The Repository Last Known Position

B-24 Heaven Can Wait: How 4 of 11 Airmen Got Names

October 14, 2026 · Runtime 12:19 · Watch on YouTube

On 11 March 1944 the B-24 Heaven Can Wait went into the water off Awar Point, in Hansa Bay, New Guinea, with eleven men aboard, after observers saw flames erupt from her bomb bay. In 1950 the Army declared all eleven non-recoverable. In 2024, four of them were given their names back. We follow the case through the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency's own releases: a family's archive search, a sonar survey, and a saturation dive to 213 feet.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Hansa Bay, 1943
  2. 0:23 11 March 1944
  3. 1:07 What you are seeing
  4. 1:25 71,824 still missing
  5. 1:54 From Nadzab
  6. 2:29 The crew
  7. 3:01 Boram and Awar Point
  8. 3:22 Flames from the bomb bay
  9. 3:53 Non-recoverable, 1950
  10. 4:19 A family starts asking
  11. 5:01 Project Recover's sonar
  12. 5:56 213 feet
  13. 6:17 A wreck is not a recovery
  14. 6:32 The saturation dive
  15. 7:35 On the bottom
  16. 8:24 Awaro and the museum
  17. 8:46 What came up
  18. 9:04 Four accounted for
  19. 9:32 Not the same DNA
  20. 10:50 The seven
  21. 11:19 The account
  22. 11:51 Next: Colony Glacier

Transcript

This is Army Air Forces film, shot from inside an American bomber over Hansa Bay, on the north coast of New Guinea, in August 1943. The smoke is the target.

The Army's cameramen titled this part of the reel Target: Hansa Bay. They filmed the raids over three days, from August 25th to 27th.

Six months later, on March 11th, 1944, a B-24 named Heaven Can Wait flew a bomb run over the same bay. Eleven men were aboard.

Over Awar Point, men in the other bombers saw flames erupt from her bomb bay and race back to the tail. She pitched up, banked left, and went into the water.

In 1950, the Army declared all eleven non-recoverable. In 2024, four of them were given their names back. This episode follows that case through the agency's own releases, and it asks one question. How does a crew the Army had written off come back from two hundred and thirteen feet of water, and why only four?

A note on what you are seeing. The agency has released no video of the dive at Hansa Bay. The photographs in this episode are from the mission itself. The video is the same agency doing the same work at other wrecks, in Palau, the Solomon Islands, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Heaven Can Wait is one line in a very long list. In late 2025, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency counted seventy-one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four Americans still unaccounted for from the Second World War. That count only covers the cases it has worked since 1973. Of seventy-three thousand, six hundred and eighty-five, it has accounted for one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one.

The bomber flew from Nadzab, in the Markham Valley. American paratroopers had seized it in September 1943, in this jump, filmed by the Army. By March, Nadzab had numbered airstrips, and Heaven Can Wait took off from Strip Number One.

She was a B-24D Liberator, serial number 42-41216, flying with a crew from the 320th Bomb Squadron of the 90th Bomb Group. This is the same kind of bomber, on a New Guinea airstrip, in 1943.

The pilot, First Lieutenant Herbert Tennyson, was twenty-four, from Wichita, Kansas. The bombardier, Second Lieutenant Thomas Kelly Junior, was twenty-one, from Livermore, California.

The navigator, Second Lieutenant Donald Sheppick, was twenty-six, from Roscoe, Pennsylvania. The radio operator, Staff Sergeant Eugene Darrigan, was also twenty-six, from Wappingers Falls, New York. The agency's roster lists seven more.

The target that morning was Boram airfield, near Wewak. The second target was the anti-aircraft guns at Awar Point, on Hansa Bay.

Those guns were the danger. In this film, from a 1943 raid on the same coast, the black bursts are anti-aircraft shells going off around the formation.

The agency's account comes from the men in the other planes. It believes anti-aircraft fire hit Heaven Can Wait, and set off bombs she had not yet dropped.

