P-MAN X Update #14 - Data mining; a meeting with the President's Chief of Staff
05 March 2008 - Wednesday

This morning we started a marathon computer-fest. Mark Swank and Katie Rasdorf, our amazing volunteer researchers in D.C., sent a DVD and a couple of CDs along with Laura, containing a bunch of their latest discoveries at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). When we're at home, we review stuff like this on-line, but here in Palau the Internet bandwidth is terrible, and it would have taken us the rest of the trip to download a huge volume of stuff like this.

We decided that we should set aside the better part of a day to review this stuff as a group. That way everyone knows all the same stuff, and using several sets of eyes is always a good choice for complex historical stuff like this. Tedious, but good. We brought a video projector, so when we brief missions, we all gather around in the "ready room" (the two-bedroom suite that Flip and I share), close the curtains, and do slide shows on the wall. Works great.

The "Ready Room." Note video projector on coffee table.
© Reid Joyce 2008

This collection of material is mostly made up of newly discovered transcripts from Guam war-crimes tribunals, plus a bunch of intelligence reports that the Americans assembled prior to our invasion of Peleliu. But it's a LOT of material. We started about 9 this morning, made some sandwiches and ate them while continuing to work, and finally finished about 2:30 this afternoon.

Much of the material we reviewed today confirms or expands prior knowledge that we have about the executions of some Catholic priests and American airmen and frogmen. It was well worth reviewing. A key finding was a list of American crash sites that was compiled by the Japanese shortly after the war. It turns out that this list is the actual key to a hand-drawn map that we've had for a couple of years that has "red circles" on it, in each of the locations described in this new list. We'd been hoping that some day we'd find the key and be able to see what the people who created the map thought they were documenting. This is it!

We had a 3 o'clock meeting with the President's Chief of Staff. Chief Kuartei is very gracious and articulate, and he's a big fan of our mission. We thanked him for giving us permission to dive on the B-24 site yesterday (non-government divers have been prohibited from that site since 2004, shortly after we found it, after a 10-year search.

Tomorrow we're planning to go back up to the Police Hill area on Babelthuap in the morning, so we can introduce Laura to the new area and get her take on the area from the perspective of a forensic anthropologist. We'll also try to catch an interview in the afternoon back here in Koror.

- Reid
 

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