![]() ![]() The remains of eight crew members were found at this site and later recovered and identified by the U.S. ![]() It's about finding the MIAs who are no longer MIA. Pat Scannon: At the end of the game, it's not about finding aluminum. "There's a whole generation of people in my family that just did not speak of this because of the unknown."ĭr. At first you might mistake it for coral, in fact coral has been growing over it. The plane impacted and as it hit the water and that's why it's now laying in sections. On September 1, 1944, this B-24, number 453, and its crew took off on a bombing mission.Īnderson Cooper: When you first enter the water, it's only a few seconds before you see the first signs of the plane. The skies overhead were filled with Hellcats, Corsairs, Avengers and B-24 Liberators. As the Second World War raged in the Pacific, the islands of Palau were teeming with Japanese soldiers and under attack by American planes. But beneath the jungle canopy you can still find the rusted ruins of Japanese anti-aircraft guns and in the clear blue water, a graveyard of planes and the men who flew them. And focus on Palau, a Pacific island nation that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war 70 years ago, a place some pilots called "a forgotten corner of hell."įly today over Palau's 586 small islands and miles of barrier reefs and you'll see no sign of the carnage that once occurred here. They are doing it, they say, for the fallen and their families. This is the remarkable story of a group of volunteers who spend their own time and money quietly searching for these long lost servicemen - remarkable because of what they've discovered in recent years. At the end of the war, the technology didn't exist to find and identify many of the missing, but today it does. To this day, the families of some 73,000 unaccounted for servicemen have lived with the mystery of how they died and have been deprived of the comfort that comes from a burial. Adding to the heartache of that staggering loss, nearly one in five of those killed was declared missing in action. More than 400,000 Americans died fighting in the Second World War. David Schneider and Joyce Gesundheit, producer. The following is a script of "A Forgotten Corner of Hell" which aired on Nov.
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