♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ male: I've been to places in this world that are so beautiful, so majestic to behold.

Each day, that world I knew falls a little bit more away from my past.

Life envelopes my wounds with hopes of washing them clean.

It tries, but I will never forget what happened here.

[airplane engine rumbling] male: Bail out, bail out, bail out!

[rumbling intensifies] [silence] [splash] [bubbles popping] [bubbles popping] Casey Doyle: My grandfather was shot down September 1, 1944.

[sounds of combat] Casey: Seventy years after that, I actually think it was 26 January, 2004-- Dr. Scannon and the BentProp crew actually found my grandfather's plane.

Dr. Pat Scannon: The first thing that I came across, it was an open parachute in the back of the airplane and the shroud lines and--were all tangled up in the wreckage, and I started pulling on the parachute, and the parachute was burnt.

Somebody was struggling to get out and didn't make it.

Our plowing guy Joe stuck his hand in and he brought out what he thought was a stick or a pipe or something, and I saw it and, you know, I knew immediately it was a human tibia.

And I really started connecting, you know, aluminum, bone, families.

Casey: He had been looking for that aircraft for ten years at that point.

And there was another couple of years before the identifications were made positive, before my dad actually got the final word.

This is definitely the crash site.

Your father was definitely on that plane and he lost his life on a mission, September 1944.

Flip Colmer: You know, what you see is what you get with Pat.

He's determined to provide answers for people he doesn't know, and that's infectious.

Pat: Yeah, we're on the water right now.

We're over the B-24.

Marcus Luttrell: Mr. Scannon, he's kind of the tip of the spear when it's like, hey, no man left behind.

I mean, he's intense.

He's all business.

Pat: We evaluated 20 targets and we took them down to 7.

That could be consistent with Houle.

Every day you go out, you kind of think, yeah, today is the day we're gonna find a plane.

Pat: The greatest amount of evidence suggests that it's all in the southeast part of Malakal Harbor.

[splashing] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: In the area that we're going into in Palau, it's a tricky place because there are many coral heads.

Sometimes the visibility is really poor.

You're going to be doing a lot of grid searches and searches along cliffs and around coral heads.

Without the sure knowledge that you're going to look in places where there's nothing, you're bound to have a lot of failure along the way.

Failure is something you learn to live with.

Failure, actually, is a pathway to success, If you can persevere.

There were over 200 aircraft shot down in Palau in World War II.

So where are they?

That's the question.

Where are they?

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Casey: My grandfather's disappearance was something that we did not talk about because it was just such a taboo, untouchable subject.

And I think with a lot of families, there's always rumors, stories, people wanna grasp on to what they can.

Maybe he's still alive somewhere, maybe he didn't want to come back, maybe he couldn't come back.

My father was only about two years old.

He kind of grew up with all those questions, and it took all those years for my father's questions to be answered.

The first time I met the BentProp crew was in 2009 at my grandfather's funeral.

The team members all showed up from around the country, spending their own time, their own money to come out to a memorial service for someone that they had had no connection to whatsoever.

And I could not figure out exactly what these people were all about.

For a while, I kept racking my brain and thinking, okay, how do I thank these people for the way that they've changed my father's entire perception of who he is and where he comes from?

And the answer is there isn't a proper way to thank people for that.

The only thing that I hoped that I could do is join them and hope we can do this for somebody else.

♪♪♪ Pat: I was a skydiver and I started BentProp through the skydiving community.

I was looking for team members, and they were looking for something to do beyond just jumping out of airplanes.

female: 1944, a 20-year-old George Bush attacked a Japanese boat, sending it to the bottom of the ocean.

male: The future president was piloting a torpedo bomber off the aircraft carrier San Jacinto.

His plane sunk a Japanese trawler in a lagoon off the island of Palau.

Bush's gun camera got a picture of the sinking trawler.

Pat: Because this ship had never been found, we decided to put a team together to go find it.

male: A team of documentary filmmakers accompanied by a team of divers just found the trawler that was sunk by Bush way back in 1944.

Pat: It's a strange feeling, a feeling of connection to the past.

It set a, sort of, a tone in my mind about answering questions that had not been answered in regards to World War II.

And after we found the ship, instead of going to the pretty dive sites, the blue holes, the blue corners, we hired a guide and said, "Show us wreckage."

He said, "I have this piece of aluminum.

I don't know what it is."

And when I saw it, it took my breath away.

It was a 65 foot wing sitting in shallow water.

I jumped off the boat immediately.

I didn't know whether it was American, I didn't know if it was Japanese, and I'd found one round thing.

I know now it was a turbo charger.

There was a little aluminum tag and it said "General Electric."

And sure enough, it was the wing of a B-24 that was shot down.

From the time I jumped off the boat to get to the wing, my life was never the same.

Pat: There were over 200 aircraft shot down over enemy territory and were lost in Palau.

And so, I started building up a database, a lot like a scientist would when you're starting a new project.

Dan O'Brien: I first met Pat about 1996.

Pat was going, in a couple of cases, by himself to Palau, looking for MIAs.

Pat: Oh, there's a wing on the main line?

Flip: Pat really started this 20-plus years ago on his own.

His technology was pretty much a copier and a film camera.

Pat: In '95, I got my first GPS device.

