But even taking off at all was an uncertainty. Launching land-based bombers, laden with fuel, bombs and five-man crews, from the short runway of a carrier designed for smaller fighter planes had been done in training, but never in combat.

That he survived the bombing run, and the water landing of plane 15, and then a cat-and-mouse drama for weeks with the Japanese Army as it hunted for the airmen — eight of the 80 men were captured and three were executed — was just a matter of luck and of doing one’s job, Mr. Saylor said in an interview with The New York Times last year.

“I didn’t dwell on it,” he said, his voice clipped and matter-of-fact, his shirt buttoned to the top. “It was just a mission we did in the war,” he added. “We did what we had to do.”

In some ways, the real test for Sergeant Saylor, who turned 22 the month before the raid, on April 18, 1942, came before takeoff, when an engine of his plane malfunctioned in testing on the carrier Hornet as the squadron sailed west toward Japan.

The task of finding the trouble and fixing it fell to him as the plane’s engineer gunner, he said. Disassembling a bomber engine on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, he said, had never been done, and it meant carrying every loose part into the fuselage as he worked, for fear that pieces would roll off the deck into the sea. On a coffee table in his house, he kept a replica of the gear arm that was at the heart of his, and his engine’s, trouble that day.