Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II

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. (Nov.)