You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  George and the others huddled together back at the Crowne Plaza in Port Moresby to review the bidding. Their plans to launch multiple recoveries out of the Wewak area were quickly falling apart. They had run into a series of obstacles. First, as George was learning with each passing hour, all the planning back at JPAC for an undertaking such as this only went so far. At the hotels and guesthouses he visited in and around Wewak—if you could even call them that—George was offered lodging for the JPAC teams at outrageous prices. As soon as the proprietors knew who he was, they sought to fleece the Americans for all they could get. One asking price was actually three million dollars. The outlook temporarily brightened when George secured permission to set up a base of operations for multiple teams at a PNG Defense Force outpost on Cape Moem east of Wewak. But bigger issues arose. The two sites they had surveyed so far were both problematic for full recovery operations. On Kairiru there was now more conflicting information on where Thorpe’s remains might be. Claims by some of the natives that the grave had been exhumed and the bones reburied in the native cemetery would require a more intensive search on the island. This made the case, much to George’s disappointment, less promising than it had seemed to be. Meanwhile, the crash site believed to be where McIntyre and Russell were lost posed its own logistical problems. It would require helicopter support and setting up a base camp at the crash site for the duration of the recovery. On top of that, they weren’t developing enough other promising MIA leads around Wewak to justify bringing full teams to the region. For an organization operating on a shoestring budget like JPAC, the more locations that could be excavated during a deployment, the better. George needed to convince his superiors back in Building 45 that every dollar spent trying to bring home MIAs—and every soldier enlisted in the effort—was being maximized to the fullest extent possible. He just wasn’t there yet.

  The numerous crash sites on his list that were farther south in the highlands also proved elusive. Passing through Lae, where the local officials had still not responded to their advance requests for assistance, what they were hearing from the embassy was only more discouraging. There was too much lawlessness and political strife, too many recent reports of roving bands, to bring in a large number of American troops for an extended period of time—especially with provincial leaders so unwilling to provide security. At minimum, he reported back to JPAC, a small investigation team could operate in Lae and in Madang in the highlands developing the leads for future recoveries. But George was running out of time to lay the groundwork for the large recovery teams that were set to deploy in a few short months.

  Their best bet, they all agreed, was now New Britain Island, where they had relatively solid information on nearly a dozen possible crash locations, several of them in relative proximity to each other in the thick jungle blanketing the northern tip of the island.

  But the still-active volcano they had been warned about when they arrived in Port Moresby was in a decidedly sour mood, choking the skies with thick clouds of ash and shutting down air traffic. On January 26, after a tedious delay, George and the survey team finally got a flight to New Britain. The two-hour journey, in an aging jet operated for New Guinea’s national airline, took them out over the Coral Sea, the scene of an early naval battle between the U.S. and Japanese Navies and where the USS Lexington had been scuttled after sustaining heavy bombardment in May 1942. The aircraft turned northeast and traversed the majestic Owen Stanley Mountains, where many American GIs, mostly from the Michigan and Wisconsin National Guard, had met their doom later that same year and countless airmen had disappeared. Once they were over the Solomon Sea, the aircraft soon began descending toward the rugged, crescent-shaped jungle island of New Britain.

  New Britain, known by the Germans who once controlled it as New Pommern, or New Pomerania, was the largest island in the group known as the Bismarck Archipelago, which stretched eastward from the Bismarck Sea on the northeast coast of New Guinea about five hundred miles to the island of Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. Covered in rain forest and dotted with volcanic peaks reaching as high as 6,000 feet, the island is 370 miles east to west and at its widest point about 60 miles across. It is blanketed with trees up to 150 feet high that form a canopy over a second layer up to 30 feet high, and tangled clumps of bamboo and palms sprouting from thick undergrowth. There are numerous rivers and streams running out of the mountains, and where the island isn’t covered in forested swamps, the earth is made up of a thick reddish-brown soil that turns to mud in the frequent torrential rains. Cross-country movement is extremely difficult. Meanwhile, the native population, mostly a mix of Melanesian and Polynesian blood, are still largely governed by tribal allegiance, not central authority. Even though the modern world has reached most areas, there are lingering reports of isolated cannibalism and head-hunting in the island’s interior.

