Over 56,000 American troops have been listed as missing in action in wars that have been fought over the past century. The majority of these soldiers were lost in the Pacific theater during WWII. In "Vanished" Wil Hylton traces what became of the eleven man crew of an American B-24 bomber that crashed in 1944 near the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. Divers searching for the underwater wreckage of the plane eventually located it. Wil Hylton describes how the search for this missing plane happened. For the families of these missing aviators the discovery of the wreckage provided some sense of closure.
"Vanished" was one of my favorite books from 2013. My interview with Wil Hylton was also one of my personal favorites from the past year.
