Vanished by Wil S. Hylton

military bases in England, Sicily, North Africa, and throughout the United States, but he was heading to the Pacific for the first time.
    To join him, Hope brought some of his favorite performers, including the singer Frances Langford, the comedian Jerry Colonna, the musician Tony Romano, the dancer Patty Thomas, and a joke writer named Barney Dean, who had been working with Hope since his early days in 1920s Chicago vaudeville. When the airlift touched down to refuel in Hawaii, the entertainers transferred to one of Douglas MacArthur’s personal planes, the
Seventh Heaven
, to complete their journey south. Over the next two and a half months, they would travel thirty thousand miles across the South Pacific, performing 150 shows that would change Hope forever. According to biographer William Robert Faith, the comic remarked at the end of the trip, “Everyone claims I’m a little more serious than I was. . . . Those men, those soldiers, they’re not just a bunch of crap-shooting, wolfing guys we like to joke about. These men are men , with the deepest emotions and the keenest feelings that men can have about everything life holds dear.”
    While Hope circulated through the islands, the Long Rangers were gearing up for Yap. In their first strike, they took the Japanese garrison by surprise, plastering the harbor and airfield with enough bombs to destroy nineteen planes and damage fifteen more, all without losing a man. But they hadn’t found the Japanese ships, and were surprised to discover how extensive the fortifications were on Yap. They were planning a series of follow-up missions, but they knew the surprise was lost.
    The return to Yap would also mark the first combat mission for a member of the Big Stoop. As part of each crew’s preparation, the pilot and co-pilot were required to fly one mission as observers with another crew. On the morning of June 23, under a blanket of cumulus clouds, the pilot of the Big Stoop crew—Norman Coorssen—climbed aboard a silver B-24J to see his first day of battle. The plane was so new that it had onlycompleted eight missions, and it had no name or artwork painted on its nose; it was known only by the last three digits of its serial number, 453.
    But that was a number Coorssen would never forget.
    —
    C OORSSEN WAS A STRAPPING KID with blond hair and blue eyes and the faintest hint of a sarcastic smile. He came from the town of Amesbury, Massachusetts, just above the harbor of Newburyport, where shipwrights had built the
Antelope
in the nineteenth century for its journey past Palau. In the years since, Newburyport had diminished as a shipping center—its waterfront yards giving way to railroad tracks, then parking lots, while its remaining docks echoed not with maritime traffic, but with the vestigial ruckus of longshoremen carousing.
    The town of Amesbury, meanwhile, was nestled up the Merrimack River and its tributary, the Powwow, far enough from downtown Newburyport to sustain its own social strata. Tucked below the New Hampshire border, it was about as far north as one could go in Massachusetts, and the Coorssen family was as far north as one could go in Amesbury. They owned the last big nautical company in town, the Henschel Corporation, which made telegraphs and consoles for ships in a massive brick warehouse that employed 10 percent of the town.
    For the Coorssens, the Great Depression had been something in the newspaper. Norman and his older brother, George, enjoyed the sort of crisp New England privilege that seems rinsed in sepia even to those who were there. “ It was almost a caste system ,” George’s wife, Helen Coorssen, said. “It’s embarrassing to say it now, but the Irish were still not accepted. There was a large French population, who were the workers. Then there were the Protestants, who lived at a higher level. And then there were five or six families like the Coorssens—for them, it was a wonderful place to live. They had no competition. They all