  JPAC’s interest lay mostly on the northeast end of the island, where scores of fighter pilots and bomber crewmen had been lost in the siege of Rabaul from 1942 to 1945. That was where George’s hopes of bringing home some of his lost comrades were now pinned. Their immediate destination was Tokua Airfield near the town of Kokopo, which had replaced Rabaul as the region’s commercial center after the volcano erupted in 1994. Flying in from the east over St. George’s Channel, making landfall just south of Cape Gazelle, the aircraft approached a small airstrip cut out of the jungle near the shores of Blanche Bay. As it descended over the bright green carpet of the coastal plain below, up ahead, just visible from the right side of the aircraft, was a striking view of the hook-shaped caldera enclosing Simpson Harbor—and at its tip the belching Mount Tavurvur.

  George spit out the pinch of chewing tobacco. He pulled his lucky camouflage cap, the tattered one with the Florida State University logo, low over his forehead. He climbed up the steep slope, peering through the dust. The landscape was a pallid charcoal gray, utterly barren save for the tops of a few palm trees poking through the surface. He halted on top of one of the mounds of ash and looked out at the geography around him.

  The bleakness of his immediate surroundings contrasted sharply with the vista beyond. The blue waters of Simpson Harbor sparkled in the distance, enclosed on three sides by a fishhook-shaped caldera of jagged mountains and triple-canopy jungle, which blinked brilliantly green in the equatorial sun. George, who was perched near the tip of the fishhook, glanced south to the opposite shore and a trio of mountains that formed the spine of the Gazelle Peninsula, a vista covered in bamboo forests and large-leaved mango trees. The scene was at once more beautiful and more forbidding than any he had ever seen—and he had seen his fair share these last few years.

  It was an unusual duty post for a thirty-four-year-old U.S. Army officer. Nor did George look the part. Instead of a uniform, he wore a pair of well-worn jungle khakis and a light cloth shirt unbuttoned at the collar. Rather than the sands of the Middle East, his hiking boots were caked in dried reddish-brown mud from trekking through the rain forest. He had a couple of days’ worth of stubble on his ruddy square-set jaw and a few extra pounds on his stout five-foot-seven-inch frame. His standard military crew cut had been replaced by the strands of dirty-blond hair poking out from under his cap, and he was unarmed, save for his machete, the gift from the village chief in Laos.

  Now, as he gazed out over Simpson Harbor, for the first time he fully grasped what had taken place here. On the shoreline below, partially obscured by the billowing peaks and valleys of volcanic ash, were the outlines of a vast concrete bunker, where a rusted anti-aircraft gun was still perched outside the entrance. Inside the warren of damp, subterranean rooms had been the headquarters of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, which George had toured after paying a few kina to the locals. The skies above him had been the scene of one of the most bitterly fought air campaigns of the war. Though the guns had been silent now for more than sixty years, George could still see the evidence of the colossal clash that took place here. Rusted Japanese vessels still sat in their cave berths around the
harbor. Crumpled fighter planes lay amid the coral just off the beach. Even the remains of Japanese soldiers were left undisturbed in the twelve miles of caves that snaked deep into some of the surrounding ridges. On the very ground where he now stood had been the Lakunai Airdrome, one of the Japanese’s largest fighter bases. This was Rabaul, the place that had “terrified a million Allied fighting men.”

  It had been all but forgotten by the outside world, eclipsed by more famous battles with names like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Bulge and Stalingrad. But not by the small military unit that George was a part of. Hidden in the swamps and bogs or covered in thick scrub growth were clues to what happened to hundreds of pilots and crewmen. Their crash sites, buried beneath the vines, creepers, brush, and razor-sharp kunai grass, beckoned for someone to unlock the mysteries of their ultimate fates—and at long last try to bring them home.

