The BentProp Project

P-MAN V - p. 6

09 MAR 03: As with our last day of P-MAN IV the previous April, Joe took us back by boat to Ngaremlengui to search once again for a crash site that Lazarus said he had seen some years ago in the mangroves north of Ngaremlengui's dock. We walked about an hour north from his house in town and entered the mangroves not far from a battery of Japanese artillery pieces still in place silently pointing west against a land invasion that never happened, at least not here. Laz took us to a point west of where we ended our search last year and we confronted the densest mangrove vines I have ever seen. With only a possibility that an American aircraft lay somewhere "out there" we entered the mangroves, threading our way through it. The humidity and heat combined with almost no visibility made the probability of finding anything about on par with winning the lottery. Clem, while following me, almost stepped on a large coral snake (very poisonous but usually very shy). But this snake was unusually aggressive (at least in my experience) and turned on both of us - fortunately, the snake rapidly lost interest in us. After spending several hours in which our eight-person team collectively covered an area of no more that 20X100 yards, we concluded, as with the lottery, the odds were once more against us. This area, called Aramaten Point by the Americans during WWII, is the site of a reported crash of a Corsair flown by LT Virginius Perry, VMF-121. I believe Laz did see something years ago but I also believe that, as we saw at LT Brown's Corsair, the mangroves have grown enormously in the intervening years and are now hiding that crash site. One reason to keep searching is that there is a story that has made the rounds within the VMF-121 Reunion Group that LT Perry had been captured and executed (original source unknown). If his Corsair could be found, his remains could be searched for, which might finally answer the question of what happened to LT Perry.

Flip, Pat and Dan (I think) in one of the open spaces
in the mangroves of Ngaremlengui "looking" hopelessly
for downed aircraft. © Val Thal, Mar 2003

11 MAR 03: Earlier during P-MAN V, I gave a talk at Sam's Dive Tours about our searches in Palau. Afterwards, an American with the first name of Dennis, living on a sailboat with his wife in Palau, told us about coming across a "piece of a wing" in about 40 feet of water about 5 minutes from the dive shop. We followed Dennis along the south side of Ngargol and entered a small inlet surrounded by rock islands. On site, as he described, we found at a depth of 55 feet a split flap that looked identical to one belonging to an Avenger we had found on Peleliu a few days earlier. Dennis showed us more debris about a hundred feet from the flap which turned out to be a bombed-out landing craft, probably a Daihatsu, along one side of a rock island ("Monkey Island") inside the inlet. Although we found no additional aircraft debris in that inlet, in the midst of the Daihatsu field, we found what we believe is an unexploded American bomb, which measured 48" x 14". The split flap may be a first important clue toward finding another Avenger known to have crashed somewhere in the vicinity of Malakal Harbor. The question is: is this related to the Avenger debris off A-K Causeway, discussed in the P-MAN II report? In a recent visit to the National Archives, Flip Colmer and I came across a photo that, when magnified, revealed an essentially intact single-engine aircraft with square-tipped wings (with a star on port outer wing) and elongated canopy (open?). It is lying in shallow water (less than three feet deep - personal experience) and is in the exact location where we found and team member, Reid Joyce, identified an intact Avenger tail wheel assembly during P-MAN II. This aircraft is about 1 mile NNE of the split flap described above.

At left, magnified view of a USAAF high altitude photograph taken from a B-24 in July 1944 during a bombing mission over Palau.

This appears to be an intact Avenger (star on upper port wing) lying in shallow water near the A-K causeway.

An Avenger tail wheel was identified during P-MAN II in this exact area.

A split flap found on P-MAN V is approximately one mile SSW from here.

Photo courtesy NARA, 2003

11 MAR 03: Dennis then took us to an underwater "junkyard" lying along the south side of Ulebsechel (the "long island"). Indeed this is a large dump area with trucks, some aircraft debris (mostly Japanese), multiple bombs (minus fuses) and other unidentified material. We also found a burned out small ship lying to the east nearby along the shore of the island. As it turned out, this junk field was the most easterly of three underwater large junk fields we found along the southern shore of the Long Island (not including the burned out ship). While interesting to dive on, these fields could complicate the search for American aircraft known to have crashed in this vicinity. Our working thought is that these junkyards were dumped there after the war as part of the land clean up, as the Palauans started to recover from all the war damage.