![After completing training, Jack Masters’ crew was handed a new B-24 to bring to the Pacific Theater during WWII. [Credit: Sean Siff/MSFS2024]](https://www.flyingmag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/03/FLY0226_1.1_Sim-Lab-1-e1773663887751.jpeg)
I graduated from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, 20 years ago this year. The milestone caused me to reflect on my undergraduate thesis on the topic of World War II nose art—one of longtime personal interest.
WWII aviation was introduced to me by my grandfather, who earned his Navy aviator’s wings flying an F4U Corsair with fighter squadron VBF-98 in Los Alamitos, California. He was spared from combat missions when Japan surrendered in September 1945, but he was day and night carrier qualified and ready to go to war.
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Decorating the nose of combat aircraft began in WWI, but adorning fighting vehicles and objects with artwork dates back at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years. I focused my work on the significance of bomber crews coming together to choose a shared combat identity, and I learned that nose art covered a much wider set of categories than pinups. Forged in training missions as preparation for the crucible of aerial combat, many aircrews participated in the voluntary selection of their own unique identity.
Since most B-17 and B-24 bombers left the factory in the same olive green paint scheme, this was a deliberate act undertaken by the aircrews and sometimes in direct opposition to Army Air Corps leadership. Not surprisingly, many commanding officers allowed it, given the positive impact it had on crew morale. The bomber’s name and associated artwork became an artifact of lives lived and lost over enemy-controlled territory. At the end of the war, most of the bombers were scrapped and melted down, and with them went thousands of examples of nose art.
Fortunately, hundreds of photographs have been digitized and shared in books and on the internet, helping to preserve these identities. By the early 2000s, the Greatest Generation began to age out, and their families began to share precious photographic artifacts from their time in combat. Photos began to make their way onto WWII remembrance web pages, giving the interested a chance to learn just a little about the young men who went to war to support our allies.
As the research for my thesis began to wind down in spring 2005, my grandparents connected me to a lifelong family friend of theirs, Jack Masters, who had been a waist-gun operator on a B-24 in the Pacific Theater during the last two years of WWII. In two handwritten letters, he shared some of the memories of his 35 bombing missions. Although he died in 2012, I was reacquainted with Masters’ WWII experience, rereading the stories he shared, and feeling fortunate that those memories were provided to me.
Jack and his crewmates assembled at Muroc Army Airfield—now known as Edwards Air Force Base in California. There, the individual specialists were combined with their pilots to learn how to fly and fight together as a single unit. Then, they learned to fly in formation as a squadron of bombers, participating in mock bombing missions. They also practiced aerial gunnery, shooting at targets towed behind two-engine airplanes.
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With training completed, Jack’s crew was given a brand-new B-24 to bring to the Pacific Theater. He recalled in his letter that they took off from California and were relieved to land in Honolulu many hours later. Some of the B-24 aircraft bound for the war in the Pacific had been lightened by removing bulletproof armor and the tail gun turret to accommodate more fuel to extend the range for the long, cross-ocean flights required to reach targets and return to base.
The extra fuel was stored in the bomb bay, forcing B-24 crews in their bomber group to take half loads of bombs. In Honolulu, they refueled and flew the 115-mile hop to Kauai, Hawaii, landing at Mana Airport, now called the Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, to refuel and layover.
Jack recalled that their pilot flew them over the lush mountains in the center of the island and descended into the Waimea Canyon, flying between and below the surrounding mountains before turning west out over the ocean to land. He said that the short flight was one of the “greatest thrills” of his WWII experience, recalling it clearly six decades later. After landing, he joined his crew on a nearby beach for a photo before heading into the war. Pictured with some of his crew, Jack was 22 years old, and some of his crewmen were as young as 18. None of them had ever been to Hawaii or so far away from home.
Kauai was their last step off the United States and into the vast combat zone of the Pacific. Like other crews before them, their first challenge was to find Johnston Island, a small outcropping of land just large enough for a landing strip in the middle of thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean, using only their radio navigation instruments.
Using my home flight simulator, I recently decided to recreate Jack’s last U.S. flight between Honolulu and Kauai as an opportunity to reflect on his crew’s contribution to the war effort.
