B4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 , 2019
the bottom of the bay.
He could tell it was a
single-engine airplane, compact
and rugged-looking. He did not
recognize the model, “but I could
tell by the structure and the wings
that it was either a military fight-
er or aerobatic [airplane], just by
the strength that was built into
the wings.”
He noticed the engine was torn
off the front. The bubble canopy
had slid open, and the cockpit was
piled almost to the brim with
sediment.
But where was the pilot? Did he
get out of the plane? Could his
remains or effects still be in the
cockpit?
“Do not know,” Lynberg said.
He tried taking pictures, but
they did not turn out. He surfaced
and had already noted the loca-
tion.
That was about 2010, he said.
About three years ago, he said,
the Naval History and Heritage
Command asked institute volun-
teers to conduct a search for lost
aircraft in the bay near the air
station. The Navy had begun a
systematic search for such planes.
One of them was Mandt’s Bearcat.
“We found some unexploded
ordnance and that kind of stuff,”
Lynberg said. “Then they gave us
this box area. They said, ‘We think
we lost an F8F out in this... area.’
And we went out and searched
that area very thoroughly and
found nothing.
“Then we thought, ‘Maybe that
thing we found a few years ago
could be the target,’ ” he said. It
was five or six miles from where
the Navy believed the plane had
gone down, Lynberg said.
“So we went back,” he said.
“And with detailed drawings of an
F8F, we could go down and say,
‘Yeah. This is it. This is a hit. This
is an F8F Bearcat.’ ”
On later dives with the Navy, he
said, researchers noted that the
shape of the air intakes in the
wings, their spacing from the ma-
chine guns and the location of a
RETROPOLIS FROM B1 gun camera lens were “a perfect
match for a Bearcat.”
In addition, the Navy said
Thursday, the bubble canopy was
a feature of the plane, and the
wingspan of the sunken plane
seems to be about 33 feet, 10
inches — close to the Bearcat’s
35-foot wingspan. Experts are not
yet positive about the finding.
“We don’t really have that piece
of evidence that we need to say
conclusively that this is the air-
craft that we think it is,” said
George Schwarz, an archaeologist
with the command.
That could change if divers can
excavate the cockpit and find a
small metal data plate that bears
the aircraft’s bureau number,
which is like a car’s vehicle identi-
fication number.
In this case, it was 90460.
“What we need to do now is go
back and send a Navy dive team
down,” Schwarz said. “We would
try to locate that data plate and
then get the bureau number, and
then we can say without a doubt it
is this specific aircraft.”
The Navy said it hopes to dive
on the plane again next spring.
And is the pilot still there?
“It’s possible,” Schwarz said.
“That’s why this site is a little bit
sensitive There is a potential for
human remains. The pilot was
never found.”
The airplane, for its part, was a
first. It was the initial model pro-
duced, according to the records of
Northrop Grumman’s aerospace
systems historian. It was built by
the former Grumman Aircraft
Engineering Corp. in mid-1944.
Grumman had built the Navy’s
earlier Wildcat and Hellcat carri-
er fighters, and the Bearcat was
designed to be more nimble
against Japanese fighter planes.
It had some stability problems,
however, which were apparently
worked out, and an odd feature
where its wing tips were designed
to break off under high stress,
aircraft historian Rene J. Francil-
lon said.
The Patuxent River air station,
meanwhile, was then the test cen-
ter for new airplanes, according
to the air station’s website. Hun-
dreds of seasoned combat pilots
were brought in to try out new
models.
Mandt was one of them, and he
had seen some stuff.Over 900 hours in the cockpit
On Nov. 10, 1943, then-Ensign
Mandt had taken off from the
deck of the Bunker Hill with 26
other Navy planes from fighter
squadron VF-18. They were to
escort 23 dive bombers and 18
torpedo planes on a strike on the
big Japanese base at Rabaul, onthe island of New Britain, in the
South Pacific.
Mandt was then 22. He had
grown up with his younger sister,
Patricia, in a small, three-bed-
room house on Ardmore Street in
Detroit. His father, John, a Navy
veteran of World War I, worked as
a boring mill operator at an air-
craft company, according to gov-
ernment records.
David Mandt had attended
nearby Lawrence Institute of
Technology and was a member of
its “soaring society,” which flew
gliders. He earned his private
pilot’s license in early 1941.
He had enlisted in the Naval
Reserve in March 1942 and was
commissioned that November at
the Naval Air Training Station in
Corpus Christi, Tex., according to
the National Archives.
