num_pages: 288
description: In the fall of 1944 a massive American bomber carrying eleven men vanished over the Pacific islands of Palau leaving a trail of mysteries. According to mission reports from the Army Air Forces the plane crashed in shallow waterbut when investigators went to find it the wreckage wasn't there. Witnesses saw the crew parachute to safety yet the airmen were never seen again. Some of their relatives whispered that they had returned to the United States in secret and lived in hiding. But they never explained why.For sixty years the U.S. government the children of the missing airmen and a maverick team of scientists and scuba divers searched the islands for clues. They trolled the water with side-scan sonar conducted grid searches on the seafloor crawled through thickets of mangrove and poison trees and flew over the islands in small planes to shoot infrared photography. With every clue they found the mystery only deepened.Now in a spellbinding narrative Wil S. Hylton weaves together the true story of the missing men their final mission the families they left behind and the real reason their disappearance remained shrouded in secrecy for so long. This is a story of love loss sacrifice and faithof the undying hope among the families of the missing and the relentless determination of scientists explorers archaeologists and deep-sea divers to solve one of the enduring mysteries of World War II.
language: English
title: Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II
publisher: Riverhead Books