I thought it was the technological mountaintop, so to speak.

Dan: The GPS in one hand, a machete in the other, and their ability underwater was very, very limited because we had only eyeballs.

Flip: This is the long ballgame.

This is not for anybody who wants instant gratification.

male: Stop!

I can't quite tell from a distance, but they're very symmetrical.

male: That's a conch shell.

male: I thought I'd make it interesting.

Dan: It's an obsession.

Paraphrasing from a book, "Get obsessed and stay obsessed."

And that's what he's done.

Pat: One of the first MIAs that I investigated was the Houle plane.

Pilot name is Richard Houle.

He was the section leader in VT-51 that George Herbert Walker Bush was an aviator with.

Bush flew wing on Lieutenant Houle's plane.

When I first went to Palau, we found an enemy ship that had been sunk by Lieutenant Richard Houle and Ensign Bush.

That happened on the 26th of July, 1944.

The next day, Bush and Houle again were flying on a mission.

It was then that Richard Houle and his air crew of Ingram and Mintus were shot down.

This is the air crew, an aircraft that we're looking for.

Pat: It was the 27th of July and this particular mission was a bombing attack with a target in Malakal Island.

How they got there is an interesting story.

Pat: They had a target of opportunity in one area, but another squadron had beat them to it, and Lieutenant Houle got ahead of the rest of his section.

His squadron mates were having trouble catching up to him.

By the time they made the turn, he had been shot down.

They saw fire on the water, they saw one parachute.

George Herbert Walker Bush was on that mission.

His memory was outstanding.

Pat: He remembered the mission.

He particularly remembered the separation between Houle and the rest of the division.

Pat: President Bush described his relationship with Lieutenant Houle, it was a very close relationship and, obviously, it was a very sad day for him.

Pat: You can see the crew, as we've mentioned, still missing in action.

I would go to the National Archives, and at the National Archives there's written records, there's film, cartography, or mapping area, planning and air action reports, and so forth.

But I realize that there are limitations in terms of the records that are kept and some records disappear.

So I started looking for reunion groups, and Marines are really good at reunion groups.

These Corsair fighter pilot reunions, these guys were still in their 70s, low 80s, but still extremely sharp.

I would just go introduce myself to different--'cause I knew their names.

"Oh my God, there's Lieutenant Cantrell!"

And I'm seeing the real person who's written up in these air action reports.

So this was very exciting to me.

Bill Cantrell: My name is Bill Cantrell and I was born in Springfield, Missouri and I've never had enough money to leave town.

I still live in Springfield, Missouri.

Pat: His memory was incredibly sharp, and he just filled out what it was like to be a combat pilot in those days.

Bill: My first reaction was: those people are shooting at me.

And I was a little surprised, and then I wondered if I would ever get used to this.

Pat: And I got an incredible series of interviews over a period of a few years.

Pat: What made you choose Marine aviation?

male: That's easy.

In 1939, "Life" magazine printed a full page picture of the F4U Corsair.

[airplane vrooming] male: I thought that was the sexiest aircraft on earth.

Bill: There was a lot of talk about Sammy and his airplane.

I never thought of the F4U as sexy.

I thought it was a hell of an airplane, but there was nothing between us like that.

Dan: Bill Cantrell was from the Corsair fighter squadron in VMF-114.

He said flying over Palau every day for about seven months, it was all beauty, tranquility, peacefulness.

And then you shot at people, they shot back, but he fell in love with the place.

Pat: I can only imagine what it would have been like being, you know, 20-year-old fighter pilot in, again, one of the hottest aircraft in the world at the time.

[airplanes vrooming] Pat: If you look through the log books of American fighter pilots, there's this common theme.

They all flew roughly 1000 hours, and that's it.

And the vast majority of the American fighter pilots came home and never flew again.

Anything.

I've always wondered about how they could walk away from that experience, but they said, "I have to stop what I wanted to do in life, fight this war, and I wanna go back to doing what I did before the war."

And that was Billy Cantrell.

Billy was instrumental for the reunions and, at first, he said, "I can't believe someone's actually doing this."

So he wanted to help me in any way he could.

Dan: Boy, can he spin a yarn.

But those yarns were all true.

All the stories he told are documented 65, 70 years ago on Peleliu.

You know, first arriving on day three of the invasion, flying into that strip when the Japanese were still shelling the airfield.

[men laughing] ♪♪♪ Pat: Their landing field was within 500 to 1000 yards of the battlefield.

They would load the aircraft up with napalm or bombs or whatever.

They would take off and not even raise their landing gear.

Fly 500 yards, drop their ordinance, come back, and just do this cycle and do it several times a day.

Robin Hogg: Dad was looking, for decades, I think, for somebody like Pat Scannon, who would take an interest and bring that incredible time back to life.

And Pat was looking for somebody like Bill to learn about what it was like and what actually went on.

So the two of them together just literally lit each other up with energy and they became incredible friends.

Pat: In 2003, I said something like, "You really gotta come back to Palau."

And he said, "Well, I never would have asked."

When he landed at the airport in Palau, one of the first things he said was, "I've only seen this from the air."

Going around Palau, there was one concrete structure that had a unique shape and it had machine gun impact sites on the concrete, and he said, "I think I'm the one that put those in that building."

Robin: He rarely talked about it.

