Project Recover, a nonprofit which combs the seas to try to find US airmen and sailors lost during the Second World War, has discovered three US Air Force aircraft, including two Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless dive bombers and a General Motors TBM/F-1 Avenger torpedo bomber, in a lagoon about 1,700 km northeast of Papua New Guinea, Military.com has reported.
“This is the first time they were seen since they were first shot down 76 years ago,” Dr. Mark Moline, leader of the expedition which found the planes, said.
According to the researcher, all three planes “went in fairly hard” and were “definitely going at high speed” when they hit the sea during their battle with Japanese forces. In fact, Moline noted, the remains of the aircraft don’t even really “look like aircraft at all. And maybe that’s partially why they haven’t been discovered before, because they aren’t fully intact planes and basically look like any other debris field.”
Moline says his team’s main goal isn’t finding the planes anyway, but in identifying the seven aircraft crewmen thought to be on board. The airmen remain among the estimated 72,000+ WWII-era US servicemen still unaccounted for. “That’s what really drives us, is identifying aircraft that still have missing aircrew,” he noted.
The three aircraft and their crew were lost along the Chuuk Lagoon (then known as the Truk Lagoon), in a fierce battle which took place 17-18 February 1944. Ahead of the fight, classified by US military planners as Operation Hailstone, the US Navy arrayed a powerful fleet including 5 fleet carriers, 7 battleships, and dozens of destroyers, cruisers and submarines and some 560 aircraft against a group of 5 Japanese cruisers, 8 destroyers and several dozen merchant ships, along with 350 planes. During the one-day battle, the US lost about 30 aircraft and two ships were damaged, while the Japanese side lost as many as 250 aircraft and over a dozen vessels, most of them merchant ships.
Project Recover has carried out four expeditions across the Chuuk Lagoon area between 2018 and 2019, covering some 70 square kilometres of the expansive territory to discover the three long-lost aircraft. The possibility of creating an expedition team tasked with recovering any remains is currently being discussed.
The US Navy waged a fierce island-hopping campaign against the Japanese Navy between 1943 and 1945 in a buildup for an invasion of Japan which never took place. Fighting took place across tens of thousands of square kilometres of open water combined with small groups of islands. The campaign was so large and widely spread that planes and ships, from destroyers to aircraft carriers, continue to be discovered to this day.
