Military Review English Edition January-February 2015 | Page 137

BOOK REVIEWS

As a first step, Scannon’s associate proposed they locate
and dive on the wreck of Japanese ship supposedly sunk
by a young U.S. Navy pilot named George H. W. Bush.
The plan was they would produce a documentary
film to raise money to search for the gold, an odyssey
that began in 1993 and finally concluded in 2010 with
burial of the remains of five airmen that called themselves the “Big Stoop” crew. On that first trip, Scannon,
who was not an experienced diver, was of little use to
the “documentary crew.” However, when his wife joined
him, he made the discovery that changed his life and
the lives of a great many others.
On a tour of World War II wrecks, a guide showed
him the wing of an aircraft shot down in the shoal
waters of the archipelago. Scannon would later identify that wing as belonging to a Liberator flown by
William Dixon and nine other airmen, who were shot
down two weeks before the Marines landed in Pelelieu.
Identifying the Dixon crash site was fairly easy; for
Scannon it was also an epiphany. He went on to find
clues to the fate of two other aircraft that he then felt
compelled to follow up on. Subsequently, he found and
identified a second wreck flown by a crew led by Glenn
Custer that was shot down eight months after the
Marine Corps landing. Still later, the most compelling
discovery came from finding a Liberator tail bearing
the number 453, which had flown with the “Big Stoop”
crew on 1 September 1944 and then vanished. The least
was known about this last plane’s fate.
Hylton traces at a dizzying pace how Scannon’s fascination with these three airplanes grew. He researched
archives, he attended reunions of the 307th where he
interviewed old soldiers and their families, he became
a certified diver, and he founded a nonprofit called the
BentProp Project devoted to supporting the efforts to
locate “missing” downed aircraft in Palau. He apparently went to Palau every year from 1993 through at least
2007, where he interviewed islanders, rented aircraft
and boats to search, and finally mounted expeditions
that ultimately located 453. He even made it possible
for the son of one of 453’s crewmembers to dive on the
wreck. All of this he did while coping with the legitimate bureaucratic rules associated with these wrecks,
including dealing with the joint service organization in
Hawaii that recovers remains. As his research expanded, he tracked down what happened to several airmen
who apparently were able to parachute safely from
MILITARY REVIEW  January-February 2015

the plane but later died at the hands of the Japanese.
During this period he went down blind alleys, but
persisted and ultimately helped return some of these
soldiers to their families.
What emerges from Hylton’s narrative goes beyond
Scannon’s compulsion. Hylton reveals insight into the
suffering of the families, and how this little known
backwater campaign touched the lives of so many.
However, the very best way to understand why this was
important is best left to Scannon. He was touched by
the sacrifice of these young, half-trained men who died
in support of an effort some later claimed was unnecessary. As Scannon put it, for those young men, “it made
no difference that they died in a backwater campaign.
They died young and violently. They deserve to be remembered.” All should read this book and remember.
Col. Gregory Fontenot, U.S. Army, Retired,
Lansing, Kan.

THE TRUE GERMAN: The Diary of a World War
II Military Judge
Werner Otto Müller-Hill, Palgrave MacMillan, New
York, 2013, 240 pages

T

his is an odd book. It purports to be the
contemporary diary of a Wehrmacht military
judge, Major Werner Otto Müller-Hill, from
1944-45.
Anyone expecting
to learn more about
the Wehrmacht
judiciary or military
justice system will be
disappointed, as there
is nothing of substance
about those institutions at all. Instead,
almost every page is
taken up with a series
of never-ending, withering, and contemptuous comments directed at Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels,
the Wehrmacht high command, Major Müller-Hill’s
superior officers, and fellow judges. The comments are
uniformly strident. For example, “It’s not possible for
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