Inside a Maritime Archaeology Search for a B-24 Liberator, Broome WA.

Fathom Archaeology was recently involved in a search for a WWII aircraft lost since 1942 just offshore of Broome, WA.

When war came to the Pacific, an evacuation route was established from Java to Australia, with Broome as the first stop for refueling on the route to Perth and the East coast. In early March 1942, Japanese fighters flew across Broome, sinking fifteen flying boats at their moorings in Roebuck Bay and attacking aircraft stationed at Broome airport. One plane, a US Army Air Corps B-24 Liberator, loaded with wounded and sick American service personnel recently evacuated from Java, managed to get airborne. The lone survivor, Sergeant Melvin Donoho of Oklahoma, was in the water for over 30 hours before finally managing to reach shore and stagger back to Broome Airfield.

More than eight decades on, that aircraft has still not been found. Fathom Archaeology's director, Jane Mitchell, was the project manager and the lead archaeologist on one of the latest attempts to locate it.

The Latest Search

The search for the Liberator has been ongoing since its loss, not just by the US Government but also by Australian professional and avocational maritime archaeologists.

As ABC News recently reported, this fresh search, funded by the US Department of Defense's POW/MIA Accounting Agency, has just wrapped up off the WA coast. The team didn't find the wreck, but as Jane put it: "We didn't find it this time, but we've been able to rule out an area of about 15 square kilometres so no result is still a result" — even if it's not the outcome that was hoped for.

The search will continue…

The Liberator is one small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Of the roughly 80,000 American service personnel still unaccounted for from conflicts worldwide, about 280 are believed to have died in Australian waters.

The search for these wrecks will continue, and as technology improves and mapping the seafloor becomes cheaper and easier to achieve, it's hoped that searches such as the recent Broome investigation will solve the puzzle for the families of the missing.

As Jane says: "[The crash] is still in living memory and there are families wanting to know what happened to their loved one, so it's an honour to have the opportunity to try to answer some of those questions."

Read the full story at ABC News: "80-year Australian mystery of missing US war dead"

Interested in Fathom Archaeology's other maritime survey work? Get in touch to find out what we do.