Vanished

by Wil S. Hylton

At the same time, another BentProp member was beginning to fixate on a different kind of photo. Flip Colmer was a former Navy fighter pilot and an avid skydiver. He’d first met Scannon through the SkyDance school in 2001, and joined the missions to Palau every year since. Colmer was an inexhaustible presence on the islands. Whether standing in mud up to his hips or snorkeling through a pounding rain, he seemed happiest when the conditions around him were worst, and he was content to subsist for weeks at a time on a diet of Spam and Oreo cookies.

  Colmer’s experience as a fighter pilot got him thinking about mission photos. During his years in the Navy, it was common to send a second plane after a bomb run to shoot pictures of the damage. Those photos were known as bomb damage assessments, or BDAs, and they were often taken a day or two later. In fact, they were sometimes taken by another unit, and would not appear in the original mission report. To find them, a researcher would have to guess that they existed, and then sort through a second set of records. “The bulb went off,” Colmer recalled. “Even if there weren’t photos in the mission report, there could be photos in the BDAs.”

  With just four months left before the 2004 mission, Colmer called the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. He couldn’t be sure that World War II pilots had done bomb damage assessments, or that they would have been called by that name, but he tried to explain to a researcher what he meant. “Do you have anything like that?” he asked.

  “Sure,” the archivist said. “Come on down.” There was a warehouse full of aerial photographs in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. If Colmer put in a request for them at the front deck, the archival staff would retrieve as many canisters as he wanted to see. Colmer called Scannon right away with the news. By the time they hung up, they were ready to book the flight to Maryland.

  Scannon had been to the archive in College Park many times, but he wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d missed something important. It was the largest archival building in the world, with two million cubic feet of records, and it was still relatively new. The facility had been completed in 1993, and many of the World War II documents in places like Maxwell Air Force Base were still being transferred in. Along the way, there were inevitable glitches in the system. For an obscure place like Palau, you might find records filed under “Peleliu,” “Micronesia,” “Western Carolines,” or even “Philippines.”

  The lobby of the archive was a soaring modernist space filled with light, and Scannon hurried toward the elevators for the photography floor. Colmer had flown in to join him, along with a man named Reid Joyce, who had first joined Scannon on the Arnett channel in 2000. A small, gentle figure with glasses, Joyce had recently retired as a psychologist after working with the military’s human-engineering labs, and he brought to BentProp an organizational sensibility that surpassed even Scannon’s. He was building an online database to digitize the team’s research files.

  As the three men gathered in the archives, they sifted through a byzantine catalog of photos, ordering every canister that seemed to have a marginal relationship to Palau. By the end of the day, they had filled out dozens of orders for overnight delivery. They spent the night in a nearby hotel, and returned early in the morning to wait anxiously as the staff wheeled out a cart stacked with tall, black canisters marked with details like “Intelligence, Photographic Division.”

  Scannon, Colmer, and Joyce slipped on cotton gloves. They each removed a canister and cracked open the lid. The stench of developing chemicals flooded into the room, and it dawned on Scannon that the film had not been viewed since the end of the war. He carefully removed a translucent sheet and rested it on a light box. It was a massive twelve-by-twelve negative with the shapes of islands and coral heads clearly visible against the water. In the foreground, there was a huge white silhouette of a bomb falling toward the ground. Scannon worked his way through the images in the canister, then a second canister, then a third, when suddenly Colmer called out, “Here’s the reel from September first!”

  Scannon and Joyce spun around. They stared for a moment in silence. They had come to find bomb damage assessments taken after the mission, but these were photos taken the same day. All three men gathered around Colmer’s light box to examine the film.

  There were only ten negatives in the series, all taken from plane number 101. It was the plane that had suffered the most damage that day, and it was a miracle to think that the photographer on board, with shells ricocheting through his plane and slicing into the stomach of a waist gunner just a few feet away, had the presence of mind to stand by the window taking photos of the mayhem below. There were no obvious signs of the Arnett plane in the pictures. They showed the southwestern coast of Babeldaob, a few coral heads offshore, and a pair of tiny white dots near the waterline.

  “What do you think these are?” Scannon asked, pointing at the dots.

