Shhh... don't tell anyone, but the "Rescue Targets" are also scripted... If a US plane does happen to crash within the designated target zone, then yes, he counts toward the rescue count, but outside the zone, they do not - though you can pick them up. You cannot pick-up Japanese survivors though to bring them in for questioning... which really, they should have allowed that,..
Ahhh... good find. Yeah, you could activate all of your Dark Waters mods, then run the tools for a "fix pack", which might be slightly necessary, but probably won't yield as many errors as the Stock game has, since those tools were run during DW development, but I am almost 99.9% certain there are still errors in the Campaign, due to infecting them anew with edits for DW (

guilty!

), but also from existing errors that are both of the type that are difficult to track down, except with a BUNCH of campaign testing...