An elite team dived 200 feet underwater in search of the crew of “Heaven Can Wait,” a bomber shot down off New Guinea in 1944
The bomber’s pilot, 1st Lt. Herbert G. Tennyson, a former hotel clerk from Wichita, Kan., approached the target at an altitude of about 8,000 feet. His B-24 carried eight bombs, an array of heavy machine guns, and 10 other men.
Three figures were seen jumping out as it went down. The wreckage burned on the surface and sank in about 200 feet of water, leaving behind a large oil slick. There were no survivors.Earlier this month, a team of elite Navy divers and archaeologists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency ended a five-week, deep-water search of Hansa Bay for the bones of Heaven Can Wait’s crew.
The agency said the osseous material was being treated with the reverence and ceremony due human remains, but verification would need to take place in the DPAA laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.The wreckage of the plane had been discovered in 2017 during an underwater survey by Project Recover, a nonprofit partnership that uses technology to hunt for the missing, mainly from World War II.
The system allowed them to work in the pressure of deep water for long periods without having to decompress after each dive, the Navy said. They only needed to decompress at the end of the project. Tennyson’s grandson, Scott Jefferson, 52, of Queenstown, New Zealand, said he thought the plane’s loss “was a mystery that would never be solved. … I’m just overwhelmingly grateful to everybody that made this happen.”
The experts had pinpointed the front section, where Tennyson; co-pilot Michael J. McFadden Jr., 26, of Clay Center, Kan.; and several other members of the crew were stationed. Sheppick was from Roscoe, Pa., a small town on the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. He had previously worked as a bank teller, according to Census records, and for Carnegie Illinois Steel, in nearby Homestead.The nickname, Heaven Can Wait, probably came from a 1943 movie of the same name, starring the actor Don Ameche.
John Emmer was 26 and had worked in the family lumber business in Minneapolis. Everyone called him “Johnny.” He had a girlfriend named Mary. By March 1944, the United States and its allies had begun to push back the Japanese advances in the Pacific. “The third man was wearing a chute but I did not see it open,” Smith recalled. “The tail assembly broke off and fell into the ocean. The plane banked left and drove in a slip into the water a quarter mile off the point.”Other bombers circled near the crash site looking for survivors. “I could see no evidence that bodies remained at the surface,” Smith reported.
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