Vanished (7 page)

Faced with a string of losses on their outer islands, Japanese commanders were pulling back to a new defensive perimeter. They called it the Absolute National Defense Zone, and it hooked up from their claim on Timor, through central New Guinea, around the Caroline and Mariana Islands, and back to the Japanese home islands. Just getting the Japanese Army and Navy to agree on the new boundary involved a fierce debate; now that the line was in place, both had orders to defend it to their last man.

At the heart of the new perimeter lay tiny Palau. Since the first American strike on the islands by carrier planes in March, many Japanese commanders were convinced that Palau would be the next major US target. To defend the archipelago, the prime minister of Japan, General Hideki Tojo, dispatched one of the most vaunted divisions of the Japanese military. The Fourteenth “Shining” Division had, since its founding in 1905, won a string of battles in Siberia and Manchuria, and was one of the most honorable assignments in the Imperial Army. At the head of the Shining sat Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue (
in'-no-way
), a square-jawed man with large round spectacles, stiletto cheekbones, and a black triangular mustache, whose wife described him as “
strict, but actually quite warm-hearted
.”

Inoue had been leading the Shining for about a year in China, but when Tojo summoned him to a private meeting in Tokyo, his new instructions were clear: Palau was vulnerable, exposed, and possibly indefensible. But it was Inoue’s job, and the job of the Shining, to hold it. If Palau was to be the next American target, Inoue was to make it the bloodiest target they’d ever taken.

Inoue landed on Palau just as the Big Stoop crew left Tonopah. As they made their way toward Los Negros, he was settling into the islands: digging intricate caves and bunkers through the hills, and girding the new defensive perimeter for the coming assault.

DISCOVERY

T
hirty thousand feet in the air, Pat Scannon cracked open his massive black sketchbook and rested it on the tray table in front of him. It had been two months since his visit to Maxwell Air Force Base, and his fixation on the missing B-24s spilled across the pages of his logbook in pencil and red ink. Each night he devoured history books and archival records, taking notes on the arc of Japanese colonial power, the aerodynamic details of the B-24, and the controversial role of Palau in the Pacific campaign—a debate still lingered among historians over whether it had been worth so much blood for such a small group of islands.

Scannon had also been planning his return to the islands in meticulous detail. He memorized topographic maps of Koror, cross-referenced them with vintage photos, and studied the witness statements in the mission reports. He contacted the Eastman Kodak Company to learn about
the chemical properties of infrared film, hoping that with the right equipment he might be able to peer through the water of the channel and spot Arnett’s plane. That channel, he now knew, was called Toachel Mid (
tow-ah'-kul mid
), and in a few days he expected to be there. Five months had passed since his first trip to the islands, but this time felt different.

He felt different. In all his years of medical school, the doctoral program in chemistry, and professional projects, he had always been able to maintain exacting focus, but the focus he now gave to Palau eclipsed anything he’d ever known. The six days he spent working at Xoma paled beside the seven nights he studied the islands, reviewing his plans and preparations into the hazy hours. Now that he was on his way, it was time to step back—to review everything he’d learned and what he hoped to accomplish.

Scannon flipped through the sketchbook until he found a blank page, and he popped the cap of a black felt-tip pen, writing in the upper left corner: “
4:30 pm, over Pacific
. I’m going back alone to Palau to find out more on B-24s. Because this is an expedition, a series of goals is proper. But first, after more than five months of research, what do I know?” He quickly summarized the leads he’d found. The wing that he and Susan had seen “is most likely the wing of Dixon.” The rest of the Dixon plane appeared in photos to be heading for the north shore of Koror. The Custer plane seemed to have crashed somewhere near the Dixon wing—“south and east of Koror, into mangroves.” And finally, the B-24 flown by Arnett “fell north of Koror and south of Babeldaob, but exactly where is unknown.”

Next, Scannon listed his priorities:

• Locate Dixon wing, and see if other debris can be seen.
  
• Attempt location of Custer plane—also wing just west of plane, about 100 yards in water near outlet. Also, see if anything can be seen on adjacent island.
  
• Fly between Babeldaob and Koror to see if Arnett can be located.
  

