by Brian Murphy
It wasn’t often that evidence bags arrived from Alaska. Most of the JPAC missions are dispatched to Southeast Asia or the South Pacific in search of the thousands of American remains believed resting in forest lowlands or mist-covered mountains. In Alaska the MIA tally is tiny by comparison—around three hundred—mostly from aircraft or ships that went down over the sea during the Aleutian battles. Others, like the Iceberg Inez, were taken by storms or cold or malfunctions during flight. Usually, the Alaskan crash sites are in places so inhospitable and remote that military investigators need more than just a hunch to mobilize a search for remains. Any Navy personnel lost at sea, meanwhile, are considered “entombed” under the waves and are not part of the active JPAC searches.
Occasionally, though, Alaska gives up its secrets on its own.
In June 2012 the Alaska Army National Guard was conducting a training flight over Mount Gannett, east of Anchorage. As their Black Hawk passed over the Colony Glacier, a crew member spotted what appeared to be yellow life rafts and shredded metal exposed by melting ice. It was the spot where an Air Force C-124 cargo plane crashed in November 1952, killing all fifty-two people on board.
The Hoskin case had an added distinction. Amateur sleuths such as Beckstead are exceedingly rare. Without his dedication to scour the wreckage, the Hoskin file would likely have remained on the shelf.
When the evidence from the Charley River dig reached Hawaii, it was put in the hands of analysts and anthropologists who had no knowledge of Hoskin or the background of the case. JPAC calls it working blind. All the lead investigators at that stage are allowed to know is the approximate area and era of the site in question. The protocol is designed to prevent any subconscious bias from influencing the analysis. In other words, if they were told they were looking for the remains of Harold Hoskin—a tall, young airman—there might be an inclination to favor evidence supporting that conclusion.
Instead, the pieces from the Charley River site were examined for details such as whether they could point to a specific rank or were consistent with gear issued during World War II. If they added up, the case shifted to the next stage.
Anything tied to a World War II veteran carried special significance at Hickam Air Force Base, which in 2010 would merge with nearby Pearl Harbor as part of Pentagon base consolidations. Japanese planes bombed and strafed Hickam in a rearguard attack during the Pearl Harbor blitz. The Japanese sought to keep Hickam warplanes from joining the fight or chasing down the Imperial Navy’s aircraft carriers. Some of the buildings at Hickam still carry the bullet holes and shrapnel scars.
It was not the first time that Hawaii was part of the Hoskin family story. In late February 1944, Harold Hoskin’s kid brother John stepped off a transport plane from San Francisco and into the humid island night.
John was a newly commissioned officer. But that gave him no additional access to information about his brother. He knew only what everyone else did: Harold was missing in Alaska, and the search had come up empty. In his mind, the facts pointed in only one plausible direction. Harold was gone.
He kept those opinions to himself, however. His brother’s pregnant wife, Mary, refused to entertain that kind of talk. She simply would not allow herself to contemplate the worst. Even as months went by—and the northern Maine winter drifted into pale green spring—she would tell everyone that she expected Harold to one day walk through the front door like he was coming back from a normal day at work. People would smile sympathetically at Mary’s unflappable faith. Then, when Mary was out of earshot, they would shake their heads and wonder when she would come off her cloud and deal with reality.
That wasn’t so easy. Mary seemed to have a charmed romance with Harold. Everyone in town knew it since high school. They just fit. Mary couldn’t imagine it could all be over so soon, so abruptly.
Let’s not forget, she’d tell herself, that sometimes good fortune has a way of shining through even amid tragedies. The story of her father and the insurance salesman was a case in point. Her dad was a potato farmer imbued with a healthy dose of Yankee crustiness. The insurance man had an equal measure of perseverance. He tried to pitch life insurance to Mary’s dad, but was sent packing. He came back some months later with the same result. On the third visit, somehow the salesman got through. Mary’s dad signed the insurance papers. A few days later, he was kicked by a bull and died. The insurance payout helped keep the family afloat.
