When March had secured a boat, he and Scannon helped Tadashi aboard and pulled into a channel. They steered past the southern promontory of Koror and around to the southern bay, passing a series of small islands, including the one that held the Dixon wing, which Scannon now knew as Ngetkuml. Just to the north, there was an even smaller island, Iberor. It was where Tadashi had seen the Custer wing land.
As they crept toward Iberor, rain began to fall, pattering at first, then rising to a deluge. Scannon held a hand above his eyes and stared at the shimmering limestone walls. When the boat stopped a few feet from shore, he jumped out and splashed toward the cliffs. They were slick and slippery in the rain, but Scannon scrambled up. Directly above him, he could see a piece of the wing extruding through the foliage. There was a white star painted on the bottom, against a blue background. When he reached it, he grabbed the metal and hoisted himself up. He pushed into the subcanopy and found a second piece of the wing wedged between two trees. He could hear Tadashi and March shouting for him to come back, but he pulled off his backpack and found his underwater camera, snapping a few photos of the wing. He paused to offer a moment of silence, then he was rustling back to the cliffs and down to the boat.
Heading east, they passed another small island and Tadashi pointed to an opening on the cliffs. It was his hideaway during the war, just barely large enough to hold a man. It seemed impossible that Tadashi had lived there for months on end, but Scannon was learning that everything about the war was impossible to comprehend. The verdant hills had been carved with tunnels and strewn with cannons and military bunkers, and if it was difficult to grasp the full scale of the terror and violence, he knew he should be grateful that it was so hard.
The northern rim of the bay lapped against the shoreline of Koror, and Scannon stared up at the hills rising from the water. There was a Shinto shrine somewhere near the top, and beyond it, a massive gun emplacement known as Battery Hill. The area had been remade into a luxury hotel and putting green, but during the war, the guns of Battery Hill had probably shot down all three B-24s.
Tadashi gestured to a mangrove swamp to the east, and as March steered the boat closer, Scannon could see debris trailing into the jungle darkness. He stepped gingerly into the mud and waded toward the shore, past rods of metal jutting up from the ground and electrical equipment scattered in branches. He found a single piece of landing gear resting upside down. There was a large tropical plant growing in the wheel well, and without quite knowing why, he tried to pull it out, but the roots were bound deep in the metal and he couldn’t break them free. Scannon removed his camera and took a few pictures of the wreckage, then he stopped to take it all in.
He wondered what sort of man Glen Custer had been. It was easy to imagine the airmen as gallant young heroes, but of course they weren’t. They were all sorts of men, as prickly and troubled, crude and foolish as anyone else. He wondered if Custer had been alive long enough to see the jungle rushing toward him, and Tadashi crouching in the mangroves, his eyes wide with terror. He wondered how many of Custer’s crew had survived the crash. He knew that the navigator, Wallace Kaufman, parachuted into Japanese hands. Some of the postwar reports described what happened to Kaufman. He tried everything to stay alive; at one point, he even attempted to convince his guards that he was Franklin Roosevelt’s cousin. But the Japanese soldiers killed him. Took off his head with a sword. Scannon wondered if anyone had made it off Dixon’s plane. He wondered what had happened to the airmen who parachuted from Arnett’s.
In two days of searching, he had found two of the three B-24s. He’d done it with patience, and by asking the islanders for help. They were eager to share what they knew, and they knew more than he ever would. Scannon could only begin to imagine what else Tadashi could tell him—about the years of Japanese occupation, the treatment of the islanders, and the fate of men like Wallace Kaufman. On the islands, none of those things seemed so far away. The Palauans also reminded Scannon that the search was much larger than himself. It wasn’t about the thrill of adventure, or finding a pot of gold. It wasn’t even about the lost planes. It was about memory. It was about preserving the past. It was about the feeling that came over him when he saw the Dixon and Custer wreckage, though it would be a long time before he understood where that feeling rose from in his past.
