Vanished (23 page)

For Belcher, diving on the 453 wasn’t negotiable. It was the best way to confirm that the wreckage was really a B-24, and to see if there were any signs of human remains on board. It was also the best way to make sure that Scannon had not gone inside the fuselage or, in the thrill of discovery, handled any pieces. Finally, it was a virgin wreck—unseen by human eyes since the day it plunged from the sky. There was no way Belcher was going home without a look.

On the morning of January 30, he motored to the site with Scannon. As they approached the coral, he was struck by the color of the water. The outgoing tide pulled sedimentary debris from the mangrove swamps nearby, creating an opaque swirl of mud and silt. “It’s just murky,” Belcher recalled, “and you can’t see anything from the surface, but then you drop in and it’s just amazing. About thirty feet down—
boom
—there’s a big propeller stuck in the side of the coral. And then down some more—
boom
—there’s the rest.”

Belcher began to explore the site, making a mental inventory of the wreckage. He noted each fragment buried in the coral—the turret guns, the cockpit seats, the engine blocks, the flight deck pedestal, the shattered pieces of aluminum tumbling down the underwater hillside toward the sandy flats below. But underneath his scientific detachment, he felt the pure rush of discovery. Nothing, not even the mile-long underwater caves he had traversed or the experience of breathing trimix gas at four hundred feet, compared to the B-24. It was the whole front end of a World War II bomber separated into a dozen large pieces, and resting unseen, untouched, on the seafloor since the day it disappeared—every strut of steel, every scrap
of fabric, every .50 caliber shell a testimony to the presence of the men inside.

“It was,” Bill Belcher said, “the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen.”

While Belcher examined the wreckage with Scannon and the BentProp team, Maldangesang drifted off alone. A lifelong diver, he had mastered the art of conserving air, and long after the rest of the team had surfaced, he was still underwater. When he finally came up, he shouted, “
What a lucky day
!”

Scannon turned and saw on Maldangesang’s face a grin that he would never forget.

“I thought it was a rock!” Maldangesang shouted. “It’s huge and long! It’s the tail and the body!”

Powers gasped. Joyce felt the hair stand up on his arms. Belcher and Scannon scrambled back into their gear to drop in, swimming around the coral head with Maldangesang and plunging to the bottom, where the eighty-foot tail of the plane lay perfectly preserved, leaning against the sloping hill with debris spilling from the windows—camera lenses from the aerial photographer, oxygen bottles, wires and tubing, and piles of .50 caliber ammunition. On the side, the waist gunner’s window yawned open, and Scannon swam over to peek inside. In the shadows, he could just make out a flicker of movement and he strained his eyes for a better look. Long, thin streamers fluttered in the water, but what could they be? Dock lines abandoned by a passing ship? Wire so old that it had become loose as twine? Then he realized: Parachute shrouds. Not the tiny, synthetic lines he’d used at SkyDance. The old, heavy kind from the war.

Scannon swam around the plane and pushed his head through an opening on the bottom. He strained his eyes for a closer look at the lines rippling in the darkness. He traced them back to a common point deep in the fuselage, where a single deployed parachute fluttered in the water. But there was no harness. If it had been attached to a man, the man was gone.

That night, Scannon fought the urge to call Tommy Doyle. He had promised Belcher and the lab that he would keep his distance from the
families, but every instinct in his body pushed him to pick up the phone. On the other side of Koror, Belcher was struggling, too. His supervisors in Hawaii were furious that he’d been down to see the plane without approval, and they were even more irate that BentProp had posted news of the discovery online—describing Belcher’s visit, Arnett’s name, and the tail number 453.

In the days to come, Belcher and Scannon would commiserate about the stringent military rules, as Belcher wrestled with the disapproval of his command, threatening at one point to quit. But in the end, each man would acquiesce to the protocol of the lab. The most important thing for each of them was to see the lost airmen brought home. It would be a massive undertaking for Eric Emery’s new underwater program. A small fighter in shallow water would have made an easier target. For the B-24, a complete recovery might cost more than $1 million, and might require dozens of men to work for months, even years. To convince the command that the project was worth it, they would have to apply just the right mix of deference and pressure.

