DPAA Text:

On December 12, 1943, a forty-foot motor launch carrying fourteen U.S. Navy personnel and sixty-two U.S. Army personnel departed Espiritu Santo Harbor in the New Hebrides island chain (now Vanuatu). The launch sailed through the Segond Channel with its destination a gunnery school at an anti-aircraft training center on Urelapa, an island used by American forces as a military supply and support base, naval harbor, and airfield. A half-mile off Brigstocke Point in the Sanma Province, and just outside the harbor, heavy ocean swells swamped the boat and caused it to sink in over 200 feet of water. Of the seventy-six personnel on board, seventeen swam ashore and survived. In 1947, American Graves Registration Service personnel interviewed a plantation owner on Malo Island who witnessed the boat's sinking. The witness had recovered parts of fourteen remains that washed ashore near his home and had turned them over to U.S. authorities. Several other sets of remains were recovered and buried on Guadalcanal. Of the seventy-six on this launch, fifty were lost in the boat's sinking.

PFC Robert Bean entered the U.S. Army from Kansas and served in the 466th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Automatic Weapons Battalion. He was aboard this motor launch when it sank and likely drowned in either the boat's sinking or during an attempt to swim ashore. His remains have not been recovered or identified following the war, and he is still unaccounted-for. Today, Private Bean is memorialized on the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.

Based on all information available, DPAA assessed the individual's case to be in the analytical category of Active Pursuit.