Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II

Just before dawn on September 10, 1944, the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise came to life, as ground crews readied a line of airplanes for battle. The day’s mission was critical: to hit Japanese positions and ships in advance of an amphibious invasion of Peleliu, an island in the archipelago of Palau some 50 miles to the west. At approximately 5:30 a.m., the first contingent of planes taxied and took flight. Then crews moved the next group into position on deck: 12 fighter planes known as Hellcats, five heavy bombers called Helldivers and seven even larger bombers known as Avengers.
When Manown’s plane went down that morning, it was traveling at least 300 miles an hour. If anybody inside had survived the initial hit, they would have had little time to react, much less to escape. Moreover, nobody aboard the other planes nearby had seen parachutes. Without evidence that the crew might have survived, the Navy declared Manown and his crew “missing” and “presumed dead”—three men among upward of 80,000 American service members listed as missing in action after the war was over. Like others consigned to this category, Manown and his crew were understood not to be alive, but they were not declared dead, either. And unless their remains were somehow found, there would be no formal recognition of their demise—no bodies to prepare for burial, no funerals to attend, no graves to visit.