a B-24 bomber was shot down by enemy fire over Hansa Bay, New Guinea, carrying my uncle John and 10 other crewmen. They were officially MIA until Good Friday of 2018, when the team of Project Recover discovered the plane nearly 200 feet under the surface of the bay.
I had stopped by the family cemetery plot on that same Good Friday on my way to a prayer vigil in Saint Paul. As I cleared snow from the tombstones, I began thinking about uncle John and how little we knew about him. I decided to walk the cemetery praying a rosary for all the deceased in my family. Little did I know that, on that very day, his plane had been discovered.
More details about the discovery, and the consequent gathering of the families of the deceased crew, at the links below.
in memory of uncle John
Heaven Can Wait family gathering (October 2018)
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Excerpt from “For the Fallen” by Laurence Binyon
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
In January of 2023, the families of the crew members of Heaven Can Wait were notified that:
The underwater recovery mission 23-4 PG, commonly referred to by its aircraft name, “Heaven Can Wait” is now set to go this spring. DPAA with support of the Navy Experimental Dive Unit have completed planning efforts and are excited to get this mission back underway very soon.
As background, the HCW recovery effort is a complex and extensive undertaking that will take several months to execute, beginning with the mobilization of the deep water dive team and its equipment, movement of the team by transport ship to Singapore, loading onto a specialty class ship for the deep water mission, transit from Singapore to Papua New Guinea waters, before finally starting the actual on-site mission work. At the end of the field site work, the dive team will then do the entire sequence in reverse to get back to home base. The actions from beginning to end encompass the entire DPAA mission spectrum with the actual field work being only a part of the total mission timeframe.
The delays to date have been related to access constraints in both Singapore and Papua New Guinea due to the global Covid 19 Pandemic. We have recently completed our first return mission to Papua New Guinea, after nearly three and a half years of suspended operations, a good sign of improvement.
NOTE: I’m still working on a blog post about the things I learned about Uncle John and the Heaven Can Wait crew from my visit to Omaha in May of 2019 for the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency regional meeting. I was able to sit down with a casualty officer, analyst, and historian to review what they know about what happened to the crew of Heaven Can Wait on March 11, 1944.
