World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC: Three Who Came Back

The three U.S. airmen ate whatever they could find — caterpillars, grubs, toads, snakes, lizards. Resourceful, they grew some of their own food by planting small gardens of taro and kaukau (something like yams). When they could, they killed game like cassowary or ratite bird, but meat was a rarity. Once they found some canned salmon that had washed ashore from a sunken Jap supply ship. For ten long, horrifying months they fought sickness and hid from Japs in New Britain’s jungle. Last week the world learned that by sheerest luck they had been rescued.

Their 6-26 medium bomber, eight men aboard, set out last May to bomb Jap-held Rabaul. “We dropped our bombs on the runway and machine-gunned two bombers on the ground,” said 2nd Lieut. Eugene D. Wallace of Los Angeles, the plane’s copilot. “Antiaircraft fire was awfully heavy and … we were hit. . . . The pilot said we would have to make a crash landing.”

Two of the crew were killed in the crash. The other six, wounded, made their way to New Britain’s coast. Their chief worry was capture. Sometimes they were so close to Jap troops, said 2nd Lieut. Marvin Hughes of Baird, Tex., “we could have whistled at them.” Once they hid on one side of a narrow stream and watched Japs eating breakfast on the other side. Two of the six were finally captured. Another died.

Wallace, Hughes and Pfc. Dale E. Bordner of Chillicothe, Ohio, all 23 and all unmarried, lived on as best they could, almost hopeless, but hoping. They found native villages where they got some food and shelter. Sometimes they had to separate because no one village had food enough for all.

Several months ago they met an Australian private, John Leslie Stokie, who was also hiding in the jungle. The four began building two dugout canoes in which they hoped to escape to New Guinea.

But one day a U.S. Liberator bomber came over, flying tree high. “We ran and got the biggest mirror in camp,” said Bordner. “It was about six inches square. We flashed it for all we were worth. By the grace of God, somebody saw it.”

Details of the rescue were withheld (Australian flyers apparently extricated them), but somewhere in New Guinea last week Brigadier General Ennis C. Whitehead, U.S. Fifth Air Force commander, gave Heroes Wallace, Hughes and Bordner Purple Heart medals.