If he did, it was jokingly, it was lighthearted.

It was not the battle, the horror, the minute and seconds that changed lives.

My dad had carried a sense of guilt that he got out alive and so many of his dearest friends and heroes didn't.

Bill: The 4th of March when Cowboy got killed and the admiral was gonna end the war on a good, pretty Sunday and told us what we were going to do and that we were going to keep doing it as long as there was a single Japanese gun firing.

[exploding] Robin: I think he didn't understand the feelings that he had when he was 20 years old.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: When I first started, I really only thought about the aircraft.

I really didn't think about the air crews and their families.

But I realized there's these terrible consequences of war, and loss of life is something that we can look at a statistic and it doesn't have much impact on us.

But when it's your family member, it doesn't matter what statistics are, what matters is the loss that you've had and how that affects you and your whole life from then on and your family's whole life from then on.

Pat: We started about six months ago, assembling all the information for this next mission to find Lieutenant Houle's plane.

The technologies are many, many orders of magnitude and more powerful than where we started.

male: Can I go ahead and set a run?

male: They're underwater drones, they're autonomous.

They don't have any tether.

Eric Terrill: Last year, we surveyed close to 20 square kilometers.

Pat: That's at least a decade of diving, and we're probably going to cover 40 kilometers this year.

Eric: Just like you might mow your lawn, we can set up a pattern and have the vehicle hunt that area for us, collecting the data.

Pat: It is taking, what's the written record?

What's the visual photographic or film record?

The interviews of locals, of American veterans, Japanese veterans, and then trying to reassemble what happened.

Pat: A fire was seen burning from an object on the water a few hundred yards further south.

There was an open parachute seen.

Eric: Each one of these red dots is where captured Japanese reported seeing a downed aircraft.

Pat: There are a number of red circles throughout Malakal that that could reference Houle.

Eric: So let's go ahead and zoom in.

We're taking all those old pieces of information and then being able to geo-position them so we can actually come up with latitude and longitudes to narrow our searches.

And what caught our eye was a high contrast of reflectivity.

Pat: This was the target of interest here.

As soon as we find out what this is, if--I'm interested in the shadow of that.

So one, two, three divers on this one?

Pat: You're looking for subtleties of things that happened 70 years ago, where there's going to be silts or coral or some kind of overgrowth or something that's going to distort shapes.

You're looking for that one angle, that one curve that you know is not natural and you hope you find it.

♪♪♪ Pat: We didn't find Lieutenant Houle's plane.

We found a ship.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: Clearly bombed in on one side, the bow was complete upheaval.

♪♪♪ Pat: And I'm really interested in because from here out there is where I think the Avenger might have gone down.

So this is a good place for it.

I've never known the team to feel any sense of disappointment when we would come home, what people would say empty-handed, 'cause we're never empty-handed.

It's just that we didn't find what we were looking for, but we also know where not to look next time.

I started looking for the Houle aircraft in July of 1994.

Malakal Harbor is a big harbor, but it's a harbor.

That means he didn't crash out in the sea.

So we should be able to find him.

The years rolled by and it would be hundreds of dives in that harbor with no success.

It just takes time.

Dan: If they were that easy to find, they would have been found already.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: When you find a new wreck, it gets to you.

I mean, it gets to me.

Then you start thinking about, what were this guy's last thoughts?

He knows in that last two seconds that there's nothing he can do.

You just don't have time.

So here we are in the living embodiment of his last moments.

♪♪♪ Marcus: I mean, I kind of got an understanding of what goes through somebody's head when it all goes bad and when they're going down, and you hold on to that last glimmer of hope.

"I'm gonna make it out of here" kind of a deal.

male: One of the most extraordinary stories of bravery to emerge from the war in Afghanistan began when a Navy SEAL team found themselves badly outnumbered in a long and vicious firefight.

Only one of the SEALs survived.

His name is Marcus Latrell.

Marcus: The first thing I did when they pulled me out of there, when the army found me, was we broke maps.

I was like, "This is where my guys are.

We need to get them."

And they went looking for them immediately.

It doesn't so much happen to us nowadays, but back then, even in the previous wars, guys just disappear.

I mean, they're gone.

Their Missing in Action, the POWs.

Imagine their brothers not knowing where they were at and not being able to get to them.

It's a weight that it can't really be explained.

[car engine revving] Marcus: Most guys who have actually been in combat, who've seen combat, really seen it, they don't need to talk about it.

R.V.

Burgin: The first time I met Marcus, about four or five years ago, we were in San Antone at the Marine Corps reunion, and him and his wife came when we were having our banquet that night.

Marcus: That was a privilege to see that and to listen to those guys talk.

I just, again, I just sat there and kept my mouth shut and let them do all the talking.

I wrote about him in my book.

I--we sat down and--over lunch the first time, then I went up the house.

Pictures hung up on the walls of all his buddies and everybody who survived that whole ordeal, and they took a group photo on the beach.

They have a reunion every year, and I went to that and got to see some of those guys.

[guns firing] R.V.

: It looked like the island was on fire.

[airplane engine roaring] R.V.

: We weren't saying anything.

We knew we was walking into a death trap.

[guns firing] [man yelling] [guns firing] Dan: The Marines, some of the units were literally decimated by, like, 80%, dead and/or wounded.

