Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

  Jimmie, meanwhile, was deep into a love letter to Myrle. If his writing was occasionally florid, it was nevertheless remarkable from a man with a grade-school education. “Sweet,” he wrote, in what would become the last letter in Myrle’s collection, “my mind is nearly a blank tonight, for I am all took up with thoughts of you and home. Maybe it won’t be too long until the day when I will be home, and we will be together again. With your arms around me, I can forget all this, and settle down to spending years with you. Gee, what a glimpse of you would be worth! I’ll have lots of time for just feasting my eyes on you. How I miss you! Sweet Darling, tomorrow is a busy day, and I have to get up early. So I’ll stop for tonight, and tomorrow I’ll do better. But you know I love you with all my heart, and will for always. Tell the folks hello, and write as often as you can. Good night, Sweetheart. With all my love, Jimmie.”

  —

  THEY GATHERED AT THE AIRSTRIP before dawn. It was a morning like any other. In film shot by a unit cameraman that day, the sun over Wakde airfield gleams against the silver B-24s while ground crews bustle through familiar routines on the coral runway. A little after 6 a.m., the crowd of airmen began to climb aboard the fleet, each man moving into his position with the burnished confidence of a veteran flier.

  Since their arrival three months earlier, the Big Stoop boys had flown nearly a dozen ships, including the Babes in Arms, the Dina Might, and several with no name, but that morning they were scheduled to fly airplane number 453, the same plane that Norman Coorssen had flown without them on his observation flight to Yap. Now it would be their turn to fly the same plane without him.

  The reason for Coorssen’s absence that day may never be entirely clear. He was the only man from the Big Stoop crew who wasn’t present. A few others were relatively new additions, like flight engineer Robert Stinson, who joined the crew in July, and co-pilot William Simpson, who was the third man to fill that role. Photographers also came and went, depending on the mission. Since their arrival on the islands, the Big Stoop boys had flown with five different combat cameramen on a total of nine missions. Their favorite photographer was Mario Campora, a bulky young man from western Massachusetts with a tangle of brown hair and the delicate features of a child. Campora had only flown with the Big Stoop boys three times, but he fit in so well that they’d invited him to join the crew photo in July. He was scheduled to fly with them again that morning, but he woke up with a throbbing cold and resigned himself to a day of rest. Instead, they got photographer Alexander Vick, another familiar face. Vick had been with them on their last mission. In fact, every man on the plane had been on the prior flight—except Jack Arnett.

  No Army document can explain why Arnett took the helm that morning, and no living veteran of the Long Rangers knows. At least two possibilities remain. If the unit historian Jim Kendall was right, then the Big Stoop boys were not scheduled to fly at all, and they were rushed onto Arnett’s plane only after his crew refused to board. But in letters written the night before, the men seemed to know they were scheduled for the mission. Jimmie Doyle referred to a busy day ahead and the need to wake up early—the same language he always used on the night before combat. The other possibility is that the Big Stoop crew was scheduled to fly all along—and it was Coorssen who failed to board the plane, and Arnett who was the replacement.

  This much is certain: by September 1, 1944, Jack Arnett had been ejected by at least one crew. Six weeks earlier, the men who trained with him in Tonopah had thrown him off their plane. Only two members of that crew, and the wife of a third, survive. But all three recall the incident in detail. Arnett, they say, was an exceptional pilot, but he could be abrasive and imperious. Where officers like the Big Stoop navigator Frank Arhar followed the advice to “laugh with your men,” Arnett was known to bark orders and demand extreme obedience. “He was bossy, and whenever he spoke something, he expected you to do just that,” said Jack Pierce, the top-turret gunner who trained with Arnett in Tonopah. “Well, the boys didn’t want to do exactly what he said—and they let him know it.”

  According to Martha Raysor, whose husband, Jim, was on the same crew, the tension between Arnett and the men was apparent even before they left the United States. “He thought he was better than the rest of them,” Raysor said. “One time, they were all traveling in California, and gas was at a premium, and Jim says, ‘Well, if you want to go by my folks’, my dad can probably give you some gas because he works for the oil company.’ So they drove there, and the rest of them went in and had something to eat. But Arnett wouldn’t get out of the car. He was an officer and my husband was not, and he wouldn’t lower himself.”

  As Pierce recalled it, the tension only grew in combat. Among other problems, Arnett began to drink. “A lot of us were drinkers,” he said, “but not on the aircraft. He would go into the airplane with a bottle in his hand. My position on takeoff was to stand between him and the co-pilot, so I got to observe what went on. Many times I saw him with a bottle at the steering apparatus.”