Scannon quietly removed the references to Arnett and Belcher from the BentProp website, leaving only a vague mention of the “four-engine bomber.” As he returned to California, he watched the phone, wondering if the Doyles had seen the earlier version. But the phone didn’t ring, and Scannon had promised not to call the Doyles himself. He returned to his office at Xoma, while in Hawaii, Bill Belcher resumed his duties at the lab—determined to pull every string, and push every button, until Eric Emery went to Palau.

FALLOUT

T
he loss of any crew cast a pall on the Long Rangers, but the casualties in Palau were stunning. In a single week of missions, the unit had lost more than fifty men. It was the
third-bloodiest week
since the start of the war, and for the new commander of the 424th Squadron, Jack Vanderpoel, the first combat losses.

For all his exuberance and bravado, Vanderpoel took those losses hard. Those who knew the young captain say that he retreated to his private quarters to anguish over the letters home. It was one thing to face the artillery in his own cockpit, or even to watch a plane go down in the adrenalized rush of combat. It was something else to linger on the loss during a quiet moment, and to contemplate in writing the devastation it would mean at home. The vanishing of a single plane in the Pacific sent ripples to the far side of the world, and for Vanderpoel it was important to
recognize each lost man as a man. When he didn’t know the crew members well, he would circulate through the camp, asking questions about their backgrounds and their interests before he sat down to write. “
My father didn’t talk much
about the war, but the one thing he talked about was the difficulty of those letters,” his son, Eric Vanderpoel, recalled. “He said it was easier to write the officers’ families, because he knew who they were. But he couldn’t know all the enlisted men, and that bothered him. He said he worked hard going to the tents and talking to the mates of the guys who were lost, so he would have something meaningful to write.”

As September passed, Vanderpoel composed his first letters to the Big Stoop families. “Dear Mrs. Moore,” he wrote to Johnny’s wife, Katherine. “
It is my regrettable duty
to inform you that your husband has been reported as ‘Missing in Action’ on 1 September 1944. On a scheduled combat strike mission in the Southwest Pacific Area, the plane of which your husband was Assistant Radio Operator/Gunner was hit in the left wing by two direct heavy anti-aircraft bursts while over the target, causing one of the engines to burst into flames. Two men parachuted out, and then the airplane snapped in two and crashed into the water. Planes flying with the ship dropped down to a low level and searched the area without results. Your husband was a new member in our squadron, but his friendly manner won him many friends and his loss is deeply regretted by the entire squadron.”

While Vanderpoel wrote the other families, Mario Campora walked the camp on Wakde in a daze. As a photographer, he was not formally a member of any crew, but he thought of himself as one of the Big Stoop boys. They had invited him to join their crew photo, and he kept a copy of it in his tent. Now the photo served only as a reminder that his best friends on the island were gone, and that, if he hadn’t been sidelined by a fever, he would be gone as well.
He promised himself
that when the war was over and he was back home in western Massachusetts, he’d save money for as long as it took to visit their families around the country.

The Big Stoop tent on Wakde sat empty until the mortuary men came
to collect belongings—sorting through duffel bags to gather combs and brushes and souvenirs, deciding what to save, send home, or destroy. There were no hard rules for those decisions, and the packages that began to arrive in Ohio, Texas, Arkansas, and New York said as much about the man who mailed them as the man whose belongings were inside. There was no way to know, for example, the special meaning that Jimmie and Johnny attached to the matching shells they had collected on Los Negros six weeks earlier at low tide. Nor was there any way for Myrle and Katherine to know that the shells were missing. Like so many things, the shells had meaning only to the boys who found them, and the meaning, with the boys, was gone.

At home in Marlboro, New York, Diane Goulding was coming back from a picnic with Ted Junior when the telegram arrived. She read it once and stumbled into her room, where she stayed for weeks, raging and crying while the family tended little Ted. “
I won’t say she abandoned the baby
,” her brother, Paul Graziosi, said. “But she stayed in that room, it seemed, forever. She never smiled, she never laughed, she didn’t even wear her glasses if she came out of the room and went to the bathroom, which was an outhouse. I think she didn’t want to see the world. We took care of the baby.”

