WWII Recovery
to the screening station, which hangs off the back of the barge.
Screening sediment is a simple process but takes time. You take a pail and dump the contents into a shallow wooden tray lined with wire mesh. Then you use a hose to wash away the sand and silt, leaving behind anything larger than a quarter of an inch. Scannon and Boteler begin work, joined by Derek Abbey, a longtime team member who was among the group that found pieces of Manown’s Avenger on a nearby island. A former Marine who piloted F-18 Hornets, Abbey took over as Project Recover’s chief executive officer in 2019, though Scannon remains heavily involved in day-to-day operations.
No one at the screening station says much. The sound of running water dominates. As the sand washes away, the screens reveal the usual mix of shells and coral fragments but also much more: shards of clear, red and green glass, which evidently came from an instrument panel; knobs and dials; and additional items that look likely to have come from the cockpit.
Then someone finds a piece of curved gray material. It resembles a shell, but when shown the object Weise says: “It’s a piece of a cranium.” Soon what appear to be more bones surface in the screens: another possible skull fragment, a likely bone from a foot and other pieces, each recorded in a log by Weise.
As the operation winds down, many other artifacts come to light. A piece of the plane’s communication system; a button from a flight uniform; and, finally, a small circle of metal that some cleaning and polishing reveals to be a nickel, quite possibly from the pilot’s pocket— perhaps a talisman or charm. The coin is dated 1941, the year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, setting in motion the sequence of events that would lead to the deaths of Manown and his crew—and, in the fullness of time, the presence of everyone on deck that day.
THE LIKELY BONE FRAGMENTS were sent directly to Oahu, Hawaii, for intake at DPAA’s state-of-the-art forensics facility, the largest skeletal identification laboratory in the world. The structure is a gleaming, light-filled building with two wings—from a distance it looks a bit like a plane. The lab houses dozens of active-duty forensic scientists who specialize in handling and analyzing human remains. Typically working with photographs of missing ser
vice members in plain view—a constant reminder of the gravity of their charge— these scientists carefully collate, record and analyze the bones and teeth along with any personal effects recovered. To make a positive identification, they make use of evidence such as the location of the remains relative to the wreckage; the presence of items belonging to the deceased; comparisons with dental records, typically those recorded in military personnel files; and dog tags.
But these methods are suggestive, not dispositive. DNA evidence, on the other hand, when compared with DNA taken from cheek swabs of the deceased’s relatives, can provide conclusive identification—a process that can take months and sometimes years. Until that time, the military won’t comment on the status of any investigation, not even to family members—including, for now, Manown’s.
Once a case is closed, however, the remains are sent to the closest surviving family members and given a full military funeral. Project Recover members frequently attend these funerals, as many did in September when Wilbur Mitts was laid to rest in Seaside, California.
Diana Ward, Mitts’ niece and oldest living relative, sat beneath a canopy at the gravesite, surrounded by dozens of family members. She never met her uncle, she said during her eulogy, having been born three days after his plane was shot down in Palau. But she described how he remained a palpable presence during her childhood: The family sang his favorite songs and nurtured his memory as if he might one day return.
Her account is typical of many surviving relatives of MIAs. With no body to mourn, survivors experience what psychologists call “ambiguous loss.” Deprived of the closure of a conclusive death, family members dwell in a peculiar purgatory that can carry over from one generation to the next. Perhaps this helps explain why Mitts’ funeral felt more like a celebration than anything else. The dead cannot come back to life, but they can come home.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, Zaborski quietly approached Ward. He knelt beside her, and the two spoke privately for several minutes before he hugged her and returned to the Project
Susan Holmes, former federal policy director of the Utah-based organization Wildlands Network, told me soon after the infrastructure act passed. “It creates a new priority for biodiversity.”
For Switalski, too, the funding had proved transformative. “We’re adding zeroes to a lot of budgets,” he said. His group, the Clark Fork Coalition, had recently received a half-million dollars from yet another new initiative, a $161 million effort sponsored by the Bureau of Land Management, to restore degraded landscapes around the West. Among other restoration activities, the money would help the coalition decommission roads in the Blackfoot River watershed, made famous by A River Runs Through It. “You spend half your time searching for funding to address the road system, and we now have this incredible mechanism to get work on the ground,” Switalski said.
