Vanished (26 page)

As Tommy spoke with other Big Stoop families, he learned about Johnny Moore’s father, gone blind and mute from grief, and he called Johnny’s wife, Katherine, in the final years of her life, and the brothers of Earl Yoh in Ohio. For the first time, Tommy found himself offering answers, rather than questions. In the summer of 2006, he flew to another Long Ranger reunion in Bellevue, Washington, where he met Diane Goulding in person for the first time. Sitting at the dinner table with Diane, her son, Ted Junior, and his wife, Bev, the Doyles handed an envelope to Diane. Inside was a letter she had written to Tommy’s mom six decades earlier.

Diane opened the envelope and removed two pages of yellow paper covered with her own handwriting. “Dear Mrs. Doyle,” it began, “
I received a letter from the War Department
saying your husband has been missing since September 1st with my husband, and I thought I’d just write to you to offer my sympathies, as I know how you must feel. We have an 18-month-old son who is named for his dad. Do you have any children? [Ted] has only seen him for seven days, over a year ago. I hope it will be
real soon when he sees his son again. We must pray and have faith, and I know we will find all our prayers and dreams answered and coming true. Hoping we get good news soon, I remain, very sincerely, Diane M. Goulding.”

Reading the letter, Diane Goulding’s face crumpled, and she sobbed quietly. Then she folded the pages back into the envelope and pushed it across the table to Nancy, who whispered, “
No, no, that letter is yours
,” as Diane’s eyes flooded again.

Autumn descended, and Tommy and Nancy checked in regularly with the recovery lab. More than a year had passed since the mission to Palau, and Emery had not been back. The divers were still manufacturing a metal cradle to stabilize the wreckage. Nancy wanted to know how it was coming and when it would be complete. She never had trouble reaching Johnie Webb and she knew he held a lofty position at the lab, but she also knew that Webb hadn’t been to Palau himself. Whenever she hung up with him, she felt a step removed from the operation. What she wanted more than anything was to reach the leader of the recovery team. One day in the fall of 2006, she asked Webb if she could.

Eric Emery had to read the email a few times to be sure he understood. It was the public affairs officer wanting to know if he would speak with a relative of the B-24 crew. As far as Emery knew, that was a pointless question. He’d never been allowed to speak with a family member before, and he’d always believed it was forbidden. At a personal level, he was happy to speak with a family. The reason he’d come into the unit was to provide answers for them. But he knew family contact was Johnie Webb’s domain, and the rules were strict. He sent the email up the chain of command, asking how he should respond. To his surprise, he got an email from the lab’s scientific director saying it was okay to speak with the Doyles.

Emery called Tommy and Nancy in Snyder, but he found himself mostly listening. There was so much he didn’t know. He’d never heard about their trip to Palau, just days before the recovery began, and he was
stunned to hear the rumors about Tommy’s dad. The one part of the plane he couldn’t reach, Emery explained, was the tail turret. It was the whole reason he’d called off the recovery, and the reason he was building the cradle. Now the cradle was nearly finished, and he was heading back in a few weeks. The next part of the plane he planned to explore was the tail turret. If Tommy’s dad was in there, Emery would find him.

Emery watched the cargo plane unload on Babeldaob with the Doyles on his mind. “Once you make that connection,” he said, “you know these people are waiting and hoping, and you start to wait and hope as well.” But as the divers put the stabilizers in place, the hope faded fast. They pulled back a layer of sand, then another, and another, but all they found was more sand. Where the tail turret should have been mounted on the plane, all that remained were two bolt holes. The turret was missing.

Emery was no longer confined to the monitor. He had used the two-year break to enroll at hard-hat dive school. To train, he awoke at 5 a.m. each day and spent two hours running and lifting weights. Then he worked out another hour each night, watching his diet and losing weight, building cardiovascular and muscular strength. He’d graduated from the school with kids half his age, and now he could join the hard-hat divers working below the barge. He made daily, sometimes hourly, trips down, excavating deep into the sediment, but the turret was simply gone. “We cleaned that sucker from top to bottom,” Emery said. “It just wasn’t there.”

