With no enlistment card recognizable on the NARA or Fold3 sites, not much pre-war information is available on 1Lt Stephen P. Toth, other than that he was a resident of New York. He apparently arrived in New Guinea during the late summer or early fall of 1943 with the first wave of replacement crews and was assigned as a navigator to the 501st Bomb Squadron, 345th Bomb Group at Schwimmer Airdrome in Port Moresby, New Guinea.
As navigators were in greater demand than pilots, Lt Toth was probably flying missions by October 1943. The available mission records do not list crew composition beyond the pilot’s name until January 1944, when a collection of Load Lists that lists the names of all crew members becomes relavent. In light of that documentation deficiency, Lt Toth undoubtedly flew many more missions than the sixteen accounted for in the Load Lists.
1Lt Stephen P. Toth was lost, along with the rest of the crew, in the crash of B-25 #41-30594 in Hansa Bay, New Guinea, on January 30, 1944. Because of a misguided attempt to recommend the pilot of that plane for the Congressional Medal of Honor, there are several sets of crash documents that give differing accounts of the fate of that crew.