The lieutenant’s focus was on flying that day, as it was on every mission. After rumbling off the Ticonderoga, he was less than 50 feet above the water and he could barely see in a gray dawn at about 4 a.m. If his engine cutout or “faltered for a second like a car on a cold morning,” he would crash, McNabb explained. “At that height there would be no chance, no fighting the controls, just a cough, a splash and cold water filling the cockpit,” he said, as his eyes stared off into blank space. “It had happened before — not often — but it had happened.”

Flying a formation above the skies of the northern Japan, McNabb said he had to be alert for Japanese fighter planes potentially lying in wait above the American force. As the squadron’s last bomber with no fighter planes of their own to accompany them, he peered into the skies above the squadron as “the eyes in back of the heads of 12 guys.” Nearing the coast, the formation tightened and everyone kept their eyes peeled.

Because he was the last plane of the 16 flying, including 12 bombers and four photography planes, he was also the last to fire, the last to drop the bomb his plane carried. It was a 500-pound bomb that would turn out to be the very last one dropped on Japan in World War II.

“If you hit a factory or a dock, it might shorten the war, but you didn’t notice it,” he explained. “Hit an airbase, though, and the next day there were fewer enemy planes in the air. Now, that was a result you could see, a result that affected you. We wanted immediate results.”