tail gunner were sent to the area from the United States. This involved the group performing a cross-country trip from Hamilton Field to MacDill Field, Florida. From Florida, aircraft were flown south to Trinidad, then Belém, then to Natal on the easternmost tip of Brazil. Then a flight across the South Atlantic from the tip of Brazil across to Africa and landing at the British airdrome at Freetown, Sierra Leone. Then they headed inland and north to Kano, Nigeria, and across Africa to Khartoum, Sudan. At Khartoum, all the crews were given cholera inoculations, then the planes flew either up to Cairo before turning eastward, or else they were sent straight east across Arabia to Aden and then northeast to Karachi. Either at Cairo or Karachi the crews first learned that Java was their destination. It was the first indication they had had that the United States had been driven out of the Philippines. The last stop was at Colombo, Ceylon. From there the B-17s went straight through to Java and landed at Bandoeng Airport, where they received orders to go on to Malang Airport. On Java, the planes arrived in flights of one, two or occasionally three planes. From Malang, the planes moved to Singosari Airfield near Surabaya, in northeast Java where the 9th operated from with the 22d Bombardment Squadron. Their very first mission had given them a violent introduction to the kind of fighting they might expect from the Japanese. On 16 January two B-17Es and three LB-30S took off together from Singosari to attack Japanese air and naval concentrations in the Bay of Manado located at Menado in the Northern Celebes Islands, about 1,000 miles to the northeast. The attack force staged through an airfield on Kendari, spending the night of 16 January there, refueling and taking off in the early hours next morning. Two targets had been assigned: the B-17s were to attack shipping in Menado Bay, while the LB-30S bombed an airport in the vicinity. However, their orders were so unclear that the LB-30 crews could not be sure where the airport was and they had to spend fifteen or twenty minutes searching before they finally found the field at Langoan, beside a lake, about 20 miles south of Menado. Almost in the instant that the last plane reported its bombs away, they were hit by five Zeros, and for six minutes the three