Qualla: Bakers Creek Air Crash

Bakers Creek Air Crash: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 3.0. Forty-one men climbed aboard a worn-out bomber before dawn on 14 June 1943, going home from the war for a little while. They had spent ten days in Mackay on rest leave, a reprieve from the fighting in New Guinea, and now the Flying Fortress was to carry them back across the Coral Sea to Port Moresby. It lifted off into fog at around six in the morning and almost at once banked low over the dark country south of the airfield. Minutes later it went down at Bakers Creek, about eight kilometres from the runway. Forty of the forty-one men were killed. It remains the deadliest aviation disaster in Australian history, and for fifteen years almost no one was allowed to know it had happened.

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bakers Creek Air Crash: Miss Every Morning Fixin

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 3.0. The aircraft was a Boeing B-17C, serial number 40-2072, an early Flying Fortress long past its prime as a bomber and pressed into service ferrying men. Its crews had given it a name that was half joke and half complaint: Miss Every Morning Fixin. A former maintenance chief reckon...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bakers Creek Air Crash: Forty Men Going Home

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 3.0. These were not strangers to danger; they had survived combat in the islands to the north. That is part of what makes the loss so hard. They had been pulled out of the fighting and given ten days in a quiet Queensland town, the kind of ordinary peace that war makes precious, and t...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bakers Creek Air Crash: The Man Who Lived

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 3.0. One man walked away from it. Foye Kenneth Roberts was the sole survivor of the forty-one aboard, pulled living from the wreckage of a disaster that killed everyone else around him. He carried that distinction for the rest of a long life, dying in Wichita Falls, Texas, in February...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bakers Creek Air Crash: A Secret Kept Too Long

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 3.0. The disaster vanished into wartime censorship almost before the wreckage cooled. No newspaper could report it; only the people of Mackay, who had seen the men in their streets, knew what had occurred, and even they were expected to stay quiet. The wider world learned nothing unti...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 3.0