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Palau Yields a History of Heroes
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Plane wreckage tells of bloody battle
Sunday, March 07, 2004
By Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Writer
In the 60 years since war ravaged the western Pacific nation of Palau, population 17,000, the placid string of islands has become a tourist destination for scuba divers lured by the turquoise ocean, coral reefs and white beaches.
But in the jungle hills and the shallow waters of the atoll, the ghosts of World War II remain.
In 1944, the Navy and Marine Corps battled an increasingly desperate Imperial Japan on these islands for two savage months in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the Pacific Theater.
The Americans suffered 1,285 killed in action and more than 6,000 wounded; nearly all of a Japanese force of 11,000 died. At least 200 U.S. aircraft of all types went down here, and their wrecks litter the ocean floor near the main islands of Koror and Babelthuap.
The planes and their crews, many still listed as missing in action, are not forgotten.
Patrick Scannon, 56, a San Francisco physician and research scientist who grew up in Wilkinsburg, and Reid Joyce, 62, a retiree and longtime diver and pilot in Butler County, are among a group of adventurers making sure of that.
Their "BentProp Project," founded by Scannon to locate wrecks and pay tribute to missing airmen, recently returned from a six-week expedition to Palau, where team members found an Army Air Forces B-24 bomber shot down in September 1944 off Koror, the capital.
They'd been looking for it for eight years.
"You can hardly imagine how interesting it is and how caught up in it you get," Joyce said last week at his home off Route 8 in Valencia. "Looking for long-lost MIAs is pretty important stuff."
The remains of eight crew members are buried among the pieces of coral-encrusted fuselage in 70 feet of water. Three other airmen who parachuted out were executed by the Japanese a day before the Sept. 15 Marine invasion of Peleliu, one of Palau's southern islands and at the time the location of a Japanese airstrip.
Joyce, a bearded, soft-spoken former research psychologist who serves as BentProp's webmaster, is emotional about the mission.
"You'll forgive me if I'm a little red-eyed and introspective for a while here," he wrote on the Web site Jan. 26, the day of the discovery. "I've just come back from a long-lost grave site -- the final resting place of some young guys who made the ultimate sacrifice for me ... when I was 3 years old. I didn't appreciate it then, but I damn sure do now."
On Feb. 6, the president of the Republic of Palau, Tommy E. Remengesau Jr., dove on the wreck and declared it a memorial.
"This piece of history must be preserved for both the Palauan and the American people," he said. "It is through such dedication and persistence that these wreck sites are discovered. The people of Palau will protect and honor the sites with that same level of devotion."
In the annals of World War II, the Battle of Peleliu has been obscured by such famous Pacific engagements as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, but it's considered the most tragic because it might not have been necessary.
As U.S. forces advanced across the Pacific in 1944 to recapture the Philippines, Adm. Chester Nimitz thought it necessary to take the island to protect Gen. Douglas MacArthur's flank from air attacks launched from Peleliu, one of 243 Palau islands.
But Adm. William Halsey, whose fleet was pounding the Japanese throughout the western Pacific, recommended the invasion be canceled in favor of stepping up the timetable for the Philippine assault.
Nimitz stuck to his plan, thinking Peleliu would be useful as an air base and relatively easy to take. After bombardment, he and the Marine commanders estimated, they would secure the island in a few days.
But that assessment was based on faulty intelligence and deceptive aerial photos that indicated the island was flat. In fact, it is dominated by the Umurbrogol Mountains, a ridge a few hundred feet high.
When the Marines splashed ashore Sept. 15, they discovered that the Japanese were hiding in the mountains inside an interlocking series of concrete-reinforced caves protected by camouflaged steel doors. The Japanese would emerge from the caves, open fire on the Marines, then disappear again.
To make matters worse, Marines in some areas weren't able to dig into the hard coral to protect themselves.
The Marines eventually prevailed and moved inland, burning the Japanese with flamethrowers or sealing them in their caves. The fighting, described by veterans as some of the worst in the war, dragged on for two months.
But in the meantime, MacArthur had landed at Leyte Gulf in October to utter his most memorable line: "People of the Philippines, I have returned."
Peleliu, it turned out, had not been critical. The invasion is now seen by many historians as a costly mistake, not only for the Marines but for airmen, too.
In five air campaigns until the end of the land battle, the United States lost more than 200 planes, including fighters of all types and three B-24s. Many of them were reported shot down without ever being officially located.
For more than 10 years, Scannon and his team have been trying to correct that, spending thousands of dollars of their own money on air fare, equipment and guides.
He and his friends have found 15 wrecks since 1993, when Scannon first traveled to the islands as part of the expedition that found the armed trawler that then-future President George H. W. Bush sank in July 1944 as a young Navy torpedo bomber pilot.
Continued Palau Yields a History of Heroes, Page 2
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