In her room, Diane was struck by how little she knew of Ted, how little time she’d had to get to know him. She knew his father had come to the United States from England in about 1910, and two years later, had sent for his mother and siblings to
travel aboard the
Titanic
, and she knew that when the ship went down, he wore a black armband for weeks before a letter came to let him know they’d booked a different ship. She knew that, by the time Ted was born a decade later, the home was drowning in conflict, as his father drank and fought with his mother and took out his anger on the kids. But Diane scarcely knew Ted’s parents herself. She knew none of the Goulding family in England, and had no idea whether any of them would want to be part of Ted Junior’s life. Now it was too late to ask—that, or anything else.

Or was it? Secretly Diane had a nagging feeling that Ted wasn’t really gone. It was crazy, she knew, but there it was. Some combination of instinct and faith told her that he was alive. Lost, maybe, or captured, or sick, or perhaps it was amnesia. Over the next three decades, she followed every scrap of news from the Pacific for a sign of Ted. Each time a Japanese soldier emerged from a jungle hideaway in the 1950s and ’60s, she would picture Ted coming out from his own cave one day, or being released by his captors, and part of her grieved at the thought that he might be in trouble, while another part smiled at the thought that he might come home. In the years to come, she would remarry and begin a new family with three daughters, but when that marriage grew rocky, Ted Junior left home and rarely came back to Marlboro. Then Diane’s second husband died, and she was alone again, alone with the undying faith that Ted was still alive. Late in life, she would say, with tears streaming down her face, “I always thought he might come home.
I thought he had amnesia
. I thought he was going to remember who he was.”

At night, Diane wrote to the other families of the crew, like Jack Arnett’s mother, Dessie, and Jimmie’s and Johnny’s wives. She wrote to the Yoh family in Ohio, and the Schumacher family in Minnesota. To Myrle Doyle, she wrote, “I thought I’d just offer my sympathies and I know how you must feel.
Everything is so uncertain
, one doesn’t know what to think. All we can do is to hope and pray we’ll hear good news soon of our loved ones.”

Diane’s letters became a kind of a life raft for Katherine Moore as the autumn rains in Arkansas gave way to winter and a spring flood. “
I got another letter from Diane
,” Katherine wrote to Myrle. “She writes often. I don’t know what I’d do without you and your letters. They have helped me over some rough spots.”

In their letters, the families searched one another for hope, asking what the lost men had said about the war, what news the Army had sent, and what personal effects they’d received. Katherine had opened the package to find just two bundles of her own letters to Johnny, his fountain pen,
his pipe, and a pair of swimming trunks. When Myrle wrote to say that she’d received Jimmie’s hat and clothes and assorted trinkets, Katherine wrote back, “I should say,
you did get more of Jimmie’s things
back than I got of Johnny’s. I know Johnny must have surely had other things. I guess though, they have so many things to attend to like that, that they couldn’t possibly keep everything straight.” Even Katherine’s copy of the crew photo was beginning to rip and disintegrate from her tears. “If you have any copies made from yours,” she wrote to Myrle, “please have an extra one made for me and tell me how much it costs.” When the photos and letters weren’t enough, Katherine drove to Texas to spend a week with Myrle and Tommy. Then she decided to stay for good.

Back in Arkansas, Johnny’s sister Melba moved in with their parents. Her mother had called in desperation, saying, “Melba, your dad’s gone crazy,” and when Melba arrived at the house she found John Senior in a catatonic state, crouched up in his chair as if bracing for impact. After eighteen years of fishing and hunting with Johnny, the thought of a lifetime without his son was too much to bear. As the weeks passed, he refused to eat, couldn’t sleep, and his body began to fail. A doctor prescribed anxiety medicine, but it made little difference. Finally his eyes did what his heart could not, and John Moore went blind. “
Mama said she lost them both
,” Melba recalled. Every time Melba closed her own eyes, she saw Johnny standing on the porch with that wild fear, whispering, “I don’t think I’m ever going to see you again.”

