biochemical bonds at work than in forging them over drinks, and he knew that his first marriage had suffered in part from that unreachable aspect of himself. When the marriage ended, he’d made the long drive north to visit his daughter each weekend, privately suspecting that the distance made him a better father, that it forced him to set aside time for Nell that he might not have found otherwise. Now she was a teenager who seemed to share his singular drive; he felt they understood each other in unspoken ways. But with the fliers, Scannon felt a different kind of kinship. He felt as if somehow he had always been among them, as if laughing with them and slugging a beer and leaning back in his chair, he belonged, and he was entranced by even the most trivial minutiae of their wartime memories, the intricacies of the islands and the bombers and the bases.
He began to visit the airmen at home, recording interviews that could stretch for hours or days or only a few minutes. One weekend, he drove 150 miles to spend two hours in the living room of a gunner who had seen both Dixon and Arnett crash. Scannon spread his records on the table, tracing the path of the Dixon plane in the mission photos; then he pulled out the pictures he’d taken of the wreckage fifty years later—the pristine wing, the mangled nose plunked in shallow water. He listened in awe as the gunner recalled the sight of Dixon falling, and the strange sensation that came over him, a combination of unbridled hatred for the Japanese and unalloyed joy at having been spared.
But when Scannon pulled out a map of the channel and asked where Arnett went down, the gunner just shook his head. It might as well have been a map of the moon, she said. After half a century, he could still see the plane’s left wing bursting into flames. He could see it folding off, and the plane swerving right, then left, before it hit the water, while two parachutes popped into the air and floated through the clouds. But the precise location of the wreckage had vanished from his memory.
Back home, Scannon continued reading, calling, and studying the mission reports, when yet another anomaly caught his eye. The men who crashed with Arnett had never flown with him before. On every other mission that summer, they flew with another pilot, Norman Coorssen. So why did they join Arnett on their final mission?
Scannon called the historian of the 307th, Jim Kendall. Over the prior year, they had spoken many times. Kendall had given Scannon some of his first mission documents, pointed him toward the archive at Maxwell Air Force Base, and introduced him to surviving airmen from the Palau campaign. In fact, Kendall himself had flown with the unit that summer, and he regaled Scannon with colorful stories about life on base. But when Scannon asked Kendall why Arnett had flown with a different crew on his final mission, he could hear the dread and weariness seep into Kendall’s voice.
Arnett, Kendall explained, had problems with his crew. A few hours before the mission, they refused to fly with him. There was no way to resolve the conflict in time for the mission, so commanders brought in another crew to fly with Arnett. They’d never flown with him before, and the whole thing was a breach of protocol. It would have led to a disciplinary investigation, except the plane crashed.
Scannon’s eyes grew wide as he scribbled into his journal in black ink: “Crew voted him out! Navigator, co-pilot, and bombardier refused to fly with him. A serious complaint was filed, and another crew flew on that day.” Yet as he hung up with Kendall, he realized that he still had no idea what it meant. Why would Arnett’s crew refuse to fly with him? Was it personal, or did they question his ability? And was it a coincidence that his plane went down the same day? The timing seemed too neat to dismiss, but there was no other evidence to go on. There was no record of the crew change in the mission documents. There had been no investigation, as far as he could tell. And Kendall said he didn’t know any other details.
It would be a long time before Scannon did.
—
THE DEEPER SCANNON’S FIXATION with Palau became, the more baffling it was to Susan. She had never shared his overpowering awe at the Dixon wing, and after a childhood in the Pacific she saw little magic in the war-torn islands. “The Pacific isn’t exotic to me,” she would say with a shrug. “To me, Switzerland is exotic.”
Yet privately, Susan was delighted by Scannon’s budding obsession. She enjoyed a raft of her own pursuits that rarely involved Pat—writing plays and sewing her own clothes and gardening and attending symphonies, while Pat’s hobbies had always been: work, work, and more work. If he suddenly felt a hankering to hump through a distant jungle and unravel the mysteries of war, well, the only thing that worried Susan was the possibility that he might resist that urge out of some misplaced deference to her. One night as he was rustling through yet another stack of papers, she poked her head into the room and watched for a moment.
“Patrick,” she said.
He looked up.
“You need to go back.”
A flash of confusion crossed his face, and she said, “You need to do this. Go. Stay as long as you want.” Then she smiled. “It’s nice to cook for one.”
Scannon went back.