  Colmer and Joyce shook their heads. There weren’t any buildings in the photo, so it wasn’t a bomb damage assessment. But the specks were too small to be the plane.

  Then the realization hit Scannon. It was the plane. In the frantic moments over Koror, the cameraman must have taken a few extra seconds to get the shot. By the time he began shuttering images, Arnett was nearly down. Those tiny white dots were the wing and the fuselage, but they were thousands of feet below.

  Scannon looked at the last two photos in the series. The spots were in different places, moving in a line across Babeldaob toward water. In fact, they were heading toward the place where he and Susan had seen the propeller on their first day of diving, ten years earlier, right after they left the Dixon wing. Scannon had been back to that propeller countless times. It was old and weathered, and he’d never been able to measure the blades precisely. Without the measurements, he couldn’t be sure what kind of plane it came from, but he’d always wondered if it was a B-24.

  Suddenly Scannon remembered a Graves Registration Service report written in 1947. It described a B-24 crash in the same area. He had dismissed that possibility years earlier, when he learned that the airplane listed in that report had been found somewhere else. Now he realized that the GRS was right: there was a B-24 in that area, just not the one they thought. It was the 453.

  The memories kept coming. He thought of an interview two years earlier with a Palauan elder named Ricky Speis, who said he’d seen a bomber go down in the same position. At the time, Scannon had gone directly to the site and spent a few days diving. But when he found nothing, he returned to the channel.

  Staring at the new photos, Scannon’s heart leaped and sank. Two things were clear. After ten years of searching for Arnett, he had just come across the most promising clue yet. And for ten years, he had been searching in the wrong place.

  —

  THE JOURNEY TO PALAU was always tinged with magic for Scannon. As the trip drew closer, he began to dream of the warm tropical air, the fusty familiar aroma of the jungle, and he would find himself closing his eyes to imagine the moment he would step down from the plane onto the islands. But the 2004 mission would be unlike any other. For one thing, Scannon knew he was closer to Arnett than ever before. For another, he knew that BentProp wouldn’t be the only team searching the islands. The military lab was scheduled to begin a full-scale excavation of Police Hill that year: even as Scannon dove for Arnett, Belcher would be two miles away, digging for evidence of the mass grave.

  For weeks, Scannon spent his nights preparing. He packed and repacked his bags, ordered and reordered equipment, and by the time he boarded a flight from San Francisco International, with an apple pie from Susan tucked into his carry-on bag, his check-in luggage was stuffed with 120 pounds of photographic equipment, computer drives, and an endless array of scuba gear, and he’d mailed himself two large boxes with a printer, history books, research files, an old machete, and videotapes of earlier missions.

  Settling into his seat on the flight, Scannon tried to calm his mind. He ordered his usual tomato juice without ice an
d dropped a CD by the Hawaiian band HAPA into his portable player. Then he opened his yellow waterproof notepad and, for the first time in years, let his thoughts and hopes pour out.

  “1100—Now on Pacific,” he began. “I cannot but think of men shipping out 60 years ago, with uncertainty, in the same direction. Many had time to think about it, zig-zagging their way from San Francisco or San Diego. Others flew their bombers and had less time to think, a lot less. Now I am peacefully making my way in a much less circuitous direction to Palau—where a few men found and never left. Do they know we are coming or that we are there? Are their spirits waiting to be remembered, or at least not forgotten? Or do their spirits live through their families, embedded in the DNA they left behind? To whom does this matter? In the end, it matters to me, and it matters to a few folks—incredible folks crazy in their own right—who sacrifice their time/money to get beat up in the jungles, in the waters, on the coral, by the sun—to freeze in the rain.”

  At Honolulu International Airport, he met up with Reid Joyce, who had been traveling since 3 a.m. After a quick hello, they found their seats and settled in for the seven-hour flight to Guam, each man retreating to his thoughts. They were briefly interrupted when a passenger two rows up had a seizure and Scannon helped stabilize and monitor him. Then he was back in his seat, the cabin lights dimmed, gazing through the window to the eternity of night.