R. V.: All that shelling and striping and bombing, I don't think they did much damage.

The Japanese on that island--or not on the island, they were in the island.

There was over 500 caves*.

Dan: The Battle of Peleliu was supposedly gonna take maybe three days, but it, in fact, took almost three months.

[yelling and guns firing] [yelling and guns firing] [flame throwers blowing] [silence] ♪♪♪ R.V.

: For the first 35 years that I was out, you couldn't have paid me enough money to go back over there.

On Peleliu, the 1st Marine Division had 6,523 casualties.

Terrie Burgin: My dad was in the first division, K-35, and in his company there were 235 of them that actually landed on Orange Beach.

And after 30 days of battle, there were only 85 of them that were still standing and still alive.

Kyle Shepherd: You could start asking him questions and you could definitely have a conversation with him about it, but, you know, as a kid, it was a taboo subject to talk about the war.

Marcus: I like to adopt stuff from guys like that.

He's a good man, you know, served this country, fought in the war, came home.

male: Thank you for safe travels.

Marcus: Gave back to the community, loved his wife, has kids, and never looked back on it.

Combat was combat.

That's what that is, you know.

I think the hardest thing that hit him was when his wife passed.

[sounds of children's voices] R.V.

: There's a bond.

I know he's been through hell in the combat zone, and I've been there.

We've never talked about the war.

We will one day.

But I don't want to burden him with it.

I figure if he wants to tell me, he'll tell me.

Marcus: If he wants to talk about it, I'll sit there and listen until he gets done, and no matter how long that is.

But other than that, we just talk about everything else: football, hunting, fishing, and all that stuff.

Pat: I don't share the bond of combat, I've never been in combat before, but there are things we're allowed to be witness to.

It means a lot to each of the team members to have the respect of the surviving veterans.

Pat: We were swimming in a grid line, visibility in this--just awful.

I mean, it was--you might be able to see my hand.

My dive buddies would just disappear in the silt.

I'm going along and I've got one guy on my left side and two guys on my right side, and they're just gone.

They're just--I don't know where they went.

And then eventually we ran out of air and came to the surface.

The other two guys are on the surface yelling and screaming, "I--we think we found something."

I said, "Well, that's gotta be what we're looking for."

The adrenaline starts pumping.

Up until that point, you've been calm, collected, cool.

We go down to take a look.

It wasn't Lieutenant Houle's plane, but it took me about 15 seconds to figure out whose plane this was.

That was incredibly exciting.

It all fit.

When I first started our archival searches, one of the ones that came early was Lieutenant William Q. Punnell, and he was a Hellcat pilot.

There's a very detailed after action report, probably one of the most detailed descriptions of an air loss that we've seen.

He was on a mission over a certain part of Palau, so any aircraft fire was coming in from a whole lot of different directions.

He was hit in the tail section of the plane and the whole tail separated from the rest.

And so, when tail section separates from the plane under power, it just goes straight down.

[airplane zooming and crashes] Pat: I started the search at least 12 years ago, never came up with anything.

We're now going to be able to complete a story.

Dennis Kelvie: One day, I got a call from Project Recover, and they had found my uncle's remains.

And I thought to myself, what kind of a scam are you doing on me here?

William Kelvie: You know, when dad got the phone call, that's when Great Uncle Bill all of a sudden became real.

Dennis: Uncle Bill was the hero of the family, but they didn't talk about him much.

He was just my uncle who crashed in the ocean over by the Philippines.

William: We never talked about it because it was too painful for grandma.

She looked up to her older brother and he didn't come home.

Pat: I did not fully appreciate just how important it was for families to get closure.

There's a sort of an intellectual side of me that said, "Oh, come on, it was 70 years ago.

Surely, they put this behind them."

But an MIA family never, ever puts away the loss of somebody who hasn't been able to return home.

Bertie: Oh, hi Pat, I'm Bertie.

This is Dennis.

Pat: Dennis, pleasure to meet you.

Pat: And I've never met a family yet that wouldn't do almost anything they could to have the remains home.

Dennis: I would never have imagined that they could have found his remains.

I mean, it seems to me like it would be looking for the smallest needle in the largest haystack of haystacks.

That ocean's a big ocean.

William: The ability to find a plane in 80 feet of water out in the middle of the ocean after seven decades, it's truly unbelievable.

male: It was the first year when we were out there and we--.

Dennis: Well the first time that I saw the videos of the crash site, that was overwhelming and I cried like a baby then 'cause I cannot imagine how he died.

I just can't.

William: Walking into that room at Arlington National Cemetery and seeing this very large group of people that flew in from all over the world to come and honor Great Uncle Bill.

For me, you know, it's like talking to movie stars.

I mean, honestly, you know.

These people are my heroes.

female: So everybody in this room was involved and--.

Pat: Every single person.

Dennis: This has been the most amazing thing of my life, I think.

William: It's really, really amazing.

These family members that are missing, we can't forget them.

They're heroes, and it's important that we tell the story even if it hurts and keep telling the story.

Dennis: There's hope.

It's real, it can happen and it'll happen at the darndest time when you're not expecting it, just out of the blue sky.

[airplane engine roaring] Pat: There--in the history of the SEALs program, and the predecessors to the SEALs are the Underwater Demolition Teams, there are only three missing UDT SEALs that have not been accounted for, and those are the three UDT men that we're looking for.