But even before he delved into the jungle and water, Scannon wanted to speak with Palauan islanders. He would only have one week on the archipelago, and it would be easy to waste it trudging through all the wrong places. Places that appeared small on a map could be dangerous or inaccessible, and he also didn’t want to spend his time searching for something that someone else may have found. He knew that the veterans of the 307th Bombardment Group had no record of where the B-24s crashed, but that didn’t mean a Palauan islander hadn’t found the debris. The islanders were expert fishermen and hunters who dove and trekked every day. They might easily have found a plane without bothering to notify the US Army. The smart approach was not to begin searching on his own, but to spend a few days meeting guides and elders who could tell him what the islanders already knew.

When Scannon’s plane touched down at the airfield on southern Babeldaob, he descended a staircase to the runway in darkness. It would be his first time alone on the islands, and it filled him with a combination of excitement and fear. This time, he wouldn’t have experienced travelers like Lambert and Bailey to help him arrange logistics and navigate the serpentine roads that led through the islands and their customs. As he walked across the airfield under a moonlit sky, he realized he was just a few hundred yards from the Toachel Mid channel. Everything about the islands was as unfamiliar and alien as that watery grave. The hot, moldering air clung to his skin and the sounds of the jungle echoed through the sky, yet somehow it all felt strangely reassuring, as if his body knew he belonged. He picked up a rental car in the terminal and drove slowly across the bridge to Koror, passing through the low concrete buildings of downtown, by gas stations and shuttered groceries and children bicycling through the night. When he found his hotel, he stumbled into his room with the realization that he’d been traveling more than twenty-four hours. In bed, he cracked open his journal and scribbled, “
Travel—Overnight—Ugh—Jet lag
.” Then he passed out.

In the morning, Scannon headed to the Belau National Museum, a white stucco building with a red tin roof in a clearing above the southern bay. Like the traditional spelling of its name, the Belau museum focused on the islands’ early history. It was nearly empty when Scannon arrived and an employee named Kemphis Mad walked him through the exhibits, pointing out ancient tools and weapons, dioramas of traditional villages, and a special collection of photos from the war, showing bombed-out Japanese fortifications and starving Palauan islanders huddled in the jungle.

As they walked, Scannon explained to Mad the purpose of his trip, how he’d come to the islands a few months earlier for a temporary diversion, but felt something deeper stirring when he saw the Dixon wing. He described the research he had been doing, how he riffled through archives and dug up photos of the lost bombers, and how all three of them seemed to have fallen just a few hundred yards from where they stood. As Scannon spoke, Mad listened and nodded. To the islanders it was hardly news that the archipelago was filled with missing planes and men. The mystery was why it had taken so long for someone like Scannon to come find them. “
I can help you,” Mad said
, writing a series of names on a scrap of paper. If anyone had seen the planes come down, or if someone had found them since, the guides and elders on his list would know it.

For two days Scannon worked his way through neighborhoods and small towns, following a trail of introductions that began with Mad’s contacts, then caromed between their relatives and friends, rumors and fading memories. It seemed that every few hours he would pull up to some new home in a remote community, to find a small group of islanders sitting in the bright sun, usually chewing a mixture of betel nut and crushed coral wrapped in a local leaf, which swished together in their saliva to make a chemical reaction that turned their lips orange. As Scannon took a seat, he would explain where he had been, who he’d met, and who had sent him, then he would ease into the conversation until finally
he found an opportunity to pull out his photos and maps, asking, “Have any of you seen this plane? Do you know anyone who has?” Each time, the islanders would shake their heads, and give him another list of friends to ask, and he would follow another byzantine set of directions to another group of elders in the sun.

With every dead end, Scannon pushed down the urge to race to the dock and rent a boat and begin searching on his own. He reminded himself that working blindly was a fool’s method. One man could never hope to discover in a week what the islanders had seen all their lives. Someone, somewhere, must have seen the bombers go down. It was just a matter of finding that person.

And then he met Xavier March.

—

I
T HAPPENED SO FAST
it was dizzying. One minute, he was pulling up to the young guide’s home in central Koror, shaking hands, sitting down, and pulling out the photos; the next, they were driving to meet one of March’s uncles, Demei Temol, at the home of another elder, named Belsam Lekesel. Then they were all sitting together on the stoop in front of Lekesel’s tin-roofed house, chewing betel nut and sweating pools in the sun, while Temol and Lekesel flipped through Scannon’s photos, saying, “No, no. There’s no B-24 on Koror.”

