WWII's 'Little Eva' incident involved Frisco City resident, mailman

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in the “Little Eva” incident, which involved Frisco City resident, Grady Gaston. Gaston died in 1998, but before that he was our hometown mailman, and I grew up hearing tales about his dramatic World War II survival experience.

During WWII, Gaston was a staff sergeant aboard the “Little Eva,” a Consolidated B-24 Liberator that crashed on the coast of Queensland, Australia on Dec. 2, 1942. The plane was returning from a bombing run in Papua New Guinea when it encountered a storm that knocked out the plane’s radio. The crew lost their bearings in the storm and eventually ran out of fuel while trying to return to their base.

Gaston, who served as the plane’s ball turret gunner, was among a number of the plane’s crew who parachuted to safety, but his ordeal was far from over. He and three second lieutenants traveled west on foot until they reached the coast. They followed the shoreline until they found an abandoned shack on Christmas Eve. One officer later drowned, and the two other lieutenants died later in February.

All along, Gaston would survive on his own for two more months until he was eventually found on April 23, 1943 by natives looking for stray cattle. He would go on to be featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for his five-month-long ordeal in the Australian wilderness. As a boy, I remember hearing tales from the old-timers in the barbershop about how Gaston ate raw snakes and frogs to stay alive.

You can find a lot of information about this incident online, but there’s one thing that I haven’t been able to put my hands on for quite some time. Around the time that I was in the fourth grade, the magazine for our local rural electrical association did a large feature story on Gaston. I believe that would have been around 1984 or 1985. I kept a copy of that magazine for several years, but eventually lost my copy of it. If anyone out there has a copy of this magazine, I’d love to photocopy the Gaston article. If memory serves me correctly, the article included a copy of the old Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoon that featured Gaston.

As you might have imagined, the “Little Eva” incident has been the subject of a few books. In November 2004, the University of Queensland Press published a 209-page book called “Savage Wilderness: The Epic Outback Search for the Crew of the Little Eva” by Barry Ralph. In October 2006, Pelican Publishing Co. published a 240-page book called “The Crash of the Little Eva,” also written by Barry Ralph. In all likelihood, the incident is probably described in a number of other books.

In the end, does anyone out there know where I can get a copy of the REA magazine article about Gaston? Have any of you read Barry Ralph’s books about the “Little Eva” incident? What did you think about them? Does anyone have a copy that I could borrow? Let me know in the comments section below.