At the same time, we're still looking for POWs who parachuted and landed but were subsequently executed.

We believe that there is a common killing field where the executions occurred, and three of those would be the UDTS.

Bill Belcher: This may have the remains of up to 21 individuals mixed in it, or may be scattered around pits around here.

I do this for the United States government as a professional archaeologist and forensic anthropologist.

The testimony indicates that the individuals were executed over a period of several months in one area.

Around the time of the surrender, towards the end of the war, they started to exhume the bodies and burn them, theoretically, to get rid of the evidence of any war crimes.

We don't know to what extent they had been burned and how high the temperatures got.

Marcus: Obviously, I got a close kind of tie with the UDT guys that are here.

I mean, if that's point in fact that they are here, that's to bring us home and close that loop would be great.

But to find anybody--to bring anybody back home to their family is the ideal situation.

Pat: They were captured in Yap, which is a couple hundred miles away.

They were brought by boat to Palau.

They were last seen getting into a car with Japanese officers who had sabers, samurai swords, and the car came back 30 minutes later and they were no longer in the car.

The reason we know all of this was because we go from village to village trying to talk to elders, and we found two elders that had seen these POWs and both of them referred to them as Frogmen.

male: American Frogmen.

These pictures, filmed under fire off of the coast of Balikpapan-- Marcus: We still carry that moniker.

The Frogmen, Navy SEALs, it's the same thing.

As Navy SEALs, it's Sea, Air, and Land Specialist, so we can shift to landlocked areas to fight, or we're in the water, either way.

Those UDTs, they were--they're something else.

I mean, it was one of the deals where they throw on masks, snorkel fins, a KA-BAR knife, piano wire, and a haversack on their back, slip off the side of that boat and, like, "Hey, we'll see you when we get back."

Before anybody could go in to storm the beach, well, UDTs had to go in to clear it.

[explosions] Marcus: I mean, I jab at other service members and, trust me, I've had my butt saved more times by the Corps and by the Army, and everyone likes to say they're the first ones in.

But when it came to those UDT guys, they were the first ones.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Bill: Once bones have been burned, they have a higher tendency to preserve.

We don't know what process they used to cremate them.

I suspect it was pretty haphazard because they were in a hurry.

Usually, when people are in a hurry and they're exhuming a body, they'll grab the vertebra, some of the ribs, the head, and the long bones, but a lot of the hand and feet bones get left behind.

I've seen that over and over again in different areas.

Marcus: Not everybody is designed to burn tortured bodies, so like you said, it was probably done quickly and--get it done, bury them up.

Bill: As the dirt comes out of the hole, what we wanna do is screen the material through this quarter inch mesh and we're looking for small fragments of bone that would be retained on the screen: zippers or boot grommets, anything that might show up.

If they cremated them well, the bone'd break up into really small squares.

♪♪♪ Bill: Jo Schumacher's uncle Arthur Schumacher, who was the Navigator on the B-24 that we excavated several years ago, she's out here now, she's out here to make a connection.

Jo Schumacher: His mother got a telegram that said Arthur was missing in action.

For years, that's what she believed.

He was just missing, missing, missing.

It was only a matter of 50 years later that we found out that he survived the crash.

Pat: When you saw the plane get shot down, where were you?

male: I was on the hill of Aimeliik.

Yeah, I was on my way home to see my parents and I saw people dropping through the air and I saw them parachuting down did.

Pat: You saw the parachutes?

Do you remember how many?

male: Yeah, I think I saw three.

Pat: We know that Arthur did bail out of the plane, was immediately captured by the Japanese, and imprisoned for a few days.

Mark Swank: The American military that works with--that we know of, which would be the three aviators, the--there was one officer and two enlisted men.

The officer was shot, and the two enlisted men were beheaded.

And we got multiple witness statements for that from the Japanese military that confirmed that.

Pat: Schumacher is--he was one of the officers.

Jo: Expectations can cause great disappointment.

I learned that for years.

I--this could be a potential relocation site after they possibly burned them.

They could be here.

Marcus: Hopefully, we can get them back.

If I can't, it'll be somebody after me, and there'll be somebody after him.

So if it takes 100 lifetimes, we're gonna get them back.

They've been missing for a long time.

That's all it is, is time.

Robin: What happened to my dad in Palau never left him.

He internalized a lot of that brutality and that horror until, maybe, six months before he died and it all came out.

Pat: And Robin gave me the privilege, once I learned that he passed away, of coming and talking at his memorial in Missouri.

So a few of the BentProp team members went to pay our respects.

Derek Abbey: And Billy was a special one that we were able to have a personal relationship with, to share stories with, to hear stories of his and in person.

Bill: I like that Marine dress blue uniform and I spent the whole war in Zelon flight suits or utilities, dungarees.

And I've got a almost brand-new set of dress blues I'd be glad to sell to anybody that-- male: They still fit?

Bill: No, they don't.

That's why I'm selling them.

But don't join the Marine Corps for the uniform unless you like utilities.

Robin: I think he wanted to be back in that place where he left so many of his dear friends and he wants to be with them.

Pat: One of his last wishes was that his ashes be spread around the waters of Peleliu.