Observers saw three men leave the plane. One appeared to have no parachute. Two had parachutes that did not open.

Several aircraft circled the crash site, looking for survivors. None could be seen. And no one could go back to search. The Japanese held the coast around Awar Point.

After the war, the Army's Graves Registration Service searched the region, and finished in late 1948. In March 1950, a board concluded it could not locate the remains of any of the eleven. They were declared non-recoverable.

Their names went onto the Walls of the Missing, at the American cemetery in Manila. For more than sixty years, that is where the record stopped.

It started again with a relative. On Memorial Day 2013, Scott Althaus, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, began looking into his mother's cousin: Tom Kelly, the bombardier.

One of his sources was the 90th Bomb Group's own historian, Wiley Woods, who died in 2015.

Between 2013 and 2017, the Kelly family worked through the archives with him. Althaus wrote that one research trip, in 2015, brought home more than eight hundred photographs and scanned images. What came out of it, according to the Air Force, was a thirty-two page report.

The research went to Project Recover, a team of scientists and volunteers who search for missing Americans with sonar and underwater robots. In October 2017, a team led by Eric Terrill, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, went to Hansa Bay.

The University of Delaware, a partner in the search, says the team mapped the seafloor with sonar carried by autonomous underwater vehicles. Then a robot on a tether went down with a camera, to confirm what the sonar had seen. In the agency's words, it was a unilateral survey. Project Recover went on its own.

The bay is not small, and it is not empty. Project Recover believed it held five American aircraft and twenty-four missing men. The team spent eleven days on the water, and covered nearly twenty-seven square kilometers of seafloor.

One debris field was a B-24. It lay in two hundred and thirteen feet of water, about sixty-five meters, where the pressure is more than seven times what it is at the surface.

On March 30th, 2018, the families of the crew were told. Project Recover announced the find that May.

A wreck is not a recovery. In 2019, an underwater team from the agency surveyed the site, inspected the wreckage, and cleared it of unexploded ordnance. Then the pandemic pushed the excavation back.

Two hundred and thirteen feet is deep for this work. So the agency brought in the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, and a saturation diving system that flies in by air.

About fifteen divers came from the unit's saturation detachment, with two more from the Navy's Undersea Rescue Command. The system had just come back from a deployment to Singapore.

The system can keep six divers under pressure for up to thirty days. They live in a chamber on the deck, and ride to the bottom in a bell that locks onto it. It is built for pressures equal to a thousand feet of seawater. At Hansa Bay, it needed about a fifth of that.

Coming back to surface pressure takes days, so the divers stay sealed in for the whole rotation. Their food is passed in through a hatch. On March 24th, 2023, the first team came out, after fourteen days.

The last team came out on April 16th, after the final dives. They had been sealed in for twenty-one days.

On the bottom, they cut the wreckage apart with hydraulic tools. Sediment went into big baskets, and a crane hauled the baskets up to the ship.

On deck, every basket was washed through screens of quarter-inch mesh, and picked over by hand.

From March 9th to April 13th, the divers logged thirty-seven diving days, a hundred and two trips to the bottom, and more than three hundred and sixty-seven hours of work on the wreck. Counted another way, that is five thousand, three hundred and four man-hours spent under pressure.

The mission commander, Captain Weston Iannone, put the objective in one sentence. It was the fullest possible accounting of eleven Army Air Force service members, lost on March 11th, 1944.

The bay is someone's home. The team met the leaders of the nearby village of Awaro, and brought members of Papua New Guinea's National Museum aboard to see the work.

Project Recover calls it the deepest underwater recovery of missing Americans the United States government has ever attempted. The agency's own release does not use the word.

What came up, in the agency's words, was possible osseous material, life support equipment, and identification tags.

On April 12th, 2023, at a ceremony at Hansa Bay, it was handed over in a case under an American flag, and sent to the agency's laboratory.

