by Bryan Bender
George had studied the case, designated Missing Air Crew Report 5754, intently. Lieutenant Robert Thorpe was reported missing on May 27, 1944, after taking off in a P-47 Thunderbolt from an airfield near Lae to strafe the Japanese airfield west of Wewak. Efforts to locate him by Army Graves Registration teams after the war proved unsuccessful. The subsequent search by authorities from the United States and Australia was also futile. As was the case for so many families of the missing, the letters to his distraught parents from the War Department contained those painfully unsatisfying words that “your son second Lieutenant Robert E Thorpe has been missing in action since twenty seven May over New Guinea.” Yet there emerged glimmers of hope over the years that answers might someday be found.
A few months after the Japanese surrender, an Australian team interviewed a Japanese prisoner who told them an American pilot fitting Thorpe’s description had floated ashore on Kairiru on a log, was captured by natives, and was handed over to the small Japanese garrison. The story went that he had died of malaria while in captivity. But when Australian mortuary specialists later exhumed a grave on Kairiru that they were told was Thorpe’s, the remains turned out to be those of several Japanese. Not until a half century later, when JPAC began to scrutinize anew the records relating to hundreds of aircraft losses in New Guinea, did a fuller picture begin to emerge. Later testimony of Japanese officers assigned to the Twenty-Seventh Special Naval Base Force headquarters on Kairiru told another version of what happened. Records previously overlooked showed that under questioning by Americans in Tokyo in 1947, a Japanese Navy officer named Keoru Okuma who was stationed on Kairiru at the time offered startling details of an American pilot he encountered on the island:
He was about 20 years old, 5′5″ tall, slender build, medium brown long hair, brown eyes, unshaven, body and face sunburned. He wore light blue short pants—torn above the knees—probably Japanese Navy pants given to him by his captors. No hat, barefooted, naked from the waist up, no hair on chest; not blindfolded, hands tied behind, feet not tied, no scratches or wounds that I remember.
He said he was born and lived near Boston. He said he was a first lieutenant Army Thunderbolt pilot, shot down east of Kairiru, and swam to Kairiru with a floating log.… The POW was first beaten after I completed my interrogation by about three noncommissioned officers with their hands and sticks about his face and buttocks. His back was bleeding somewhat. The POW just bowed forward.
Later that same afternoon, the officer recounted, the order was given for the American prisoner to be executed. He described the gruesome final moments, which he said took place in front of about thirty Japanese troops next to a coconut tree near a native cemetery where a fresh grave had already been dug:
They held him up so he could walk. The crowd was yelling but the POW was quiet. When we reached the execution spot, the POW stood beside the hole, blindfolded, hands tied behind him. [One of the other Japanese officers] said in English to the POW, “I will kill you with my pistol.” Then he stood beside me and shot at the POW’s left ankle, but missed both times, and said, “I’m not so good.” The crowd laughed. [The Japanese officer] stepped up and then pushed the POW into a kneeling position before the hole with the head bowed and forward. The POW’s lips were moving, but I heard no sound. Then he poured water from the bottle on the POW’s neck and washed it, and also poured water on his heirloom samurai sword. He then beheaded the POW. When I next looked I saw the POW’s body in the hole with only a part of one leg sticking out of the hole. I think I saw blood on the ground. Later I learned [another officer] had cut open the POW’s corpse.
Several other Japanese officers corroborated key details of the incident. One recalled the pilot said his name was Robert. Another identified him from a photograph as the prisoner in question. A third, JPAC historians learned from long-forgotten records, even sketched a map of where the execution took place. It pinpointed an area on the west side of a small stream running behind a Catholic mission on Kairiru that had served as the Japanese headquarters.
George now had a copy of the map, which was little more than a few pencil lines and arrows to depict a jungle path, nearby fields, and a circled X marking where the Japanese officer recounted Thorpe was executed and his body buried.
George also knew something else. Still awaiting answers back in Rhode Island was Robert Thorpe’s seventy-seven-year-old brother. Gil Thorpe, whose angular face and bushy eyebrows bore a striking resemblance to those of his older brother, was thirteen when he answered the door on a late Tuesday afternoon in early June 1944 and was handed the War Department telegram reporting simply that Bobby was “missing in action” over New Guinea. Picking up where his father left off, Gil, now a retired dentist, never gave up hope that his brother might someday be buried in the family plot. He penned letters to his U.S. senator, attended family updates that JPAC held periodically in nearby Connecticut, and even teamed up with a historian friend to try to glean more information about his brother’s fate from Japanese war records. His older sister, Nancy, who had recently been moved to an assisted-living facility, continued to ask Gil whether there was anything new to report about their missing brother.
No one from JPAC had ever been to Kairiru. Now George and Sergeant Jackson would make their way out in the morning. As George gazed up at the mysterious island on the map above the bar, which he located just north of a smaller one called Muschu, he tingled at the prospect that Bobby Thorpe might still get his long-overdue homecoming. He also knew it might be too late.