Like Jack, I have never been to Hawaii in-sim or in real life and was unfamiliar with the islands. Beginning my own flight in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (MSFS2024), you can begin to get a sense for the B-24’s size.
Approaching the airplane on the ramp, it is easy to be in awe of the young men who learned to fly these airplanes, handling their size and complexity in combat formations—especially since most American pilots started in the sprightly Piper J-3 Cub just months before. It is a pilot career progression that’s difficult to relate to today, especially considering that WWII aircraft were the fastest and most technologically advanced airplanes ever built.
The B-24’s handling characteristics have been well documented as a physical airplane to fly, and especially challenging when fully loaded.
Taxiing the B-24 reminded me of seeing the real airplane in person at airshows over the years.; The familiar squeaking brakes and the forward-to-back rocking motion as it lumbered around the ramp were faithfully re-created by the all-volunteer team at Flight Replicas, the software team responsible for the B-24.
In-sim, even gentle braking caused the airplane’s nosewheel suspension to load and unload. I could “feel” the size and weight of the B-24 when I departed from Honolulu and pointed it out over the ocean toward Kauai. The aileron control response felt comparatively slower and heavier than the G58 Baron I am used to flying in-sim.
The Flight Replica’s B-24 has two operational compasses for navigation, so I opened ForeFlight on my iPad and disconnected it from the simulator so that the map view would not show my airplane and act like a traditional paper map. I plotted my relative departure direction from Honolulu and selected a compass heading to follow it.
I hand-flew the B-24, even though the Sperry Gyropilot was operational. Flying with live weather conditions in-sim gave me 10-plus miles of visibility, low winds and few clouds, making the flight out to Kauai a straightforward VFR exercise.
Once in cruise, I measured the approximate distance to travel, noted the indicated airspeed, and calculated a rough estimated flight time enroute to Kauai. Being in-sim, I was not burdened by any of the real-life responsibilities of managing the engines, other than making sure I didn’t run out of fuel. Details like selectable failure modes were not yet available on the Flight Replicas’ B-24, although the airplane is being continually updated by the development team. I appreciated the hundreds of hours of work that have gone into it, including the animation of the B-24’s asymmetrical landing gear retraction.
Looking out at the fair weather clouds on either side, I was reminded of one of Jack’s most harrowing combat stories from his 35-mission tour. As part of the 26th Bomb Squadron within the 11th Bomb Group, Jack and his crew logged their first missions in a war-weary B-24 called Tropical Trollop, which had already flown 60-70 sorties with other crews.
The airplane made an impression on Jack as the B-24 featured colorful nose art depicting a “lovely Hawaiian dancer doing the hula.” Jack added: “For many years after the war, I carried the picture of the ‘nose art’ in my wallet, ’til she was worn out.” He and his crewmates also flew on Texas Kate, a newer B-24 equipped with “advanced computerized guns that adjusted to speed, wind, and were terribly accurate.”
Sometimes, extenuating circumstances dictated that crewmen would switch aircraft to help fill personnel vacancies due to injury or sickness. Before a bombing mission over the Truk Islands, Jack volunteered to fill an open waist-gunner position on one of his squadron’s B-24s. The night before, he recalled the “strangest feeling of imminent disaster” but did his best to ignore it and get on with the mission in the morning.
On the way to the Truk Islands, Japanese fighters intercepted their squadron. Fortunately, the mission was the first where they had accompanying P-38 Lightnings as fighter escorts. Jack watched from his waist-gun position as a Japanese fighter was hit by a P-38 and streaked down to the ocean in flames, trailing black smoke. He witnessed the Japanese pilot bailing out and pulling his parachute, which was unusual as they were discouraged from abandoning their airplanes.
During the altercation, a Japanese fighter broke through the P-38s and took aim at Jack’s crewmates on Tropical Trollop. Out of gun range to help, Masters said the “last I saw of them was watching them go into a cloud bank with an engine on fire.” Heartbroken, having just witnessed the probable loss of his pilot and crewmates, he wrote, “You can imagine how I felt—my crew—gone?”