And what we really thought we were going to have was this little three or four, five person ceremony.

Pat: What's best for the defense of our country.

He is truly my friend, my dear friend.

I can certainly-- Pat: But once we were in country and I let the president of Palau know that we were going to have this ceremony, he wanted to be part of it.

President Thomas Remengesau Jr.: I would like to use this occasion to remember all those young men and women who fought the great battle at Peleliu.

Not just remember--.

Pat: The president of Palau gave an interesting perspective.

He spoke of Americans who died in Palau and were shipped home.

He just doesn't--has never heard of an American who survived and chose to be--to come back to Palau.

President Remengesau: I think his wish is that he remains with his comrades, he remains with his friends, but for Bill Cantrell, he will forever be a Palauan.

And so on behalf of the Palauan people, I would like to present you the Palau national flag because to us his remains here actually means that he's a Palauan forever.

[applauding] male: I'm gonna share some words that Robin shared with me earlier, so I have to give her full credit.

But she said that Billy thought and dreamed about flying the Corsair every day of his life.

[airplane engine revving] male: We couldn't lock on a Corsair for today, but we did get a helicopter, and so today Billy Cantrell will fly his last mission from this airstrip here in Peleliu and we'll all have the opportunity to watch him fly over Orange Beach and his ashes ultimately will be spread over the beach.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ R.V.

: He had many memories of this island and what he did when he was here and what the other man did.

He just felt so close to it.

I had mixed feelings on it, but I was glad that he got his wish.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ R.V.

: And I was glad I was here to see it.

Robin: What was so special to me that day and the helicopter coming into Palau was that I got to see what my dad saw from the bird's eye view in the plane.

It's just such a perfect completion.

[airplane engine rumbling] [engine rumbling] [engine rumbling] Marcus: Moat it in about a couple of miles out?

R.V.

: Gets it out of range of artillery.

Marcus: Just drop the cargo nets on the side and y'all climb down?

Coming in on a hot beach.

I mean, I know you just gotta suck it up and do it, but good Lord.

Terrie: I don't ever think about my dad being afraid.

He's a very brave man, but it was a terrifying moment to actually go and experience the place where he fought, to see Orange Beach and to know that that was the point in his life that he was the most scared.

I don't think that he would have ever done it on his own.

Marcus: Hey, Skipper, can you pull this over here so his shoes don't get wet?

R.V.

: Thank you.

[faint sounds of men yelling] [faint sounds of men yelling] [yelling intensifies] R.V.

: I didn't have any qualms at all about going back to Peleliu and--but when we hit the beach, I had mixed emotions going in.

Marcus: This is all cut through though, right?

All burned down?

R.V.

: Burned down, shot up.

Marcus: When we were coming in I said, "So did you hide behind--I mean, did you guys come up to the beach, hid behind these trees?"

he goes, "There were no trees there.

There's nothing there.

It was just bullets flying."

And were y'all taking fire out when we hit the beach because they were--yeah, they were shelling y'all coming in, right?

R.V.

: Just being together, two veterans at a different era and a different time, but it didn't make any difference if it had been 100 years.

That would have been the same feeling and the same conversation.

Marcus: I saw there's a bunker over there with a 75 millimeter gun in it.

Marcus: Those artillery bunkers and--that's all still there.

He goes, "We got it right here, man.

They were opening up on us with that can."

It was still sitting there in that bunker.

Nightmare, man.

Nightmare here.

R.V.

: When we went in on an island, we knew that we was gonna have to kill every one of them, because they wouldn't surrender.

[men yelling and guns firing] [men yelling and guns firing] Terrie: I knew that he was reliving those moments, but there was also that closure of him, realizing those years are gone and today it's the most peaceful, beautiful, gorgeous island that you could ever ask for.

Marcus: So I know it was all coming back on him pretty hard.

Just to be a part of his life and for him to allow us to go over there was an honorable experience.

R.V.

: I would imagine there's more that's out there in the bushes.

Marcus: That's what I was saying.

How much stuff is still laying on the ground out here.

R.V.

: That must've fell.

Yeah, we'd pick those things up and make bracelets and beads.

Sent Florence one.

Marcus: "Thinking of you from Peleliu"?

R.V.

: Yeah, "Thinking of you from Peleliu."

Marcus: I imagine he had a lot of things going through that head of his.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: We have some interesting debris patterns in this one area.

It was about a half a mile away from where Lieutenant Houle's plane was shot down.

[airplane zooming and crashes] Pat: And unless it exploded into very small parts, the bulk of the aircraft has got to be there.

[splashing] ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Eric: We had snorkeled that area, scuba'd that area, never saw anything.

Pat: Eric Terrill from Scripps has this really cool device called Navigator, which is a handheld sonar device, and he saw a signal.

And then we come into the main debris field and the first thing I see is a propeller.

Finally, after 22 years, we are looking at Lieutenant Houle's Avenger.

♪♪♪ Pat: You're in 70 or 80 feet of water and you just don't know whether you wanna scream or cry.

Flip: It's victory.

It's just--just victory.

I mean, there's a--there's families that don't know what's going to happen to them now because they're gonna have a lot of questions answered finally after all these years.

men: Whoo!

Pat: It's a jumbled up mess.

There's lots of stuff scattered all over the place, things piled on top of each other.

