After 80 Years, Lost Americans Might Finally Escape 'Hellship'

A boot pulled from a corroded ship off the Philippine coast may be the most promising find yet in an 80-year effort to bring World War II prisoners home. The Wall Street Journal's Mike Cherney follows a US mission at the wreck of the Oryoku Maru, a Japanese "hellship" sunk by American planes in 1944 while carrying 1,619 Allied POWs, most of them Americans. About 250 Americans are believed to have gone down with the ship. Divers working from the USNS Salvor have cut into the flattened wreck and vacuumed out sediment, turning up artifacts including two US-marked boots, an ID bracelet, glasses, and what may be human bone, all carefully documented for forensic analysis.

The Pentagon's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency hopes the site will finally yield remains from the lost POWs, as officials work to identify some 80,000 US service members still missing, mostly from WWII. Cherney threads the technical, high-risk underwater work with the stories of families like that of Maj. Paul Schurtz, a New Mexico postal worker who left behind two young children and a pregnant wife when he deployed to the Philippines in 1941. "I can't believe that after all this time, that this would be something that would even be possible," Schurtz's grandson says of the recovery mission. For a full account of the mission, the science, and the families waiting for answers, read the original piece in the Journal.