Vanished (16 page)

To anyone else, Scannon’s spontaneous obsession with the lost men could seem peculiar, even bizarre. He carried no visible tether to his military past. But to Scannon, the work in Palau felt like the solution to a lifelong conundrum. It was a way to focus his passion for science on something larger than his own company, and to honor the military tradition in his family without abandoning his sense of self. “I had always wanted to be a civilian, but my history brought me back to the military,” he said. “What I’ve found is that I
love working with the military. I just don’t want to work for them.”

WASTELAND

A
s Franklin Roosevelt steamed away from his meeting with Nimitz and MacArthur, the strategy for the war was settled, but it remained top secret. In fact, Roosevelt’s trip itself was secret. Though the president had met with reporters on the dock and at the Holmes mansion, the interviews were under embargo until his return to Washington, DC. Other than MacArthur, Nimitz, and a few senior commanders, no one in the US military knew which way the war was turning.

Certainly the men on the ground didn’t know. In the Central Pacific, they drove onward through Tinian and Guam, while in the South Pacific, MacArthur pushed across the rim of New Guinea—with the Long Rangers bridging the distance between them. Some days, they flew north to cover Nimitz; others, they zipped west to back MacArthur.

One rainy afternoon at the end of July, Ted Goulding kicked about the
Big Stoop tent aimlessly. It was his day off, and Ted hated those. Every successful mission counted toward the end of his tour, and the day he finished fifty, he would go home. To speed things up, he’d volunteered to fly as a substitute for any crew with a sick man, but so far, no luck. So he was in the tent. Listening to the rain patter on the flysheet, he tried to imagine life in New York, the summer heat fading into autumn’s descent, the snow arriving soon to blanket the banks of the Hudson, and he picked up a sheet of paper to write Diane’s parents with a request.

“Hey folks,” he began. “
Here I am at last
. How is everything at home? How is Dee and our son Teddy? Please take good care of them for me because I will be home pretty soon. I wish this whole mess was over so that we could all come home. . . . There are only a few more months left of warm weather, then it will get cold. Could you look in a catalogue and find some warm clothing for Dee and Ted? Don’t worry about the money because I will send it to you. Get some nice warm little shirts, hats, mittens, and sox for Teddy, and get Dee some warm slacks, shoes, sox, gloves, and undies and such. Send me the list of things and the total amount, and I will send you the money. That way Dee won’t have to use up the money she is trying to save. Keep all this to yourself until you get the stuff and then give it to Dee and tell her that I didn’t even forget about the weather at home. I want them to be warm and healthy. . . . In other words, please make sure that Dee and Ted have everything they want.”

When the sun returned a few days later, Ted pulled his cot outside and stretched out below the tropical glare, baking the cold from his bones, but after a few minutes, Jimmie Doyle rousted him for a swim. They ambled toward the shoreline and tumbled through the rough surf. As evening fell, they returned to their bunks and Jimmie wrote to Myrle, “
We sure got dunked
a lot, and both of us are a little red!”

Since the mix-up over Crum’s girlfriend, Jimmie and Myrle had settled back into an easy rapport. Myrle reported from Lamesa with the weather, the gossip, the progress of crops, and the comings and goings of friends, while Jimmie soaked up each detail, combing through the newspapers
she sent for the most arcane trivia. “
I have read everything in the paper
, even the want ads,” he wrote, noting, “Lee Barron has a lot on 4th and Miller for sale. What sort of place is it, and is it worth what he asks? You know the place, just north of the old lady’s where I built the fish pond? I think there used to be a couple of houses there. Why not take a look at it, and if it’s worth the price, maybe we can arrange for the money. What do you think?”

When Myrle sent a copy of the book
Big Spring
, a collection of folksy tales from the town where her sister lived, Jimmie grew homesick reading lines like “
Why, on a clear day
, you can stand on top one of these little hills around Big Spring and see to hell and gone, way over to Lamesa.” He confessed to Myrle in a letter, “
Sorta got the blues in a way
. I have been reading the book, and it brought back everyone so plain. I can just see the whole country, and boy, that country sure has a hold on me. Those plains would sure be a welcome sight to Jim.”

