By Rachel Sawicki

NEWARK — Over 10 years of research, recovery and reunited families are coming to fruition Wednesday. “To What Remains,” a documentary following Project Recover on its mission to locate Americans missing in action since World War II, will be showing at movie theaters nationwide, and features two professors from the University of Delaware.

In 2012, Project Recover was informally founded as a collaborative partnership between the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Delaware.

Originally named the BentProp Project, it started out with Dr. Pat Scannon’s vacation to Palau in 1993, when a tour guide took him to a crash site in the water, which Dr. Scannon later discovered was the wing of a B-24 bomber.

Locating the missing crew turned into his first recovery mission, and he returned with a small team every April to search for more sites. But a chance encounter with Mark Moline in Palau in 2012 is when the recovery efforts really kicked into gear.

“Pat saw the potential of our high technology and forming a partnership,” Dr. Moline said. “We thought the mission was pretty challenging from a technological standpoint but also pretty interesting.”

The day after they met, they took a small team out to survey a parcel of the ocean. Dr. Moline, currently the director of the School of Marine Science and Policy at UD, and colleague Eric Terrill, with Scripps Institution of Oceanography, were in Palau working on science and engineering studies under the Office of Naval Research. As it turned out, the autonomous robotic systems they were using for modeling water flow around coral reefs, lagoons and islands are also great at finding underwater aircraft. They found one in just four hours, which would have taken 50 years of individual dives to find without technological help, according to Dr. Moline.

Subsequent missions were partly funded by the Office of Naval Research for two years until they partnered with benefactor Dan Friedkin in 2014, who helped them go global in 2015. The partnership was formalized in 2016, and renamed Project Recover in 2018.

Over nearly three decades, the team has located more than 30 U.S. World War II aircraft associated with more than 100 MIAs in missions around the globe.
Dr. Colin Colbourn, lead historian for Project Recover, said there are over 82,000 MIAs, and all but about 10,000 cases are from WWII.

“To What Remains” focuses on the families of the 14 MIAs who have been identified thanks to Project Recover so far. While it may not seem like much, there are still over 80 sites that have been found and are awaiting a recovery team.

“This movie is really about the families,” Dr. Colbourn said. “We have these huge rushes of adrenaline, these big wins. But we have to remember that it takes time and that is just part of the process … but we’re going to keep going out and finding these guys.”

Dr. Colbourn is a history professor and marine science postdoctoral researcher at UD and joined Project Recover in 2016. He collects all of the archival research, putting together any information available on cases in order to get the equipment in the right place in the water.

Dr. Moline explained that a pre-programmed, torpedo-shaped vehicle collects images from 15 to 20 feet above the sea floor using sonar technology. The data coming in has to be analyzed carefully, since aircraft can often look like rocks or reefs. The historical team looks for specific markers that may give hints as to where an aircraft is, but Dr. Colbourn admits that ocean recovery is a daunting task, between a constantly moving environment and questionable reliability of distance perspectives.

“If someone says, ‘400 miles offshore,’ I’m telling you that 99.9% of the time that usually means over a mile,” he said. “We have had cases where we have photographs of aircraft crashing and we look in the place right where their photographs show it is, and it’s not there. And that really has to do with the environment under the water. But we’re also dealing with these historical judgments of distance. That’s why prioritization is hard.”

With so many missing Americans, Dr. Moline said they have to determine what is doable and how they can best use their resources successfully. Out of a few thousand cases in their database, around 400 are currently actionable.

Project Recover works in collaboration with the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency to take care of identification and transportation of the remains and to notify family members of the person found. DNA extracted from remains for identification are run at a Dover Air Force Base laboratory.

Dr. Colbourn added that, in many cases, families aren’t aware that anyone is even looking for their lost loved ones, but it may be better that way. He said they don’t want to let people down, but want to be able to give them the good news when it happens.

“It becomes a huge family event,” Dr. Colbourn said. “We had a funeral in Pennsylvania … where not just the family but the whole town came out to celebrate. It was one of the most healthy, patriotic things I’ve ever experienced in my life, where it wasn’t about politics, it was about this person who sacrificed their life and everyone coming together in a patriotic way. That was really something special.”

“If I had a wish for the film itself, it would be to raise awareness of the 82,000 still missing,” Dr. Moline said. “It’s a huge number and most people don’t know that. Just a little under 20% of all the casualties from World War II never made it home and the effect that has on families is significant. … I’m a scientist, but the human element of this is what has kept me so excited about the project since day one.”

Project Recover team members attended a private screening of the documentary Tuesday in the U.S. Navy Memorial Museum in Washington.

The film was also shown at a private screening at the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum in Honolulu that day.

Screenings in Delaware will be Dec. 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Regal Peoples Plaza in Newark and AMC Classic in Dover. There will also be a screening at Regal Salisbury & RPX in Salisbury, Maryland.