This 12 months, Navy divers and Pentagon archaeologists retrieved a corroded canine tag from the underwater crash website the place it had rested for 79 years. When it was cleaned, the partly deteriorated identify “FLORENC” emerged, in addition to the rusted deal with: “415 MAIN ST,” “OUGHKEEPSI.”
It was a exceptional discover. Much of the wording on the tag, together with Eugene’s identify, had rusted away. But the consultants have concluded that this was the canine tag worn by the radio operator when his aircraft, nicknamed Heaven Can Wait, was shot down on March 11, 1944, killing your entire crew.
Darrigan’s canine tag was amongst artifacts recovered this spring throughout a five-week expedition that despatched elite Navy divers in a diving bell to depths of 200 ft off the distant north coast of New Guinea.
“It’s a really weird feeling,” mentioned Gregory Stratton, a forensic underwater archaeologist who headed the mission and first examined Darrigan’s canine tag. “You know that somebody’s family is going to find out for sure what happened to their ancestor. No more generalities.”
Dan Schindler, Darrigan’s grandson, mentioned in an electronic mail that he wished his late father, Tom — the Darrigans’ son — had been round to see this. Tom died in 2020.
Items belonging to a few crewmen have been discovered, in addition to an array of attainable human stays, the aircraft’s bomb bay doorways, a number of .50-caliber and .30-caliber machine weapons, and each of the bomber’s two steering yokes.
Stratton mentioned different objects which can be nonetheless being examined is perhaps linked to the crew.
Family members mentioned they obtained their kin’ artifacts final month.
In addition to Darrigan’s canine tag, the divers and consultants from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) recovered two canine tags and a hoop belonging to 2nd Lt. Thomas V. Kelly Jr., and two canine tags of 2nd Lt. Donald W. Sheppick.
Sheppick, 26, of Roscoe, Pa., south of Pittsburgh, was the aircraft’s navigator. Kelly, 21, of Livermore, Calif., east of San Francisco, was the bombardier.
“It’s amazing after all this time,” mentioned Deborah Wineland, Sheppick’s niece, who lives in the home the place her uncle grew up and the place his spouse stayed whereas he was within the service.
The gold-colored ring that Kelly had been carrying learn “Bombardier,” a reference to his specialty on the aircraft, and “USAAF,” for U.S. Army Air Forces.
The ring was lacking its central stone however nonetheless bore photos of an eagle and a winged bomb.
Stratton, a scientist with the DPAA, mentioned he soaked the ring in vinegar from the ship’s galley and cleaned it with a smooth brush. “I could read ‘USAAF’ and ‘Bombardier,’” he mentioned. “Incredible.”
Kelly’s household, in the meantime, has found a wartime picture that exhibits him carrying the ring.
“The only picture that we have of him and the crew from Papua New Guinea shows very clearly he’s wearing a ring on his left hand,” a cousin, Scott Althaus, mentioned in a phone interview. “And we now have that ring in our possession.”
Kathy Borst, 69, of Yorkville, Calif., a niece of Kelly’s, mentioned she obtained her uncle’s artifacts from the DPAA on Oct. 24, encased in a transparent plastic baggage labeled “Evidence.” She mentioned she obtained the objects as a result of she is the eldest in Kelly’s instant household.
“It’s kind of a lump-in-your-throat thing,” she mentioned in a phone interview.
She added, “It’s awe-inspiring that anyone could bring something like those … tiny bits of anything off the bottom of the ocean, 220 feet, or whatever it is, after 80 years. That’s just a remarkable feat, that something was located to that degree on a planet this big.”
Another niece, Diane Christie, 66, of Folsom, Calif., mentioned, “When I knew they got delivered … my heart kind of, I don’t know if it dropped or skipped a beat, or what it did.”
She added, “I would be absolutely shocked if they didn’t have some of his bone.” The DPAA has indicated that DNA is perhaps extracted from any recovered bones and in comparison with DNA samples supplied by relations.
“I don’t think it means closure,” Christie mentioned of the discoveries, as a result of Kelly’s mother and father and sister are deceased. “We didn’t experience the loss, and they did.”
But the story of Heaven Can Wait introduced the household collectively, she mentioned. “It reunited us,” she mentioned. “And it’ll keep us together now in our lifetimes.”
Kelly’s household began the undertaking to analyze the destiny of the crew a decade in the past, when Althaus, a primary cousin as soon as eliminated and a professor on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, started digging into the story.
Over 4 years, Kelly’s kin gathered a trove of knowledge, and Althaus compiled an in depth report on the destiny of the bomber and its crew.
In 2016, the household made contact with Project Recover — previously the BentProp Project — an exploration partnership between the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Delaware.
Althaus despatched the organization his report on July 31, 2017, and the next October, Project Recover launched an expedition and pinpointed the situation of the aircraft within the deep waters off New Guinea.
“They went out on their own effort to see what they could find,” he mentioned. “They made this possible.”
But the wreckage was too deep for normal archaeology dives, and the Navy Experimental Diving Unit provided to assist.
In March, the Navy despatched a group of elite divers and its transportable SAT FADS — Saturation Fly-Away Diving System — to the positioning.
The diving equipment, considerably like an area station, included a pressurized habitat the place the divers lived aboard the ship, and a pressurized diving bell, which they used to achieve the underside.
The system allowed them to work within the stress of deep water for lengthy intervals with out having to decompress after every dive, the Navy mentioned. They wanted to decompress solely on the finish of the undertaking.
Once on the underside, the divers exited the bell. They needed to noticed a few of the wreckage aside and vacuum materials from the crash website into large baskets. The baskets have been hauled as much as the ship and the contents sifted for artifacts.
The group stored the names and footage of the bomber’s crew on a big info board on deck, the DPAA’s Stratton mentioned. “It’s just a little gentle reminder of what we’re doing, and who we’re doing it for,” he mentioned.
It was the deepest underwater restoration mission thus far for the DPAA, the federal government company that seeks to account for service members lacking in motion in previous wars. And it was the primary time the SAT FADS system was utilized in such a job, the Navy mentioned.
The final result is “beyond what I ever completely imagined … 10 years ago,” Althaus mentioned, including that the “main feeling that I have is gratitude” for the work of the DPAA and the Navy. The diving was harmful, laborious and taxing, he mentioned.
Heaven Can Wait, in all probability named after a 1943 film, was on a mission to bomb a Japanese goal in New Guinea when it was hit by antiaircraft hearth. The tail broke off, and the aircraft plunged into the water.
Three figures have been seen leaping out because it went down. The wreckage burned on the floor and sank, abandoning a big oil slick. There have been no survivors.
The 11 males on the aircraft have been labeled as killed in motion. After the conflict and an investigation by the American Graves Registration Service, their our bodies have been declared unrecoverable.
