How One PBY Pilot Landed on Open Ocean Under Fire — And Saved 56 Men

## The Slowest Plane in the Navy, the Hottest Harbor in the War: Nathan Gordon’s Impossible Rescue

At **9:47 a.m. on February 15th, 1944**, Lieutenant (junior grade) **Nathan Gordon** sat in the cockpit of his **PBY-5 Catalina** and watched smoke rise from the northeast—dark, oily columns twisting above **Cavieng Harbor** like a warning flare. Forty miles away, the harbor was a furnace: burning ships, anti-aircraft bursts, and the sharp, ugly math of combat where a single misjudgment could drown a crew before help arrived.

Gordon was **twenty-seven**, a former lawyer from Arkansas, and he had spent the last eighteen months in the Pacific learning a truth that never appeared in recruitment posters: the ocean didn’t care about medals, and war didn’t pause for regulations. His Catalina—Bureau Number **08139**, nicknamed **Arkansas Traveler**—was a flying boat built for patrol and endurance, not heroics. It cruised at roughly **125 miles per hour**, slow enough that almost anything armed could catch it. It was big, ungainly, and vulnerable, with a hull made to land on water and wings made to keep it there.

That morning, Gordon’s duty was “Dumbo”—search and rescue standby during a Fifth Air Force raid. Most Dumbo missions were hours of waiting and scanning and returning home without incident, the kind of job where boredom was considered success. Gordon had flown dozens of missions since joining his squadron, and he had done a handful of rescues—calm-water pickups far from enemy defenses, the kind that proved the Catalina’s value without challenging fate.

Cavieng was different.

Cavieng was the kind of place pilots circled at a distance, where Japanese guns watched every approach, where the shoreline itself seemed armed. It was among the most heavily defended bases in the region, and even after months of Allied bombing, it could still bite. If Gordon flew into that harbor, he would be flying into a shooting gallery.

At **9:52**, his radioman passed him a message: an **A-20** had gone down. A crew was in the water. The request for help carried the quiet panic of men who knew what shore batteries did to anything that moved.

Gordon checked fuel—enough for hours. He looked at his young co-pilot, **Ensign John Barfield**, twenty-three years old and on only his ninth mission. Barfield’s hands were already moving toward the throttles.

“We going in?” Barfield asked.

Gordon had seconds to choose.

The Navy’s rescue protocols existed for good reasons: don’t risk the rescue aircraft unnecessarily, don’t land in heavily defended harbors without protection, don’t overload, don’t attempt water landings in dangerous seas. Those rules preserved crews. They kept a rescue force from becoming another set of victims.

But rules did not pull drowning men from the water.

Gordon pushed the throttles forward, and the Catalina turned toward Cavieng.

### A Lawyer Becomes a Rescue Pilot

Nathan Gordon had not grown up dreaming of aviation. He had planned a normal life: law school, a small-town practice, a community where people argued over property lines and wills instead of airfields and flak. He’d joined the National Guard, part-time soldier and full-time attorney—disciplined, steady, predictable.

Then the war arrived and made predictability meaningless.

In flight training, instructors noted what mattered most in a rescue pilot: calm under pressure, precise control, quick judgment without panic. Gordon learned the Catalina until it felt like an extension of his hands—its heavy response, its long takeoff run, its ability to land where there was water and a little luck.

In the “Black Cat” squadrons, PBYs flew night harassment missions—black-painted aircraft slipping low over waves to strike Japanese shipping. But Gordon gravitated toward rescue. Not because it was easier—it wasn’t—but because it was the most direct kind of purpose: you didn’t merely fight the enemy; you brought someone home.

### Cavieng: Where the Ocean Was Under Fire

By **10:08 a.m.**, Arkansas Traveler reached Cavieng. From miles away the scene looked chaotic and immense—smoke columns, flak bursts, bombers strafing along the shoreline. Below, Gordon spotted shapes in the water: rafts, debris fields, men drifting farther from safety with every minute.

Four **P-47 Thunderbolts** circled above—fighters that could protect but not land, their pilots forced into the helpless role of witnesses. They radioed what they could: multiple crews down, survivors scattered, shore batteries active.

Gordon descended anyway.

At lower altitude, he saw the sea state: **sixteen- to eighteen-foot swells**. Landing a PBY in those conditions wasn’t just difficult; it could be fatal. A wrong angle could crack the hull. A hard bounce could tear open seams. And even if you landed, getting airborne again might be impossible.

Then Gordon saw a yellow life raft—five men, a B-25 crew—**eight hundred yards from shore**, with Japanese guns visible on the beach. Muzzle flashes winked like camera bulbs.

