This is why the mudflat offshore from Broome in Western Australia is littered with flying boat wrecks. This is moment it all began... Broome, North Western Australia. Approximately 9:30 am, March 3rd 1942. The image attempts to capture the last terrible moments of a single USAAF B24A Liberator overtaken by six "Zeroes" as it took off from Broome's dirt airstrip... Laden with wounded servicemen, and medical personnel evacuated from the defense of South-East Asia, the Liberator ditched somewhere offshore (some reports say 33 were on board, some only 19). Where? Who knows? By then no one was watching the B24... Anyone up and about on the 15 anchored flying boats that morning was likely to be up to their necks in av-gas fumes... you can be sure, in that moment before all hell broke loose, they were watching nothing but those six, black-nosed shapes ripping toward them across Roebuck Bay... Postscript: Apparently only one survivor from the Liberator, Sgt Melvin Donoho, made it to shore... the following day ...after a marathon swim. The tides in that area are Biblical! The fog of war, the haze of history and the vagaries of the internet aside, I've found three variations on the Liberator's name- "Arabian Night," "Arabian Nights" and "Arabian Knights." And two serial numbers... 40-2370 and 40-2374. The confusion may have arisen because a second B24 was destroyed on the ground soon afterwards. The stricken "Liberator" is a model I scratched together a while ago (the point of view and the pall of Vue "displacement" fire and smoke being necessary to hide its later variant features... nose turret, belly turret etc...I thought I'd better blow up my own Liberator... gulp) Thanks for viewing...