Making matters more challenging, while on their mission, their base at Guam had been hit by a typhoon, and “our pilot told us to prepare for a crash landing as a B-24 from another squadron had crashed on our airstrip and we had to come in on a much shorter fighter strip. We did a lot of bouncing and reverse engines but were OK. When I got back to our tent, I was the only one there, and there was no news of what had happened to my crew. I felt sick.” Much to his surprise and relief, Jack shared that great flying by pilot Paul Ridlon and their flight engineer, Jim Emly, brought their damaged B-24 home. “They straggled in and were late after being minus an engine but it was a relief for sure!”
After the mission to Truk, Jack and crew said goodbye to Tropical Trollop and Texas Kate and were assigned their own B-24. For the first time in the war, they assembled to decide on what they would call themselves.
“We never got a character nose art. I draw, but don’t paint,” he wrote. “So we just ended up with me painting Ridlon’s Rats [after pilot Paul Ridlon] on the front sides, along with the other planes we’d seen. The nose art on other B-24s was something that we were all impressed with—some planes were very famous. And you knew the crews that flew them.”
Nearly every mission had its unique challenges due to mechanical issues or combat damage incurred. Jack and his crew flew on multiple bombing missions to Iwo Jima during the monthslong battle. On a mission early in the campaign, Ridlon’s Rats were part of a nine-ship flight of B-24s. They had mechanical trouble and lost an engine hundreds of miles before the bomb run, dropped away from the squadron and lost altitude.
“Our pilot [Ridlon] made the decision to fly over Iwo Jima alone,” which all aboard knew would make them an easy target without the shared protection of their squadron’s combat box, leaving them vulnerable to Japanese fighters and anti-
aircraft fire.
“A Japanese fighter came up to us but stayed out so far we could not knock him down with our guns,” he wrote. “It was obvious they were reporting our speed and altitude as we could see the phosphorous anti-aircraft shells exploding on the space we had to fly through, and it was heavy stuff. The theory is, if you hear it, you’re OK. If you don’t, you’re dust. You never forget the sound of it, though.”
Jack’s pilot got Ridlon’s Rats over the target and on their way back to base, and much to their relief, “two or three of our squadron’s B-24s dropped their airspeed and came down to our altitude and stayed with us as we limped home. After we landed, we found we’d been hit three times. We all grew up on that flight.”
Iwo Jima fell in the waning days of winter 1945, and Ridlon’s Rats flew on three missions in less than 48 hours, just before the Marines began the landing for their ground assault. Masters and his crewmates “witnessed the largest Navy armada in the Pacific at that time. All of our planes went over Iwo at under 5,000 feet—it was spectacular.”
Before the mission, they were briefed by their group’s intelligence officer: “Do not get taken prisoner if you go down. Take out as many Japanese as you can with your .45 pistol, but save one of the shells for yourself.”
Jack and his crew completed 35 missions, concluding their tour of duty. Flying Ridlon’s Rats, they supported many of the major campaigns in the Pacific Theater, including bombing missions over Iwo Jima and Chichi-jima, then on to Saipan and finally to Okinawa, where the B-24s had sufficient range to join B-29s in the planned bombing of mainland Japan.
Back on my sim, I reflected on Jack’s tour of duty—the risks incurred, near misses, and challenges overcome. For Jack, he lived his entire war experience all before his 24th birthday.
Though I knew I couldn’t approach Jack’s experience in any real way, navigating across a short patch of the Pacific Ocean to fly the Waimea Canyon and landing at Barking Sands like him and his crewmates did 61 years ago allowed me to experience a digital version of the B-24 and Hawaii.
If you’re interested in flying the B-24, you can find the Flight Replicas version on Flightsim.to. Just be sure to select either the MSFS2020 or MSFS2024 version. Once downloaded, place the folder into your community folder.
Given that there are no B-24s flying as of this writing, my flight simulator gave me the chance to connect to WWII aviation history and, most importantly, the opportunity to share some of Jack’s combat story.
This column first appeared in the February Issue 967 of the FLYING print edition.