  George’s main focus would be several crash sites relatively close to each other. One case, designated simply “Bureau Number 02402,” was particularly intriguing. It contained the GPS coordinates of a remote village called Vunakaur about twenty miles south down the peninsula along the Tomukavar River. That was where the wreckage of a Marine Corps fighter plane had been located, its charred fuselage rusted and weather-beaten, with its serial number only partially visible. Bones and other evidence had been recovered in the vicinity, but whom they belonged to remained a puzzle. George and his team had one last chance to try to complete it.

  Like so many cases George had studied, Bureau Number 02402 was a stubborn one. But he also knew that just as obstinate were the men and women—generations of them, really—who never gave up on solving it.

  Four years after the war, the search for the pilot who JPAC suggested had been lost in the crash had effectively been deemed a wild-goose chase.

  “The remains of the subject named decedent have been declared non-recoverable by Special Boards convened in the field and in the Office of The Quartermaster General,” the Department of the Army, which ran the Graves Registration Service, concluded in November 1949.

  It might have been forgotten altogether if it had not been for a timber salesman and World War II aficionado from New Zealand named Brian Bennett, who was working in Rabaul in the fall of 1981. Bennett, a slight man who by the time George arrived on New Guinea had a shock of gray hair, had identified dozens of lost U.S. warplanes in New Guinea during his travels across the islands and painstakingly recorded all the details of the wreckages and passed them on to the Central Identification Laboratory. For a time he was a paid consultant for JPAC.

  Bennett wrote a letter to the U.S. Navy at the time reporting the wreckage of a Corsair on New Britain near a village that was then known as Viveren, where he recovered a small piece of aircraft stamped with the partial serial number 2402. In response the Navy told him that a review of war records indicated that the aircraft was last assigned to the Marine Corps captain Nathaniel Ruggles Landon Jr. of New York City, a member of Marine Fighter Squadron 211, who was reported missing over Rabaul on January 20, 1944.

  Seven years later, in March 1988, a small team from the Central Identification Laboratory visited the crash site for the first time. They found no additional identifying materials and only a partial data plate from the rusted and fire-damaged Pratt & Whitney engine. Interviews with locals at the time also suggested that the body of the pilot might have been removed years before.

  “No evidence of remains could be found,” the U.S. team that visited the crash site in 1988 concluded.

  The U.S. military still hadn’t given up hope. Three years later, over a few days in May and June 1991, another U.S. team searching for lost planes on New Britain Island visited the wreckage again, finding that it had been “thoroughly picked over” and reporting that the cockpit area had been “consumed by fire.” It also appeared that parts of the wreckage had been moved to make way for local crops.

  Then they found a new glimmer of hope. A single bone was pulled from the crash site that was later identified by the Central Identification Laboratory as part of a left humerus, or upper arm, but it could not be matched to an ID. What they found next, after digging underneath a part of the remaining fuselage, forced authorities back in Hawaii to reevaluate their earlier conclusions about who had been piloting it. It was a dog tag. But it was not stamped with “Nathaniel Ruggles Landon,” who the records indicated was assigned the plane. There was another name etched into the metal ID plate: “Marion Ryan McCown Jr.”

  But when JPAC checked the records for a crash report involving anyone by the name of McCown, it only found a one-page typewritten form dated January 15, 1944, that stated: “Pilot made water landing 47 mi. from Torokina” in the Solomon Islands. “Was later picked up by PT boat.” On the line on the form next to “injuries” was typed one word: “Safe.” For all they knew, McCown could be retired and living in his native South Carolina. It was not uncommon to discover identification tags left behind in the cockpit by previous occupants. Other records, meanwhile, indicated McCown was assigned a Corsair with a different tail number, 17448, while secondary sources suggested McCown might have been held prisoner and executed by the Japanese.

