Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
The crew of Little Eva bailed out of their B-24 Liberator over northern Australia in 1942. They spent the next four months trying to get out through flooded wilderness, tidal coastline, and river country. Not everyone made it.
by Jose Campos
The trees caught him hard enough to stop the fall. Then they held him there, dangling in the darkness. Grady Gaston hung suspended with parachute lines wrapped through the timber above him, the ground below hidden beneath black water, scrub, and shadow. The aircraft was gone by then. No engine noise carried back through the night, and no fire showed through the bush. Only the creak of suspension lines and the sound of insects moved through the wet heat.
Gaston was a crewman aboard Little Eva, a B-24D Liberator of the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 321st Bombardment Squadron, 90th Bombardment Group. In the opening days of December 1942, the aircraft embarked on a mission against Japanese forces off New Guinea. On the way back, a severe thunderstorm drove the aircraft off course.
The crew bailed out after the plane ran low on fuel. One crewman became trapped during the jump, and three men went down with the aircraft while trying to free him.
The others jumped out over country none of them knew, scattering men across flooded scrub, tidal flats, and river country along the Gulf of Carpentaria.
Gaston wound up in the trees. He worked himself loose slowly, cutting and twisting through the harness until he dropped into mud and low brush below. The country around him was flat, wet, and almost impossible to read in darkness. He stayed where he was until first light. When dawn finally opened over the Gulf country, he began moving through the scrub and found three others alive: Second Lieutenants Daleford Grimes, Arthur Speltz, and John Dyer.
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The four men checked their resources. Gaston later said they had four bars of chocolate, one jungle knife, a fishing line, and a small number of matches sealed in waterproof wrapping. Two .45 pistols had survived the bailout as well. It was not enough for a long movement through northern Australia, but at that stage they still believed movement was the only realistic option. They did not know where the other survivors had landed, how far they were from stations or settlements, or even which direction offered the shortest route out.
At sunrise they began walking toward the coast. Pilot Norman Crosson and Sergeant Loy Wilson had separated earlier and gone another direction, eventually reaching help. Gaston’s group turned north to northwest along the shoreline, following the coastline in the wrong direction and carrying themselves farther from rescue.
Their first problem was water. Gaston later described chewing leaves and sucking moisture from green bark as they worked along the coast. Roughly four days into the movement, they used the pistols on a young bullock and killed it only after several attempts. They cut what meat they could carry, cooked strips over a small fire, and ate heavily before moving again.
Within days they discarded the pistols.
The coastline gave them little shelter during the hot, humid days, and tidal water repeatedly forced them inland through scrub and mud flats before they could return to the beach. They fished at night until a large fish tore away their only hook. By then their strength had begun to drop sharply.
They crossed waters filled with crocodiles. They found a large swordfish washed ashore. With only two matches remaining, they cut into the carcass and ate it raw. Meals grew smaller and farther apart.
More than three weeks into the walkout, on Christmas Eve, three Liberators passed overhead at low altitude. The men tried to signal and could see crewmen looking from the aircraft windows, but the aircraft continued on without seeing them.
Later that same day they reached a small paperbark hut on Seven Emu Station. The structure was empty, but they harvested watermelon from a nearby vine. Rain began that night and continued for days. Speltz’s feet were in such bad condition he couldn’t walk anymore. He remained at the hut while the others pushed farther ahead to search for a route through.
The country beyond the shelter slowed them again almost immediately. One river ran too high to cross. They built a raft from logs lashed together with strips torn from their clothing. They used the raft, but mud flats and tidal water repeatedly blocked the shoreline, driving them back inland through flooded scrub.
They approached another river crossing while Grimes entered the water ahead of them. He lost footing and was carried downstream toward open water. The others could not reach him. Mud flats finally stopped them.
When they returned toward the hut, they found Grimes’s body washed ashore.
They stayed near the hut and worked outward from it each day. Gaston and Dyer worked outward from the camp in short-range foraging trips between the beach and nearby scrub. They brought back whatever they could find, including dead fish and snakes.
During the first days of January, three Mitchell bombers passed overhead, but didn’t see the stranded men. The watermelon patch provided one melon between the three men each evening for a time.
Mosquitoes and insects plagued them by night, and the men lost weight and strength.
They moved shorter distances from the hut. They focused on reaching waterholes, gathering shellfish, and preserving enough strength to continue basic foraging around the shelter.
Two months after the bailout, while heading toward a water source several miles away, Dyer collapsed. Speltz and Gaston continued on to collect water and gather cockles before returning.
When they came back, Dyer was dead.
“We had decided not to bury any bodies because some day someone might come along and find them,” Gaston later said.
Two weeks later, Speltz went out in search of food and didn’t return. Gaston found him the next day on the opposite bank, too weak to stand. Gaston dragged him slowly back toward the hut. He fed him what fruit and melon remained. Speltz recovered enough to sit upright for periods, but his legs and ankles had swollen badly. He died near the shelter during the final week of February.
Gaston dragged the body down beside Dyer and nearly collapsed himself during the effort.
Gaston was now alone.
The final stretch lasted nearly two months. Gaston remained near the shelter and worked the surrounding ground for food. He caught sand crabs and had his hands bitten badly while doing it. He drove off dingoes with a stick. He found several eating a dead calf, pushed them away, and ate what remained of the carcass. He continued searching the shoreline for dead fish carried in by the tide.
By April his movement had slowed severely, and most activity remained centered around the hut, nearby water, and the shoreline.
The first people to reach him were Indigenous stockmen and station workers moving through the area in April while searching for cattle. They had seen human tracks and were searching for who made them.
Gaston weighed 80 pounds, and his hair was gray.
Cattleman J.H. Keighran gave Gaston bread and cold beef, followed by johnnie cakes the next morning. Keighran sent for help.
Australian soldiers pushed into the area with the help of an Aboriginal tracker, cutting a trail for nearly three days through remote country. They recovered the bodies of Speltz and Dyer. They carried Gaston 185 miles to Anthony’s Lagoon, where he was flown onward to Cloncurry and then taken to a military hospital.Of the 10 men aboard Little Eva, only three survived. Gaston returned home to Alabama, and later worked as a mail carrier. He died in 1988 at age 77.
Jose Campos writes frequently for Soldier of Fortune.