When JPAC first concluded that Thorpe’s remains might still be buried near the Catholic mission on the island, commanders were concerned that if word leaked out the Americans were coming the grave could be disturbed. JPAC knew from firsthand reports that the inhabitants of Kairiru were particularly superstitious and the knowledge that a white man might be buried in their midst would be considered bad luck. One of the documents in the JPAC file reported “recent activity regarding the removal of body parts from graves used in sorcery practices.” JPAC was told there were “lots of stories about ghosts, mass graves,” tales that like virtually everywhere else in New Guinea “get expanded by each person you talk to.” Any local inhabitants who helped the Americans, JPAC was also warned, might be at “real risk” of retaliation by their fellow islanders.
If George was looking for the archetype of New Guinea’s ancient customs and cultural rites, he couldn’t have come to a better place. Even by the standards of Papua New Guinea, Kairiru was shrouded in myth and legend. Black magic and evil spirits were part of everyday existence. The most common tales, passed from generation to generation in the glow of torches of dried coconut and sago leaves, spoke of devils with supernatural power that took human form and wandered in the darkness with an insatiable desire for human flesh, especially children’s. In their rituals, the inhabitants of Kairiru prayed to devils known as tambaran, who were said to live in rocks, caves, and mountains. They prayed to tambaran for help fishing the surrounding waters and harvesting taros, yams, and other staples, and in times of birua, or war, they invoked these spirits to bestow magical powers on their spears of soft limbum wood.
But many devils brought only bad luck, which in the ancient culture of the people of Kairiru was synonymous with death. Like the masalai, who lived in rivers and seas and could change a man’s mind or make him do evil things. These devils could bring destruction by rain and earthquake. They could also be more easily spotted: they were often white-skinned or had light-colored eyes.
George’s only means of reaching the island was crouched in a rickety sixteen-foot banana boat with an outboard engine he had rented the day before on the Wewak waterfront—for a whopping four hundred dollars. It was far more than he had planned to spend, but the craft was the only available mode of transport.
As the officer in charge of safety, George ordered Huston and Teel, much to their consternation, to remain in Wewak while he and Sergeant Jackson went on to Kairiru. There were only two life vests, and
visions of having to pull the two middle-aged men out of the waves didn’t exactly appeal to him.
Now, with the early morning gleam of sunshine reflecting off the aquamarine waters of the Bismarck Sea, George, Jackson, and a local, Anton Sakarai, the minister of culture and tourism for East Sepik Province, soon pulled around the headlands off Wewak, passing a tuna-processing plant. Spying the massive tunas jumping near the boat, George wished he had some fishing tackle. But his decision to leave Huston and Teel behind was quickly reinforced. The banana boat entered the open water and began to rock violently in five-foot seas as it chugged around the southern rim of Muschu, Kairiru’s neighbor, with its idyllic black sandy beaches and thatched-roof huts framed by swaying palmettos.
Then they headed northwest in the Muschu Passage and cut through a breakwater. There the seas grew even choppier, the waves now topping eight feet.
Finally, about an hour after leaving Wewak, George sighted Kairiru in the distance. About twenty-five miles around, the tropical island resembled a brilliant green dome, with its mountainous spine running east to west and centered on the three-thousand-foot Mount Malangis. As the boat approached the southwestern shore, George eyed the four or five clapboard buildings of the St. John’s Mission and the adjacent St. Xavier School cut out of the bush. On the eastern side of the grounds he could also see what remained of the Japanese airstrip. For the first time, the war had an immediacy for George. Until now he had only really experienced Port Moresby, which he knew had changed significantly in the decades since General MacArthur paced the balcony of his headquarters. But Kairiru, he thought, must have looked much the same back in 1944, when planes lifted off and landed at Ulbau Beach and Imperial Japanese Navy warships anchored up the coast in Victoria Bay, where the hulks of two Japanese ships sunk by Allied bombings still rested beneath the deep. He imagined what it must have been like to be held prisoner in this idyllic setting, knowing—as all American fliers did back then—that capture was a fate worse than a fiery death in aerial combat. George recalled a photograph in a Time-Life picture book he had seen as a kid of an American POW being beheaded by a Japanese soldier, an enduring image that encapsulated for him the barbarity of the American enemy in the Pacific theater. He would now forever associate the photograph with Robert Thorpe.
As the boat approached the shores of Kairiru, George’s momentary reverie was interrupted when he spied Brother Graeme waiting for him onshore. Graeme Lynch was a Catholic missionary from Australia who had been running the St. John’s Mission for more than twenty-five years. George first approached him on the beach in Wewak the day before after learning he made regular trips from Kairiru to sell chickens and eggs to raise money for the mission. Brother Graeme greeted George warmly as the boat came ashore. The mission and the nearby St. Xavier School consisted of the remnants of the Japanese naval base. The former headquarters building was now the main school building and the dilapidated barracks the student dormitories. Even the grass airstrip was now a ball field. George could quickly see that Kairiru had virtually no infrastructure, not even electricity. He asked about the island’s water source and was told it came from a volcanic lake in the mountains. The living would be sparse, but George concluded that a well-supplied recovery team using generators could probably make do on the island during an extended excavation, particularly if it could house in some of the school’s buildings. However, the mission would be risky without reliable air transport. If the team needed to evacuate an injured team member, it would simply take too long to get back to the mainland by boat and then arrange for air transport to a modern hospital. As he jotted details in a notebook, George noted that the remote island presented a “difficult scenario in absence of helicopter availability.”
