An Archipelago of Grief: Vanished, The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II

 Rock-Islands,  Palau by Peter R. Binter, 2007; Wikipedia

Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II

By Wil S. Hylton

Published by Riverhead Books, the Penguin Group

©2013, 272 pages including bibliography and notes

 I just came around that bend in the coral and I was a different person.

— Pat Scannon

Pat Scannon is  medical researcher with an MD, a PhD in chemistry,  and founder of a biotech corporation named Xoma who initially went to Palau as part of a treasure-seeking scuba trip with  an interest in finding the first combat kill of Present George H. W. Bush. But it was the location of the missing B-24 bomber that went down with a crew of eleven on September 1, 1944 that held Scannon’s efforts of nearly two decades and forms the focus of Vanished.

The following are quotes from Hylton’s fascinating and riveting mystery of the whereabouts of the WWII bomber and its crew, known as the Big Stoop. We cannot help but compare it to the present search for the Malaysia Boeing 370 that has been missing since the March 8th departure from Kuala Lumpur on a flight to Beijing.  The quotes from Vanished are reactions from family members  after the B-24 crew are classified as MIAs.

. . .

Tommy Doyle was told by his mother that “his daddy’s plane went down in the Pacific Ocean, some patch of islands called Palau. The crew was never found.” Tommy was not supposed to hear, as a kid,  another story about his missing father: “He’d survived the crash. He’d come back from the war. He was living in California with a new wife and two daughters. He just didn’t care about Tommy anymore.”

. . .

“Secretly Diane [Goulding] 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 released from his captors, and part of her grieved at the thought that he might be in trouble, while another part smiled at the thought of him coming home.”

. . .

“Back in Arkansas, Johnny’s [Moore] sister Melba moved in with their parents. Her mother had called in desperation,  say, 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.”

. . .

“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.”

. . .

Quotes from Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II by Wil Hylton. Copyright 2013 by Wil Hylton.

©2014 Tam Martinides Gray for SeniorWomen.com