A Citizen Soldier in the Air - a B-24 Liberator pilot's story.

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A Citizen Soldier in the Air.

Night Raid On Rabaul

Night raids against Rabaul continued to be flown, and one of these in spring of ’43 was especially memorable.

The flight from Port Moresby was pretty uneventful, even as they reached the target area and split off into single aircraft at assigned altitudes to make their bomb runs. They were flying with a new type of 1000 pound bomb that night, some type of new air-burst fuse that they had not used before. "There wasn’t even that much flak, and I thought maybe we could see what the explosion was like. So we dropped and I immediately went into a steep, diving left bank, to evade any flak and hopefully to see the bomb effects."

At that precise moment, two Japanese search lights happened to converge on them. "There was no instrument panel - I was blinded by those damn searchlights! I said, ‘Brad, take it,’ but he said, “I can’t see either!"

Charlie recalls, "Fortunately our flight engineer, Smitty, was at his favorite station, right between our seats, and for some reason he hadn’t been looking towards the lights. He said, ‘I can see!' so I said ‘Well, tell me how to fly this thing!’ - Smitty was already trained, in fact he was a good pilot, so he could read the instruments quite well, and he coached us, reading off airspeeds and telling us how to turn the yoke to come out of that diving turn."

Patch of the 321st

But not before the airplane had gotten WAY too fast - red-lined at maybe 300 mph, they were doing over 400 mph in that dive! "We couldn’t pull it out - it took three of us, Brad, Smitty, and me, pulling the yokes as hard as we could, and we finally recovered." As they pulled out of the dive, Charlie heard all kinds of noises, pops and bangs. "I’m thinking, oh my God, they hit us - must have been Jap flak - I called the crew to check in, and they were all OK, and couldn’t see any damage."

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