Nopuko's Store: Micronesia Books WW2 Books Micronesia Shirts Island Videos Cell Phones & Service Computer & Video Games Cameras & Photo		SHOREVIEW, Minn. - Patrick Ranfranz's search for his uncle's sunken B-24 bomber in the South Pacific has relied on Micronesian chieftains, incomplete military records and the fading memories of 80-year-old veterans and their relatives. He'd like more assistance from his own government. Years of research and his own travels to an island called Yap have given the 40-year-old suburban St. Paul man a fairly good idea about where the bomber lies that entombed his uncle, a Watertown farm boy named John McCullough, 63 years ago this June.
		Patrick Ranfranz holds part of an American Hellcat in the jungle on Yap.Ranfranz has visited the South Pacific island twice looking for the plane in which his uncle, John McCullough, was lost. (Photo by Photos courtesy Patrick Ranfranz)	Now Ranfranz is hoping his extensive work will interest the Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command, or JPAC, in bringing its 21st century technology to the island to help him search. "I was at a meeting in Minneapolis for families of World War II MIAs, and literally, the conversation was that Yap is now an area JPAC is interested in," Ranfranz says. "The indication is that ... it's because of the work we've done. One of them told me, 'We're going to Yap in the next couple years.' " But if JPAC does come to Yap, will it be in time - before potential eyewitnesses die? The
		government's slow pace is as frustrating to families of missing World War II service members as have been the decades of trying to learn what happened to their loved ones. Finding the lost Within the Department of Defense, the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office handles policy and oversight when it comes to investigating, recovering and identifying Americans missing or lost in war. Almost half of its $105 million annual budget is spent by JPAC, the agency that actually sends teams out to do the recovery work. While the agencies are charged with accounting for Americans held captive or otherwise missing in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of their work also involves trying to account for service members missing from World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War and Vietnam. JPAC estimates that 35,000 of the more than 78,000 Americans unaccounted for from World War II are potentially recoverable. The rest are either lost at sea or entombed in sunken vessels that can't be accessed. That compares with 1,800 still missing after Vietnam and 8,100 unaccounted for after the Korean War. JPAC officials estimate that they identify the recovered remains of about 74 POW/ MIAs a year. But recovery efforts are slow for World War II missing, hindered by poor and inaccurate records, the inability to access some loss sites, even the weather. "Asking a bureaucracy to be more efficient ... is an oxymoron," says Janice Snyder of Indianola, Wash., part of a loose-knit group called World War II Missing In Action Recovery Group. Her father, Air Force 2nd Lt. Dale Watterson, was shot down March 31, 1945, over Germany. She describes JPAC's efforts at recovering World War II missing as trying "to carve Mount Rushmore using a dental pick. Some of us want to give them extra dynamite to blow away some of the rocks in the way." Continued Nephew Yearns for Help