CT-Rich
Contributor
Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II by Wil S. Hylton (Nov 5, 2013)
Josef Stalin said, One death is a tragedy; a million deaths isa statistic. In the Pacific theater of WWII there were 56,000 sailors, soldiers and airmen listed as missing in action. For each of those servicemen lost, there is also a story of a family coming to grips with the uncertainty of this fate. This book add this book tells the story of a few of those families.
Across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans there are tens of thousands of wrecks, ships of all size and type and aircraft that never made it to land fall. As divers we crawl over and in these wrecks, often hoping to find some artifact that will connect us back into the past history of the wreck or people who had traveled before us. We think of the men that were lost on those craft whether they were at war or in peace time.
Vanished: the Sixty Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, by Wil S. Hylton gives a much more interesting insight into the tragedy of these wrecks by looking at the impact of a single lost aircraft from a viscous, if not renowned battle of WWII. Thousands of aircraft and aircrews were lost in the battles of the Pacific and the story depicted in this book is a rather ordinary tragedy in the scheme of that war. A single B24 bomber shot down by anti-aircraft artillery on an otherwise totally forgettable mission in an air campaign that stretched over months.
The loss of this plane and the stories that Wil S. Hylton tells surrounding its loss and eventual discovery are potent reminders of the price of war, not only for those lost in combat, but those who were left wondering on the home front. The MIA issue is most famous for the Vietnam era, where family members were reporting hints that missing soldiers were being reported alive and living in captivity or under assumed names in foreign lands. Hundreds of families lived with false hopes that missing fathers, sons and husbands might someday come home.
Throughout the book Hylton deftly jumps from the perspectives of family, to airmen, to those searching for the crash site. He also tells personal stories of life in a combat zone (known through letters and interviews of survivors) and the decades of doubt that followed the crash of the plane.
This book was good on several levels, it gave an incite into the sad pain endured by families that have receive the ambiguous report that a loved one is missing in action, with no body to bury and no definitive answer about what happened. Instead children grow up wondering if their father abandoned them and wives keep waiting for them to come home... It was also an excellent detective story that kept me engaged as the mystery unfolds around the location of the plane and the fate of the crew. All wrapped around the story of Pat Scannon, the Biochemist who spent more than a decade trying to find this single lost aircraft.
While this is a diving forum, there is only a cursory discussion of diving and the exploration of underwater archeology here. However, this book does a beautiful job reminding divers of what intrigues so many about wrecks and the war graves that are scattered across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I recommend this book highly.
Josef Stalin said, One death is a tragedy; a million deaths isa statistic. In the Pacific theater of WWII there were 56,000 sailors, soldiers and airmen listed as missing in action. For each of those servicemen lost, there is also a story of a family coming to grips with the uncertainty of this fate. This book add this book tells the story of a few of those families.
Across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans there are tens of thousands of wrecks, ships of all size and type and aircraft that never made it to land fall. As divers we crawl over and in these wrecks, often hoping to find some artifact that will connect us back into the past history of the wreck or people who had traveled before us. We think of the men that were lost on those craft whether they were at war or in peace time.
Vanished: the Sixty Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II, by Wil S. Hylton gives a much more interesting insight into the tragedy of these wrecks by looking at the impact of a single lost aircraft from a viscous, if not renowned battle of WWII. Thousands of aircraft and aircrews were lost in the battles of the Pacific and the story depicted in this book is a rather ordinary tragedy in the scheme of that war. A single B24 bomber shot down by anti-aircraft artillery on an otherwise totally forgettable mission in an air campaign that stretched over months.
The loss of this plane and the stories that Wil S. Hylton tells surrounding its loss and eventual discovery are potent reminders of the price of war, not only for those lost in combat, but those who were left wondering on the home front. The MIA issue is most famous for the Vietnam era, where family members were reporting hints that missing soldiers were being reported alive and living in captivity or under assumed names in foreign lands. Hundreds of families lived with false hopes that missing fathers, sons and husbands might someday come home.
Throughout the book Hylton deftly jumps from the perspectives of family, to airmen, to those searching for the crash site. He also tells personal stories of life in a combat zone (known through letters and interviews of survivors) and the decades of doubt that followed the crash of the plane.
This book was good on several levels, it gave an incite into the sad pain endured by families that have receive the ambiguous report that a loved one is missing in action, with no body to bury and no definitive answer about what happened. Instead children grow up wondering if their father abandoned them and wives keep waiting for them to come home... It was also an excellent detective story that kept me engaged as the mystery unfolds around the location of the plane and the fate of the crew. All wrapped around the story of Pat Scannon, the Biochemist who spent more than a decade trying to find this single lost aircraft.
While this is a diving forum, there is only a cursory discussion of diving and the exploration of underwater archeology here. However, this book does a beautiful job reminding divers of what intrigues so many about wrecks and the war graves that are scattered across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I recommend this book highly.