  The airport on Babeldaob was a single runway that stretched toward the water in darkness, but inside the terminal, Scannon and Joyce found three Palauan friends waiting. Joe Maldangesang (mal-dang'-uh-sang) was a scuba guide at the local dive company Neco Marine. He’d first met Scannon in 1996, on the mission with Chip and Pam Lambert and Scannon’s daughter, Nell. With a limited English vocabulary, Maldangesang had spent the week wondering what kind of crackpot Scannon was. “I’m thinking, ‘Maybe this guy is crazy,’” Maldangesang recalled. “Why does he want to dive here? It’s so ugly!”

  But Scannon had taken an instant liking to Maldangesang. Unlike some of his earlier guides, Maldangesang was never in a rush, and he projected a quiet joy on the water, throwing in a line to yank out fish or chomping on betel nut until his grin was brilliant orange. Scannon had hired him as a boat driver each year since.

  Like many islanders, Maldangesang had a deep affection for the American fliers of World War II. The relationship between Palau and Japan had grown strong since the war, but many Palauans still regarded the US victory in the Pacific as their moment of liberation. As Maldangesang returned to the waterways with Scannon each year, he witnessed the discovery of Corsairs and Avengers, and soon he began to join the search himself—taking a position in the underwater grid, humping through the jungle, and interviewing tribal elders about their wartime memories. His wife, Esther, was a princess in Palau’s matrilineal society, which only added to the value of his support. Some of the islanders who had once scratched their heads at Scannon, wondering if he was just another treasure hunter looking for Yamashita’s gold, began to pass him information through Maldangesang. By 2004, Maldangesang had become central to Scannon’s project. Scannon presented him with a BentProp coin, and named him in reports to the lab as a team member.

  Now Maldangesang was at the airport with Esther and a Palauan friend. They exchanged hugs and handshakes and Esther draped a floral lei over Scannon’s head. Then they piled into a car out front and sped toward Koror. Along the way, Scannon and Joyce explained about the photos.

  —

  AS SCANNON AWOKE the next morning, he resisted the urge to rush to the water. There was equipment to unpack, gear to set up, and paperwork to submit at the Historic Preservation Office. He also wanted to review his plans with Maldangesang, view the new search area from a small plane, and track down Ricky Speis, the Palauan elder who had first pointed to the site two years earlier. In between, he and Joyce would pick up the other team members at the airport, including Jennifer Powers, who was filming a documentary about BentProp with SkyDance founder Dan O’Brien and a videographer they had asked to join them on the islands, Pete Galli.

  Over the next three days, while the rest of the team coordinated permits and equipment, Galli showed Scannon a trick with the program Photoshop. He imported the new archival photos and superimposed them over a current map of Palau, stretching and angling the images to see where the white specks fell on the modern landscape. With a line-drawing tool, he could extend the trajectory of the dots to predict exactly where they were heading. Scannon had never seen Photoshop before, and he was amazed at the possibilities. On the fourth day, he and Galli went to the airport to lease a private plane. The pilot who had once flown Scannon over the channel, Spike Nasmyth, was no longer on the islands. But a pilot named Matt Harris agreed to remove the back door of his twin-engine Islander plane so that Galli could lean out and shoot photos of the water. Then Galli and Scannon retreated to the hotel, huddling over Galli’s laptop to add the new images to the Photoshop overlay.

  On the fifth day, Scannon brought the team to meet Ricky Speis. He was a short, squat man with a light dust of gray hair and deep copper skin. At his home on southern Babeldaob, he welcomed the group to sit on his front porch below a sign that said “God Bless Our Home.” With a peach-colored polo shirt and loose khaki shorts, Speis was hardly the conventional image of a tribal elder, but his memory stretched across sixty years to the day in 1944 when, as a seventeen-year-old student on his way to visit his parents, he saw the 453 cross the sky.

  “I was on the hill at Aimeliik,” he said, gesturing west with a weary frown. “I was on my way home but it became hard from the Japanese shooting up and the planes bombing Koror. Koror was smoking, and then all of a sudden, I saw the plane being hit and losing part of its tail, then spinning down and impacting on the reef.” He paused, and Scannon asked if he would show them where the plane landed. Speis nodded. Sure, he said. Come back in the morning.