So what we're trying to do is orient and find the cockpit area.

And then once we find the cockpit area, then search the areas for evidence of personal effects or human remains.

Pat: These are not sterile pieces of steel or aluminum.

They're what's left of people who were fighting for their lives.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Dan: Only 5 feet of visibility.

It was hard to get a full view and picture of the site.

male: Obviously, it's a plane, there's a propeller, but where is the fuselage?

Where is the port wing?

That's, kind of, what's addictive, too, is you get down there and say, "So how did this happen?

Where are all the pieces?

Where might the pilot be?"

Dan: Scripps, with their specialists and a lot of work, came up with this beautiful panoramic shot.

It blew us away.

It looks like that 'cause we could never get a view of the entire site, and it changed our perspective.

Pat: We found the debris field that we know had to be the Houle missing Avenger, but with only two sets of remains.

All we knew from 1994 to 2018 was the plane was shot down, one parachute was seen.

So it's really been a major find for us to know who the two crew members were that were identified.

That's Ingram and Mintus.

Richard Houle was still missing.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Doug Berglund: For over 15 years in my front yard I've flown a POW-MIA flag to show everybody how proud we are of the sacrifices that he made.

He was permanently declared missing in 1945, but apparently he wasn't declared dead until sometime in the 1990s.

Then they authorized that he could have a headstone in the memorial section of Fort Snelling Cemetery.

My family just assumed that this story was over and no idea that anybody was even looking.

We had no idea.

My mother received a phone call about having to supply a DNA sample.

Verille Schmidt: I got the kit, probably, 11 o'clock in the morning.

I called Doug and I said, "It's here," and he says, "Okay, I'll be over at lunch."

And we did it that day, sealed it up, I took it down to the post office, and that was it.

I mean, we were just--the insides were just boom, boom, boom.

Doug: When I found out that the two that were identified were not Dick, I was disappointed, but I thought about those two families and what that must feel like to be able to bring those members home, and I hope at that time that there was still members alive that actually remember them, 'cause in my family that's not the case.

Verille: My mom was very secretive--or she didn't want to share, let's put it that way.

David Berglund: I think a couple times she did share with us.

It was, I mean, she held on to that pain of, you know, losing her brother and him being missing for so long.

I think her emotions were just under the surface and she didn't want to talk about it because it upset her so much, you know.

Doug: I knew about the friendship with President Bush and that they were friends and roommates.

My grandma had a Christmas card that she had received from President Bush referencing how much he missed Dick.

And I had no idea that President Bush was as engaged in wanting to know the same answers that I wanted to know.

Pat: In 2003, I had the privilege of interviewing George Herbert Walker Bush and he just stuck like glue next to me, you know, wanting to know everything we knew about Dick 'cause that--he called him Dick Houle and he gave the most definitive explanation of what happened on that mission.

It could almost feel like he was reliving the mission, almost flying the plane-- Doug: In his head, yeah.

Pat: I mean, he knew every bend, every turn.

Lieutenant Houle pulls up very quickly and goes to the secondary target, he banks and goes into his dive and disappears.

♪♪♪ Pat: We're still looking for Lieutenant Houle because we know one parachute was seen and we now know that that parachute contained Dick Houle.

Pat: Thank you.

This is actually for you.

We always assemble a book about the planes that we find and it kind of goes from the beginning, more or less the beginning, describes the combat situation.

And we were able to get at least one picture of him flying.

You know, we go through the air action report, the photographs and-- Doug: That's the day of.

Pat: These are scenes that he would have seen 'cause this had-- Doug: There was already things happening at that time there.

Wow, I can't wait to show this to my family.

Pat: And this is based on the interview I had with former President Bush.

And so that's why we were able to get this kind of a description, was from him.

And that's the the grid map that they would have used, and this was the target area that he was going after.

And then, this is the autonomous underwater vehicle that found it.

Doug: I think I was just dumbfounded by how much digging they had been doing.

For 25 years, they've been trying to find a member of my family, and I didn't even know they were looking.

Doug: I'm sorry, I just didn't--I didn't expect that.

Wow, it's just amazing.

Pat: And that's what the first underwater side scanning sonar looked like.

So these shadows don't exist in nature, so it was the shadows, actually, that kind of gave it away.

And this is a composite.

So this is where one set of remains were found in here.

And this would have been Mintus, and this would have been Ingram.

And the cockpit, the seat would have been just right in this area.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Doug: Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Pat: We will do everything we can to continue this because now you're next, right?

Your family's next.

Verille: I probably gave up after I knew he was gone for 20 years.

I mean, it's just--we--I mean, we--what you're doing is, I don't know, it's wonderful and there's no way we can thank you enough.

That's all I can say.

Pat: Well, it's my way of saying thank you.

Not only for Dick Houle's sacrifices but your sacrifices.

You know, you--your lives were changed when--whether you know it or not, your lives were changed when he was lost.

And not to have the answers, I just think is wrong, and to give something back for, you know, the sacrifices that have been made is just very important to me.

[sighing] R.V.

: I lost a brother in Europe during World War II.

That's a hard feeling.

We didn't get him home until March 1948.

It leaves a void, you know, in your mind and heart.