The influx of cash wouldn’t just produce more road restoration—it augured more effective restoration. One frequent objection to decommissioning, Switalski said, is that national forests are overrun with so many roads that it’s hard to eliminate enough: A patch of forest laced with, say, ten miles of logging roads doesn’t magically become good grizzly habitat if you reduce its mileage to eight. But now there is enough money to remove roads at an adequate scale, and to restore the creeks they’d damaged by digging new pools, installing logjams and planting streamside vegetation. “I now have the luxury of doing the highest-quality decommissioning possible,” he said. “In a couple of decades or less, you won’t even know that a road went through that landscape.”
The road, however, does not easily surrender its grip. Not long after our visit to the Lolo, I ventured with Switalski into the nearby Helena National Forest, up yet another treacherous dirt road. Downed trees blocked our progress, and Switalski stopped often to hack them away with a handsaw. Abandoning our car, we hiked on foot past ponderosa pine and Douglas fir stumps. After 20 minutes of walking, we crested a rise that overlooked a lush mountain meadow. Wind tousled the grass, and I half-expected a family of von Trapps to traipse across the hillside.
Yet the tableau was eerily wrong. A thick purple belt of vegetation, almost hallucinatory in its vividness and precision, girdled the hillside. As we drew closer, the belt resolved into thousands of spiny, head-high plants tipped with violet flowers the size of baseballs. The plants, Switalski explained glumly, were musk thistle, an exotic weed that crowds out native species, and their invasion was an unfortunate side effect of road decommissioning. Years ago, logging trucks had transported thistle seeds in their treads and deposited them on the mountainside, where they lay dormant for years. When an excavator finally churned up the road, it surfaced the seedbank and loosened the soil—fomenting perfect conditions for the thistle to germinate.
This was not unexpected. Switalski has found that obliterated roads are initially cursed by up to six times more weeds than control sites. The problem is so common that he has come to recommend spraying herbicide before and after restoration at sites in the mountain West to prevent weed explosion. “It’s one of our primary issues,” he admitted. Even in their death throes, roads warped the land.
But roads that scar the landscape, like scars on the human body, can also be signs of healing. As we picked our way through the thistle, Switalski stooped to point out subtle signs of regeneration. “Here’s a raspberry under the shelter of this log, right where you’d expect it,” he said. “There’s a spirea. There’s some strawberry coming up.” Native grasses—timothy, brome, fescue—bowed to the wind, heads heavy with seeds. Come back in five years, Switalski added, and you might find dozens of larch seedlings straining skyward—the germs of a new forest. The road would be a distant memory.
Recover team members who were standing in a circle nearby.
At a reception afterward, Scannon mused on the meaning of it all. If the remains he and his team found over the summer are ultimately proved to belong to Manown, Scannon said, he’d find it eerie, if a little fitting, that the plane’s junior crew members had been found first. “When a plane is headed for a crash, there’s an important rule that the pilot or commander is the last one to bail out,” he explained. “In a way, then, it’s appropriate that Di Petta and Mitts came home first.”
Time will tell whether Manown will come home, too. His Avenger will not. The government of Palau considers the plane, like other wrecks and relics from World War II, a part of the nation’s historical heritage. Which is why, a few months earlier, on the expedition’s final day, the team collected all the pieces of the bomber the divers had recovered during the excavation. Under a dark gray sky, they wrapped the plane parts in a burial shroud made of wire mesh and secured it with a rope. As everyone gathered to watch, the crane lifted the giant bundle and brought it out over the water before gently lowering it until it rested just below the surface. A single diver jumped overboard and, dodging whitecaps, swam out to the rope. Then he pulled a knife from a sheath strapped to his leg and cut the line. The shattered pieces of Manown’s plane vanished from view, reunited with the rest of the wreckage in the darkness below.