His application for Navy flight
training contains a snapshot of a
serious-looking young man in a
coat and tie. A picture taken for
his graduation shows the same
young man, now smiling in the
white uniform of a naval officer.
Mandt joined squadron VF-18
on Aug. 3, 1943.
Less than four months later, ashe and the other American pilots
neared Rabaul, they ran into
about 60 Japanese fighters guard-
ing the harbor, according to a
report in the National Archives
posted on the military records
website Fold3.
During the ensuing scramble,
Mandt and his wingman, Lt. j.g.
Jim Pearce, were escorting torpe-
do planes on their run when a
Japanese fighter — a “Zeke” —
swooped in behind Mandt and
opened fire.
The wings on Mandt’s plane
were holed, but Pearce went after
the enemy plane and drove it off,
according to the report.
The torpedo planes completed
their attack. The U.S. fighters
picked them up again on the way
out.
Suddenly Pearce’s plane was
hit by an antiaircraft shell that
exploded inside the fuselage. A
rudder cable and a hydraulic line
were severed. Smoke began to
trail from Pearce’s plane.
Mandt began swerving back
and forth to cover Pearce and the
departing torpedo planes until
they reached safe airspace.
Pearce’s plane was so damagedhe could barely control it, and he
crash-landed when he reached
the carrier deck. Pearce survived
and went on to become a distin-
guished test pilot.
Mandt went on to fly for
months, helping in attacks on the
Japanese at Tarawa, Truk, Tinian
and Guam, among other places.
On Christmas Day in 1943, he
shot down a twin engine enemy
reconnaissance plane near Kavi-
eng, on the island of New Ireland,
according to the citation for the
Air Medal, which he was posthu-
mously awarded.
Ten days later, he shot down
another Japanese reconnaissance
plane.
In May 1944, he was detached
from his squadron VF-18 and sent
to the Patuxent River air station.
He had logged more than 900
hours in the cockpit, most of
which were in the hostile skies
over the South Pacific.Out of view
Ten months later, on March 18,
Mandt was preparing for his sec-
ond flight of day, testing the ma-
chine guns on the Bearcat.
Far away, World War II was still
raging.
For now, he was out of it. He
was reportedly engaged to be
married, and he had just returned
from the wedding of a Navy bud-
dy in New York City.
The wind was light and out of
the northeast when he took off,
according to the post-accident
“crash card.” There was broken
overcast at 7,000 feet. The water
in the bay was no doubt frigid, as
it always is in late winter.
Even though he was a seasoned
pilot, he only had about six hours
of flying time in the Bearcat.
He was seen to make three
successful runs testing the guns,
and then his plane passed out of
view to the south.
When he had not returned by
3:45 p.m., the Navy sent out
search-and-rescue crews. No
parachute was found. At
4:45 p.m., the search planes spot-
ted a large oil slick bubbling on
the surface. At 5:05 p.m., a boat
arrived at the scene and found
scattered items floating in the
water.
Among them was a left-hand
glove. Written on it in ink was the
name “Mandt.”
[email protected]Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this
story.RETROPOLIS
Plane in bay may
be one lost in 1945
BY SUSAN SVRLUGAThe College of William & Mary
will deepen and broaden the ex-
amination of its own history with
a grant emphasizing the experi-
ences of people enslaved by the
school and the Founding Fathers.
The five-year, $1 million grant
from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation will fund several ef-
forts to explore the legacies of
slavery and racism, including
classes, an oral history project
with descendants of enslaved
people and exhibits at James
Monroe’s Highland. Highland
was a home of the fifth U.S.
president and alumnus of Wil-
liam & Mary, and the university
owns and operates the historic
site near Charlottesville.
The grant’s launch coincides
with statewide efforts marking
the 400 years since the first
Africans were brought to Vir-
ginia. And it continues the
school’s push to give a more
honest — and troubling — ac-
count of its own history.
Dozens of schools, including
Brown University, Georgetown
University and the University of
Virginia, have been confronting
the legacy of slavery and racism
in recent years.
Students at William & Mary
urged the school to more critical-
ly examine its history in 2007, and
in 2009, the school launched the
Lemon Project, a research effort
named for a man who was en-
slaved by the college. The school
is planning a prominent memori-
al to the people who were en-
slaved there.