Always, Jimmie asked about family. Growing up with just his father, he’d taken to calling Myrle’s parents “Mother” and “Dad,” and he traded letters with each. When Myrle’s mother wrote that one of her other daughters, Dorothy, was pregnant and moving to a new farm with her husband, Tracy, Jimmie wrote to Myrle for specifics. “
Where is this farm of Tracy’s
?” he asked. “Mother said they had a pretty nice place, but she didn’t give any details.” When two weeks passed and he still hadn’t heard more, he brought it up again. “I have heard about Tracy and Dorothy’s farm,” he wrote, “but no one has ever said a word about where it is. Is it close to Sparenberg, or near town? And how are they doing with it?”

Jimmie had a special fondness for Myrle’s sister Gladys, whose broad, round face was perpetually lit up with glee. Back in Texas, she and Jimmie were forever prodding and teasing each other, and Jimmie tried to keep the spirit of the relationship alive in his letters. “
Tell Gladys it’s a good thing
that her boyfriend is in Italy instead of here,” he wrote to Myrle. “Because she would probably lose him to a native woman. The native
women don’t wear any clothes from the knees down, nor from the waist up.” When Myrle wrote back that Gladys had taken a job in the egg dehydrating plant, making military rations, he wrote, “Tell Gladys to leave just a little more taste in those eggs when she dries them.” But when Myrle replied that she was taking a job alongside Gladys at the plant, he responded with uncharacteristic worry. “Please don’t hurt yourself,” he wrote, “for the money isn’t anything compared to your health. I know you feel better when you are working, and you’re awful sweet about it, but please take care of yourself.”

While Myrle’s letters always seemed to brighten Jimmie’s day, Johnny’s letters from Katherine often had the opposite effect. Each time he received one, he would tear it open eagerly, skimming through the pages in search of news that she was pregnant. Nearly three months had passed since they said good-bye, and Johnny could hardly stand waiting for the good news. So far, it hadn’t come. In fact, Katherine sent confusing signals, suggesting in one letter that she was pretty sure she was pregnant, then wondering in the next why she wasn’t. “
She keeps him in a state
,” Jimmie wrote to Myrle. “He will get a letter saying she is, then the next day, he’ll get one saying she isn’t, so he is on needles and pins about it. But that is one of their worries we can’t do anything about. I talk to him, and try to help him all I can, but I feel sorry for him. I know just how he feels, for I went through the same experience. Remember?”

Johnny also had a tendency to write Katherine when he was lonely. His frustration would bleed onto the pages, and throw Katherine into a panic. Jimmie told Johnny to knock it off.
Put on your best face
, he said.
The letters are for her, not you.
But Johnny seemed incapable of holding the loneliness in. “
When he gets the blues
,” Jimmie confided to Myrle, “he sits down and takes it out on her, and it doesn’t do a bit of good. It must make her feel worse. The best thing he could do would be to just try to keep from getting low, and when he does, just sweat it out.” When Johnny’s sister Mary wrote to let him know that Katherine was keeping a secret
herself, and had been fighting an infection for several weeks, it only made his depression worse. He wrote to Mary, “
Six months ago I got married
. Now I’m thousands of miles from my wife. What a life.”

The one thing airmen could not discuss in their letters was the war. Each time they pushed an envelope into the postal drop on base, they knew it would be opened and read by a censor, who would use a pair of scissors to snip out any explicit reference to the unit, the islands, the mission, or the enemy. How much else the censor read was anyone’s guess; each man was left to imagine for himself which of the officers he encountered on the base knew
the most intimate details of his life
. “
The officers that censor our mail
are with us in our same squadron,” Ted Goulding wrote to Diane. “They aren’t supposed to mention anything they have read, or whose mail they have read, but there is always that feeling in our hearts and minds.”