  On the water, Maldangesang motored expertly through narrow passages that cut between the coral heads. One wrong turn, and the boat would run aground in water just inches deep. About a mile offshore, they passed the propeller that Scannon had first seen in 1993. After all the years of seeing the propeller, it suddenly looked different to Scannon. The possibility that it might have come from the 453 chilled him. Speis gazed past the propeller to a spot just a few yards north. That, he said, pointing, was where the plane went down.

  Everything was beginning to converge on a single region. Scannon and Galli spent another two days mapping the area for a search. Using the Photoshop overlay, they drew a grid on the coral heads, noting the boundaries of each square and the best way to reach it. While they plotted the approach, Maldangesang chased down yet another lead. Speis had mentioned a fisherman who knew the area well, and Maldangesang wanted to ask if he’d ever seen anything strange in the water. To his surprise, the fisherman was tight-lipped. He didn’t want to get involved, he said, or spend hours motoring around the coral on a boat filled with Americans. But when Maldangesang promised to keep his identity secret, the fisherman said yes: he’d seen a huge jumble of metal embedded in one of the coral heads. Using a verbal shorthand, he explained to Maldangesang where it was. When Maldangesang returned to Scannon’s hotel, he pointed to the spot on a map. It was right near the center of the grid that Scannon and Galli were mapping.

  Finally, on the morning of January 26, the BentProp team boarded a boat for their first dive. It had taken ten days, but between the Photoshop overlay, the tip from Speis, and the fisherman’s advice to Maldangesang, they had collected enough information to launch a systematic search. They would begin with the fisherman’s directions.

  When they reached the site, Maldangesang handed the wheel of the boat to Galli. Two pairs of divers would make the first sweep: Scannon with Maldangesang, and Joyce with Powers. They would descend together and move across the coral as a group. But when Scannon reached the bottom, he looked around and saw only Maldangesang. After a few minutes, he raised
his hands in a gesture of questioning annoyance. Maldangesang returned the gesture. They waited, dangling in the translucent blue to the sound of their own breathing, but Joyce and Powers did not come back. Finally, Scannon pointed up. Maldangesang nodded. They surfaced to the sound of Pete Galli shouting.

  “They found something!” he called. “Reid just came up for his camera! He’s heading back down!”

  Scannon and Maldangesang glanced across the water to where Joyce’s air bubbles were rising, and they dove back under, following the trail through a column of deepening blue, descending farther into the void until the surface no longer shimmered above them and the shapes of two figures began to materialize gently in the darkness. The first was Joyce, floating at the side of a steep rise of coral. The second was Powers, holding on to something tall and thin. It was a propeller. As Scannon approached, he could see that she had both arms wrapped around the blade, her eyes wide, bubbles streaming up from the edges of a grin she couldn’t contain.

  “I was not letting go!” Powers said later. “I dropped right onto it and I said to myself, ‘I’m staying here until someone finds me.’”

  Scannon felt his heart drum against his chest as the rhythmic whoosh of his regulator rose and fell. He drifted close to Powers in a daze. With trembling hands, he reached out for the chalkboard attached to her waist, writing in large, blocky letters: ARNETT.

  Powers nodded. She pointed down the sloping coral to a tangled mass of metal resting by the seafloor. It was an engine, with a second propeller attached to it, and below that, the unmistakable profile of a B-24 wing. The whole front half of the plane stretched out before him.

  Scannon drifted down. He passed through the wreckage of the Liberator in awe. He saw the nose-turret bracket resting on a ledge, surrounded by hoses and wires and warped aluminum skin, and he paused to study a small metal box. There were four thin rods protruding from it, with a knob on the end of each. It was a throttle. The throttle. Jack Arnett’s throttle. Each of the sticks controlled one engine, and they were all stuck in position by the growth of coral. Two of the sticks were pushed forward, and two pulled back, and it occurred to Scannon that this might be exactly the movement a pilot would make to compensate quickly for the loss of power on one side. He stared at the quadrant as a flood of emotion coursed through him. In ten years of searching, he had experienced many sensations at the wreckage of lost craft—the excitement of discovery, the chill of mortality, the overpowering sense of debt and duty to the missing. But as he gazed at the throttle he felt overcome with the low ache of loss. It was as if, in that final position of the throttle, Arnett’s will to survive was recorded forever. “It was the last correction Arnett made,” Scannon said later. “I can’t explain why, but that was the thing that struck me the hardest.”