It took the laboratory seventeen months. On September 20th, 2024, it accounted for the radio operator, Eugene Darrigan, and the navigator, Donald Sheppick. Five days later, the bombardier, Tom Kelly, and the pilot, Herbert Tennyson.

Each name rested on teeth and on the anthropology of the bones. It also rested on the circumstances: one bomber, one known site, and a roster of eleven men.

And each rested on DNA, but not the same DNA. That is the part of the case the releases spell out, man by man.

Mitochondrial DNA passes down the mother's line, almost unchanged, so a cousin through a mother's sister can match it. The Y chromosome passes from father to son, so a nephew through a brother can match that.

Kelly was matched on both lines. Tennyson, on the mother's line. Sheppick, on the father's line alone. Darrigan, on both, plus autosomal DNA, which is inherited from every ancestor.

The agency names a man twice. First comes a short initial release. The complete one waits until the family has received its full briefing. Kelly's initial release came on October 10th, 2024, two weeks after he was accounted for.

The full releases came later, after each family had been briefed: Kelly in November 2024, Darrigan in January 2025, Tennyson in February, and Sheppick in May.

Tom Kelly was buried in his hometown on Memorial Day 2025. On the Walls of the Missing in Manila, a rosette now marks a name that has been found.

Seven of the eleven are still unaccounted for. Staff Sergeants Donald Burd, John Emmer, Walter Graves, Paul Martin and Eugene Reinhardt. Technical Sergeant Edward Gorvetzian. Second Lieutenant Michael McFadden.

The agency has not said why. Its releases do not say whether the other seven were in what came up, or whether what came up was all there was. News reports say a return to the site is possible.

So here is the account. Eleven men. Declared non-recoverable in 1950. Found by sonar in 2017. Dug out of two hundred and thirteen feet of water in 2023. Four named in 2024.

For seventy-three years, the last known position of Heaven Can Wait was a phrase in a loss report: in the water, off Awar Point. What turned it into four names was a family that kept asking, a sonar, a saturation dive, and relatives who gave a sample.

Next, a plane the ice gave back. On November 22nd, 1952, a C-124 Globemaster with fifty-two men aboard flew into Mount Gannett, in Alaska. In 2012, sixty years later, the moving ice brought it back to the surface, as far as twelve miles from the crash. In January 2026, the last of the fifty-two was named. That is the next episode.

Description and sources

From 2013 to 2017 the family of the bombardier, 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly Jr., worked through the archives with Scott Althaus of the University of Illinois. In October 2017 Project Recover found the debris field by sonar in 213 feet of water. After a 2019 survey that cleared unexploded ordnance, a DPAA underwater recovery team with the Navy Experimental Diving Unit excavated the site from 9 March to 13 April 2023, living under pressure in a deck chamber for up to 21 days. In September 2024 the laboratory accounted for four men: S/Sgt. Eugene Darrigan, 2nd Lt. Donald Sheppick, 2nd Lt. Thomas Kelly Jr. and 1st Lt. Herbert Tennyson, each matched on different DNA lines (mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, autosomal) alongside dental and anthropological evidence. Seven of the eleven remain unaccounted for.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • DPAA Diving Deep 23-4PG (10 images) | DVIDS -- Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency | public-domain

Last Known Position reads a missing-in-action case through the record that closed it: the loss report, the excavation and the laboratory.

About the material. Film: Army Air Forces, "Air War in the Pacific", 1943, National Archives RG 111 (catalog 14113). Photographs: the 2023 Hansa Bay mission, U.S. Marine Corps photos by Sgt. Jack A. E. Rigsby, DPAA. No video of the Hansa Bay dive has been released; the diving video is the same agency at other wrecks. All public domain, via DVIDS and the National Archives. No human remains are shown. Diagrams are drawn in code. Nothing here is AI-generated imagery.

The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense visual information does not imply or constitute endorsement. This channel is independent and not affiliated with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force or Project Recover.

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