P-MAN X Update #10 - More jungle, then Max, then party
01 March 2008 - Saturday

On the way back up north today, we stopped at the base of Police Hill along the main road to explore a new hypothesis about the real location of "Aikoku Bridge," a feature that appears on some of the maps from the tribunal testimony. It has been hard to reconcile the relationship between that bridge and the road leading up to Police Hill. It had just occurred to us that the big bowl-shaped feature between the top of the hill and the Compact road on the west must surely produce and concentrate a large volume of runoff water that has to find its way to the stream on the other side of the road, and that might be the location of the old Aikoku bridge. But there's no obvious bridge there now. But sure enough, when we stopped and checked out the area, there's a culvert passing under the road at that very spot. When we interpret some of those testimony maps as having a bridge in the spot were the culvert is today, several features that were formerly puzzling or apparently inconsistent seem to fall into place. We'll see. The analysis continues.

Then we continued to the northern part of Aimeliik. Although we wound up near the area that we've searched during the past two days, today we spent time in some very different terrain. Our plan was to extend the Allison search area beyond the area the team searched last year. We've begun to do that.

Rich Wills from JPAC has analyzed the crash-site locations reported by the Army's Graves Registration Unit, comparing GRU's reported latitude/longitude of a number of Palau crash sites with the now-known locations for several of those sites. His conclusion is that the actual crash sites are offset from the GRU-reported locations by anywhere from 200 to 1000 meters, most of them in roughly the same direction. So we decided to plot a course 1 kilometer long from the Allison GRU-record location, and do a line-abreast sweep of that area along that 1-km line in the direction suggested by Rich. That's basically what we did.

The terrain in this new area is all densely forested but with fair visibility, and it has substantially more vertical component than the areas we've previously searched. We were able to do a line-abreast sweep and were able to keep each other in sight with a separation of as much as 50-100 feet. We found a few areas that contain clusters of evidence of the Japanese occupation (some helmets and other military objects) in the first couple hundred meters of the hike, but nothing from there to the end of our search line. We shifted slightly west of our outbound line and hiked back out on a roughly parallel track, without seeing anything else. Lots of slippin' and slidin' up and down those hills.

About all we feel we've learned about the Allison crash is that this area we were in today would make a much better place to hide Corsair-crash debris than most of the other places we've surveyed in this general area.

When we returned to Koror we had an interview with Max, who is Esther's uncle. He did some underwater salvage in the '50s. Sometime in the next couple of days he's going to take us to a piece of wreckage at the southeast end of Malakal Harbor that we haven't seen before. He also mentioned that there's another elder Palauan who was involved in salvage in the '50s and who worked around the west end of Malakal Island. Max is going to try to set up a chance for us to interview him, too.

After cleaning up, we headed over to the Taj, an Indian restaurant, where we'd been invited to JPAC's end-of-mission party. JPAC is proud to be able to close the B-24 site after their three successful missions there. They're hopeful about successful identification of remains returned from each of those missions.

They presented a plaque to Pat for the whole BentProp team, acknowledging our contribution and the fact that without our efforts, none of the JPAC B-24 missions would have happened.

They also handed out JPAC coins to the team of Navy divers who worked this final B-24 mission, calling each one up by name. The JPAC coins are special, but these are even more special: all of the coins handed out tonight have spent some time underwater at the crash site. For us, the most special part of the coin ceremony was the first coin they handed out: it was given to Pat to give to Bob Holler's family. Bob was one of our BentProp team members last year, greatly admired by the JPAC people and sadly missed by all since he was killed a few days after returning home from that mission.

- Reid
 

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