THE EXCERPT

Deep Dive

The craft arrived at its destination on a summer day in 2016 guided by science, folklore, and intuition. Tim Caza pulled back the throttle, and his twenty-five-foot research vessel, Voyager, powered down and began idling toward the coordinates. The water that day was calm, making the task somewhat easier. So, too, did the help Caza had enlisted for the mission: John McLaughlin, a retired volunteer fire chief and body-recovery diver, who was climbing around the cuddy and onto the bow. Caza, with an eye on the GPS, shifted into neutral. As the boat drifted over the designated point, he signaled to McLaughlin, and a moment later the anchor was overboard, the rode running from the chain locker. Caza cut the power, and the engine noise gave way to the patter of wavelets against the hull and a general sense of stillness. They were within sight of the southeastern shore of Lake Ontario in only ninety feet of water, even though generations of conventional wisdom placed the object of their search somewhere to the west and in much deeper water.

Caza and McLaughlin, both broad at the shoulder, moved about the crowded little boat with practiced steps, the conversation turning to the task at hand. Caza ducked below and reappeared a moment later with his diving kit. McLaughlin, in his mid-seventies, was still a capable diver but knew well the hazards of uncharted wrecks, even for individuals in their physical prime. The plan was for McLaughlin to remain in the boat and spot Caza, who was twenty years younger, with a drop camera. McLaughlin had gear if the need arose, but he was happy to leave the frogging to a younger man. Above all he was there to witness the discovery. For the occasion he had brought an American flag, pristinely folded and sealed in clear immersible plastic.

It was early July, and along the shoreline, some miles off, occupants of seasonal cottages were in the midst of a weeklong celebration of Independence Day. Flags were in abundance, both those stirring languidly in the offshore breeze and the dollar-store variety that seemed especially suited to the clutches of small children. Though it was still only midmorning, the heat was building, and youths were dragging inflatables down to the water, over pebbly beaches, past remnants of campfires where on previous evenings parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors had set off fireworks. Adults—those not joining the children on the beach—would now be drawn to porches and lawn chairs with coffee or iced tea or maybe a bloody Mary.

The cottages—locally known as “camps”—were for the most part built in the post–World War II boom years, some of them styled after twostory beach houses but most little more than bungalows or trailers with decks and awnings. Harking to an era when waterfront property could be bought on a working-class salary and developed on fifty-foot lots by a generation flush with victory, they remain remarkably unchanged to this day, sharing an eclectic charm, general mustiness from being shuttered from Labor Day to Memorial Day, and an unbroken view to the horizon. That view—as sensational as the camps are modest—is an ever-changing flourish of light on water: fireworks, sunsets, lightning storms, constellations parading around the North Star or, on days like this, the sun burning colors from a vast empty sky into ponderous depths. It’s this stunning view—sometimes serene, sometimes sensational—that captivates generation after generation, though few are aware of the wreckage it conceals. Caza’s boat, roughly the size and shape of a sport-fishing charter, might have been observable on this clear day for anybody who cared to look through binoculars. Still, it would have registered as no more than a speck on the horizon, its singularity of purpose lost on the observer.

It was at this point on the horizon, on a previous outing, where the long train of empty lakebed visible on Caza’s sonar screen had yielded to something of impressive dimensions. As the image scrolled into view, Caza had known immediately it wasn’t a shipwreck. And while ill-defined and obscured by sediment, it was too uniform to be a natural feature of the lake’s bottom. Geometric shapes amid shadowy features suggested parity of form. With much to cover that day, Caza had taken several screen shots, logged the coordinates, and continued with his survey.

It wasn’t until after Caza had returned home that he began to fully grasp the potential of his discovery. McLaughlin, a friend and neighbor, had stopped by to have a look. After examining the sonar image, McLaughlin produced a folder with diagrams of a four-engine aircraft. He placed one illustrating the aircraft’s proportions viewed from above next to the sonar image. As he rotated one image to align with the other, the confusion of shapes depicted in grainy monochrome on the lake’s bottom took on sudden coherence. The exposed section of its centerpiece and, most vividly, a lattice pattern on its top matched the nosepiece and cockpit canopy of the aircraft in the diagram. McLaughlin pointed out shapes protruding from the sediment—engines at the leading edge of the wing.