  By the second week of July, the crew had seen enough. The officers confronted Arnett about his domineering manner, but the conversation did not go well. Arnett threatened to have them punished for insubordination. In desperation, they turned to the enlisted men for support. “The word got to us through the other commanding officers,” Jack Pierce said. “He was planning to let them go and keep the enlisted men. Well, they objected to it, and we stuck with them.”

  Faced with a disintegrating crew, squadron commander Jack Vanderpoel came up with a tidy solution. Another pilot, Charles McRae, had been sidelined for weeks with an ear infection, and was coming back into rotation. Vanderpoel assigned McRae to take over the Arnett crew, and he gave Arnett the crew that had flown with McRae in training.

  As Arnett began flying with his new crew, there was no sign of conflict. On the contrary, his record remained stellar. Twice, on missions from Los Negros to Yap, he was forced to turn back when an engine failed, but each time, he managed to bring home his plane and crew safely. By September 1, he had been flying with his second crew for seven weeks—the same amount of time he had spent in combat with his first. Perhaps the second crew had also seen enough of Arnett. Perhaps, in the final days of August, they, too, refused to fly with him. Or perhaps Jim Kendall was mistaken about which Arnett crew “voted him out.” There are no surviving members of the second crew to ask.

  Nor did Arnett’s family have any inkling of his troubles. Like so many other families, all they would know in the years to come was the threadbare agony of a lost child. At their home in Charleston, West Virginia, his parents hung a portrait of Jack above the fireplace, staring at the amber-eyed kid who got in trouble for questioning his teachers—the kid whom even a close cousin, Carolyn, remembered as “private” and “aloof.” His brothers, Marvin and Warren, would always remember Jack as their mama’s pet, the one who could get away with shooting blossoms off the flowers in the garden, while their mother, Dessie, would always cling to Jack’s last letter home, in which he promised that the war had not hardened his heart. “They have not made me hate anyone,” he wrote, and she pasted the words into a scrapbook of photos bound in a thick blue cover with the title “A Book without an Ending.”

  —

  SITTING IN THE COCKPIT of the 453, Arnett watched the first planes in the formation lift off. Anywhere else and it would have been a comical sight. One by one, they rolled to the head of the runway with the languid majesty of a great beast, turning to gaze down the long, white airstrip that stretched across the island, but the moment the pilot leaned on the throttle, the illusion of grace vanished—the plane lurching forward, bobbling and clattering wildly on the uneven surface, disappearing into the hollow, and then charging up the other side toward the water. In Tonopah, the Army had spent a small fortune paving runways for B-24 training, but on Wakde, it was clear that they might as well have trained on the desert floor.

  When Arnett’s turn came, he
guided the 453 through the same gauntlet, gripping the controls and bracing himself in the cockpit as the plane hurtled forward, until at last the pandemonium gave way to the easy vibration of flight. Wakde Island shrank below until it was just a speck fading behind them.

  The mission plan called for the usual eighteen-plane formation, with six from the 372nd Squadron in the lead; then six from the 424th, including Arnett’s; and finally, six ships from the 371st bringing up the rear. Together, they would fly northwest to another satellite island, Niroemoar, then they would angle north for the journey to Palau. As they closed in on the archipelago, three planes from the lead squadron would split off, circling north over Babeldaob on a reconnaissance mission, while the remaining fifteen planes would converge into a box formation for the strike. Their target was a string of buildings at the center of Koror—government facilities, a power plant, a sawmill, and a school.

  No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, but the plan that day didn’t come close. Within twenty minutes of takeoff, one plane in the Big Stoop squadron began losing oil and had to turn back. Then, halfway to Palau, the formation ran into a squall, and as they tried to steer around it, the Big Stoop squadron went one way while the remaining two squadrons went the other. By the time they all emerged on the far side of the storm, the Big Stoop was far behind.

  As a tactical matter, this could hardly have been worse. The original plan called for the Big Stoop to cross near the middle of the formation. Now they were so far behind, they weren’t in the formation at all. They would reach the islands several minutes late, with every gunner on Koror waiting.

  Watching the islands grow on the horizon felt like staring at an oncoming train. Plumes of smoke trailed up from the bomb blasts left by the first two squadrons, and the sky glittered with shrapnel streaming down. The squadron pulled close together. They had learned from experience to make themselves into a small target. “When we first got there,” a gunner on the mission, Al Jose, recalled, “we’d tell the guys who came in close to us, ‘Get away! Get away!’ But after a while, we realized that we wanted it tight, and we were shouting, ‘Come on in!’”

  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.”

  THIRTEEN

  BREAKTHROUGH

  BentProp 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 po
werful 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.