Once in a while, an errant mention of the war would slip past the censors, as when Johnny wrote to his brother-in-law in early August, “
You should have seen us bombing
yesterday, Gilbert! We really blasted the hell out of things!” Or when Jimmie wrote to Myrle the same day, “
I have shot down one Jap ship
so far. I can’t say where or when,” and praised his crew: “All the guys are swell, and I couldn’t ask for a better bunch. We have the best pilot of the war.” To his sister Mary, Johnny wrote, “
Our pilot told us
if there was anything on the ship we wanted to learn to do, to tell him. So I told him I wanted to fly it. He’s gonna teach me!”

But what Johnny couldn’t know as he finished that letter was that hours earlier the news of Roosevelt’s trip to Hawaii had broken in the US news. The cover of the
New York Times
that day showed a photo of Roosevelt, MacArthur, and Nimitz sitting on the deck of the USS
Baltimore
in Hawaii, beside the headline “
Roosevelt and Leaders Map Plans
for Return to the Philippines; A Job for M’Arthur.”

For the first time, the path ahead was clear. If the president was sending MacArthur to the Philippines, he would have to get through Palau. That meant the Long Rangers would be packing up soon and leaving
Camp De Luxe for a new base, six hundred miles to the west and right on the front lines of war.

—

T
HE ISLAND OF
N
EW
G
UINEA
stretches across the South Pacific like a lid hovering over Australia. It is the second-largest island on earth, and in 1944, it was one of the most politically fractured. At the western end, it lay deep in Japanese territory, almost to the oil refineries of Balikpapan, while the eastern end was just as firmly in Allied hands, reaching to the doorway of the Solomon Islands. In between, the wild core of the island was a swirl of impenetrable jungle, with soaring mountains, yawning canyons, and verdant forests filled with so many native tribes that
some eight hundred languages
were spoken.

For months, MacArthur’s troops on New Guinea had been fighting their way through the jungle, trying to drive the Japanese west, while Australian forces pressed up from the south. But the jungle did not allow for clean dividing lines. The same folds and pockets that kept native tribes isolated now became
sprinkled with Japanese holdouts
, some of them so deeply naturalized into the landscape that they lost all contact with the imperial command. A few would remain in hiding for decades, trading gunfire with anyone who approached.

On Los Negros, the Long Rangers had been tucked against the safest part of New Guinea; to reach Palau, they would have to move west to the front line.

The satellite islands of northern New Guinea appeared inconsequential on a map, with exotic names like Numfoor, Biak, Owi, and Wakde. But to the Army Air Forces’ command, those islands were the great prize of the New Guinea campaign. They had been seized by MacArthur’s forces over three months of fighting, and they offered American fliers some of the only protected airstrips in the region—a place to stop, regroup, refuel, and even repair their ships on long South Pacific missions.

One of the first US pilots to land on those islands was Charles
Lindbergh, whose visits to Wakde Island in particular marked a decisive moment in the war.

Lindbergh had first landed in the Pacific in late April, just as Sadae Inoue reached Palau and the Big Stoop boys finished in Tonopah. At forty-two, Lindbergh was still lean and sinewy with a cocksure smile, and he saw his trip to the Pacific as the culmination of a personal penance. Three years earlier, he’d resigned his officer’s commission in the Air Corps to protest the European war, and he’d been trying ever since to regain his military standing—first by petitioning to have his rank as a colonel reinstated, and when that didn’t work, traveling to US military bases to test and evaluate new craft. He had accepted an advisory position at Willow Run on the condition that his salary be $
666.66 a month
, the same amount he would have earned as a colonel in the war, and he’d even volunteered as a
human test subject at the Mayo Clinic
to examine the effects of altitude on the human brain.

For many Americans, this was still not enough to redeem Lindbergh’s reputation. He was widely regarded as a racist, an anti-Semite, and a promoter of eugenics, whom even Franklin Roosevelt considered
a “loyal friend of Hitler
.” Yet to the pilots he visited on US bases, his arrival brought a special kind of joy. War had a way of making ideology seem quaint in the face of survival, and here was the world’s most famous pilot, quite possibly its best, ready to offer advice on the very aircraft to which they entrusted their lives each day. The chance to fly alongside Lindbergh, and learn from him, was irresistible. For Lindbergh, it was a way to prove his fealty to the American cause, and to taste the action.