“On both the Custer and Dixon sites, I was emotionally overcome,” he wrote in his journal. “Seeing the wings in the photos and in their final resting places, realizing the bits and pieces that I see once carried crews of Americans every bit as hopeful for a future as I was at that age, I have gotten to know these crews a little. To them, it made no difference that they died in a backwater campaign. They died young and violently. They are to be remembered.”
—
ON HIS LAST AFTERNOON in Palau, Scannon drove up a long, winding road to the luxury hotel and putting green overlooking the bay. As he walked among the tropical shade trees, he felt the soft Palauan soil give beneath his feet, and he was struck again by the distinctive smell of the islands, a fusty aroma of jungle flowers, salt water, and decay, of wood fire mingling with diesel smoke, as if a thousand years of history wafted through the air at once.
In his research on the islands, he had been surprised by how long they were isolated. For centuries, European explorers simply called them “the Black Islands.” Even modern archaeologists saw the archipelago as a puzzle. They could confirm just enough about the ancient people who inhabited them to be mystified by who they were. There were signs of civilization everywhere, from the old stone ruins covered in vines, to the tops of huge mountains that appeared to be sheared off. The hillsides were dribbled with evidence of settlement that traced back three thousand years. But the genetic composition of the islanders seemed to have shifted drastically in that time. It was difficult to say exactly who had lived there, or when, or for how long. The only thing certain was that people had been on the islands continually for thousands of years, their tribes merging together and warring, and building cultures that transformed from one to the next.
The nearest neighbor was Yap, a cluster of four small islands three hundred miles away, yet for centuries, the two were locked in a blood feud, passed down by legend and by oral tradition, and manifest in the odd Yapese habit of sneaking onto Palau to carve giant stone discs from the limestone hills and ferry them home. Some of those discs were twelve feet in diameter and weighed several thousand pounds, and their value on Yap was measured precisely in the danger of obtaining them. On Yap, a disc could be traded like currency to buy land or pay dowries, while on the shores of Palau, tribal sentries stood watch for raiding Yapese moneymakers.
The first European to sight the islands was Ferdinand Magellan in 1522, but another half century passed before Sir Francis Drake came ashore, then another century before the Spanish claimed the islands, and yet another before the English stayed long enough to meet the natives. That was in 1783, when the British ship Antelope crashed into the archipelago on a journey that the historian Daniel Peacock has called “a secret voyage to China.” The British were reeling from the American Revolution, at odds with France and Holland, and found their merchant ships in Asia besieged by marauders. They had sent the Antelope to chart a course to China along a less traveled route. If the journey was successful, it would reopen the doors for English commerce in Asia.
The journey was not. The Antelope had been designed by the master shipwrights of Newburyport, Massachusetts, to be light and fast, but not especially sturdy. When it slammed into the western island of Ulong, the men on board were shipwrecked for months. By the time they had pieced together a new ship from the fragments of the old, they’d become so friendly with the tribe on Koror that they offered to bring the chief’s son, Prince Lee Boo, back to England. He packed a woven mat to sleep on, and a rope made from coconut fiber, which he tied in knots to count the days at sea.
London changed all that. Lee Boo moved into the home of the Antelope�
��s captain and began squiring his way through British salons in a pink overcoat with a green collar. He sang at parties, flirted with older ladies, and learned the proper way to pass a bowl of cherries at dinner, before dying of smallpox five months later. In 1788, the story of Lee Boo and the Antelope became a best-selling book in London, putting the islands of Palau briefly on the mind of England.
In Palau, the impression of England was even more brief. Long after the departure of the Antelope crew, the islands remained a tribal land of family, village, honor, tradition, and internecine war—especially between the people of Koror and those of the Melekeok (meh-lek'-ee-ok) region on Babeldaob. It would be another century before Spanish diplomats brokered a peace between the two, then promptly sold the island chain to Germany in a package deal that included the Marshall Islands and most of the Marianas for about $4 million.