Near the end of the tail, Emery spotted something odd. There were small wrinkles in the aluminum skin, almost as though the turret had twisted off. From the direction of the wrinkles, it seemed most likely that it would have landed on the far side of the coral with the nose and cockpit. “It was twisted counterclockwise,” Emery said, “so I’m thinking that will put me straight over to the other side, which is where the forward section of the airplane is.” But as the divers moved to the other side, filling baskets of debris from the nose and cockpit, they found everything but the tail turret. “We were digging and digging, and finding great
stuff,” Emery said—arm and leg bones, shoes and buttons, coins, and even a pair of aviator sunglasses.

Emery extended the trip. Then he extended it again. In total, he would spend three months on the site, finding bones until the end. “We were removing remains and diagnostic material evidence up until the day we left,” he said. Yet as he climbed aboard a transport jet for the flight to Hawaii, Emery felt a certain emptiness hanging over him. He had once asked Jon Faucher why, on that day in the Andes, he dove into the icy water with his back broken in two places, to pull Emery’s body from the sunken chopper, and Faucher told him, “I didn’t want to face your parents and tell them I did nothing.” For Emery, the fear had become his own. As he watched the islands drop away from the plane, he dreaded his next conversation with Tommy Doyle.

“There was a lot riding on this,” he said later. “By the time I left, I was placing personal pressure on myself to produce results for the Doyles.”

TRAPPED

P
at Scannon couldn’t stop thinking about the parachutes. Since finding the plane underwater, he’d only become more determined to locate the men who weren’t on it. Yet trying to track down individual airmen was even more daunting than trying to find the plane. For one thing, a man’s body made an awfully small target. For another, Scannon couldn’t be sure how many of those men there were. Most wartime records—including the consolidated mission report, the squadron report, and the missing aircrew report—described two parachutes in the sky. Scannon had also spoken with a gunner on the mission who recalled seeing two parachutes, and who produced a tiny journal in which he’d written: “Plane in B-1 got shot down over target.
Two guys bailed out
.”

Then again, the Palauan witnesses to the crash weren’t so sure. It was either two or three parachutes, they said, and Scannon took both
possibilities seriously. After fifteen years on the islands, he knew that the firsthand account of a Palauan witness could be more accurate than the official reports. Sure, those reports were written right after the crash, while the memory was sixty years old, but you had to consider the context. The mission reports were based on the testimony of terrified airmen who had been fighting to stay alive. A Palauan like Ricky Speis, by contrast, had seen the crash from a familiar patch of jungle, overlooking islands and waterways he’d known all his life. In hindsight, Scannon wished he had given more credence to Speis in 2002, when he pointed at the crash site, instead of spending another two years on the channel. It wasn’t a mistake he was likely to make again.

Scannon’s research at the National Archives also suggested the likelihood of three survivors. Internal Japanese documents seized after the war listed Art Schumacher, Alexander Vick, and Johnny Moore as prisoners. According to those documents, all three had been captured, detained, and then shipped to a prison in Davao, Philippines, on a ship called the
Nanshin Maru
. That story was repeated in an Army Casualty Message from December 22, 1945, which even reproduced the Japanese spelling mistakes: “
1st Lt. Arthur Schumaker
and Sergeants John Moore and Alexander Bick all US Army bailed out B-24 over Koror 1 September 1944, captured, and on 5 September placed aboard
Nanshin Maru
.” And a later report by the commander of the Marianas cited the same document. But when the Graves Registration Service was unable to confirm that the
Nanshin Maru
had landed in Davao,
the lead investigator simply closed the case
.

Scannon found it hard to imagine why the Japanese would exaggerate the number. There was no incentive to claim that they had lost track of more American men than they really had, and there was also no way to explain how else they would have learned the names of all three men. But Scannon didn’t buy the story about the
Nanshin Maru
. Shipping prisoners to the Philippines in September 1944 didn’t make sense. The islands were under daily assault, commanders were bracing for a ground invasion, and the flow of cargo to and from the islands had long since tapered off. “
All the sea lanes were mined
, and aircraft patrols were in place,” Scannon said. “It just didn’t sound right.”

