P-MAN VIII Update #9
22 February 2006

Today was a quiet down day, spent entirely in town. We spent the morning mostly brainstorming about what we know and don't know about Police Hill. We assembled all of our current and WWII aerial photos, and all of the hand-drawn maps from the war-crimes-tribunal records. The problem with the maps is that each was typed or hand-drawn into the record by the person who translated the testimony from Japanese into English - one filtering step in which even a small error in interpretation could have totally altered the sense of the map. Another problem is that everyone has a slightly different sense of time and distance and scale, so even people who were satisfied with the way the maps were drawn might have unintentionally conveyed wrong or misleading information. Another potential problem is the possibility that deposed individuals might have had personal reasons to intentionally provide incomplete or misleading information. And so on.

Each of the testimony maps can be interpreted in several ways and could apply to several different areas in the real world, and we have yet to find the key to combining them and figuring out what they're trying to tell us as a group.

We finished the brainstorming by reviewing what we know about the Waters TBM crash site on Peleliu, where we hope to spend 3 days or so over this coming weekend. The Waters Avenger was shot down on September 15, 1944, the day we launched the invasion of Peleliu. We have both still and motion-picture footage of the aircraft crashing at the edge of the mangroves on the east side of Peleliu, so our search area will be relatively small - a blessing, since there's some pretty evil-looking mangrove swamp over there.

Mike and I did some grocery shopping while Pat made his presentation at the hospital. Dan accompanied Pat as a note-taker. By all accounts, the presentation was a success. There was a lot of useful discussion, and the meeting went a half-hour beyond the scheduled time. That's usually a measure of the interest of the attendees.

This evening we all went out to the airport to meet a small group of distinguished visitors. They're Don Haake, Jane Haake-Russell, and Jane's daughter, Sarah. Don and Jane are nephew and niece of Ensign Donald Baxter, the pilot of the TMB that crashed on Peleliu, and to which JPAC devoted a recovery mission last spring. Don, Jane, and Sarah are planning to accompany us to Peleliu this weekend; we'll take them to the site where JPAC did their dig, and we'll show them the crash site's debris field that we mapped over a period of three years or so.

Remember my mentioning earlier that Pat's flight from Honolulu was delayed a week or so ago and he had to spend an extra day on Guam before making it on to Koror (with Mike and me)? Well...it appears to have happened to Don, Jane, and Sarah, too. They weren't on tonight's plane from Guam. Their next chance is tomorrow night. They'll have to hit the deck running - we have reservations down on Peleliu starting Friday. Ah, well - it's all part of the adventure.

Mike will surely tell the story better on his blog than I'm going to do here, but this evening he had dinner with an acquaintance in Koror instead of joining Pat, Dan and me. Then he took a cab out to the airport so we'd all be able to meet the group coming in this evening. He struck up a conversation with the cab driver, who said he's from Peleliu - and he knows of some aircraft wreckage VERY close to where we believe the Waters Avenger went in. But he won't be down there at the same time we are, to show us. BUT...he has a brother who IS there, and who also knows where this wreckage is, and who will surely be glad to show us.

If this turns out to be part of the Waters Avenger and saves us two or three days of slogging around in the nastiest, most crocodile-infested mangrove swamp in the islands, we plan to reimburse Mike for his cab fare.

Word has filtered back to us that some people out there have decided, judging from photos that have accompanied some of these progress reports, that the dirtier we are, the happier we appear to be. Well, yeah...in fact, that pretty well sums up Pat's approach. As we were hiking back out of the jungle the other day (the really WET day, I think), Pat just blurted out, "I really LOVE to get dirty!" So he's happy most of the time here.

- Reid