Under German control in the early 1900s, technology poured into the archipelago, as phosphate miners tunneled into the hills of Angaur Island to the south. But the German influence would disappear as quickly as it began: with the start of World War I, Japan seized control of the islands, and by 1920, all that remained of German Palau was the shrieking colony of pet monkeys that had escaped into the jungle of Angaur, soon to be known as Monkey Island.
Japan launched an immediate program of development on Koror, turning the sleepy village into the regional headquarters of its Micronesian empire, with responsibility for two thousand islands and three million square miles. Into the 1930s, the archipelago teemed with Japanese officials, merchants, and commercial fishermen, so that by the end of the decade there were three times as many Japanese residents as Palauans. They mined Babeldaob for bauxite to make aluminum, established a major army garrison on Koror, and oversaw the commercial behemoth of the South Seas Trading Company.
By the time Scannon reached Palau, most of the Japanese influence was fading, but the islands remained in political limbo. Since the end of World War II, they had been listed as a “trust territory” of the United Nations. But now, as Scannon walked the putting green above the southern bay, the country was on the verge of independence. That fall, it would become a sovereign republic for the first time. With a growing number of dive shops and hotels, restaurants and tourists, the islands maintained a fragile balance—at once a burgeoning vacation mecca and a nation anchored to the past, with no large-scale industry to mar a landscape of ancient ruins, pristine water, and sunken warships that shimmered beneath the screams echoing off Monkey Island.
While Scannon crossed the grassy expanse of the resort, the only other visitor in sight was a Japanese man in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt who was practicing his short game on the putting green. Scannon wandered to the edge of the lawn, where a pair of rusty iron tubes protruded from the ground. With a shudder, he realized they were anti-aircraft guns, probably from the Battery Hill emplacement. In fact, there was a good chance these guns had shot down Custer, Dixon, or Arnett. They seemed so small and harmless now, just spears of rust pointing at clouds. He glanced down the hillside to the glimmering water of the southern bay. Custer’s plane was down there, and behind it, Tadashi’s cave, and beyond that, Dixon’s wing, all of it nearly forgotten.
The sun was burning down the horizon and he suddenly felt aware of the absurdity around him, that he could stand on this deadly hilltop in the padded embrace of luxury, where the only other man was a tourist like himself. Fifty years earlier, they would have seen each other only as Japanese and American, and they would have rushed headlong into a clash from which only one could survive. He listened to the quiet click of the man’s putter striking the plastic ball. He turned back to the setting sun and squinted. Custer’s plane had approached in a twenty-two-plane formation. They were flying at nine thousand feet, on a heading of fifty degrees. He tried to picture the planes approaching on the horizon. “I tried to hear the anti-aircraft rapid fire,” he wrote later in his journal, “while the blast and vibrations of salvoes, as well as well-aimed bombs, went off to my right. I tried to imagine seeing a single B-24 hit, and come down in flames to crash just below my feet, while, first, a wing flutters down on a small island nearby. . . . I tried, but I could not imagine what it really was like. I felt empty, as if I wanted to feel more but couldn’t.”
As Scannon boarded a flight home the next morning, he watched the islands drop away. Then he ordered a tomato juice and leaned back in his chair. He thought of the week behind him. He had come to the islands with a list of three planes, and he had found two. But finding them only made the Arnett plane loom in his imagination. It was in the channel. It had to be. He hadn’t had time to look, but he would come back. He would scour the bottom for as long as it took to find the last plane.
Scannon reached into his bag and pulled out the black sketchbook. He flipped to a blank page and wrote:
Dixon—found.
Custer—found.
Arnett—needs to be found.
FIVE
LANDFALL
For Jimmie and Johnny and the Big Stoop boys, the South Pacific was a pleasant surprise. The base on Los Negros had an unexpected lightness and an almost fantastical air. Just a few weeks earlier, when the unit first landed, it hadn’t been so welcoming, with nests of coral snakes and adders that slithered through an impenetrable thicket. But a flurry of clearing and construction had transformed the camp into one of the most comfortable the unit had ever known.
