Vanished (29 page)

Trefalt, Beatrice.
Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950–75
. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Tugwell, Rexford G.
The Democratic Roosevelt: A Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt
. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Walterhouse, Harry F.
A Time to Build: Military Civic Action: Medium for Economic Development and Social Reform
. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1964.

Weber, Austin. “A Historical Perspective.”
Assembly Magazine
, August 1, 2001.

White, T. D., and Pieter A. Folkens.
The Human Bone Manual
. Amsterdam: Elsevier Academic Press, 2005.

Wiarda, Howard J. “The Latin American Development Process and the New Developmental Alternatives: Military ‘Nasserism’ and ‘Dictatorship with Popular Support.’”
The Western Political Quarterly
25, no. 3 (September 1972): 464–90.

Wilson, Peter.
Aku! The History of Tuna Fishing in Hawaii and the Western Pacific
. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011.

Witts, David A.
Forgotten War, Forgiven Guilt
. Las Cruces, NM: Yucca Tree, 2003.

Wright, Derrick.
To the Far Side of Hell: The Battle for Peleliu, 1944
. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. First published 2002 by Crowood.

Zellmer, David.
The Spectator: A World War II Bomber Pilot’s Journal of the Artist as Warrior.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Zuckoff, Mitchell.
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. First published 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf.

The list of sources for this book could fill several volumes. In the interest of concision, I have refrained from listing in the bibliography every letter, interview, trial transcript, and mission report, which number in the thousands. Instead, I cite here those documents on which the book draws most directly. To avoid redundancy, I note the interview date for each person who is quoted at their first appearance in every chapter. Subsequent quotes in the same chapter are drawn from the same interview, unless otherwise noted. In a few cases, as with Pat Scannon, a scene or description may come from dozens of conversations over many years, and the dates cited in such passages refer specifically to the quoted material. Researchers who are interested in learning more about this story should begin at the BentProp website, bentprop.org, and that of the Long Rangers, 307bg.net. However, there is no substitute for the experience of sifting through the reels of footage, stacks of photographs, and mountains of mission documents at the National Archives, their fading yellow pages a last, best glimpse into the world from which our own emerged.

P
ROLOGUE

a rumpled archaeologist
:
From observation. I joined Emery in Palau for the 2008 recovery mission.

they would marvel
:
Interviews with divers, including Andy Baldwin, Rod Atherton, Randy Duncan, Totch Mabry, Paul Wotus, PJ O’Dell, Woody Woodburn, Julius
McManus, Jericho Diego, Cameran Cox, Kenny Bontempo, Nick Zaborski, Josh Lamb, and Mariano Lorde. January–March 2008.

the depths were considered secret
:
Navy divers are careful not to discuss recent depth records. However, since at least the 1970s, the Experimental Diving Unit in Panama City, Florida, has conducted extensive tests on the limit of human endurance. One record, set in 1972, pushed a man to 1,000 feet; another, in 1979, sent a team of divers in a simulation tank to the depth equivalent of 1,800 feet. These dives required two and three weeks of decompression, respectively.

Air Force historians trained to identify
:
Life-support investigators play a critical role in crash identification. Often, by the time the military locates a missing airplane, the wreckage has been salvaged by locals for scrap metal, and what remains is difficult even to recognize as a plane.

sometimes even the gender or ethnicity
:
The skeletal variation by gender, region, and ethnicity is widely documented but still open to some debate. Orlando M. Gutiérrez has shown that these differences are apparent at a young age, suggesting a hereditary basis, while Anne Fausto-Sterling has argued that such discrepancies are mostly a product of environmental conditions. Gutiérrez, 347; Fausto-Sterling, 657.

healing properties of superoxygenated fields
:
The subdiscipline of hyperbaric medicine was first developed to address decompression sickness among divers. In recent years, studies have suggested a wider range of applications, including the treatment of diabetic foot wounds, cerebral palsy, and infection by flesh-eating bacteria. Barnes, 188; James, 2052; Escobar, 437.

rose ten thousand feet from the seafloor
:
This is a conservative figure. The shallow, western side of the archipelago averages about ten thousand feet, but water to the east, in the Palau trench, is much deeper—approaching twenty-six thousand feet in some areas. Kobayashi, 1303.

The people did not have a creation story; they had many
:
The first legend described here is that of Chuab; the second is that of Miladeldil. There is also a creation story about a giant exploding clam, and another about a woman who formed the northern islands with a hibiscus stick and a coconut shell.