But the photos clearly showed the Dixon fuselage streaking down near Lekesel’s house, and Scannon insisted that it had to be nearby. “I kept asking,” he said later, “‘Could it have gone over here? There?’ and they said, ‘No, no. Absolutely not. No bombers crashed on the island.’ And I just couldn’t think of another question, so I finally said, ‘Okay, I appreciate your talking to me,’ and I got up. And they said, ‘You know, you never did ask about the wreckage in the
water. . . .
’”

Minutes later, Scannon and March were hurrying down a jungle trail, which burst into the open coastline of the north shore, where ankle-deep
water lapped at the beach and, twenty feet out, a dense knot of metal the size of a car sat plunked in the surf.

Like it fell from the sky
, Scannon thought with a smile. He rushed into the water, not even bothering to take off his shoes, and as he approached the wreckage, he could feel fragments of debris in the mud beneath his feet. When he reached the metal, he knew immediately that it was a plane—the sheets of aluminum joined by rivets, the bombardier’s window cut into the side. It was the nose. The cockpit. He crept around it, peering into its core. There were pulleys inside, and a lever with a small button on the tip, which he recognized instantly as the bomb-release handle of a Liberator.
Dixon’s plane
, he thought. It was just as it appeared in the photos—struck by the anti-aircraft guns over the southern bay and streaming over the island in flames to land here.

Scannon examined the cockpit for several minutes; then he sloshed toward the shore. He was exhilarated by the discovery and yet unnerved by the presence of death. William Dixon had probably died in this spot. In fact, he was probably still there, along with his navigator, Duncan, their bombardier, Tenton, and who knows how many of the crew. There had been a young lieutenant flying with them as an observer. He was probably in the cockpit, too.

When Scannon reached the shore, he glanced down at the sand. There was a glint of half-buried metal, and he reached to pick it up. It was a seventy-five-millimeter shell. He turned it over in his hands, confused. It was the same kind of shell used by the anti-aircraft guns on Koror, the kind that would have shot Dixon down. But those shells would still be in the hills with the guns, not here with the wreck. Scannon glanced back toward the water and did a double take. Directly over the crumpled nose, there was a rainbow forming. He laughed to himself and shook his head. He was a chemist, a physician—a lifelong empiricist. He stared at the rainbow a long time. Later, he wrote in his journal, “
It was almost too much
.”

In the morning, he and March met up to follow another lead. The same two elders who knew about the Dixon cockpit also knew a man named Ichikawa Tadashi, who had seen another B-24 go down. It was, they said, somewhere in the southern bay. From his research, Scannon knew it had to be Custer.

They stopped by Tadashi’s home on Koror. He was a frail man with tentative legs and a long scar down his forehead, but he agreed to take a boat to the site where he’d seen the plane go down. As they barreled toward the dock in Scannon’s rental car, Tadashi recalled the crash.

Like many Palauans, he’d fled the city during the war. The only shelter he could find was a cave. It was carved into the limestone wall of a small island in the southern bay, where he could see the daily formation of Liberators as they came on the horizon. Most of the time, he would wait out the bomb strikes inside his cave, but one day in May 1945, the bombers arrived while he was foraging on Koror. From the shoreline, he could see his cave across the water, but there wasn’t enough time to swim back. All he could do was duck into the mangroves and watch the US bombers sweep overhead, laying a string of bombs across Koror while the Japanese gunners lit up the sky.

As he crouched in the mangroves, Tadashi recalled, he saw one of the American planes take a hit on its left wing, and he watched as the wing floated down to land on an island near his cave. The rest of the fuselage was coming straight toward him, a stream of smoke and fire that hit the earth with a concussive blast as shards of metal rained down, slicing into Tadashi’s arm and thigh and carving the long, deep scar that Scannon had noticed on his forehead.

Scannon searched for words to respond, but found none. Tadashi had nearly been killed by Custer and his men, the very airmen he was now taking Scannon to find. As they pulled into the marina, Scannon glanced outside, suddenly overcome by another memory. It was the same dock where he and Susan had met their guides on the day they found the Dixon
wing. Now, as he watched Tadashi hobble from the car toward the pier, he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything he had seen since then, from the discovery of the wing, to the photographs at Maxwell, to the crumpled cockpit in the water, even the scar on Tadashi’s face, was all part of some invisible path that he was merely following.