“By partnering with their de-
scendants to conduct new re-
search and share it widely with
the public, William & Mary dem-
onstrates how building meaning-
ful partnerships can move com-
munities towards reconciliation
and lift up histories that have not
yet been fully understood,” Mel-
lon Foundation President Eliza-
beth Alexander said in a state-
ment.
The school hopes to draw in
the descendant community in
several ways. There will be free
genealogy classes for people in
the Williamsburg area, said Jody
L. Allen, director of the Lemon
Project and an assistant professor
of history. Research and oral his-
tories with descendants of the
people enslaved at Highland and
William & Mary will inform class-es and exhibits.
Sara Bon-Harper, executive di-
rector of Highland, said Monroe
owned 250 enslaved people, start-
ing when he was 16, and their
work and experiences are an inte-
gral part of his story.
People have been asking for
help researching their family his-
tories, Allen said, and they knowof many eager to talk about their
memories; she recalled an elderly
descendant tearing up as she
described black students not be-
ing allowed to wear caps and
gowns when they graduated from
her high school during the Jim
Crow years.
“This will be a game-changer,”
said Ann Marie Stock, vice pro-vost for academic and faculty
affairs at William & Mary, antici-
pating a much broader story
about national identity inform-
ing their curriculum.
“We were a slave-owning insti-
tution — that’s part of our past,”
she said. “We’ll be facing that
head-on.”
[email protected]VIRGINIAGrant to help William & Mary explore racist legacy
lost, and began sending threaten-
ing letters and social media mes-
sages to staff members, police
said.
Ramos armed himself with
smoke grenades, fired through
the doors of the newspaper office
with a shotgun during the attack,
police and prosecutors said.
Ramos’s defense team has said
he suffered a “mental
disorder” at the time of
the shooting and has for
at least the past decade.
At a July hearing,
Anne Arundel County
Circuit Court Judge
Laura Ripken granted
prosecutors’ request for
access to the jail rec-
ords, which would de-
tail his calls, visitors,
disciplinary history and interac-
tions with guards and inmates
since he has been detained. The
records, prosecutors said, could
indicate Ramos’s competence.
On Wednesday, Ramos’s de-
fense team sought to block shar-
ing the mental and psychological
files included in the jail records,
saying it was privileged informa-
tion and not something prosecu-
tors could review this early in the
case.
“There is no right of pretrial
discovery of privileged records,”
said William Davis, one of Ra-
mos’s public defenders.
Anne Arundel County State’s
Attorney Anne Colt Leitess coun-
tered that Ramos forfeited that
privilege by raising his mental
condition as a possible defense.
RECORDS FROM B1 The records are “crucial” and
“highly relevant” as prosecutors
seek to defeat Ramos’s plea of not
criminally responsible, which is
Maryland’s version of an insanity
defense.
“He is saying he could not con-
trol himself on June 28,” Leitess
said. “The state has the right to
challenge that.”
Ripken agreed, saying the rec-
ords are fair game because the
issue of whether Ramos is
not criminally responsi-
ble because of a mental
condition has “squarely
been set forth by the de-
fense in this case.”
Although the judge did
allow the release of the
records, at an earlier
hearing she gave Ramos’s
attorneys the option of re-
dacting details about pro-
fessional visits, which they fear
would reveal confidential infor-
mation about defense strategy.
Ripken reviewed and approved
redactions in court on Wednes-
day.
In a matter Ripken did not take
up this week, Ramos’s lawyers
have requested client files from
the attorney who represented the
woman Ramos was convicted of
stalking. Her attorney, Brennan
McCarthy, said he planned to
fight the release of the files, call-
ing them “privileged informa-
tion.”
The records from McCarthy’s
office and other issues are expect-
ed to be argued at another hear-
ing before Ramos’s trial starts in
November.
[email protected]
Lawyers build their cases
in Capital Gazette attack
U.S. NAVY
ABOVE: An XF8F-1 Bearcat prototype flies over the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. Lt. j.g. David L.
Mandt was flying from the station in 1945 to test out the plane’s guns when he disappeared. BELOW: A
1942 photograph that was attached to Mandt’s application for Navy flight training.NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATIONRamosGENE RUNION/COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY
The home of President James Monroe, a William & Mary alumnus said to have owned 250 slaves.RENDERING BY WILLIAM SENDOR /COLLEGE OF WILLIAM & MARY
“Hearth,” designed by William Sendor, was the concept selected for the Memorial to African
Americans Enslaved by William & Mary. Names of enslaved people, right, are engraved on bricks.DONATE YOUR CAR
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