Lady Be Good was a brand-new B-24D Liberator, serial number 41-24301, assigned in March 1943 to the 376th Bombardment Group at Soluch Field, an airstrip on the coast of Libya near Benghazi. The crew was new too. They had reached Libya barely two weeks earlier, and on 4 April 1943 they flew together for the first time, one of twenty-five bombers sent to strike the harbor at Naples in a late-afternoon raid. They took off at 2:15 in the afternoon. A sandstorm scattered the formation and sent eight aircraft turning back; Lady Be Good pressed on. Over Naples the target lay hidden under haze, so the crew dumped their bombs into the Mediterranean to save fuel and turned for home in the gathering dark. Nine men: Hatton the pilot, Toner the copilot, Hays the navigator, Woravka the bombardier, and the enlisted men, Ripslinger, LaMotte, Shelley, Moore, and Adams. They were heading back toward the African coast. They thought they were almost there.

They were not almost there. The navigator believed he was flying a straight line from Naples to Benghazi, but the field's radio direction finder had only a single loop antenna, unable to tell whether a signal lay ahead or behind. The reading that should have guided them home instead drew them onward. In the blackness over the desert the crew never saw the coastline pass beneath them, never saw the lights of base, never knew they had flown clean over Soluch and out the far side into the open Sahara. For hours they continued south, certain the sea was still ahead, while the fuel gauges fell. At around two in the morning on 5 April, with the tanks nearly empty, Hatton gave the order to bail out. One by one, nine men stepped from the aircraft into the night and the wind, trusting they were coming down near water. They were more than four hundred kilometers inland.

Eight of them came together in the dark. The ninth, John Woravka, did not; his parachute failed, and he died where he landed. The survivors gathered what little they had, half a canteen of water among eight men, and began to walk north toward a coast that was impossibly far away. The diary that copilot Robert Toner kept records eight days of it, the cold nights, the savage heat, the thirst. Daytime temperatures reached well over 50 degrees Celsius. After roughly 85 miles, five of them could go no further. Hatton, Toner, Hays, LaMotte, and Adams lay down to wait while the three strongest, Ripslinger, Shelley, and Moore, walked on to look for help that did not exist. What those men accomplished is almost beyond belief. On half a canteen of water, in that heat, they covered distances that defeat well-supplied travelers. They simply ran out of desert before the desert ran out of them.

It took until 1960 to bring most of them back. Guided by Toner's diary, search teams found the five who had stopped together, then pushed farther north for the others. Shelley was recovered about 24 miles beyond the five; Ripslinger another 26 miles past Shelley, well over 200 kilometers from the plane and still short of the coast. Woravka was found near the aircraft, his parachute still attached. Eight of the nine were eventually located. Staff Sergeant Vernon Moore, who had walked on with the others, was never officially found, and lies somewhere out in the sand to this day. The aircraft itself was picked over for parts, then in 1994 moved to a Libyan base for safekeeping. A stained-glass window was placed in the chapel at Wheelus Air Base for the crew. Their story is often told as a mystery, a ghost plane in the dunes. It is better understood as nine men who did everything right after one navigational error, and walked as far as human beings can walk.