Fortress Rabaul (49 page)

Every time a plane went missing, which happened with disturbing regularity, the cycle of stress gained a tighter grip on every man in the
group. Ralph K. DeLoach, a pilot in the 43rd Bomb Group, recalled that several crews simply disappeared. “
They just went out and that was the end of it
. There was never another word. So there was stress and strain. A crew would go out and not come back, and we never had any idea of whether the cannibals had put them in their pots … or whether the sharks had eaten them, or whether the Japanese had captured them.”

There was no practical cure for combat stress, and pilots diagnosed with an acute case were considered a liability. King advocated simple avoidance. He believed strongly in the ounce-of-prevention method, which included giving the crews something to look forward to: periodic leave in a comfortable rest area and a realistic chance of going home after completing an established number of missions. His recommendations were largely ignored, however, mainly because there weren’t enough planes and crews available in the Southwest Pacific.

So the tired crews kept going. Rarely did more than a few days go by without a plane being declared missing. “
We lost a lot of airplanes
in the swampy areas and up in the mountains,” agreed James L. Harcrow, another pilot in the 43rd Bomb Group. “I got in a big thunderstorm one night near the Owen Stanley Mountains, and we went up and down. We’d lose about three or four thousand feet, and then go shooting up. I think we went over the mountains on our back. The navigator seemed to think so—but the copilot and I were quite busy. When we finally recovered and came back to Port Moresby, the navigator got out of the airplane and kissed the dirt, saying ‘Boy, I’m happy to be home.’”

Too many crews were less fortunate. The slopes of the Owen Stanley Mountains are strewn with dozens of wrecked aircraft, many of them still undiscovered. It is no coincidence that most of the crashes, such as the one that killed Bill Benn and his crew, were caused by pilot error and bad weather.

THE MONTH OF February brought little change in the routine. Rabaul was harassed by a few bombers almost every night, mostly by the 43rd Bomb Group with occasional participation by Liberators of the 90th. Between missions, the ground crews toiled to make repairs and keep the worn-out bombers airworthy. “
I had to have seven airplanes available
,” recalled Jim Dieffenderfer, who doubled as his squadron’s engineering officer. “We would load up with bombs and try to get twelve planes if we could.”

The missions were divided among the squadrons to spread the workload. Crews flew a combat mission about every third or fourth night, usually taking off between 2300 and 0100. Flight profiles were deliberately simplified because of darkness, with little emphasis on maintaining formation. The trip to Rabaul took about three hours, according to Dieffenderfer.

We took off from Moresby and went down the coast, climbing as fast as we could, then made a 270-degree turn to the right, which got us high enough to get over the Owen Stanleys. We went up the coast to the east of New Britain, then cut across Wide Bay to Rabaul. If it was overcast at our [estimated time of arrival], we would circle. If nothing happened, we’d go another ten minutes and circle again. Pretty soon the Japanese would start shooting at us. That’s how we found them, about half the time. Once we located them, we’d go in one at a time.

We would fly over and drop half our bombs, then go back about five minutes later and drop the other half. So every mission was actually two passes over the target. The Japanese didn’t know how many airplanes we had, and we wanted them to think that we had a lot more than we did. The planners gave us a time to be over the target so that we didn’t run into each other. We would pull out and watch the next guy go through the barrage of ack-ack. It was like a fireworks show. We’d watch him go through it, and pretty soon it was our turn to go through it again. It was exciting. Not anything you looked forward to, but that’s what we were told to do and that’s what we did.

On February 9, the same day the Guadalcanal campaign was officially declared over, General Kenney gave the go-ahead to begin a series of strong night attacks. He credited Whitehead with engineering a plan to “
really take Rabaul apart
,” hoping to duplicate the successful raids flown in October. The profile called for the first wave of bombers to “burn out the town,” paving the way for subsequent waves to attack the airdromes and shipping. Due to a spell of bad weather, the first opportunity to carry out this plan did not come until the night of February 14-15.