So this is a lesson, Mary would say. The plane was missing, but her Hal could be fine and just trying to get back to her. It just may take some time. I have to keep faith, she told herself. Don’t give up on Hal.
While Mary kept up her brave front, Harold’s parents veered off on other emotional tangents. His mother accepted the news of the lost B-24 with quiet resignation. If she had hopes that Harold survived, she kept them to herself. Hoskin’s father, on the other hand, was not at all satisfied with the meager details from the military. Every few weeks, his frustration would boil over. He’d get out his pen and paper and set up near the old Franklin woodstove, the warmest place in the drafty house at 5 Columbia Street in Houlton, just miles from the border with New Brunswick. In letter after angry letter, he demanded more information from the Army.
But something Harold told the family during his last visit stuck with them all. He had just received his Army wings in December 1942 and had a few days free. Everyone gathered in the living room to hear Harold’s stories of life in the Army Air Forces and what it was like to be in control of the big B-24s. Some fresh logs were tossed into the Franklin stove. Younger brother John listened with perhaps the most interest. He was home for the holiday from college in Massachusetts. He wasn’t going back, though. He had received his draft notice and had to report in a few weeks.
Harold began talking in more detail about the B-24 Liberator.
“Thing is,” Harold told his family, “if there’s a problem on the plane, I’m not getting out.”
What do you mean? they gasped.
He said either the parachutes for the pilot and copilot were stashed behind the seat, or, often, they were sitting on them without them being fully hitched up.
“There’s probably not going to be time to put it on and get out,” he told the family. Then he shrugged it off with a joke. This was always his way. Keep it light. I’ll be fine, he assured his family. I’ll be back in one piece. Don’t worry about that.
Harold left a few days later.
John, meanwhile, had been selected for officer candidate school, which picked enlisted personnel for intensive twelve-week courses that ended with promotion to second lieutenant. John got into a new branch training medical administrative officers, who would assist in field hospitals and help run the military’s vast health care networks. Harold planned to come to John’s graduation from officer school outside Abilene at Camp Barkeley. The camp is smack in the middle of Texas and, to the chagrin of the military, sported an extra vowel in its name. The site was named for a World War I hero named Barkley, but a clerical error is believed to have revised the name.
Harold couldn’t make it to the graduation, however. He was already in motion to be shipped to Alaska. We’ll see each other soon, he promised John.
John bounced around the West Coast for a few months until he got orders for Hawaii. All during 1944, soldiers were streaming into the islands. The military commanders were not saying much. But it didn’t take a genius in strategy to figure it out. Word began to circulate about preparations for an amphibious assault on Japan—an attack bigger than D-Day—intended to end the war in one crushing offensive. The cost, however, would likely be unprecedented casualties on the Allied side.
The prediction was that Germany’s surrender was imminent—it finally came in May 1945—and all resources would then be thrown into a ground campaign aimed at the industrial heartland in Japan. The planned assault was to begin with the “Olympic” front on the southern island of Kyushu.
John Hoskin was part of this group. The intent was to divert Japanese ground forces before a second wave a few months later to storm Honshu and battle toward Tokyo.
As the date for Olympic neared, John Hoskin and his unit practiced beach landings on Oahu. Seasick soldiers puked on their boots. They tripped over each other in the waves. And they all knew—just like with Normandy—they would be splashing ashore amid intense enemy fire. For some reason, John wasn’t too worried. This was a chance to finally end this war, get back to Maine, and, hopefully, find his brother waiting for him. “I was twenty-one,” he said seven decades later. “Who thinks at twenty-one they are going to die, even in a war? ‘I’m going to swim in the ocean. I’m not going to be eaten by sharks.’ It was that kind of thinking.”