  Nonetheless, the likelihood of finding more remains at the crash site was deemed remote. “Plane # not definite, but no further work needed at site,” the archaeologist who was part of the 1991 team recommended. He concluded that with the command’s limited resources there were simply too many other cases that had better prospects. “If any human remains had been close to the surface or associated with the removed metal, then those remains probably would have been moved. Dogs and pigs would have also disturbed the human remains. The possibility of there being additional recoverable remains at the site is remote. No further work is recommended for this site now or in the future.”

  Then a new break came in 2003, when JPAC’s chief historian, Christopher McDermott, was forwarded an e-mail from an Australian helicopter pilot reporting that he had found a fire-damaged dog tag next to a Corsair near Rabaul stamped with the name “Marion Ryan McConn Jr.”

  McDermott, a slight, soft-spoken man with short brown hair and spectacles, was a World War II historian by training, and so was his wife, who also worked for JPAC. With his near-photographic memory, McDermott spent countless hours poring over piles of old records typed on onionskin to find new leads and uncover additional information that might revive some of JPAC’s cold cases.

  A few days after receiving the e-mail about the recovered dog tag, McDermott wrote back to the Australian pilot saying there was no record of a World War II pilot with that spelling but asked for more details about the location of the wreckage. A week later, the Australian helicopter pilot responded that he had been mistaken. After cleaning the damaged dog tag, he discovered the correct surname. It was McCown. Not McConn.

  Still, the name meant nothing to McDermott. He did a cursory search and reported back two days later that data “suggests that he may have been a POW in Rabaul, but not returned following the war.” In the meantime, McDermott contacted the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, to request a copy of McCown’s Individual Deceased Personnel File, or IDPF. For JPAC’s history section, the IDPF had come to be “the best primary source document for casualties.” While all members of the military had a personnel file, those killed in combat or declared dead after being missing for years generated an IDPF, which could include reports associated with their loss; information on what steps had been taken at the time to search for them; whether they had been taken prisoner; any correspondence between the government and their next of kin; or anything else the bureaucracy generated over the years related to their case.

  The National Archives responded to McDermott’s request for a copy of the file by reporting that it couldn’t find it. JPAC would ultimately request a copy three times, only to be told the same answer. The case was put aside again.

  “How do we get momentum in this case?”

  It was a question that McDermott was
asking often in the summer of 2005 as he reviewed a number of stalled MIA cases in New Guinea that once seemed promising. He knew that DNA analysis was now far more advanced than it had been in the 1990s when the bone found at the crash site was first tested—without results—for genetic code. He also knew that JPAC’s field methods were much more rigorous and precise than they had been back in 1991, when the archaeologist concluded nothing else could be found.

  He decided it was time to resample the piece of the left humerus stored in the lab since the visit to the crash site fourteen years earlier. But once again, the report came back “inconclusive.” What the case needed, McDermott concluded, was new information that helped confirm who actually died in the crash. Then they might have justification to go back and look for more remains that might have a better chance of being identified.

  McDermott and his staff began looking for any additional records that might shed more light on the case. “We may, if we did some historical type research, try to figure this puzzle out,” he wrote in July 2005 to one of the other historians, “but it is a big problem with at least 73 F4U-1s recorded as lost over Rabaul.”

  He set aside for the moment the indications that McCown was flying another plane—the one that crashed on January 15, 1944, when he was rescued at sea. He studied records from his unit, VMF-321. On a trip to the National Archives facility in College Park, JPAC staff pulled all the combat reports from the Hell’s Angels. They learned that McCown was reported missing on January 20, along with two other Corsair pilots in the squadron. The records also reported that one of them, Roger Brindos, was killed in the POW camp at Rabaul and his remains were buried after the war in the U.S. military cemetery in the Philippines. The other pilot, Robert Marshall, was still MIA.