Kenney’s favorite bombing outfit led the way. Recent changes had affected the 63rd Bomb Squadron—Bill Benn was sorely missed, and Ken McCullar had left to take over the 64th—but many of the old hands were able to participate. Lieutenant Dieffenderfer and the maintenance troops
outdid themselves, getting thirteen Fortresses ready for the mission. The bombers began taking off from Jackson airdrome before midnight on the 14th, but one turned back because of mechanical trouble. The rest, led by Maj. Ed Scott, who had taken the reins of the squadron in November, continued toward Rabaul. He guided them through “electrical storms” in his B-17F,
Cap’n & the Kids
, while the group commander, Col. Roger M. Ramey (no relation to Brigadier General Ramey) flew as an observer aboard
Double Trouble/Ka-Puhio-Wela
.

Arriving over Rabaul at 0340, the first wave of Fortresses spent forty-five minutes making individual runs over known areas where fuel and munitions were stockpiled. Their diverse payloads, designed to start fires and spread them, consisted of flares, 300-pound demolition bombs, 100-pound “daisy cutters” wrapped with wire, 20-pound fragmentation bombs, and hundreds of incendiaries. An estimated three-fourths of the bomb loads landed in the target area, starting one massive petroleum-fed blaze and several smaller fires. An hour after the 63rd did their part, ten Fortresses of the 65th Bomb Squadron hit the downtown areas of Rabaul and Kokopo, starting more fires and destroying two searchlights. Two more attack waves, consisting of eight B-17s and four Liberators, brought the effort to a total of thirty-four heavy bombers. Altogether they dropped an estimated 98,000 pounds of bombs over Rabaul and Simpson Harbor, including 3,700 incendiary devices. There was no interception by Japanese fighters, and only three B-17s received minor damage from antiaircraft fire.

Other than the obvious fires, the results of the attack were not observed by American crews because of the darkness, but Japanese sources indicate that damage in certain parts of Rabaul was significant. A postwar history compiled by the Imperial Navy mentioned “considerable loss of ground installations and personnel,” while a separate document described the event as a “big raid” responsible for setting fire to fifteen planes, destroying a large food stockpile, and burning up “lots of oil drums as well as ammo dumps.”

For the men on the ground, the unusually heavy raid was both noisy and frightening. Petty Officer Igarashi, based at Vunakanau with Air Group 705, was impressed by the “
loud sound of antiaircraft
guns and bombing like thousands of lightning strikes.”

After the mission, Colonel Ramey issued a personal commendation to the men of the 43rd Bomb Group, praising their effort in what he described
as “one of the largest and most successful raids ever accomplished in the Pacific Area.” The 63rd Bomb Squadron received a few days of rest, but two other squadrons from the group attacked Rabaul the following night with a total of seventeen Fortresses. Igarashi considered the second attack even worse than the first, though his perceptions may have been influenced by the onset of illness, probably dengue fever or malaria: “
I had a terrible headache
and fever,” he wrote. “I felt beaten physically and emotionally. I tossed and turned to ease the suffering, but nightmares kept possessing me with no break.” Considering Igarashi’s misery, the noise of exploding bombs must have been difficult to endure.

COLLECTIVELY, THE TWO heavy bomber raids in mid-February 1943 burned up some stockpiles and aircraft at Rabaul, but the overall damage was far from debilitating. The stronghold was simply too vast, too well stocked, for such attacks to cause a major setback. Kenney himself knew there was still considerable room for improvement: an official Fifth Air Force assessment described the effort to bomb enemy shipping as “
less than satisfactory
,” and that was putting it kindly. Thus far, the only technique that had shown promise was skip-bombing. Unfortunately, the characteristics that made B-17s ideal for long-range attack—namely their tremendous range and payload—did not translate favorably for skip-bombing in broad daylight. The sheer size, lack of maneuverability, and relatively low speed of the heavy bombers made them too vulnerable at low level.

The same was not true of smaller, twin-engine aircraft. In late 1942, thanks to a combination of happenstance and ingenuity, two U.S. Army models underwent modifications that changed the course of attack aviation.

The first of these, the Douglas A-20 Havoc light bomber, began its evolution by default. When the 89th Bomb Squadron/3rd Bomb Group received its first A-20s at Charters Towers in August 1942, the aircraft were supposed to be equipped with four fixed, .30-caliber machine guns in fuselage blisters and three additional machine guns in flexible mounts. But the guns had not been installed, and to make matters worse, the A-20’s fuel capacity allowed a combat radius of only 250 miles. There were few Japanese targets within that distance, even when staging from Port Moresby. Seeking improvements, the 3rd Bomb Group turned to a middle-aged engineering officer who had joined them earlier that year under unusual circumstances.

