The 1994 Discovery

Scannon 1993 finding the Dixon '603 Wing

Pat Scannon upon discovery of the Dixon '603 Nose in 1994

Fifty years after the Shootdown an important random discovery was made after Dr. Pat Scannon found the wing lying next to an island in the lagoon.  He wondered about the fate of the crew and set to work identifying and researching the crew’s recovery.  In his search, chronicled in a book “Vanished” by Wil Hylton he found the nose of a B-24 off the north shore of Koror.  He correctly deduced that it was from Dixon’s ship ‘603.  He was unable to find the main part of the ship seen burning down in all of the photos.  Eyewitnesses on the day of the crash reported that it did indeed land on the island in a built-up area of Koror.

Dr. Scannon from this point organized a missing aircrew recovery team that operates to this day searching for missing crewmembers all over the South Pacific, but mostly in Palau.  Their team has operated for 20 years and is known as “Project Recover", formerly known as "Bent Prop”.

The BentProp team in 2015 when the Mikita's (lower right) met them

Having discovered the work that Scannon did, a relative of Gunner SSgt Herb Farnam, Ted Mikita, was curious as to why he never found the main fuselage.  Scannon told Ted that he tried to find it for almost 20 years, had some clues, but figured that the near impenetrable mangroves fringing the islands must have swallowed it up, or it had been buried by the islanders, or maybe even the Japanese.  He was comforted to discover that some human remains had eventually been recovered from this aircraft and that the “crew” had been “officially” repatriated to the U.S. and buried in a plot at the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville.  He had more pressing discoveries and searches to make and this one fell off his radar.  In 2015 Ted Mikita began his own search to find missing parts of the airplane.

Due to Pat Scannon's discovery it became evident that the nose compartment broke off in mid flight.  However nobody knew this in 1948 when they went searching for bodies, so unfortunately the original repatriation was much less than hoped.