I think it should be that every military man that fought in the wars, they should be brought home.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pat: It has certainly been disappointing not to bring Richard Houle home, but we are able to return Walter Mintus to his family, and that's meaningful for all of us.

male: Group, attention!

♪♪♪ male: Forward.

♪♪♪ Pat: Most of the families are not even aware that someone's looking for their loved one.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Richard Kozak: His name was Walter Mintus, but as family we called him Uncle Burt and we thought he was just the greatest uncle in the world.

Leonard Kozak: I remember my Uncle Burt from the famous picture that is by his coffin right now.

That picture hung in our wall all through my childhood.

That picture inspired me to join the Navy.

Richard: I got older, I realized that he wasn't just Uncle Burt, he was Uncle Burt our hero now.

male: Now, therefore, be it resolved that we, the commissioners of Cambria County, do hereby declare November 9, 2018 as Petty Officer Walter Mintus Day.

Pat: One of the other things that has struck us is that it's not even a family event, it becomes a community event.

And the communities that we've seen have had such pride in recognizing the individual.

It's really--it's an all-American thing.

Pat: What we want to do is say thank you to you for the sacrifices that you've had to make over the seven plus decades that Walter has been missing.

Welcome home, Uncle Bert, and thank you very much.

Pat: I started meeting some of the families and I started flag ceremonies.

Every crash site that we found I would bring an American flag and we would hold a little ceremony, then fold the flag and reserve it for the family.

Flip: So it's my honor to be able to transfer the flag to you and your family, and here's the flag that was flown over Uncle's resting spot.

♪♪♪ Pat: This is a flag that we flew for Walter Mintus and I wanna present it to you and-- male: Thank you very much.

Pat: "For the Fallen."

"They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted; They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall not grow, as we that are left, grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them."

William: You know, you don't really think about these men and women that are serving our country that don't come home, and they're just kids.

Kind of takes your breath away for a minute when you realize that this person was a real person with a family that loved him and they didn't come home.

Pat: An MIA family never, ever puts away the loss of somebody who hasn't been able to return home.

I have never been in a home where there isn't a very special place for that family member.

Jim Gray: Bud was always a mythical character to us, a picture on the mantle in his Navy uniform.

Mary Ann Rybarczyk: My brother Bud, he was just a very fine young man.

He was a man all the way and he played all the sports.

Cindy Gray: He looked athletic.

Girls must have really liked him.

Mary Ann: Oh, he had a girl and he said that he would marry her when he got home.

♪♪♪ Toni Polling: I grew up hearing about Junior and seeing pictures of him.

Joan Stough: He was friendly.

He didn't know a stranger and he was good looking kid.

Girls all liked him.

Toni: And he seemed like a really fun-loving character, somebody that I wish we would have had a chance to know.

We all had hope that he would eventually make it back home.

♪♪♪ Toni: It is closure to think that he will be buried with the rest of the family.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Doug: The potential that Uncle Dick had and the life that he had in front of him, you know, I try to put in perspective.

He was 25 years old.

You know, my son is 23, and I think about all the things that were in front of him at the time, an incredible college education that he received, military pilot officer, friends with the people that he was friends with, and newly married to a beautiful gal.

He had so much in front of him.

Those are the things that, you know, when I'm alone and I think about the sacrifice that he made, it's a shame.

It's shameful that he had to give up that much, but that's where the pride comes in for us, that, you know, I'm just honored by his generation, right?

I mean, we've all said that, the greatest generation, but that, to me, is unforgettable.

And because of this project, it never will be forgotten.

R.V.

: The survivors of Peleliu, there's only three or four of us left, but you never forget your comrades.

Never.

♪♪♪ R.V.

: All the islands, they've all got cemeteries on it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ R.V.

: They always say semper fi--always faithful.

That's it.

Always faithful.

♪♪♪ Pat: Our work isn't done.

Our work continues.

It's important to keep the momentum going, and we have lots of work ahead of us.

male: And my Palau remains the same.

So beautiful, so majestic to behold.

My old wounds, now washed clean.

Reminded me of promises made and the hope we had to what remains.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ I'll be seeing you ♪ ♪ In all the old familiar places ♪ ♪ That this heart of mine embraces ♪ ♪ All day through ♪ ♪ In that small cafe ♪ ♪ The park across the way ♪ ♪ The children's carousel ♪ ♪ The chestnut tree ♪ ♪ The wishing well ♪ ♪ I'll be seeing you ♪ ♪ In every lovely summer's day ♪ ♪ In everything that's light and gay ♪ ♪ I'll always think of you that way ♪ ♪ I'll find you in the morning sun ♪ ♪ And when the night is new ♪ ♪ I'll be looking at the moon ♪ ♪ But I'll be seeing ♪ ♪ You ♪ [men laughing] ♪ Where has the time all gone to?

♪ ♪ Haven't done half the ♪ ♪ things we want to ♪ ♪ Oh well, we'll catch up ♪ ♪ some other time ♪ ♪♪♪ ♪ Just when the fun is starting ♪ ♪ Comes the time for parting ♪ ♪ But let's be glad for what we've had ♪ ♪ And what's to come ♪ ♪ There's so much more embracing ♪ ♪ Still to be done ♪ ♪ but time is racing ♪ ♪ Oh well, we'll catch up ♪ ♪ some other time, ♪ ♪ some other time.

♪♪