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

" From a mesmerizing storyteller, the gripping search for a missing World War II crew, their bomber plane, and their legacy. On September 1, 1944, a massive American bomber carrying eleven men vanished over the tiny Pacific archipelago of Palau, leaving behind a trail of mysteries. For more than sixty years, the U.S. government, the children of the missing airmen, and a maverick team of scientists and scuba divers searched the archipelago for clues with cutting-edge technology and unyielding determination. They crawled through thickets of mangrove and slogged into groves of poison trees, flew over the islands in private planes shooting infrared photography, trolled the water with magnetometers and side-scan sonar, and launched grid searches on the seafloor, but the trail seemed to lead nowhere. Now, in a spellbinding narrative, Wil S. Hylton weaves together the true tale of the missing men, their final days, the loved ones left wondering, and the broad sweep of world events that converged upon their last mission. With more than 56,000 troops still missing, the Pacific theater of World War II accounts for two-thirds of all American MIAs over the past century. These soldiers have never been seen again. But our government has never stopped trying to find them, and for two generations, their families have passed down the wounds of war, unable to find closure in a story without an ending. This is the story of those missing soldiers, the families they left behind, and the legion of scientists, explorers, archeologists, and deep-sea divers who offered everything to finally give their story an ending"--