Oil was blowing back from the ailing engine onto the wing surface, and a long the plume of black smoke trailed out far behind us. In imminent danger of fire and explosion, we made an emergency landing at Kern County Airport in Bakersfield, which luckily happened to be in the immediate vicinity.

It was not until 15 April that, after an engine change, we took the air for destination Sacramento. Soon after takeoff, we encountered problems with # 3 engine again. It would continue to haunt us all the way - from Bakersfield to Sacramento and from Sacramento to Hawaii to Kwajalein and finally to Saipan. We flew nearly the breadth of the Pacific on only three engines. Ordered to leave the aircraft at Saipan, we did so willingly, and proceeded on down to Guam by military transport.

There we joined our Group, and were reunited with Glade Loy, our flight engineer, and Bob Sands, CFC gunner, both of whom had been lent out to other crews for the trip over. They both had already been up to Japan and were combat christened. We were fascinated by their stirring tales of flak and fighters. It was saddening, though, to lean that several of our buddies had already perished in the skies over Japan, or in the hostile waters of the Pacific.

The Tokyo mission on 25 May, our fifth, was one of the Crew 5's toughest missions. Added to the peril of heavy flak and the profusion of enemy fighters, we were beset with malfunctioning engine and bomb bay doors that wouldn't close. In addition, the thermal currents from the fiery holocaust tossed us around violently. A combination of these problems made it impossible to maintain altitude. For several frightening moments, bail out, over Tokyo seemed likely. With the horrified consequences racing through our minds, the following minutes seemed like eternity. Fortunately, we were able to close the bomb bay doors manually. This lessened the drag on the aircraft and even though we had one engine out and another throttled back, we were able to maintain altitude.

This relieved one problem, but we weren't home safe yet, as we made our withdrawal through intense flak we became framed atop a pyramid of blinding searchlights. By violent maneuvering Spaulding managed to escape the deadly beams.

We had no more than slipped away from the deadly lights when one of several "fire-balls, " with its 2,000-pound TNT warhead, came after us with deadly intentions. Bob Spaulding succeeded in evading it by ducking into a dense smoke and racing toward the sea.

The acrid fumes of burning wood surged up from the raging fires below and penetrated the cabins. Eyes and throats smarted painfully and it became necessary to hook up the oxygen to relieve the coughing and gagging.

To add to our worries, the lethal thermal currents were bouncing us around like a cork in the ocean. We would, without warning, be thrown upward hundreds of feet as we entered a column of superheated air. Then as we emerged, it seemed to as if the bottom fell out of the airplane and we'd plunge downward uncontrollably. Spaulding and Baldi had their hands full as they fought to keep the aircraft from flipping over on its back, as had happened to other crews. Thankfully, the roller coaster ride ended as withdrew from the fiery arena and limped out to toward the sea.

Down below a firestorm was raging out of control. This is a meteorological phenomenon, which occurs when many fires join to heat the air to as high as 1100 degrees. This tremendous heat creates a violent updraft, which in turn sucks the fresh air into the center of the fire. This suction causes a wind of fantastic velocity - a roaring inferno.

The toll in B-29 losses was among the heaviest yet suffered by the 21st Bomber Command. Twenty-six Superforts went down and at least another eighty received some degree of damage. This amounted to nearly twenty (20) percent of the striking force either destroyed or damaged by the intense barrages of flak or the vicious attacks of sixty Japanese fighters.