In August 1943 members of the highly classified Wright Project departed Virginia’s Langley Field for service in the South Pacific. Ten Consolidated B-24D Liberator bombers—equipped with an untried combat electronics system and designated SB-24s—and their handpicked crews were off to join the Thirteenth Air Force, then battling the Japanese in the Solomon and Bismarck Islands. The project’s leader, Colonel Stuart “Stud” Wright, had a letter in his breast pocket with the letterhead of U.S. Army Air Forces Headquarters, signed by no less a person than Commanding General Henry “Hap” Arnold. The Arnold letter instructed all commands to help the unit deploy as soon as possible and provide all necessary support.
Wright and his team touched down at Guadalcanal’s Carney Field on August 23, 1943, and, initially designated as the 394th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) of the 5th Bomb Group, flew their first combat missions three days later. Before long the Wright group became known as “the Snoopers.”
The project’s ten crews—100 officers and men—and aircraft intended to prove the combat effectiveness of an electronics system devised by Radiation Laboratory, a research and development team of civilian scientists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Working closely with the 1st Sea Search Attack Group at Langley Field, the lab’s technology would allow an aircraft to fly into to the blackness of night, spend 10 or more hours hunting over large swatches of enemy-dominated ocean, detect targets at great distances, and home in on them with precision low-level attacks. A single nightstalking aircraft could seek prey from 5,000 feet or more, then drop to a thousand feet or less to strike, unseen by the target vessel until the bomb blasts lit up the night. The attacking aircraft would then speed away to return home safely at daybreak.
While good intelligence frequently suggested where the SB-24s should look for its targets, just as frequently an aircraft’s advanced microwave search radar detected enemy ships from distances of