One of the most innovative men in the Fifth Air Force, forty-three-year-old Major Paul I. “Pappy” Gunn had worked his way out of an impoverished youth in the Ozark Mountains. Blessed with an innate ability to understand anything mechanical, Gunn trained as an aviation mechanic in the U.S. Navy and later earned his wings as an enlisted pilot. Retiring as a chief petty officer after a twenty-year career, he became the operations manager and chief pilot for the Philippine Air Lines in 1939. When the Japanese attacked two years later, the U.S. Army Air Corps commandeered his planes and commissioned him as a captain. Soon thereafter, Manila fell, but Gunn was out of the country to transport a planeload of aviators to Australia. His wife and four children became prisoners, giving him the incentive to wage a private war against the Japanese. Stuck for all practical purposes in Australia, Gunn was well-acquainted with “Big Jim” Davies and attached himself to the 3rd Bomb Group at Charters Towers.

Gunn was renowned, as we would now put it, for “thinking outside the box.” Perhaps more than any other individual in the Southwest Pacific, he possessed the raw genius to conceptualize an entirely different role for the A-20 than its designer had intended.
*
Gunn discarded the notion of using the A-20 as a conventional bomber and envisioned a low-level attacker, primarily a gunship, which negated the need for a bombardier. By eliminating that position and all of the associated equipment, plenty of space became available in the nose of the aircraft for mounting four fixed, .50-caliber machine guns. Gunn replaced the .30-caliber guns in the fuselage blisters with a single .50-caliber machine gun on each side, giving the A-20 a total of six forward-firing heavy machine guns. And with the power turret behind the cockpit locked forward, two more “fifties” were available. The bomber’s combat range was increased by installing two fuel tanks totaling nine hundred extra gallons in the forward bomb bay, and honeycomb racks mounted in the rear compartment enabled the A-20 to carry forty or more small parafrag bombs.

Gunn personally conducted much of the flight-testing to ensure that important factors such as center of gravity (a critical component of safe flight) and structural integrity had not been compromised. The changes
were true field modifications, done completely outside normal channels without the hindrance of bureaucratic red tape. In a remarkably short time, the A-20s were transformed into potent attackers.

The success of the modifications set the stage for the next big project. It stood to reason that if alterations to a light attack aircraft like the A-20 were so successful, similar improvements would yield even better results in a sturdy medium bomber. General Kenney seemed to take credit for conceiving the idea himself. “I sent word to Pappy Gunn at Brisbane to pull the bombardier and everything else out of the nose of a B-25 medium bomber and fill it full of fifty-caliber guns, with 500 rounds of ammunition per gun,” he wrote in his postwar autobiography. “I told him I wanted him then to strap some more on the sides of the fuselage to give all the forward firepower possible. I suggested four guns in the nose, two on each side of the fuselage, and three underneath. If, when he had made the installation, the airplane still flew and the guns would shoot, I figured I’d have a skip-bomber that could overwhelm the deck defenses of a Jap vessel as the plane came in for the kill with its bombs.”

The truth was that Gunn had made preliminary drawings of a B-25 gunship in June 1942, fully two months before Kenney arrived in Australia. Regardless of who designed the package, Kenney kept his hand in the selection process. It was his prerogative to choose which squadron would receive the newly modified attack planes, for the crews would require intensive training. For that purpose, Kenney singled out another promising young pilot.

Captain Edward L. Larner, an A-20 driver in the 89th Bomb Squadron, had already received a promotion along with a Silver Star from Kenney during the Buna campaign. Larner had a reputation for taking his airplane lower than anyone else on strafing missions. On one occasion he’d banged up his aircraft by flying through the tops of palm trees; on another he returned with visible evidence that the tail had made contact with the ground. This was exactly the type of aggressive pilot Kenney adored. He cut Larner loose from the 89th Squadron and instructed him to “
help Pappy with testing
, and learn to like the airplane.” Larner returned from the temporary assignment two weeks later, whereupon Kenney gave him another promotion, placed him in command of the 90th Bomb Squadron, and told him to train the squadron in the art of low-level attack.