Many of the island myths featured women
:
Such as the legend of the old woman who caught fish in her breadfruit tree, the woman who taught the islanders about natural childbirth, and the women who turned into mermaids. The Japanese occupation of Palau in the early twentieth century diminished some matrilineal tradition, but women continue to elect tribal chiefs and inherit family titles and land. Petersen, 68; Marck, 345.

a special breed of jellyfish
:
The lake, Ongeim’l Tketau, is home to a unique subspecies of the spotted jellyfish, which biologist Michael Dawson has proposed to name
Mastigias papua etpisoni
,
after former Palauan president Ngiratkel Etpison. Dawson, 689.

C
HAPTER
O
NE
: R
UMORS

“it seemed like he never would”
:
Interview with Nancy Doyle, March 17, 2008.

From the first day of practice
:
According to records at Texas Tech, Tommy Doyle and Dave Parks each made four touchdown receptions in the 1963 season. The three that Tommy caught against Kansas State are listed as both a school and a conference record. Parks became the first overall selection in the 1964 draft, chosen by the 49ers; the following year, Anderson was the seventh overall selection—his $600,000 contract the largest in football history.

“I was just born crooked”
:
Interview with Casey Doyle, April 25, 2009.

“At last I can write a few lines”
:
Letter from Jimmie Doyle to Myrle Doyle, May 28, 1944.

“My Precious, sure am ready for bed tonight”
:
Letter from Jimmie Doyle to Myrle Doyle, May 30, 1944.

“Darling
 . . .
there aren’t any words”
:
Letter from Jimmie Doyle to Myrle Doyle, May 31, 1944.

“It gives me a feeling of serenity”
:
Letter from Jimmie Doyle to Myrle Doyle, July 2, 1944.

“I just couldn’t look at them”
:
Interview with Tommy Doyle, March 17, 2008.

“I was against my mother bringing all this up”
:
Interview with Casey Doyle, April 25, 2009.

a fire in Saint Louis
:
The fire, on July 12, 1973, at the National Personnel Records Center in Saint Louis, burned for more than four days and took forty-two fire districts to extinguish. Some sixteen million to eighteen million military personnel records were destroyed.

“I can’t tell you any details”
:
Letter from Jimmie Doyle to Myrle Doyle, June 25, 1944.

“I have talked to some of the fellows”
:
Letter from Lloyd Waits to Myrle Doyle, December 11, 1944.

“the Indiana Jones of military archaeology”
:
Parade
magazine, May 28, 2000: 6.

C
HAPTER
T
WO
: W
RECKAGE

his wife, Susan, had long since
:
Interview with Susan Scannon, July 14, 2011.

working for the king’s hospital
:
Lambert conducted clinical research at the King Faisal hospital in Riyadh until 1983, when he accepted a position at a World Health Organization laboratory in Lebanon. “The day I was to get on the plane to train for the Lebanon job, the Marine barracks was blown up in Beirut. So they canceled that. Then they wanted me to go to Mogadishu, to run a microbiology clinical lab for the UN. Mogadishu was not a very attractive place, and it was getting worse, so I opted out and took a job at Xoma.” Interview with Chip Lambert, August 12, 2012.

There was gold on the islands
:
The story of Yamashita’s gold is debated everywhere it is discussed, but this much is certain. In 1988, Rogelio Roxas filed suit against Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in Hawaii state court, claiming that he’d found the gold in 1971 and the Marcos family had, in legal jargon, “converted” the treasure to themselves. In 1996, a jury found in favor of Roxas, awarding him $22 billion, the largest judgment of its kind in history. In 1998, the Hawaii Supreme Court affirmed the verdict, concluding “there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s determination that Roxas found the treasure” and “there was sufficient evidence to support the jury’s special finding that Ferdinand converted the treasure that Roxas found.” In 2006, the conclusion was affirmed yet again by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which wrote, “The Yamashita Treasure was discovered by Roxas and stolen from Roxas by Marcos’s men.” How much of the Yamashita treasure is still buried, and where, no one knows.
Roxas and the Golden Budha Corporation v. Ferdinand E. Marcos and Imelda Marcos
, Supreme Court of Hawaii: 89 Hawaii 91, 969 P.2d 1209, filed November 17, 1998;
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith, Inc. v. ENC Corporation
, United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit: 464 F. 3d 885, filed May 9, 2006.

