Two Navy “TBD Devastators,” ditched in Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands during a U.S. attack on Japanese forces in the Marshall Islands in early 1942, are the only surviving TBD torpedo bombers of the 129 originally built by the U.S. military in World War II, said Van T. Hunn, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who is heading the group from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, or TIGHAR.
TIGHAR has flown in engineering and marine archeology experts to assess options for safely recovering one of the two TBD Devastator bombers. The group aims to produce a detailed recovery plan for review by the Marshall Islands Historic Preservation Office and the U.S. Navy later this year, said TIGHAR official Russ Matthews.
Assisting on the trip are Peter Fix, the assistant director of the Center for Maritime Archeology and Conservation at Texas A&M University, and Al Baycora, technical director for New York-based AECOM Technology Corp., a large engineering firm.
The two Devastators in Jaluit’s lagoon — one at about 50 feet, the other at 130 feet depth — are an important part of American naval history, said Hill Goodspeed, the chief historian at the National Museum of Naval Aviation. “We thought none existed,” he said. The Marshall Islands planes “are definitely a crown jewel of naval aviation history.”
“There is not one of these planes above water or in a museum anywhere,” said Hunn.
Both planes are relatively undisturbed and intact, unlike their sister planes, many of which were shot down over deep ocean areas during WWII battles. The reason these two planes are largely intact is because they were deliberately ditched by their Navy pilots who did not have the fuel to return to the aircraft carrier Yorktown, so they made slow, controlled landings on Jaluit’s lagoon. Shortly after these landings, the planes sank to the shallow lagoon floor.
“Of 41 Devastators that fought in the battle of Midway, only four returned,” said Matthews. The high mortality rate resulted from the Devastator being a “frontline torpedo bomber,” he said.
TIGHAR’s aim is to leave the shallower plane in place as an attraction for scuba divers, while devising a way to safely remove the deeper plane so it can be preserved and put into a U.S. Naval museum.
The group knows there are a host of regulatory issues to address as well as the complicated process of “how to integrate recovery of the plane with a step-by-step operation in Jaluit where we don’t have everything we need,” Matthews said. Jaluit was the Japanese headquarters when it administered the Marshall Islands from World War I to the end of World War II, but was relegated to a remote backwater when the U.S. took control of the islands in 1944. With a population of about 1,500 people, it has many guns, downed planes and concrete bunkers from World War II, but remains a remote outpost, about 150 miles from the capital, Majuro.
TIGHAR officials have spent years reviewing the planes, and developing plans for how to deal with corrosion problems once the plane is pulled out of the water. This week’s dive on the planes is TIGHAR’s fifth visit to the site.
“The key,” said Fix, “is knowing everything the plane is made of. It’s not just aluminum. There are four different types of aluminum, three of which were treated in different ways and each will react differently (when the plane emerges from the water).” All told, there are 14 different types of metals on the TBD Devastator. The biggest challenge, though, may be dealing with the iron and steel bolts that hold the plane together, since the aim is to transport the plane back to the US in several pieces.
But they will have a window of only about 24-36 hours once the plane is brought up in Jaluit to remove bolts before they expand, which could damage the plane.
Eliminating as many of the unknowns and preparing for every option is what TIGHAR is doing with its recovery plan that is expected to be completed by the end of 2009, with recovery to be staged possibly in 2010.