John was making another training run on the landing craft when word came down of something that seemed hard to believe at first. There was a huge explosion in Hiroshima. It was more than huge. It was a bomb like no other. They were calling it an atomic blast. The soldiers spent the next days fixed on the radio reports and devouring every word in the papers. Then it happened again in Nagasaki. Days later, the war was over. Japan had surrendered. John Hoskin celebrated the end of the war under the coconut palms and Hawaiian hibiscus.
But John was still bound for Japan. He stepped ashore as part of the occupation force in Osaka. John’s unit was billeted in a four-story girls’ school. Perhaps because of his training in medical administration, John was now part of the U.S. military’s drug-enforcement patrols. The job was a window into the inner workings of Japan’s military.
It was well known that Japan had directed an extensive trade in opium, heroin, and other drugs for decades. The profits helped bankroll its military expansion and costly hold on Manchuria and other parts of China. This was not an entirely novel strategy. The British East India Company and other European colonizers in the nineteenth century made mountains of cash by controlling the opium flow into China. Japan reworked it into a military doctrine. It even opened clandestine plots seeking to get Chinese commanders hooked in attempts to dull their fighting spirit. But Japan’s own forces were not immune to the lure of easy drugs. Opium and heroin use became an increasing problem. It reached such worrisome levels that a Japanese military manual included a jingoistic rant. “The use of narcotics is unworthy of a superior race like the Japanese,” it said. “Only inferior races, races that are decadent, like the Chinese, Europeans and the East Indians, are addicted to the use of narcotics. This is why they are destined to become our servants.”
At one point, an odd little man speaking English approached the school where John Hoskin was based. John was the ranking officer, so he was called to meet the curious visitor who called himself Dr. Yoshi. The doctor had studied in the States and returned to Japan before Pearl Harbor. He could not leave once the war began with America. The doctor was now living on a hill outside Osaka and fending for his family with what he could grow in his garden and whatever else he could scrounge. John quizzed the doctor about the opium trade. He seemed well informed, and they struck up a mutually beneficial partnership. The doctor offered information. He got American food and supplies in return. As a bonus, John and some soldiers scared up a turkey on Thanksgiving 1945 and had their meal with Yoshi and his family.
Back in Maine, Harold’s wife was now a single mom living in her childhood home. The baby was called Joann, the name they picked just in case their intuition about a boy was wrong. They had been so sure of a son that Harold and Mary started calling the baby-in-waiting Dick.
Mary Roberta McIntosh was a year ahead of Harold at Houlton High School, where he was the yearbook editor and played trumpet in the band. Harold was considered quite the catch. Yet few of the girls bothered to try to turn his head. It was known to all that Harold was smitten with Mary. “The rest of us didn’t have a chance,” classmate Phyllis Ritchie recalled.
Mary and Harold were married in Tucson in January 1943 just before he was reposted as a flight instructor in Texas. They bought a slightly shabby 1934 Buick and christened it “Elizabeth.” In July they drove into the mountains of New Mexico for a long-belated honeymoon. A newlywed photo shows Mary in a floral dress with her curly chestnut hair styled back in a pleasant tumble. Harold looks sharp in his uniform—green jacket and tan trousers—with a mix of maturity and innocence that brought comparisons with the budding screen idol and fellow New Englander Van Johnson. By the fall, Harold was off to Alaska, and Mary was going in the other direction, to Maine.
Mary wrote letters to Harold about town life and the anecdotes about her pregnancy, such as feeling that first kick. Harold—or Hal, as Mary called him—described life at Ladd and some of his nights out in Fairbanks. He seemed conflicted, though, about being so far from the front lines. He wanted action. But he also was full of warm and fuzzy thoughts about returning home safely to Mary, the expected baby (still called Dick), and his medical studies at Bates College in Maine. “It looks as though Dick will see his proud papa because there is no combat involved in this job,” he wrote on November 6, 1943. “Hal seems to be getting some of the breaks in this war, doesn’t he? Will you be ashamed of me, Mary, if I never get to combat?”
