Vanished

August 12, 2013
Journalist Hylton highlights the efforts to find missing American military personnel lost during WWII in the Pacific theater. The focus of the story is Dr. Pat Scannon, an M.D. with a doctorate in chemistry who became fascinated with the wreckage of American military aircraft while on a 1993 diving expedition in the Republic of Palau. The book follows Scannon as he establishes the Bentprop project and leads repeated private expeditions to Palau to search for the crash sites of the missing aircraft. One aircraft, a WWII bomber, becomes his obsession, and Hylton’s story traces Scannon’s decade-long quest to find it while highlighting many different and important aspects of the search for America’s lost military personnel and recreating the lives, training, and combat experience of the young crewmen who manned the lost aircraft. Hylton also describes the physiological and emotional impact that MIA status has on the surviving families of the lost men, and he details the extensive research necessary to locate the remains of the aircraft; the active role of the military’s Joint MIA/POW Accounting Command; and the patience and time necessary to achieve success. It’s a well-told story of WWII heroism and tragedy that demonstrates that the missing are not forgotten.

November 15, 2013
The story of the quest to discover the fates of the 56,000 American servicemen who served in the Pacific theater during World War II and were declared to be missing in action. New York Times Magazine writer Hylton picked up the story in the wake of scuba diver Pat Scannon's successful efforts to find evidence in the waters around Palau. The diver found the underwater wreckage of three bombers shot down during the battle for Palau, one of the bloodiest in the whole war. One of those shot down was tail gunner Jimmie Doyle, whose family was informed he was missing in 1944 but never had definitive knowledge of his fate. Thanks to Scannon--who sought to "honor the military tradition in his family without abandoning his sense of self"--and the team he established, Jimmie's son, Tommy, and his wife eventually discovered what had happened to the father declared missing many years ago. Scannon's investigations into the submerged wrecks led to the development of his own expertise and the organization of the "BentProp" team of divers, which took on responsibility to help account for the MIAs lost in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Cooperating with the military's Central Identification Laboratory and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command enabled Scannon and his team to successfully track down the story of the sunken B-24s. Hylton draws from a treasure trove of Doyle's letters, which later provided the impetus for Tommy to seek out Scannon and his investigators. The author skillfully weaves these strands together against a dramatic account of the Pacific theater, particularly the action in the air over Palau and its surroundings. An absorbing read that is well-structured to pull readers through the narrative. A perfect complement to Bryan Bender's You Are Not Forgotten (2013).

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June 1, 2013

I've heard persuasive raves about this work by Hylton, a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. His concern: the Pacific theater of World War II, from which more than 56,000 U.S. troops are still missing--two-thirds of all American MIAs over the past century. Hylton focuses on an American bomber lost somewhere over the archipelago of Palau on September 1, 1944, with 11 men on board. For 60 years, the U.S. government, children of the airmen, and a cutting-edge team of scientists and scuba divers have tried to find them. NPR interest.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2013

This book has three stories: the wartime actions of the men of an American B-24 bomber that crashed in the Palau Islands in the Pacific Theater in 1944, how their surviving relatives and friends coped over the decades with their loss, and how private individuals spent years trying to locate the wreckage and discover what happened to the crew. The switching back and forth among these stories can make it hard to keep the narrative straight. Hylton (contributing writer, New York Times Magazine) writes with some poetic flair about the beauty of the islands, the terrible conditions on the ground and in the air, and the hard work of private experts such as anthropologist Eric Emery and others in the last decades, as they searched for the missing aircraft. VERDICT For those interested in World War II aerial operations and the ongoing searches for missing aircraft and crew.--DB

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.