Back in the Central Pacific, the other two Seventh Air Force Liberator groups were carrying on business as usual, and a couple of 30th Bomb Group Liberators became symbols of just how much the aircraft could withstand. One of them was called Bombs Lullaby: she had been in the Pathfinders for a while before Lieutenant Bob Nelson and his crew got her. The fact was that nobody else wanted the ship - she was heavy in one wing and almost impossible to trim. They said that firing the guns or even shifting a wad of gum to the other side of your mouth would knock off the trim, but after a while they got "kind of fond" of the old girl. Her first crew had named her and taken her on ten missions, and although Nelson's crew was unhappy with the title they left it for luck. From her twenty-eigth mission with her new crew, on Sunday, September 10, 1944, she brought back over four hundred bullet and shrapnel holes, a dead engine and two dead crewmen.

The target was Iwo Jima, and Bombs Lullaby was flying through a curtain of flak, about a thousand feet below a veil of light cloud, Suddenly the clouds expelled a hail of cannon and machine-gun fire. Bob Nelson from Brooklyn, a little fellow who had trouble reaching the control pedals of the B-24 without a cushion under him, saw the tracer fire but not the fighter.

As the shells thumped into Bombs Lullaby the tail area became a shambles. Danny Keyes, the gunner, was killed. An incendiary bullet hit one of the tail guns and burned through, another hit an ammo rack and set of 150 rounds of .50-caliber. The crews beer ration, stowed over the gunner's position to cool it, was shattered into broken glass and foam.

Photographer Milo Hackett, who had traded places with another to fly with Bombs Lullaby's crew, crumpled with a machine-gun bullet through his heart. Wash Warshavsky, the waist gunner, was squirming on the bloody floor of the aircraft, badly wounded in the head and shoulder. Next to him Joe Scaro, the other gunner, had somehow survived the stream of gunfire. A cannon shell had exploded above his head, but the heavy waist window frame fell down in front of him and probably saved his life. Another Zero streaked in on Scaro's side and he held the window up with one hand and fired his gun with the other, scaring off the attacker. By then bombardier Mike Bartow and navigator Chuck Hall had made their way back through the ship to help.

Bartow thought Hackett didn't look dead, maybe shocked. There was no blood and he didn't see the small hole through the heavy sheepskin jacket, Keyes had obviously been killed, a six-inch black hole in his chest, and fragments of incendiary shell still burning inside.

There was no oxygen supply, Hackett's lifeless body having disengaged the lines when it fell. A dozen fighters were ganging up on the B-24 and the three turrets still working were roaring at them. Up front Bob Nelson and his co-pilot, Lieutenant Clem Claflin, were trying to keep up with the formation. The control surfaces of the elevator were shredded and the throttle control on the number 4 engine had been shot away, jamming it at high speed.

When the fighters finally broke off, Nelson was able to drop down to solve his oxygen problem, and Mike Bartow was attending to Warshavsky, attention which saved the gunner's life. Adminstering sulfa and oxygen, Bartow kept the gunner out of shock by talking to him. Joe Scaro remembers that "every time it looked like he would go unconscious, Lieutenant Bartow would find something else to talk about. I can't remember now anything he said but the doctors told us that if he had gone unconscious shock would probably have developed and he might have died in a few minutes."

As Bartow talked Nelson was listening to pieces of the elevator flapping in the slipstream, and counting the miles to home. He had been controlling the speed of his right outboard engine with the supercharger blast at high altitude, but that woudn't work for a landing. He says he was "trying to jockey the plane in when suddenly she went into a P-38 climb - pieces of the elevator finally flew off and Claflin and I were able to fight the nose down."

Nelson thought he might have to ditch, but somehow he made Saipan. Tenderly lowering his lumbering plane,, he felt the wheels touch and then the right one dug in, tire shot out. Nelson revved his remaining right engine and somehow kept the speeding bomber straight.

A few days later Nelson and his crew were in another Liberator over Iwo while Bombs Lullaby, holed and smelling like a brewery, was patched and prepared to fly again.