The letter, though, takes a darker turn near the end. Hoskin, like everyone assigned at Ladd, knew that the weather can be just as worthy a foe as any Japanese Zero.
“If I don’t come back . . . I wouldn’t have lived in vain nor wasted my life because I had known you,” he wrote. “The two greatest privileges a man can have is fighting for his wife and family in what he believes is a just cause, regardless of the outcome to himself.”
It was one of the last letters Mary received from Harold. She wrote one December 19—with her baby bump starting to show—that arrived in Alaska days after the crash. In the months to come, she groped for any explanation of his disappearance. The only one she refused to consider was the scenario in which Harold would never return. Could he be in a hospital somewhere, unable to write? Perhaps he was rescued in the wilderness but couldn’t make it back until spring? The image of him suffering haunted her. It was not so different from the anguish felt by Crane, imagining his parents’ grief at the news of their missing son and their unfulfilled yearning to know more.
Strolling in town with baby Joann, Mary would sometimes see trucks pass by with German POWs who were shipped to this far-off corner of Maine. It was among the dozens of POW camps on American soil—holding mostly Germans but some Italians and others—after Britain asked for help in handling a swelling number of captured soldiers.
They were the lucky ones, Mary thought. They were safe even if their families didn’t know it.
The Maine prisoners were, in fact, better off than many. Conditions were easy and food plentiful, not at all like the bleak POW camps in Europe or some hellhole under the control of the Soviets. A U.S. Army airfield in Houlton began receiving German prisoners the summer after Hoskin’s crash. German volunteers had the chance to work picking peas and potatoes or cutting wood for the equivalent of eighty cents a day in chits to be redeemed at the camp canteen. It went a long way. Cigarettes were thirteen cents a pack, beer a nickel.
A German private named Hans Krueger was captured by the D-Day invasion force and eventually sent to Maine. He recalled how the prisoners would wink at the passing young Houlton cuties from the back of an open-back truck with just one guard. Security was so relaxed, Krueger said, that sometimes they would throw pebbles at the guard tower. It could take ten minutes to wake up the sentry. On foggy mornings, “you could have marched out the entire company” before anyone would notice. But why? Nearby Canada was also at war with the Third Reich. And conditions at the camp—with all-you-can-eat meals—were heavenly after the rigors of the front. The whole experience made Krueger, in his words, “pro-American all the way.”
“Hal darling. I wish you were here. I miss you and want you so very much,” Mary wrote in that undelivered December 19 letter just before the
crash. “If you listen real hard, I bet you could hear me say over and over, ‘Hal, darling, I love you with all my heart.’”
There were photos of Harold around the house Mary shared with her mother. Harold, however, was generally off-limits in conversation when Mary was around. Her pain was too deep. As Joann grew up, she wanted to talk about her father, hear stories about him before the war. Mary made it clear that it was asking too much, even from her daughter. Mary would just sob and turn away.
“She couldn’t talk about him,” said Joann. “She would break down. The emotions were that strong, even many, many years after the war. She lost the love of her life.”
At the lab in Hawaii, the cataloged items were assessed one by one in late 2006. The older pocketknife could have been World War II vintage, but gave no direct link to the military or Ladd Field. Same for the keys.
The Hack watch was standard Army issue, getting its nickname from the military term time hack, meaning to mark the present hour and minute. The button cover was certainly Army as well.
The officer’s insignia, however, was the most compelling. Only someone in the cockpit would have had that on their cap: an eagle with olive branches in its right claw and thirteen arrows in its left.
“The material evidence recovered from the B-24D is consistent with military insignia, a style of watch issued by the military . . . and frequently worn by aviators, and personal effects commonly carried by aircrew members during the World War II era,” chief anthropologist Fox wrote in his report. “The U.S. Army Officer’s Cap Insignia is consistent with the rank structure of one of the unaccounted for individuals and the one individual who survived the crash.”
