In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

332 EPILOGUE about 2100 on the evening of March 4, 1942, a stark naked, badly sunburned man staggered up to the hangar at Broome’s airfield. Entering through the door, he surprised the men congregated in the hangar, whom he saw were fellow FEAF evacuees from Java. One of the men shouted, “There’s Mo!” recognizing Sgt. Melvin Donoho, reported as missing after the crash of the B-24A into Roebuck Harbor on the morning of March 3.1 Another of the evacuee group notified Lt. Col. Dick Legg, in charge of evacuation operations at Broome, that one of the B-24A passengers had just walked in. Legg told him to bring the man to his office. Reporting in to the CO, Donoho related his thirty-six-hour ordeal in graphic terms. After escaping from the B-24A wreck, he and fellow survivor Sgt. Willard Beatty had struggled all day and night against Broome’s renowned tide, then the next day flowed with it but were unable to reach shore. Beatty gave up two hundred yards short of land, but Donoho continued swimming until he finally reached the beach about 1800 that evening. Trudging along the shoreline in the direction of what he thought was Broome, he had managed to reach the town, then continued onefourth of a mile to the airfield on the other side of Broome.2 Donoho not only was exhausted, he was angry. Oblivious to the fact that he was an enlisted man in the presence of an officer, Donoho wanted to know why Legg had not sent out a search mission for any survivors of the B-24A crash. “If someone had gotten off his dead ass, grabbed a boat, and gone looking for them,” then maybe others besides himself would still be alive, he told Legg to his face. Maintaining his self-composure during the outburst, Legg listened quietly. He did not mention that he had tried to mount an aerial search for survivors within hours after the crash.3 Epilogue 333 Donoho was given something to eat and put to bed in the hospital. On the following night he was flown to Perth with the last group of Air Force evacuees to go out. Legg himself left for USAFIA headquarters in Melbourne at 0130 that night in a B-24A along with his friend Capt. Jack Berry; they were the last Air Force personnel to leave. His Java air evacuation work was now finished.4 at 0900 on march 4 the Dutch freighter Abbekerk safely arrived at Perth’s port of Fremantle with forty-six of Donoho’s fellow mechanics and armorers of the 17th Pursuit Squadron (Provisional) plus four wounded pilots of the squadron and hundreds of other FEAF personnel evacuated from Tjilatjap by sea four and one-half days earlier. Except for the failed attack of the Japanese reconnaissance plane, it had been an uneventful, albeit uncomfortable, trip with over a thousand men jammed on board. Ironically, the sea evacuation had proven safer for the men of the 17th Pursuit than the preferred air evacuation, which had cost the lives of 6 of the squadron’s 110 enlisted men in the B-24A crash.5 Evidently, because of the maintenance of radio silence, Fremantle’s harbor master had no idea that the Abbekerk was due in. A new base section had been set up the day before at Perth, but the CO proved incompetent and had done nothing to prepare for the arrival of the Abbekerk and its FEAF passengers . It took all day to get a train and back up its passenger wagons opposite the Dutch ship. Finally, in early evening the evacuees were offloaded down the stairway onto the dock and boarded the train for an Australian army camp at Northam, some fifty miles east of Perth. It was not before 0200 the next morning that the Abbekerk evacuees reached the camp. Most were too tired to fill the straw mattresses given them and just lay down on the floor to sleep. The next morning they were rudely surprised to find that the Aussie army commander seemed to think the evacuees were there to do infantry drill. “They don’t even seem to know that there is a war going on, since this is as close as they have been to it,” Sgt. Cecil Ingram of the 17th Pursuit evacuee group complained in his diary. It would be over a week before Ingram and the others...

Share