“Looks like the Twenty-Four,” McLaughlin had said, returning his reading glasses to his shirt pocket. Discoveries did not tend to inspire demonstrative enthusiasm in the body-recovery diver. A find isn’t a find, he is fond of noting, until “a diver can reach out and touch it.”

The object they were trying to reach was a B-24 Liberator bomber that had vanished with a crew of eight after taking off from the Westover Army base in Massachusetts at the height of the Second World War. “The Twenty-Four” was last heard circling low over Oswego County in a snowstorm in the early morning hours of February 18, 1944. For seventy-four years it had defied searches from the Adirondack Mountains to the depths of Lake Ontario, first by the US military, later by recreational divers, and, in an apparent attempt to exhaust all possibilities, a group of dowsers and mystics enlisted by private parties to channel the aircraft’s whereabouts.

The Liberator is fabulous both for what it was and what it represents. There is arguably no item that more singularly illustrates the country’s rise to engineering and manufacturing prominence while leading, in more than a figurative sense, the war effort.1 Engineered by Consolidated Aircraft under urgent deadlines for a war where, for the first time in history, air supremacy was counted as a deciding factor, the Liberator could go farther, faster, with more payload than other bombers of its day—attributes that would carry the fight in Europe and the Pacific well behind enemy lines. “It would be an exaggeration to say the B-24 won the war for the Allies,” writes historian Steven Ambrose. “But don’t ask how they could have won the war without it.”2

The plane’s capabilities were unique, though its legacy ultimately rests with an unprecedented manufacturing feat. As the American home front tooled up for war, the Liberator became the centerpiece of aircraft development. Between 1941 and 1945, some 18,500 were produced, more than any other military aircraft in history. Rosie the Riveter rolled up her sleeves and got busy on B-24 lines, including a Ford Motor Company factory a half mile long and a quarter mile wide near Detroit where Henry Ford’s auto assembly line was scaled up for production of the thirty-sixthousand-pound bomber. To be sure, the Liberator was not the only famous warplane to carry the day.3 But if the war was said to be won in the factories, the B-24 was exhibit A.

With so many of them rolling off the line back then, it is striking how few exist now. Like most of the country’s prodigious surplus arsenal that survived the war, the B-24s were valued mostly as scrap. Only thirteen are known to still exist; of those, two are airworthy.4 Yet the story of the unrecovered plane in upstate New York, no more than a dusky memory at best, was possibly less preserved than the plane itself by the time Caza and McLaughlin prepared for the dive. Few possessed reliable knowledge of the circumstances under which it disappeared, and fewer still pretended to know anything about its crew.

McLaughlin had seen a lot of things and people who had come to a tragic end at the bottom of rivers, quarries, and lakes, but the TwentyFour remained in a league of its own. The plane itself, however, was the lesser part of an ambition—a pilgrimage may be a better way to put it— that he had been pursuing for close to forty years.

The military had called off the search over upstate New York on March 3, 1944, two weeks after the airmen were last heard from and by which time it was all but certain, wherever they ended up, they had not survived. None of the bodies of the craft’s eight crew had been recovered. At the time, many tens of thousands of men were dying and disappearing on multiple fronts of the war, and tens of thousands more were urgently needed to replace them. All those men required training. The military had neither time nor resources to continue the search then, and apparently lacked incentive to do so later. The lost airmen, but for one exception, were young and single; they left behind grieving mothers and fathers from all regions of the country, but no direct descendants to pursue their precise fate and final resting place. Now the mothers and fathers of the crew were long dead and gone. So were sisters, brothers, and cousins. McLaughlin and Caza, returning to the site on that July day with a folded flag, were, in a way, surrogates.

As Voyager tugged at her anchor, Caza prepared for the dive amid an assortment of gleaming tanks and regulators. The air bore the aroma of