The more likely explanation, Scannon believed, was that the men had been executed. Ever since he’d learned of the mass grave on Police Hill, he wondered how many Americans might be there. He knew that, by September 1944, the kempei were killing their prisoners routinely. There was no reason to think they would have spared American prisoners the same treatment they dispensed to Jesuit priests.

As Eric Emery returned from the 2007 mission with a cache of bones and artifacts, Scannon turned his attention back to the mass grave. Bill Belcher’s monthlong dig had found nothing, and now they weren’t even sure they had been looking in the right area.

Each year, Scannon received dozens of calls from volunteers who wanted to join the effort, and two of the newest team members specialized in archival research. He was struck by how often such people appeared just as he was beginning to need them. Dan O’Brien and the skydivers materialized just in time to bring a new level of focus to the team. Flip Colmer brought his command experience from the Navy to help manage the growing roster—allowing Scannon to step aside, as he had at Xoma, and become part of the organization he’d built. And as the team discovered a raft of new planes, including the Avengers and Corsairs, Reid Joyce swept in to build an online database for archival materials.

Now there were two new volunteers who lived near the National Archives, and whose talents intersected neatly.

Katie Rasdorf was a former Marine who loved nothing more than to scour the archives for documents that no one else could find. Where the rest of the BentProp team would often return from the archives with a stack of documents that another member had already seen, Rasdorf had a way of locating records that nobody knew existed. She came back to the archives week after week, befriending the staff, learning the intricacies of the file structure, and photographing hundreds of documents, which she uploaded to the team website for Mark Swank to read.

Swank was a wry, compact man with mischievous eyes and an alarming memory. Most of his friends in suburban Maryland knew him as the owner of a dive bar called the Crofton Cantina, which was plopped alongside a highway. Most nights, Swank could be found at the bar with his wife, Dreama, either watching Nascar on television or beating his customers at pool and darts. But Swank also had a second job that was less apparent. By day, he worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency in a job he would only describe as “boring” and “technical” before quickly changing the subject. Whether or not the job was boring, it was clearly important. Over the next few years, he would disappear for months at a time to do classified work on military bases in Afghanistan. Wherever he went, Swank brought a personal laptop filled with BentProp files. A visitor who found him in the cantina on any given Thursday would notice that, somewhere around midnight, he would put down his pool cue and settle into a corner to read, his face lit up by the digital images of mission documents and bomb-run photography.

One day, nosing through Rasdorf’s files, Swank noticed a series of documents he’d never seen before. Like the files Don Shuster discovered in 1999, they were transcripts and statements from the war crimes tribunals—but there were hundreds of new ones and they included startling details. In page after page, the Japanese kempei described their crimes against civilians, islanders, and the Jesuit priests. Some of them drew maps of the mass grave with ominous phrases like “
place where prisoners squatted down
” and “
where we buried the bones
.”

Sitting in the corner of his bar, Swank opened a new word processing file and began to take notes on the new files. Then he overlaid the new maps with satellite imagery of Babeldaob, trying to discern where Sadae Inoue had placed his division headquarters, and where the kempei-tai would have hidden their jungle camp. Swank had never been to Palau, and he knew little about the Pacific Islands. But he began to develop a close familiarity with the Japanese soldiers who had lived there. He memorized
their names and military backgrounds, studied their medical histories, and in some cases, even discovered psychiatric evaluations by Allied doctors.

Next, Swank began to compare each soldier’s depositions and testimony over a period of months, to see whose story was consistent and who he should believe. The officers, he realized, were the least reliable sources. From month to month, major details of their stories would change. Swank believed this was because they knew they would be held accountable for what happened under their command. The enlisted men confessed more freely, offering the same details again and again. They described a rash of executions through the summer of 1944, peaking in September, when a B-24 crashed in the water and three airmen were captured. The airmen had been taken to division headquarters, kept in isolation, and interrogated for several days by division guards. In 2008, Swank called Scannon with a theory about what happened next.

—

E
VEN THE MOST CONSISTENT KEMPEI
had a hard time remembering dates. After three years in Allied custody, some of them placed the B-24 crash in mid-August, while others believed it was mid-September. But there was one Japanese soldier who remembered everything in detail.