In the South Pacific, Jack Arnett’s brother Marvin struggled with the news. He was a pilot like Jack, but in the Navy’s Air Transport Service, flying a route between island bases. One day, on a flight through the Caroline Islands,
he made a detour over Palau
, swooping low to look down for a sign of Jack on the islands. Crazy, he thought. But he couldn’t help it. A few weeks later, he did it again. Then Marvin Arnett was making detours all the time.

As the years passed, Mario Campora returned to western Massachusetts—with a burgeoning family, and a job running a gas station, and a life that left little time or money for cross-country trips. Near the end of his life in 2007, he confided to his family that he had always been haunted by the loss of the Big Stoop crew, and by his own broken promise to offer comfort to their families. “
That was his biggest regret
,” his daughter, Cindy, said, her own voice breaking. “He always thought he should have found a way.” And a few miles east, in the hills of Amesbury, Norman Coorssen tried to return to the life he’d left behind. But nothing, including Coorssen, was the same.

He’d waited a month after the crash to fly again, boarding a plane on October 3 to attack the oil refineries at Balikpapan. It was one of the most heavily defended Japanese positions in the South Pacific, and every man on the mission expected heavy losses. “
It is doubtful that a more dangerous
, grueling, and heart-breaking mission was ever flown in any theater of the war than the October 3, 1944, raid by the 307th to Balikpapan,” the historian Sam Britt wrote. By the end of that day, the Long Rangers would return with seventy airmen missing and their fleet in tatters.

For Coorssen, the mission also had a personal resonance: he was scheduled to fly with Jack Arnett’s most recent crew. Whatever had brought on the crew change of September 1, it was echoed a month later on the mission to Balikpapan: the pilot who had lost his men, with the men who’d lost their pilot.

Yet they never finished the mission. A few minutes after takeoff Coorssen turned back. “
This turn back
,” the mission report explained, “was made due to pilot illness and failure of the auto-pilot.” Squadron commander Jack Vanderpoel never believed that explanation. Sixty years later, he was still fuming. At a Long Ranger reunion in August 2004, just six months after Scannon’s discovery of the wreckage, Vanderpoel sat down with Greg Babinski, whose father had flown with Arnett that summer and with Coorssen on the October 3 mission. Babinski knew little
about his father’s war, and even less about Arnett or Coorssen. But he was compiling interviews to piece together his father’s story. As he and Vanderpoel sat together in a booth at Rachel’s restaurant in Nashville, Babinski handed Vanderpoel a list of names he’d seen on mission rosters with his father. Vanderpoel scrolled down the list, noting the names he remembered. When he got to Coorssen’s name, Vanderpoel stopped and his face darkened. “His opinion,” Babinski said later, “was that Coorssen turned back, not because of mechanical problems, but because
he lost his nerve
.” In his notes, Babinski wrote, “Coorssen was a coward.” They were Vanderpoel’s exact words.

For Coorssen’s family in Amesbury, the man who returned home from the war was unmistakably changed. The carefree kid who had laughed his way through college was gone, replaced by a grim figure who rarely smiled. He would live out the next forty years of his life in a routine so exacting that even his close relatives found it baffling. “
He wore the same outfit
every day,” his nephew, Gary Coorssen, said. “A gray suit, white shirt, and a maroon tie and socks.” He also drove the same car, buying a new model every year. “
Always blue, always a Pontiac
, always a sedan,” his sister-in-law, Helen Coorssen, said. Each morning, he would disappear into his office at the family business, whiling away the afternoon on Marlboros and nips of scotch. In the evening, Helen said, “you could tell what time of day it was when he would drive through town on his way home.” At home, “the house was so meticulous, you could eat off the basement floor,” Gary added. But Norman Coorssen seemed to take little joy from his ritual existence. “I don’t recall him ever laughing,” Gary said. “I can’t even picture him with a smile.” Once in a while, a family member would press for an explanation. “Norman,” his brother George would say, “tell me what happened in the war.” Norman would only frown and mutter, “I don’t want to talk about it.” In forty years, he never did.