NIGHT ACTION OFF MINDORO

On 27 December 1944, this radar-equipped night intruder from the Fifth USAAF’s Sixty-third Bomb Squadron, Forty-third Bomb Group attacked and sank the Imperial Japanese Navy Yugumo-class destroyer, Kiyoshimo, off the Philippine island of Mindoro before the Kiyoshimo could attack the U.S. Navy’s nearby invasion fleet. This B-24M Liberator was piloted by S.L. Flinner, who skirted a squall line en route and found Mindoro’s night sky lit by shells and flares. As the B-24 dropped it’s bombs, it too was struck. One shell exploded in the tail turret and shrapnel bloodied the gunner, H. Ebert; the other pierced the midsection behind the waist gunner cutting rubber cables and splattering the fuselage with holes. Flinner and his crew were credited with the destroyer.