The remains of a World War II bombardier whose B-24 bomber crashed in 1944 were located under 213 feet of water off Papua New Guinea in late September. Searchers found the remains with the help of specialized underwater sensors and an autonomous submarine provided by Project Recover, a nonprofit of mostly volunteers who work with the U.S. military and families to find missing American service members.
The group, Project Recover, began their investigation in 2017 with an archaeological survey of Papua New Guinea’s Hansa Bay, where a flight of B-24s on a late-war mission had reported one of their own had crashed. The survey covered 27 square kilometers of seafloor using the latest sensing and scanning technology and robots.
In spring 2023, after 10 days of searching a promising area, specialized Navy divers from Panama City, Florida found the remains of 2nd Lt. Thomas V. Kelly, Jr. in a debris field left by his B-24 bomber, 213 feet under the surface. Kelly, 21, from Livermore, California, had served as a bombardier on a bomber named “Heaven Can Wait.” Last week, defense officials announced that Kelly was accounted for.
Kelly’s recovery was the latest in a line of operations that Project Recover’s CEO views as an important national debt.
“How America commits to their missing in action is completely unique in relation to other countries,” said Derek Abbey, Project Recover CEO. “We’re the only country that puts forth such an effort at the scale that we do.”
A Presidential Mystery
A nonprofit with five staff members and 80 volunteers around the world, Project Recover enlists scientists, historians, archaeologists, engineers, and divers to work with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. The DPAA is the military’s office tasked with recovering and accounting for American service members still missing from overseas conflicts. Close to 80,000 service members remain missing from U.S. conflicts dating back to World War II.
Project Recover assists DPAA when sophisticated sensor technology is needed that the agency may not have, Abbey said, capabilities which the group has developed during its own long-standing hunts for missing Americans on and around Palau.
The origins of Project Recover go back 30 years to search for a particular Japanese trawler sunk in World War II, which included a local scuba expert, Pat Scannon. In 1944, a Navy TBM Avenger spotted the trawler off the island of Ngurangel and sank it. Though a minor note in the greater Pacific war effort, the pilot was George H.W. Bush, who would be elected President 44 years later.
During Scannon’s 1993 trip to the region he and a team located the sunken ship along with small-caliber munitions mixed in the wreckage. The bullets disproved a pending article at the time questioning whether Bush had sunk an unarmed vessel, a possible war crime, Scannon wrote in a Project Recover post.
By 2001, Scannon put together a group of volunteers which became The BentProp Project. In 2018, the group officially became Project Recover and has since finished more than 100 missions in 24 countries, developed a database of more than 700 cases associated with nearly 3,000 lost service members, accounted for over 80 missing service members, and repatriated 19 Americans.
The proliferation of new radars, sensors and robot technology has allowed Project Recover to go deeper underwater and make MIA/POW discoveries faster and more safely, Abbey said.
The organization is working to improve search capabilities on land in places like Palau where thick jungle environments still pose problems for new technologies. Abbey said they’re exploring multi-spectral analysis tools developed by the University of Georgia to look at vegetation to determine “what the plants in that area of the jungle might have been feeding on that might tell us if there’s an aircraft crash site nearby” and ways of analyzing environmental DNA with soil samples ”to determine if somebody was buried in that area.”
‘Heaven Can Wait‘
After waiting more than half a century, the mystery of what happened to Lt. Kelly was put to rest.
Project Recover shared their initial findings of the crash site with the DPAA and in 2018, officials sent a Navy diving expedition to Hansa Bay to confirm that the wreckage included Kelly’s bomber. In 2019, the DPAA planned its recovery mission which was eventually delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. In early 2023, a team, including a Navy Experimental Diving Unit headed to Hansa Bay for a multi-week operation.
Kelly and the crew of Heaven Can Wait were part of the 320th squadron of the “Jolly Rogers” 90th Bombardment Group and had arrived in present-day Papua New Guinea four months earlier to join Pacific theater combat. There were 11 airmen on board when it crashed into the ocean during a mission to bomb Japanese anti-aircraft batteries around Hansa Bay on March 11, 1944. The DPAA also recently identified the bomber’s navigator, 2nd Lt. Donald Sheppick and radio operator, Staff Sgt. Eugene Darrigan from the wreck site.
Project Recover took on the challenge after being presented with a 32-page report by Scott Althaus who began looking into the crash on Memorial Day in 2013 after he recalled a childhood memory of a family plot in California belonging to his mother’s cousin who was 2nd Lt. Kelly, according to an Air Force release.
In 2015, a group of Kelly’s family members went to visit a historian at the University of Memphis in Tennessee who had documented the 90th Bombardment Group’s deployment. The family left with more than 800 photos and scanned images for their research which became Althaus’ report he sent to Project Recover. The nonprofit had their sights set around Papua New Guinea but with Althaus’ findings, they narrowed their search to prioritize Hansa Bay.
“It’s not unique for families to reach out to us and inquire about their loved ones and as well as share information,” Abbey said. “It is unique to have such a robust amount of information delivered to us, and it’s unique for, in this case, where the majority of the families have stayed in touch for decades.”
According to DPAA, Kelly will be buried by his family in 2025.
More on Project Recover
Project Recover began working with the U.S. military after a 2015 restructuring of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command which became the current-day DPAA office.
The DPAA mission has remained the same, which is to recover and repatriate at least 200 remains every year of servicemembers missing in action or who were prisoners of war. DPAA has just over 700 staff members and two labs, one at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska and the other at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. With the help of Project Recover, the organization expects to help the Pentagon identify the remains of 26 missing troops by the end of 2025.
Beyond the Department of Defense, Project Recover also works with families who reach out to them about servicemembers who went missing or were unaccounted for during training accidents, like aviation crashes. The DPAA does not search for or recover service members classified as “non-combat losses.”
“Of course they’d like to put forth effort to search for those but just their charter – it’s almost an administrative error,” Abbey said. “They’re obviously just as missing to their loved ones and families as those that were lost in combat. Many times that research is more difficult. The records aren’t as thorough as somebody that was MIA, but we do take on those cases.”
One Navy estimate indicates thousands of missing service members fall under the non-combat loss category. Anthony J. Mireles, a historian who investigates WWII aircraft wrecks and wrote a book on aviation training accidents in the U.S. during WWII suggests the number may be as high as 15,500 missing service members.
There are no current efforts to update the charter to expand the scope of cases DPAA investigates, Staff Sgt. Austin Boucher, spokesperson for the agency told Task & Purpose.
Project Recover tries to maximize its efforts by focusing on locations “where there’s a number of losses,” such as Palau, a remote Pacific island which is part of Micronesia and about 2000 miles south of Japan, and which saw heavy fighting during the Pacific’s “island hopping” campaign. The group will also sometimes take on cases involving missing-in-action service members from other nations with less formal efforts to recover and repatriate troops.
In late October, a Project Recover team traveled to West Virginia to celebrate and memorialize Lt. Jay Manow Jr. a TBM-1c Avenger pilot who was missing in action since September 1944.
For the Manown case, Project Recover “did every single piece of the mission,” Abbey said, which included conducting research, locating the crash site and eventually carrying out multiple recovery missions. In August, Project Recover announced that Manown was officially accounted for.
“That is what success looks like to us – is when we get to go to whether it’s Arlington National Cemetery or in this case Kingwood, West Virginia or any other small town USA – getting time to spend with these families to bear witness to these memorials and celebrations is the entire reason that we do this. It’s incredibly healing for these families and the communities around them and it’s a unifying effort too.”
UPDATE: 11/21/2024; This article has been updated with information about the Navy unit involved in the Hansa Bay recovery mission.
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