Lieut. Pilsbury goes home
p. 32 · Read in the full issue
On November 21, 1943, Lieutenant Charles Alfred Pilsbury, USN, lifted his Corsair fighter off the deck of one of “Bull” Halsey’s aircraft carriers near Torokina on Bougainville’s mid-west coast, and headed for the big Japanese base on Kangu Beach.
As he neared his objective, he put his fighter into a fast dive and began firing at the Japanese emplacements.
He’d been doing the same thing every day for the past week, but that day Lieutenant Pilsbury’s luck ran out.
Japanese anti-aircraft gunners perched on Kangu hill brought Pilsbury’s Corsair down within half a mile of the Japanese emplacements. That was the last anyone heard of Pilsbury for 25 years.
Recently, Roman Catholic missionary Father O’Sullivan came across the Corsair’s wreckage in dense jungle near Kangu Beach (pictured at right). He reported it, and Administration men came out to look at the Corsair. They found Pilsbury’s bones. These will be sent to US Navy medical officers in San Francisco.
A strange home-coming, so long afterwards and from so far away.