At 8.15am on the morning of 18 December 1942, a USAAF Liberator bomber known as 'Texas Terror' lifted off from Garbutt airbase, Townsville, for Iron Range on Cape York Peninsula. The aircraft disappeared into an overcast sky, but failed to make it. Searches were mounted, but by January 1943 no trace of the bomber had been found and its disappearance was written off as another small unsolved mystery of the war. By late 1943 the Pacific frontline had moved far to the north of Australia and the loss of the 'Texas Terror' had been all but forgotten, when two Aborigines searching gullies on Hinchinbrook Island for alluvial tin, reported finding some burned US currency in the creeks at the southern base of Mount Straloch.

Early in January 1944, over a year after the aircraft’s disappearance, several experienced rock climbers were engaged to search the steep face of the mountain which is covered with dense tropical rainforest rising to sheer cliffs 920 metres in height. Most of the ridges are unscaleable and the only practical route is up the bed of a ravine filled with large round granite boulders displaced by the torrential rains of the wet season. The mystery of the 'Texas Terror's' disappearance was finally solved after the searchers hauled themselves over 750 metres up the southern flank of Mount Straloch and came across the wreckage.

The aircraft had struck the face of the mountain some 150 to 180 metres below the summit where the steep slope of the rainforest ends in vertical granite cliffs. The wreckage remains scattered over a large area with part of the fuselage remaining at the point of impact. An outer wing and motor lie wedged in a crevice above. An inner wing and landing gear lie in the forest below, with two motors at the base of the cliff. Part of a tail fin, still carrying the number 123825 on faded camouflage, lies in a nearby ravine. An aluminium cross was erected near the point of impact in 1960 as a memorial to the eleven US crew and passengers who died.