On October 18, 1942, Sergeant George Larkin stepped into a B-25 bomber for the last time. Larkin, a veteran of the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, was supposed to go up with his longtime pilot, Lt. Richard Joyce, to move supplies over the Himalayas – but Joyce was interned in the British field hospital for the area after a mission over Hong Kong to bomb a Japanese convoy.
Larkin kept a diary of the events after Pearl Harbor and continued it until his death, making him one of the best primary sources for insight into the Doolittle Raiders’ psyche in the buildup and execution of the raid. Larkin would receive a Distinguished Flying Cross for his part in the mission.
A different pilot, Captain Robert Gray, was selected to pilot the mission that would take them over the “world’s ceiling” to support missions on the other side of the Himalayas against the Imperial Japanese Army. The men took off on their last flight and crashed about 30 minutes west of the Indian town of Dinjan.
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Sergeant Jack Price, with the 51st Fighter Control Squadron, would recover the bodies of the men in the crash. He noted that they heard the plane fly above them, then the sudden silence as the engines quit. It took them several days in the jungle to find the wreck site, but the team under Price was able to recover the bodies and check the crash site.
The men were laid to rest in a military cemetery north of Calcutta. The local government of Hardin County, where Larkin hailed from, erected a commemorative marker in his honor in 2012.
The air terminal at Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, was named in his honor.