Lambert’s team had come across photos
:
Dan Bailey obtained the photos at a book-signing event in Davis, California, where he happened to have a table near Bush’s biographer, Robert Stinnett. “He’s looking over at my book, and I’m looking over at his book, and he said, ‘You know, I have some information you might find interesting—have you seen these photos before?’” Interview with Dan Bailey, August 15, 2012.

“What we wanted to do”
:
Interview with Chip Lambert, August 12, 2012.

scouring the continental shelf for abalone
:
Snail diving preoccupies a small but fervent community, among whom Buller is considered one of the best. He has recovered more than two hundred abalone larger than ten inches.

the gear shaft of a sunken destroyer
:
Bailey and the Lamberts discovered the Japanese destroyer
Samidare
beside the Ngaruangel reef in 1990. Bailey, 194.

“strong circumstantial evidence”
:
The article relied heavily on such innuendo, acknowledging at one point, “The document, as incriminating as it appears to be, doesn’t constitute irrefutable proof of guilt. Bush may have a convincing explanation.” Hertsgaard, 44.

“the trawler sank within five minutes”
:
Mission Report, VT-51, Air Group 51, Task Force 58, July 25, 1944.

a gunner on the mission, who said he couldn’t remember
:
By 2011, the author of the
Harper’s
story took a similar position himself. When asked if the abundant munitions on the ship changed his reading of the mission report, he replied, “I don’t recall the details well enough to offer any opinion that could be helpful.” Written exchange with Mark Hertsgaard, June 2, 2011.

“If Chip wanted him along”
:
Interview with Chip Lambert, August 12, 2012.

“He didn’t really contribute”
:
Interview with Dave Buller, August 29, 2011.

“Hey!” he cried out to Buller
:
Interview with Chip Lambert, August 12, 2012; interview with Dave Buller, August 29, 2011.

None of them doubted
:
Interview with Pat Scannon, December 1, 2009; interview with Dave Buller, August 29, 2011; interview with Chip and Pam Lambert, August 12, 2012; interview with Dan Bailey, August 15, 2012.

“This was a four-engine plane”
:
Drawn from numerous interviews with Pat and Susan Scannon, as well as Scannon Logs, Book 1.

there wasn’t much record of the air campaign
:
There still isn’t. Although a handful of books have appeared over the last decade, few of them mention the Thirteenth Air Force, which flew the longest missions of the campaign and wrought the most damage on Palau. For example, the 2010 book
Whirlwind: The Air War against Japan, 1942–1945
, refers to the Thirteenth only once, as the “least known of all the air forces that fought Japan.” Tillman, 237.

“The bloody, grinding warfare”
:
Costello, 497.

“the majority of above-ground buildings”
:
Bailey, 117.

“All of a sudden, he’s calling all these old guys”
:
Interview with Susan Scannon, July 14, 2011.

Everything Scannon could find out
:
In time, he would discover four additional B-24 crashes within a thirty-mile radius. See Chapter 13.

“
This is the opening of my log”
:
Scannon Logs, Book 1, 3.

“Plane down here”
:
Missing Air Crew Report #8641, September 2, 1944.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE
: A
IRMEN

“Will the B-24 Ever Replace the Airplane”
:
Bowman, 113.

one B-24 . . . on a secret photographic mission
:
Two crew members died in the attack, and have been memorialized by the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument. “These airmen,” the text notes, “arrived in Hawaii two days prior to the attack to outfit their plane for a secret photo mission. They were killed on the ground and their B-24 was destroyed near Hangar 15.” The wreckage of that plane is also pictured in Arakaki and Kuborn, 67.

“the armament and armor of the B-24 were inadequate”
:
Letter from Jimmy Doolittle to Lieutenant General Barney M. Giles, Army Air Forces chief of air staff, January 25, 1945. Johnsen, 54.

“no curtailment”
:
Estimated Refinery Output Analysis, Energy Oil Committee, Western Axis Subcommittee, September 10, 1943.

one of the largest imperia
:
The size of an empire can be measured many ways. By population, Japan’s empire was about the fifth largest in history, with 135 million subjects. By area, it was the thirteenth largest, with 2.8 million square miles—or twice the territory of Nazi Germany at its peak.

The American conquest of the West
:
See, for example, the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, about which President Martin Van Buren remarked, “No state can achieve proper culture, civilization, and progress in safety as along as Indians are permitted to remain.” Mankiller, 93.

more than four hundred people per square mile
:
With sixty million people spread across 142,270 square miles, Japan’s population density was about twelve times that of the United States. US Census Bureau, 1930. Johnson, 189.