With more than 6,000 hours of flying time, this intrepid squadron conducted 862 rescue missions, saving the lives of 576 men. When I learned that the men of the 4th Emergency Rescue Squadron were flying into combat zones without armament - their aircraft machine guns having been exchanged for space to accommodate the rescued - for the sole purpose of saving lives, I was thunderstruck. What a profound sense of duty young soldiers must have to leave behind all they know and love to serve a cause greater than themselves. Courtesy Misty Falls Motion Picture Company The film was written and directed by Christopher Johnson and produced by Mariana Tosca, p.g.a. Weaver (Evan Riley Brown) is hoisted aboard an inflatable life raft. In Journey to Royal: A WWII Rescue Mission, a badly injured Staff Sgt. When my film production partner, Christopher Johnson, first shared with me the story of his great-uncle Royal and the rescue mission that claimed his life, I couldn’t stop thinking about that 22-year-old pilot who put on his Army Air Corps uniform one day, kissed his wife and his 4-day-old daughter goodbye, and set off for the South Pacific, unaware that he would never see them again. Stratton would locate and rescue those nine men, but he would never return from that mission.
Forced to ditch their plane, the crew was adrift and unprotected in the open ocean of enemy waters between Tokyo and Iwo Jima. The Superfortress had sustained catastrophic flight control and electrical system damage from Japanese anti-aircraft flak. On that Tuesday morning, Stratton and his crew, who had been stationed on the island, were charged with locating the downed airmen of the B-29 Dragon Lady. There, Navy Seabees rebuilt its airstrips for Air Force pilots to use as a place of rescue for battle-damaged B-29s returning from missions over the home islands of Japan. The island had been designated a strategically imperative military objective.
in one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history. Eight weeks earlier, after a protracted 36-day assault, the volcanic island had been taken by the U.S. Stratton and his crew from the 4th Emergency Rescue Squadron boarded their amphibious aircraft, a PBY Catalina christened Pistofe, and took off from South Field airstrip on the diminutive island of Iwo Jima. Mensa member and producer Mariana Tosca instructs a cast member inside a B-29.
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