It didn’t hurt that the island was scheduled to become a new headquarters for the Thirteenth Air Force. With that distinction came a heightened building effort that included not only the usual Navy Seabees and Air Force Camp-Building Echelon, but also a crew of more than one hundred native men, who, for $2 a month plus a ration of canned food and tobacco, bustled about the camp carrying panels of thatched roofing made by the women of their villages, which they lashed together to form an instant village of administration buildings. By the end of May, there was a central office on the island with cubicles for pilots and squadron leaders to type their reports; an elaborate hospital, flush with supplies; a church; a chapel; a library stocked with a wide selection of titles, including Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust; and an officers’ club perched on stilts above the beach, where men could try their luck at cards, ping-pong, or the Red Cross nurses passing through. Music was piped into the mess hall for dinner, and when the men returned from a mission, they were often met on the airfield by nurses carrying trays of cold juice and cookies.
There were two airfields on the island and two others nearby, but the Long Rangers had by far the best. Mokerang Field perched at the tip of a long peninsula that stretched into the South Pacific, with immaculate beaches and pristine water all around. The airstrip offered a dual runway, with one lane used to taxi and the other to lift off, and there were new service and supply buildings to one side. Just south of the airfield, Tent City was tucked into a shaded grove of coconut trees, which had once been part of a plantation and provided the men with as much fruit as they could stomach.
Arriving at the camp in early May, one man from the 371st Squadron wrote in his journal, “I already feel it may be the South Pacific island I dreamed of one day finding: a long, narrow palm tree–covered finger of land which gently curves to the northwest. . . . The surf, sometimes thunderous and threatening, is quiet and gentle at night. The steady on-shore breeze will keep us mosquito-free and cool. Rustling palm fronds, the soft hissing of shifting sands beneath the unfurling sheets of foam-speckled water, will lull us to sleep.”
By the time the Big Stoop crew reached Mokerang and began to unpack their gear, the island was beginning to look like a Hollywood set. In photos taken by the unit that month, the roadways sway with straight lines of palms, while airmen relax on sandy beaches and sail the shallows in makeshift boats. The men erected volleyball courts, baseball diamonds, and horseshoe pits throughout the camp, where officers would play against the enlisted men in round-robin tournaments.
Some
of the men also took time to expand their tents, building elaborate tiki-hut additions and tables for playing cards. During the move to Los Negros, the unit store had been folded into a larger PX, but the larger facility would not accept the unit’s alcohol or tobacco. Since beer and cigarettes made up roughly 70 percent of the Long Rangers’ inventory, commanders had little choice but to give away the goods. Beer flowed freely throughout the camp.
One of the Long Ranger squadrons had a Scottish terrier as a pet, and the men posed for crew photos with the dog, even painting its likeness on the flat panels of their planes. Other men collected local wildlife, like lizards, birds, and snakes. “The natives used to get inner tubes from the planes to make slingshots,” a gunner named Al Jose recalled. “They’d shoot a rock at a parrot to bring it down, and they’d sell wounded parrots to the crews as pets. Of course, you’d go on a mission and come back, your goddamn tent was in a shambles.” In film shot by the unit on Los Negros, one man can be seen patrolling the airfield with a pet monkey on his shoulder, which would periodically leap into the window of a B-24 and swing from the waist gun.
In his letters home, Jimmie Doyle tried to capture the sensation of discovering an island paradise at war. “Wish you could have been with me today,” he wrote to Myrle. “I spent all afternoon on the beach, swimming and trying to take the hull off of coconuts. Johnny and I found one of those big lizards, about like the one you and I saw at Tonopah, only this one was about twice as big. We would chase him awhile, and then he would chase us, but finally he found a tree, and got away from us. There are a lot of pigeons here, all colors and kinds, but they all make a noise about like rubbing two pieces of rusty iron together. . . . About the biggest problem is getting anything to read. We don’t have papers or magazines, and I guess I’ve read about all there are here.”
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