Target: Rabaul Read Free Page A

bomber’s speed. They finally reached the rain clouds, which proved pathetically small, hiding the aircraft for only a few seconds.
    Unable to outrun the enemy, McMurria and his crew fought back. The left waist gunner, Pfc. Patsy F. Grandolpho, hollered on the intercom that he’d shot down a Zeke. No one else saw the action, nor could anyone confirm a second fighter claimed by Doyle, the bombardier, a few minutes later. The lack of witnesses supports the kodochosho (combat log) of the fighter detachment from Junyo , which lost no planes that day.
    The Zekes continued swarming, nimble carnivores nipping at a crippled beast. Despite its great size, the B-24 shuddered from the impact of bullets and 20mm projectiles. One shell exploded in the nose compartment, puncturing a hydraulic reservoir. Buzzing shrapnel flayed Doyle’s back while he stooped to fire his machine gun. He staggered up to the flight deck, shocking the pilots with his gory appearance. A large chunk of flesh hung from his left shoulder, and his flight suit was soaked red. But the wound wasn’t life-threatening. Most of what stained Doyle’s flight suit turned out to be hydraulic fluid. Martindale ordered the navigator, Lt. Alston F. Sugden, to man Doyle’s machine gun. The running gunfight continued.
    Another 20mm shell exploded at the rear of the fuselage, cutting control cables to the rudders and horizontal stabilizers. Out on the main wing, bullets shredded the fabric-covered ailerons. Unable to hold the wings steady, McMurria notedgrimly that “the ship was getting harder to fly.” The Zekes made two more firing runs, knocking out another engine, after which the Liberator was nearly impossible to control. Smoking badly and losing altitude, the B-24 descended below a thousand feet—too low for anyone to bail out safely.
    McMurria alerted the crew to prepare for ditching.
    The men in the nose compartment were to move to the relative safety of the flight deck, but one did not comply. Private First Class Walter R. Erskine, manning a machine gun to fend off frontal attacks, “was frozen to his .50-caliber and wouldn’t leave it,” reported a crewmember. A nearly identical situation occurred in the rear compartment. While the tail gunner, ball turret gunner, and one of the side gunners moved to the forward bulkhead to brace for impact, Grandolpho held tightly to his waist gun. Described as “looking extremely frightened,” he refused to budge.
    Up in the flight compartment, McMurria and Martindale struggled to control their faltering leviathan. For a few heart-stopping moments the B-24 staggered through the air, barely above stall speed. McMurria may have been the first to attempt a two-engine ditching in a B-24, and there was no way to finesse a water landing. With the bomber on the verge of a stall, McMurria lowered the nose and added power to gain speed, which gave him some control; then, at the last instant, he pulled the throttles to idle and hauled back on the control column, hoping to settle tail-first in a reasonably soft landing.
    But a B-24 was almost impossible to ditch without major structural damage. The problem was the Liberator’s design, which combined a high main wing and a cavernous belly with flimsy bomb bay doors that slid open and closed on vertical tracks. During a water landing the doors invariably collapsed, often leading to the failure of the aft bulkhead in the bomb bay. It was not uncommon for B-24s to break in two on impact with the water.
    McMurria’s Liberator struck the surface of Huon Gulf with a thunderous splash and promptly broke in half behind the main wing. The forward section, weighted by the main wing and four engines, sank immediately. The men on the flight deck, dazed by the impact, found themselves underwater and going down fast. McMurria crawled through his side window and ascended what felt like “thirty or forty feet” before surfacing. Only the tail section of the bomber remained afloat. Neither of the