Beneath Haunted Waters

Beneath Haunted Waters is a story of the crews from two B-24 Liberator bombers that disappeared in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains in early December, 1943. One plane wasn't found until 1955, at the bottom of a reservoir. The other plane was discovered in 1960 at the bottom of a lake, high in the mountains. Concerning this second B-24, the co-pilot's father had died the previous year after dedicating his life to searching for his son. He missed the crash site by only ten miles.

This isn't the story of movers and shakers and grand designs. It's the story of regular boys - they called young men "boys" in the 1930s and '40s - going off to war because it was adventurous and because that was what boys did. And it’s the story of how they died at very young ages. Our country lost more airplanes and crews to training accidents than in combat against the Japanese, and these deaths from accidents continued when the boys got to the Pacific and Europe.

Beneath Haunted Waters is the story of these two planes and their crews and of how they trained and why they died.