URBANA — Over a decade ago, as part of his political science research at the University of Illinois, Scott Althaus dove deep into the data on World War II casualties. The project was focused on studying the information Americans receive about ongoing wars overseas that involve American forces.
“And there was a season in that project work that I was entering a lot of data about… American casualties, by month and by year, and every one of those numbers that I was entering into a spreadsheet represented clusters of lives and families,” Althaus said.
He said during that time, he felt a real heaviness about the human cost of conflicts.
“And so as I approached Memorial Day [in 2013], I thought I should do something to just try to humanize these numbers, to reflect a little bit on what Memorial Day is for, to remember the fallen,” Althaus said.
He remembered his mother had told him about a relative who died in WWII. In 2013, he asked for his name.
“A few hours of internet searching suddenly led to an understanding that there was information about my relative who died in the B-24 bomber that the family never knew,” Althaus said. “And very quickly this became what would eventually become a five-year research project to try to find the final resting place of my relative, Second Lt. Thomas V. Kelly, Jr.”
Althaus learned that Kelly’s final mission in 1944 was to attack a Japanese air base in a city called Wewak on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea. The second part of the mission was to fall back to a secondary target to attack anti-aircraft batteries at a Japanese naval base in a remote part of Papua New Guinea called Hansa Bay. It was during the second part of his mission when Lt. Kelly’s plane was shot down.
Wiley O. Woods, who served in Lt. Kelly’s unit, put together an incredible archive of military records, wartime diaries of crew members, and post-war reflections of veterans about the mission of March 11, 1944, according to Althaus.
He went through those records with Woods to figure out where the plane was likely to be in the waters.
“The final piece of the puzzle was trying to understand which direction the bomber formation was attacking the target from,” Althaus said. “Because that would determine where in the Bay they might be.”
He came across a diary entry that revealed clues as to where in the bay the plane may have landed, and Althaus said he was able to pin down the final resting place of the “Heaven Can Wait” crew.
“We were excited, because the journey up to that point had been, ‘What can we learn about this final mission? Where could we pinpoint, as best we could, the likely location of the plane?,’ partly, just so our family would know where… we thought their final resting place would be,” Althaus said. “But then, in the off chance that somebody might someday be able to go and find it, we wanted to compile all of this information to be able to hand it off to them.”
From there, the quest was handed over to Project Recover, a non-profit organization that specializes in the recovery of Americans Missing in Action through the use of advanced technologies.
“Acts of serendipity and family being motivated to carry the story forward a little bit more, that’s what brought us to the point where we got our information pulled together and handed off to Project Recover,” Althaus said.
In the fall of 2017, the Project Recover team went to Papua, New Guinea, to Hansa Bay, and ultimately located Lt. Kelly’s plane. The team brought several kinds of underwater detection tools, including side-scan sonars, which looked for objects underwater that appeared to be man-made.
“When they found the wreckage for ‘Heaven Can Wait,’ they sent that robot down over 200 feet under the water to take pictures and videos,” Althaus said. “And when our family saw those videos on the weekend of Easter in 2018, it was just a profound experience of grief.”
With over 81,000 Americans still missing in action from World War II, Althaus says there is an urgency to find these veterans, and Project Recover is fulfilling that mission, by “leveraging advanced technologies underwater and on land to be able to find these wreckage sites before it’s too late, and before the living relatives who still are carrying memories of these loved ones pass away.”
Althaus says the discovery of the B-24 bomber and the remains of Lt. Kelly was made possible through a collective community effort. A group of strangers he was able to contact via email became important informants and experts to help him navigate things.
There was a group of Belgian biologists who, at one point, had a research station in the middle of Hansa Bay, Papua New Guinea. And they spent a lot of their time scuba diving in the waters. Althaus said they were extremely helpful in narrowing down the possible location of the plane. One probable area where the plane could have gone down turned out to be a popular diving spot among scuba divers. The biologists told Althaus that if there was a plane that size, they would have found it a long time ago, recommending he focus on other areas within Hansa Bay.
“It was hundreds and hundreds of people around the country, around the world, in the military, civilians, who collectively moved things forward and kept us all going to the point that we are going to be finally burying our relative 81 years after he died,” Althaus said.
Memorial Day is more than a time for barbecues and mattress sales, he said. Althaus encourages everyone to find out if they have family members who died in wars or went missing in action. And if they don’t have relatives who served or died in wars, to see if there are any local stories they can learn from.
Memorial Day is “set up to be one time in a year that we reflect on all of those who have fallen in service to our country in wars that were fought, so that those of us who are living today could inhabit futures that those who fell never got to step into,” Althaus said.
Althaus and other family members will gather in Lt. Kelly’s hometown of Livermore, California, on Monday to bury his remains more than eight decades after his death and disappearance.