“Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II” by Wil S. Hylton (Riverhead Books, $27.95)

In recent years it’s become a truism that the American military promises “no man left behind” when it goes to war. But in World War II, that promise was often not achievable and may not even have been a priority. More than 73,000 Americans remain missing in action and presumed dead from World War II. Of those, 47,000 disappeared in the Pacific during the “island hopping campaign” that can be said to have begun at Guadalcanal in 1942 and ended in Okinawa in 1945.

Tracking down the remains of the MIAs and piecing together their final moments is the daunting, emotionally fraught quest — undertaken by civilians and the military — at the heart of “Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II,” a deeply reported, compellingly written book by Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.

Hylton focuses on the airmen lost in combat, particularly from the 307th Bombardment Group, the “Long Rangers” who flew the B-24 Liberator great distances to bomb Japanese island redoubts and support the Marines and soldiers in their amphibious assaults. “Just as the Marines who rushed onto Pacific beaches would always fall in the shadow of their counterparts at Normandy,” he writes, “the airmen of the South Pacific would never know the fame that fliers in Europe enjoyed.”