He spent a week on the islands in 1995, but lost the first four days staring through the windows of his hotel room as a deafening gale rattled the streets and pelted the sea. When the storm finally broke, he raced to the airport to hire a charter flight over the islands with a pilot named Spike Nasmyth, who was an old Air Force flier himself and knew what it meant to be shot down. In 1966, on a mission over Vietnam, Nasmyth had been hit by a surface-to-air missile and fallen into enemy hands, spending the next six and a half years—2,355 days, he liked to say—in the same Hanoi prison as John McCain, beaten senseless by guards and tied in knots until his limbs were a tangle of cartilage and scars. Now he listened as Scannon explained about Arnett and pointed to Nasmyth’s Cessna, saying, “I want you to take the door off and bank over the channel, so I can hang through the opening and get a bird’s-eye view.”
“Sure,” Nasmyth said with a shrug, “but if you fall out, it’s your problem.”
Then they were coursing over the channel with Scannon lashed in the doorframe by a ganglion of ropes, reeling off hundreds of photographs with infrared film, but as he returned home and developed the pictures, he saw nothing in the water, just a vast expanse of churning sediment that washed through the channel.
Scannon felt deflated. He had spent another week on the islands and come home with nothing. Looking at the photos, what he saw most clearly was his own naïveté. The same channel that had seemed so small on the little map at Maxwell Air Force Base now stretched out before him like an angry void. It might take years to search the silty water, one dive at a time. Working alone, in fact, it could take the rest of his life.
Scannon assembled a small team for his next trip. At the top of the roster were Chip and Pam Lambert, and then two diving friends, and for fun he invited his daughter, Nell, to come along with her boyfriend, Jed. As the two-week expedition wore on, the search devolved. Each morning, they boarded a flat-bottomed boat and motored out to the channel, trailing an echo finder behind them in a series of long passes. Whenever they heard a promising ping, they would drop in for a look, but the current was strong and the visibility poor and the weather grueling. As the days passed in blasts of frigid rain and broiling sun, they broke off a little earlier each day, pointing the boat toward a glimpse of something more hopeful—the explosion of life on a barrier reef perhaps, or the giant mollusks at Clam City, or the transfixing verdancy of small islands rising up from the water.
One afternoon, Scannon and Chip Lambert scaled the walls of an especially steep island, and when they reached the top, they peered over the side to discover that it was hollow—the center bored out like a volcano, with two marine lakes at the bottom. They climbed down carefully into the lush vegetation, with sounds reverberating around them. “It was like we had gone into prehistoric times,” Scannon said. “There were these white birds flying, and eerie echoes. Honest to God, if we had seen a pterodactyl, I would not have been surprised.” But when they paused for a moment at the bottom and gazed across the landscape, Lambert cried out, “My God, Pat! Do you know what you’re leaning against?”
Scannon spun around. It was a boulder, six feet across and nearly flat on top, and he realized that he was looking at a Yapese stone disc. There was a long crack down its face and the edges were unfinished, but the rest was too carefully chiseled to be anything else. Looking around, Scannon and Lambert spotted dozens of others lying incomplete or broken in the island soil. “The whole area was a quarry,” Lambert recalled. “They had been carving stone money right out of the walls!”
“It had clearly been abandoned,” Scannon added. “You could just imagine what happened. The Palauans had a deep hatred of the Yapese, so if they ever go
t caught, they would have been killed.”
Scannon and Lambert walked deeper into the island. They crossed the lake and scaled a wall overlooking the basin, ducking into a small cave. When their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they could see that the earthen floor sloped deep into the rock. They descended past mounds of bat guano until they reached the end, where a tiny set of human bones lay carefully arranged against the wall. There were pieces of jewelry still wrapped around the skeleton, and nearby, the head of an ax.
Scannon felt the chill of death wash through him again, the same sensation he had first experienced at the Dixon wing. He and Lambert whispered quickly in the darkness, deciding not to touch another thing. They hurried outside and back to the boat, speeding off toward Koror, where they passed along the coordinates of the quarry to local preservationists.
As Scannon returned to California, he was filled again with a feeling of defeat. However intriguing the Yapese money had been, however beautiful the islands, he had gone for the Arnett plane and he now felt farther away than ever. In his first solo trip, he had found two B-24s; now, he’d made two more trips and found none. Now, he knew how impossible the task would be: it was impossible to search the channel alone, and just as impossible with the wrong team. Of the six team members he’d brought along, only the Lamberts had the right skills for the task, and even they found the channel dreary and dull. Of course they did. The channel was dull, but to Scannon it was all that mattered. How could he ever hope to find a team who felt the same way, who were willing to fly halfway around the world to one of the most beautiful underwater meccas on the planet, and then spend the whole time mucking around in the murky waters of a shipping channel?
All he knew for sure was that he hadn’t found that team yet. “We clearly weren’t productive in ninety-six,” he said. “It was a feeble attempt to put together a team. I learned from ninety-six what not to do.”
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