Lest we forget: Waukon resident shares his experience in the search and recovery of American MIAs

by Brianne Grimstad

With Memorial Day on the horizon, many start to think about taking flowers and decorations to cemeteries, getting ready for Memorial Day parades and programs, and reflecting on the American men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice to protect their country and its freedom. Some families can go and visit the graves of their loved ones at local cemeteries, some servicemen and women are interred in cemeteries in other parts of the state or country, some have their final resting place overseas, and some have not yet had their remains found to be brought to their final resting place.

Over 81,000 American service members are still Missing In Action (MIA), and rural Waukon resident Dan Davis is part of a non-profit group called Project Recover that has made it their mission to locate, identify and bring those MIAs back to their loved ones.

Davis has been a professor at Luther College in Decorah since 2011. He also served in the U.S. Navy as a navigator and salvage and submarine rescue diver. Thankfully, he said he never had to use his skills to do a submarine rescue. He served one tour of active duty and was in the Navy Reserves for several years.

His skill set also enabled him to be able to help excavate and raise the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley, which sank off the coast of Charleston, SC after the Hunley rammed the Union ship USS Housatonic during the American Civil War, detonating a torpedo and sinking the Housatonic during the blockade of the Charleston Harbor February 17, 1864.

DISCOVERING PROJECT RECOVER
Most of Davis’s research, however, has focused on the ancient world. While working in the field in Greece, Davis explained that he was introduced to one of the co-founders of Project Recover, Mark Moline, through a mutual friend. “We really hit it off,” Davis noted of his initial conversations with Moline. 

At that time, Project Recover was expanding its operations, but they needed a formally trained marine archaeologist to take them to the next level.

Davis’s background and qualifications made him a perfect candidate for the job. Shortly after that, Davis was asked to join the team. This brought Project Recover within the sights of the Defense POW-MIA Accounting Agency, also known as the DPAA. The primary purpose of the DPAA is to research and locate American POWs and MIAs around the world from various conflicts since World War II.

Even with the large number of missing American service members, teams from the DPAA were only finding a low number of MIAs every year. U.S. Congressional members wanted to justify giving money to this cause and they wanted to see the success rate increase. The solution was to partner with non-governmental organizations that could do high quality search and forensic recovery. Project Recover was an ideal candidate to partner with the DPAA.

Project Recover began as the BentProp Project in the 1990s, a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Pat Scannon. Scannon and his group would research MIA cases and go on search missions, looking for wreckage and human remains all over the world, on land and underwater. In 2012, he met scientists from the University of Delaware and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, while BentProp was on a mission in Palau. They collaborated, using technology from the universities to improve their underwater search methods.

In 2016, a partnership was formalized between the three entities, with Scannon and Moline representing the University of Delaware and Erik Terrell from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. In 2018 the BentProp Project formally changed its name to Project Recover. Davis joined the team in 2019.

FIRST MISSION
The first mission Davis took part in with Project Recover was located in Micronesia at Chuuk Lagoon (also sometimes called Truk). During World War II, Truk Lagoon housed the Imperial Japanese Navy’s 4th Fleet. February 17-18, 1944 the U.S. Navy launched a massive air attack on the Japanese fleet with the codename OPERATION HAILSTONE.

OPERATION HAILSTONE has often been referenced as America’s payback for the attack on Pearl Harbor. U.S. planes sank over 50 Japanese vessels and shot down or destroyed on land over 250 Japanese aircraft. It’s estimated that around 4,500 Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen were killed. 

The U.S. lost 25 aircraft in the battle, and one fleet carrier and one battleship sustained damage, with 40-plus American airmen losing their lives during the battle.

PARTS OF THE PROCESS
Davis explained that his team’s mission is to research MIA cases, then go into  an area and investigate it, looking for clues that would alert them to wreckage sites. Search areas are chosen from information gathered through eyewitness reports, both from military personnel and civilians. Part of the job is to interview locals at any location; however, a lot of the locals they talk with might be children or grandchildren of the original eyewitness who passed on the story to their family.

With so much time passing from the 1940s to now, details can become misremembered, or in the case of incident reports from service members, there was a lot of action going on so things may not be recounted quite accurately. Many of the pilots and sailors manning the U.S. planes and ships were young men, barely in their 20s. In a combat situation, they were trying to avoid getting shot down themselves, so details might get lost or distorted in that kind of chaos.

Davis noted that the U.S. military is very good at documentation and stamping serial numbers on parts of its planes and ships. “Because we’re looking for crashed aircraft, finding and documenting the sites is the hardest part,” he said.

They use sophisticated equipment like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to scan a potential area. These sensors are equipped with side scan sonar and magnetometers. Davis explained that they program a search grid in and then let the machines go to work “mowing the lawn.” The sonar can look for anomalies in the underwater landscape that could indicate a potential debris field of a plane or ship. The magnetometer can detect iron, which is a pretty solid indicator of mechanical parts of a plane or ship, like an engine.

They typically have two AUVs running during an investigation, and both units can cover up to four square miles per day on a single battery charge. While the AUVs are doing their thing, members of the Project Recover team are monitoring them from a boat topside and diving on potential wreckage to further investigate and document what they find.  Davis is one of the team members who dives on the wrecks.

They primarily focus on plane crash sites, as sunken ships are considered essentially an underwater cemetery, a protected war grave. Once they have their target area, divers will go down and use their hands to fan away sediment from wreckage. They look for clues like metal plates with serial numbers stamped in them. They sometimes come across hazards like unexploded ordnance, so they do have to be careful and meticulous when going about their work. Once items on the site are documented and retrieved, they can go to work matching the serial numbers to missing planes.

“We have files on the aircraft and all the crew members on those planes with us,” Davis explained. “We usually have pictures, personal information. You can easily imagine what their lives were like before and during the war.”

To read the full article, pick up the Wednesday, April 21, 2025 print edition of The Standard or subscribe to our e-edition or print edition by clicking here.