In a series of interviews at Sugamo prison during 1947 and 1948, Fourteenth Division guard Toshio Watanabe offered dates, times, and descriptions that Swank, sixty years later, could verify with US Army documents. The three captured airmen, Watanabe said, were stationed with “the Wakde American Air Forces Unit” and reached Palau at “
about 1100 on the first of September
.” This was only six minutes earlier than the time listed in Army records. After the crash, Watanabe continued, “three aviators came down in parachutes.” They landed in the water “southwest of Babeldaob island,” and were scooped up by Japanese troops. After being paraded through military stations on Koror, they arrived at division headquarters on Babeldaob, where Watanabe watched them arrive. He
even remembered their positions. “One was an officer,” he said, “one was a photographer, and one was a machine gunner.”

The first evening, Watanabe went on, the guards locked them inside an empty barracks. Night was falling, and the full moon glowed through an open window as the airmen huddled together on the floor. Another Japanese soldier who visited the prisoners that night recalled them “
sitting in a room at the end
of the long barracks with their hands tied together and they were wearing blindfolds. There were three sentries standing guard, and the sentries seemed to be giving the prisoners water and cigarettes. Food was given to them which consisted principally of dry bread.”

As night passed, the sentries traded one-hour shifts. During one shift, a private named Sekio Seki noticed small cuts and lacerations on the men. “There was a burn on the back of the head of one,” he said, and because there was no medic or first-aid equipment, Seki “dampened a towel with my mouth and wiped that area gently. As there were small wounds on the hands and arms beside that one, I treated those places in the same way. When this was finished,
the prisoner said, ‘Thank you
,’ in a low voice.”

In the morning, Watanabe returned to the barracks with the head of Inoue’s interrogation program, Toshihiko Yajima, and a Japanese civilian who worked at the Palau Girls’ School and spoke English. Over the next three days, Watanabe and Yajima interrogated Schumacher, Moore, and Vick. The airmen made no effort to withhold information. Just two weeks earlier, a special liaison had flown to Los Negros from Washington, DC, expressly to advise the Long Rangers on what to do if they were captured. After the presentation, one pilot described the instructions like this: “
If we are lucky enough to survive
a parachute jump into the jungle, or a ditching at sea, and unlucky enough to be captured by the Japanese, we will live longer if, (a) we tell our interrogators everything they want to know that we are entitled to know in our particular jobs, because they probably already know all about that sort of thing; and, (b) can string
together a sweaty and lengthy account of our real or imagined sexual prowess, a subject that presumably fascinates the Japanese. A uniformed emissary of rank came all the way from Washington to tell us this.”

Schumacher, Moore, and Vick followed the instructions. The chief interrogator would later recall that the men knew little of strategic value, but shared what they did know about Wakde and the targets they were instructed to hit on Koror. “
I learned about the organization
of their airport,” Yajima recalled, “and also the intention of their bombing forces.”
After three days of questioning
and little to show for it, Yajima called off the interrogation. He left the airmen in the division barracks for another two days before,
on September 6
, he came back with a handful of senior officers, including Inoue’s chief of staff, Tokuchi Tada, and the leader of the kempei, Aritsune Miyazaki.

The group arrived at 1:30 p.m. and strode to the end of the building where Schumacher, Moore, and Vick were still crouched together on the floor with their hands tied behind their backs. No sooner had the Japanese commanders arrived than they were interrupted by the shouts of a junior officer, who raced into the building with news that US bombers were coming.

With only seconds to react, the officers raced to the building’s air raid shelter, while the guards scurried behind them, pushing with Schumacher, Moore, and Vick. There was a long, tense wait in the shelter as a formation of B-24s laid waste to the surrounding camp. Yajima, Tada, and Miyazaki squeezed against the wounded, filthy American prisoners inside the bunker. Finally, when the raid was over, everyone spilled out. A disgusted Tada barked to Yajima, “
Suspend the investigation
of the three aviators and deliver them to the kempei-tai.” Then he turned to Miyazaki: “I request the three prisoners be executed.”