Meg Godlewski

The expression “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash” applies to the people who search for
World War II wrecks. Randy Duncan, a commercial diver and self-proclaimed “adventure junkie,”
spends his spare time looking for WWII-aircraft crash sites and ship wrecks. To some they may
appear to be just piles of scrap metal; to Duncan they are treasure troves, and in a few weeks he plans to dive in a peat bog near Olympia, Washington in search of a P-38.

The first step in tracking a WWII-era wreck is separating fact from fiction or urban myth.

“Amazingly enough, I was able to find some people who were witnesses to the P-38 crash just through
word of mouth,” Duncan said. “Another thing I heard is that it really wasn’t a P-38 that went in; it was
a small trainer. I also heard there was a scrap heap next to the crash site, and in the 1940s someone
hitched a rope to the plane and hauled it out of the bog and into the scrap heap.”

Duncan quickly adds that such “eyewitness accounts” can be misleading when people are asked to
remember something that happened over 50 years ago. He calls false alarms “nessies” after the mythical creature in Loch Ness, but he’s willing to take a chance on a tracking a nessie if there’s a chance he may find a real wreck.

According to the story Duncan heard, the pilot of the P-38 was trying to land at dusk and mistook the
swamp for the runway. The pilot wasn’t seriously hurt in the crash and the tail of the plane stuck out of
the swamp for several days before finally sinking. Duncan said he knows where the P-38 allegedly went down, but he doesn’t know for sure if its remains are still at the crash site. He won’t disclose the
location of the alleged crash because he worries souvenir hunters or unscrupulous people will strip, steal or vandalize the aircraft. P-38s are among the world’s rarest warbirds, and a lot of people would like to lay claim to the wreck. There are museums and private collectors who would pay top money for such a prize.

“It’s on private property,” Duncan said. “I have permission from the property owner to dive to see if it is in the bog. Retrieving it will be a whole different story.”

He explained that in the hierarchy of protected wetlands, a peat bog is the most protected. To get the
aircraft out of the bog, Duncan will have to get permission from the Washington Department of Ecology and the Environmental Protection Agency, not to mention the property owner.

“Getting through red tape is very difficult,” he said. “But the folks at the Collings Foundation (a
nonprofit group that recovers, restores and flies WWII warbirds) have done it.” Duncan works with the foundation to help keep their warbirds flying. He helps them locate parts for their B-17 and B-24, and he’s their flight-line manager when they visit Seattle.

Duncan owns Pacific Rim Diving and Salvage and specializes in diving in enclosed spaces, such as
inside dam turbines, but even he is apprehensive about the P-38 dive. “There’s a 99% chance that
diving into the bog is going to be like diving into a bucket of black paint,” he said. He plans to use a
helmet-mounted video camera that will feed images to a monitor on the surface. As the diver, he said,
he won’t be able to see anything and will be feeling his way around. The camera will “see” better
underwater than he will.

“It will be really difficult to do because it (the bog) has a floating bottom. You hit what you think is the
bottom, then you punch through that layer and break into open water again. The plane, if it is there, will be on the real bottom.”

On a more encouraging note, peat is known for its preservation qualities. If the aircraft has been buried in it for the past 50 years, there is a good chance the plane is fairly intact and restorable to airworthy status. If the plane can’t be restored, Duncan hopes the parts will be used to keep other P-38s flying.

The last thing he wants to see happen is the wreckage to be left out in the elements, where it would fall victim to vandals. That’s what happened to a B-17 that crashed in the Toll Valley of the Olympic
Mountains, what is now Olympic National Park.

“According to the story, the plane took off from McChord Air Force base in the late ’40s or early ’50s on a rescue mission,” Duncan said. “There was a Korean freighter in trouble in the Pacific, and they
were going to help. There was a crew of eight on board the plane, and they supposedly followed a
radio beam right into the side of a mountain. Three of the eight crewmen died in the crash.”

In 1998 Duncan visited the crash site. Locals told him the plane remained fairly intact until the 1960s,
when the government blew it up because people were reporting it as a fresh crash. Duncan went to the site, hoping to find parts that could be salvaged for the few remaining airworthy B-17s. What he saw sickened him.

“The crash site isn’t too far from the trail head, and a lot of people were there,” he said. “They were
throwing rocks at it, jumping up and down on it. It reminded me of the scene with the monkeys in the
movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” (The monkeys attack the obelisk because they don’t know what it
is.) These people had no idea what they were destroying.”

Duncan’s hopes of salvage were dashed when he discovered the damage that had been done over the
years by souvenir hunters, including a 4-by-6 swatch of rubber taken from what, according to Duncan,
would have been a perfectly good tire.

He documented his trip with video tape and photographs and took some of the wreckage, which he
plans to craft into an educational display. “I have some fuselage, bits and pieces from the plane, nothing of any salvage value,” he said. “I’m going to take the display around to museums and air shows to honor these men.” He’s been trying to get more information about the crew and their mission so he can tell their story.

Because of a fire in the Air Force’s records department several years ago, Duncan said getting
information about the crews can be nearly as difficult as finding crash sites and recovering aircraft.

“Pretty much all the records before 1960 were destroyed,” he said. He gets a lot of his information
through word of mouth and the Internet.

When he’s not hunting for aircraft wrecks or conducting dives for clients, Duncan produces
documentaries on World War II. This summer he plans to travel to the South Pacific to do a real-time
Web cast from WWII wreck sites at sea. Divers with cameras attached to their helmets will explore the wrecks while WWII veterans who fought in the particular campaign will be topside watching the video on a monitor.

“They’ll be able to direct the divers. They can tell us what they saw, what happened back then,”
Duncan said. He admits he’s in awe of the WWII generation.

“I’ve talked to these guys a lot. Their generation is incredible. They had to climb mountains in their
lifetime. I’ve run across a speed bump or two in my life compared to what they’ve lived. Anyone who
is feeling sorry for themselves or is unhappy about their life ought to think about what these people went through.”

If you are a fellow wreck chaser or have some information that could help Duncan in his quests, contact him at: airboy@worldnet.att.net. A Web site that documents his activities, Warbirds Worldwide, is located at: http://home.att.net/~AIRBOY/WARBIRDS.html.