Gordon lined up.

At **10:23**, Arkansas Traveler hit the water with a violence that felt like being punched by the sea. The hull slammed into a swell, bounced, slammed again. Water sprayed across the windscreen. The aircraft groaned—metal complaining under stress. Leaks began immediately. But the Catalina floated.

Gordon kept the engines running low, just enough to steer.

As he maneuvered toward the raft, Japanese shells began “walking” toward him—splashes at fifty yards, then thirty, then closer. That pattern was terrifying because it was deliberate: gunners adjusting range, narrowing in, preparing to place steel directly into the aircraft.

Gordon didn’t have time for elegance. He surged the Catalina forward.

The bow hatch opened. A crewman threw a line. One by one, the survivors were hauled aboard—injured, exhausted, some barely conscious. Gordon checked his time on the water. Barely more than a minute.

Then he pushed power for takeoff.

In calm water a PBY needed a long run. In heavy swells it needed more—and the hull was already leaking. Waves hammered the aircraft as it accelerated. A shell burst near enough to pepper the wing with fragments. Another explosion threw up a wall of water that blinded the cockpit briefly.

And then, almost impossibly, the Catalina lifted—barely flying, overloaded, dragging itself into the air as if the sea reluctantly let go.

Gordon climbed low and turned away.

He could have left then.

Instead, another message arrived: more men down. Two rafts drifting toward shore. Japanese patrol boats moving to intercept.

Gordon turned back.

### Four Landings, Twenty Lives

The second landing was worse. The impact cracked more structure. The Catalina took on water faster. Japanese patrol boats closed, and the remaining fighters were running low on fuel. Gordon had to land quickly, before the boats reached the men.

He landed. He picked up **four more survivors**. He fought the sea again to take off, the aircraft stalling and slamming back down hard enough to break a float and drag a wingtip close to the water. He forced it up again—climbing at a rate that felt humiliatingly slow but was still climbing.

Then the fighters left.

Gordon was alone.

A third message arrived: another crew in a raft, close to shore, defenses now fully alerted. Every gun in the harbor would be waiting.

Gordon landed a third time—knowing it bordered on suicide. The aircraft was already failing. Water rushed in faster than pumps could handle. Shells crashed around the Catalina, tearing new holes. But the crew got the survivors aboard.

Engines flooded. One engine wouldn’t start. Gordon attempted what should not have been attempted: a takeoff overloaded in heavy seas with one engine. The Catalina began to move—too slow, too heavy—until the second engine finally coughed into life and the aircraft staggered airborne again, wounded but moving.

Fuel was now leaking. Options were narrowing.

And still another distress call came: **six more men**, half a mile away.

Barfield finally said what every manual would have said: they couldn’t. The aircraft wouldn’t survive.

Gordon’s answer was quiet and final: if they didn’t go, those men would not survive at all.

At **11:43**, Arkansas Traveler made its **fourth landing**. The hull broke apart on impact. The aircraft began sinking immediately, but it was close enough—close enough that a line could be thrown, close enough that men could climb aboard.

Twenty survivors. Twenty men who would have vanished.

The Catalina could not truly fly anymore. It could barely move. But with unexpected help from other American aircraft suppressing the shore guns, Gordon managed to coax the crippled flying boat away from the harbor long enough for a destroyer to reach them. Boats came alongside. One by one, survivors and crew were transferred off the sinking Catalina.

Gordon left last, standing on the wing as his aircraft slipped beneath the water.

He looked at his watch. **12:17 p.m.**
Roughly two and a half hours. Four landings under fire. Twenty lives pulled from a defended harbor.

### What Courage Looked Like in a PBY

Nathan Gordon’s Medal of Honor citation praised “exceptional daring” and “incomparable airmanship,” but the deeper story is what his aircraft represented. The Catalina was not glamorous. It was slow, vulnerable, and often mocked as an anachronism.

Yet on that day, the slowest plane in the inventory became the fastest thing that mattered—because it could land where fighters could not, and because its pilot was willing to trade safety for strangers.

After the war, Gordon returned to Arkansas and resumed a quiet, public life. He rarely spoke about Cavieng. The men he saved remembered it for him. They carried the story the way survivors often do: not as a myth, but as proof that sometimes a person decides that other lives are worth more than his own odds.

Arkansas Traveler lies somewhere under the water near Cavieng, broken and forgotten by the sea.

But what it did—what Gordon and his crew chose to do—doesn’t sink.

Four landings. Twenty rescued. A flying boat doing the job no one else could, because one pilot refused to let drowning men become a footnote.