Most of all, he still needed to survey the possible grave site of the lost American airman, which he was told was a short walk across the grounds of the adjacent St. Xavier School.
“It’s over there behind the bunkhouse,” the headmaster told him.
George could picture Robert Thorpe standing over his own grave, his lips moving silently. He could almost hear the Japanese officers taunting him as dozens of Japanese sailors standing in a circle shouted and jeered at the bloodied American. As George scanned the ground around his feet, he imagined Thorpe’s captors firing their pistols into the dirt around him, the crackle of gunfire feeding the frenzied atmosphere.
The St. Xavier schoolmaster and Brother Graeme had led George down a slope from the main school buildings, past the remnants of a prewar Catholic church and a well-preserved Japanese Shinto shrine. At the end of an old track road they crossed a small bridge over a stream and continued up the streambed about 130 feet. They then walked a few paces up the stream bank to a shallow, unmarked depression about six feet long. It was covered by low-cut grass and located just east of a lavatory used by the school’s students. It was also a short distance from the native cemetery, located farther up the slope, where similar-looking depressions were marked with brown, green, and clear glass bottles and a mixture of colorful shells and rocks. The depression before him appeared to roughly coincide with where the records indicated Thorpe was executed and buried. Some of the locals told him that the coconut grove that had been in the vicinity during the war had been removed and a dormitory built, but otherwise the area had not been developed. The site looked very promising, George thought.
As he surveyed the terrain and took notes, he was again seized by the image of Robert Thorpe in those final moments more than six decades earlier. Stripped down to his shorts, Thorpe was kneeling now before the hole in the earth, praying silently for salvation. George was confounded by how his fellow pilot, just a kid at twenty-one years old, was so steady in the face of death, how he had so stoically met his horrific fate. Under intense questioning earlier that day, George knew, Thorpe had reportedly given his name and rank and hometown, and nothing else, as he was trained. He volunteered nothing that might help the enemy. Under similar circumstances, George felt sure many men would have broken down and begged for mercy.
“What would I have done in that situation?” he wondered to himself.
He didn’t know. But he realized in that instant that no matter how many challenges he had confronted while wearing a military uniform, and despite the horrors he witnessed and the dangers he confronted in battle, it all paled in comparison to what so many others before him had faced. As the final moments of Robert Thorpe’s life played across his consciousness like an old grainy film, George felt embarrassed. He hadn’t had it that rough at all.
What he heard next, though, was like a punch to the stomach.
“There is a lot of black magic here,” the headmaster told him.
“The schoolboys removed the bones.”
Back on the mainland, the wreckage of the U.S. Navy dive-bomber, resting in two heaps on the edge of a steep slope partially covered in thick foliage, had been nearly impossible to locate. George and Sergeant Jackson, along with a local landowner, had set out to find it hours earlier from the remote village of Saunam.
The crash site had been reported to JPAC the previous year after an elderly local man cutting down a tree found a piece of iron sticking out of the ground. Amid the wreckage were found a dog tag, a shoe, canteens, and some human remains. A review of the war records strongly suggested it was the SBD Dauntless flown by Navy Lieutenant Francis McIntyre of Mitchell, South Dakota, and his gunner, the aviation radioman second class William L. Russell, of Cherokee, Oklahoma. They were reported missing on November 10, 1943, after a strafing mission of a nearby Japanese airfield.
The villagers in Saunam were Seventh-Day Adventists, led by a former officer in the PNG Defense Force. They insisted it was only a short hike to the crash site. But as George knew all too well by now, the time it might take a local to hump the distance was usually a fraction of what it required for an outsider unfamiliar with the terrain. He had to ford a winding river seven times, wading for several long stretches in waist-deep water because the ravine walls on ei
ther side were so steep. The wreckage itself was more than three hundred feet up a sharp incline.
“The difficulty of the terrain will require that the team fix rope guides to assist in traversing the area,” George recorded after assessing the area for a possible recovery operation. “The steepness of the terrain will challenge the team and could make excavation operations precarious during inclement weather.”
It was also clear to George that a recovery team would need a helicopter to operate at the site, something that was exceedingly difficult to guarantee for a reasonable price. Otherwise, they would have to carry anyone injured back to the village of Saunam on a litter and then drive the person by 4×4 to Wewak, a process that could take up to three hours.
When George got back to the village later in the day, something else gave him serious pause about recommending the site for the upcoming recovery efforts. The young men of the village were gathered together, spears in hand. When he asked what was going on, he was informed they were preparing to march off to a neighboring village to settle some scores.