Navy divers comb a Pacific graveyard, seeking lost World War II airmen

The Washington Post

The bomber’s pilot, 1st Lt. Herbert G. Tennyson, a former hotel clerk from Wichita, Kan., approached the target at an altitude of about 8,000 feet. His B-24 carried eight bombs, an array of heavy machine guns, and 10 other men.

Tennyson was 24. He’d been married for 10 months. His wife, Jean, his high school sweetheart, was seven months pregnant back in the states.

Painted on the nose of his plane was a racy image of a woman with angels wings, and the nickname “Heaven Can Wait.”

As the aircraft approached the Japanese target at Awar Point on the Pacific island of New Guinea on March 11, 1944, it was hit by antiaircraft fire. The tail broke off, and the plane plunged into nearby Hansa Bay.

Three figures were seen jumping out as it went down. The wreckage burned on the surface and sank in about 200 feet of water, leaving behind a large oil slick. There were no survivors.

Earlier this month, a team of elite Navy divers and archaeologists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) ended a five-week, deep-water search of Hansa Bay for the bones of Heaven Can Wait’s crew.

The project unfolded about 10 miles from an active, 6,000-foot volcano in one part of World War II’s vast Pacific Ocean graveyard. It was the deepest underwater recovery mission for the DPAA, the government agency that seeks to account for service members missing in action from past wars.

And it was the first time the Navy’s socalled SAT FADS – Saturation Fly-Away Diving System – had been used in such a role, the Navy said.

The DPAA said “osseous” material that could be bone had been found, as well as “material evidence that could be used to support any potential identifications,” and two aircraft machine gun barrels.

The agency said the osseous material was being treated with the reverence and ceremony due human remains, but verification would need to take place in the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl

Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.

The wreckage of the plane had been discovered in 2017 during an underwater survey by Project Recover, a nonprofit partnership that uses technology to hunt for the missing, mainly from World War II.

Project Recover located the bomber using data from a detailed, four-year investigation by relatives of one member of the crew, 2nd Lt. Thomas V. Kelly Jr., the plane’s bombardier.

In early March, a vessel carrying the diving system, divers from the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, and experts from the DPAA arrived in Hansa Bay, the DPAA said.

The diving apparatus, somewhat like a space station, included a pressurized habitat where the divers lived aboard the ship, and a pressurized diving bell, which they used to reach the bottom.

The system allowed them to work in the pressure of deep water for long periods without having to decompress after each dive, the Navy said. They only needed to decompress at the end of the project.

Once on the bottom, the divers exited the diving bell and vacuumed material from the crash site into big baskets that were hauled up to the ship to be sifted for artifacts.

“Remains do survive . . . even after 80 years of being on the sea floor,” said Katrina L. Bunyard, a DPAA underwater archaeologist and historian.

Andrew Pietruszka, Project Recover’s lead archaeologist, said, “Fish and other animals and microorganisms, they’ll eat all the soft tissue” but leave the bones. “That’s why we get, typically, decent preservation.”

Tennyson’s grandson, Scott Jefferson, 52, of Queenstown, New Zealand, said he thought the plane’s loss “was a mystery that would never be solved. . . . I’m just overwhelmingly grateful to everybody that made this happen.”

“Throughout my childhood, I just visualized they must have gone down in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of nowhere . . . and that was that,” he said in a telephone interview.

“My grandma, even when she was more than 90 years old . . . it was a really hard subject for her,” he said. “She never remarried and . . . never gave up hope that he was coming home.”

The wreckage of the plane was found scattered across the bottom of the remote bay off the Bismarck Sea in the southwestern Pacific Ocean.

The experts had pinpointed the front section, where Tennyson; co-pilot Michael J. McFadden Jr., 26, of Clay Center, Kan.; and several other members of the crew were stationed.

A cockpit seat used by either Tennyson or McFadden had been located, according to the images from Project Recover and a sketch of the site drawn by DPAA forensic archaeologist Meghan Mumford.

The seat where radio operator Eugene J. Darrigan, 26, of Wappingers Falls, N.Y., sat was spotted earlier by Project Recover’s underwater cameras.

Darrigan had been a color mixer in a textile factory. His wife, Florence, 23, and 8-month-old son, Thomas, were back home in New York. He had seen Thomas once, when the baby was baptized.

The remains of navigator Donald W. Sheppick, 26, should “be found between the bombardier’s enclosure and the pilot/ co-pilot’s seat,” Project Recover wrote in a 2018 report.