Qualla: Little Eva

Little Eva: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. At about 2:45 on the morning of 2 December 1942, a four-engined bomber fell out of a thunderstorm and burned into the scrub near a waterhole north-west of Burketown. The men who had jumped from it a few minutes earlier drifted down into one of the emptiest corners of Australia, believing they were somewhere near Cairns and the east coast. They were wrong by the width of a continent's top edge. What killed most of them was not the crash. It was the country, and the heat, and the slow arithmetic of thirst over the weeks that followed.

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Image: Public domain

Little Eva: The Storm That Took the Radio

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. "Little Eva" was a Consolidated B-24 Liberator of the 321st Squadron, 90th Bombardment Group, flying from the airfield at Iron Range on Cape York. On 1 December she joined four other Liberators in a high-altitude raid on a Japanese troop convoy north of Buna, in New Guinea. On th...

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Image: Public domain

Little Eva: Two Who Walked East

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Not everyone made it to the silk. Several men died in those minutes — one when his parachute fouled on the aircraft, others who rode it down to the crash. Crosson and Sergeant Loy Wilson found each other on the ground and, by sheer luck, chose to walk east. They had almost no foo...

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Image: Public domain

Little Eva: The Long Walk West

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The other survivors had gone the opposite way, toward what they thought was the coast near Cairns. Four men stayed together: Staff Sergeant Grady Gaston, the ball-turret gunner; co-pilot Lieutenant Arthur Speltz; bombardier Lieutenant Dale Grimes; and Lieutenant John Dyer. Betwee...

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Image: Public domain

Little Eva: Five Months Alone

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Dyer and Gaston turned back to the hut where Speltz waited. Through February 1943 the two officers died there of starvation, days apart — Dyer first, then Speltz on the night of the 24th. That left Grady Gaston, twenty-two years old, alone in a paperbark shelter in the Gulf wet s...

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Image: Public domain