The BentProp Project: Providing Families Of WWII Airmen With Closure
By John J. Geoghegan

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“We go from village to village and ask to speak with the elders,” he explains. “Many of them have died, but the ones still alive provide invaluable information.”

BentProp also works extensively with local fishermen who know Palau’s waters better than anyone. One such person, dive boat captain Joe Maldangesang, has proved to be BentProp’s most powerful ally. “Joe thought we were very odd at first,” Scannon says, smiling. “The majority of people he takes around go to popular dive sites. We were the only ones interested in finding old aircraft.”

BentProp has come to rely on Maldangesang as a member of its expedition team. With his excellent sense of direction and expert ability on both water and land, Maldangesang has helped BentProp volunteers find much of what they are looking for.

“Joe is like a GPS device, so we call him ‘JPS,’” Scannon says. “He has this incredible talent for navigation. Whether on the water or in the jungle, Joe can see and find things others cannot.” Nevertheless, he observes, “The aircraft are never where you think they are.”

At first, Palau’s inhabitants viewed BentProp suspiciously, thinking they were looking for a gold stash allegedly hidden by the Japanese at the end of the war. Now these suspicions are gone.

“People trust us, but we worked for hard for that trust,” Scannon says. “It’s not our country. We’re the strangers here. We need to be respectful.”

BentProp works in close cooperation with the Palauan government and submits regular reports of its findings each year. “We’re not always perfect,” Scannon admits, “but we always respond to making things better.”

As Scannon describes it, BentProp prepares diligently for each year’s mission. First, they typically spend four to five months consolidating the data gathered from past missions and previous research. By September, a draft 50-page mission proposal is completed and then finalized by December for forwarding to JPAC in Hawaii. In addition to keeping JPAC in the loop, BentProp also reports its findings to the U.S. Navy Historical Center in Washington, D.C., and multiple Palauan authorities.

BentProp conducts its search activities in February, when the weather in Palau is favorable. Each mission lasts approximately four weeks. The first week is spent paying courtesy calls on government officials and influential locals and establishing mission logistics. The following three weeks are devoted to intensive search efforts. The team members review findings at the end of each day. They also file daily mission reports on the project’s Web site. The final two days of each mission are reserved for wrap-up debriefing and reviewing their findings with local officials. But nothing beats a discovery.

In 2006, after six years of searching, BentProp located a Corsair that had been shot down and crashed deep inside the jungle. “You have to have a certain amount of fortitude to go into a mangrove jungle,” Scannon notes. “They are so dense it took us five hours to go 100 feet.” Fortunately, most people don’t have the determination required to salvage aircraft that have crashed in the jungle, so the Corsair was still there for BentProp to find, even if time and the initial impact had made the plane virtually unrecognizable.

“We take this job very seriously,” remarks Scannon. “We’re not just finding remains; we’re completing the historical record.”

Though BentProp does its best to identify missing aircraft when it finds them, team members don’t recover human remains. When BentProp finds a crash site with remains, it informs JPAC, which has more than 400 staff members devoted to recovering the remains of U.S. military personnel as well as the largest forensic anthropology laboratory in the world. JPAC then does the recovery.

Tags: Aviation History, People, World War II

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