—
General Imamura realized he must reinforce the garrison at Lae, which was to serve as the anchor for Japanese control of central and northern New Guinea. With the loss of both Buna and Guadalcanal, and the consequent danger to the entire Solomons chain, Imamura knew that Imperial Headquarters viewed New Guinea as the valuable right flank protecting Japan’s entire southern empire. Considering this, he decided to transfer the headquarters of the Eighteenth Army, along with its commanding officer, General Adachi, to Lae. He also ordered plans to ship the 51st Division, less the men sent earlier with the Okabe Detachment, to Lae.
Imperial Headquarters urged Imamura to send these Lae reinforcements in May, but after consulting with his staff, the general refused to wait—a delay would simply give the Allies more time to increase the number of aircraft they could commit to attacking his convoy. Imamura’s staff estimated the convoy to Lae had no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success whenever it was sent. Based on current Allied strength, they estimated a ten-ship convoy would suffer losses of four transports and thirty to forty aircraft. Despite these horrendous assessments, Imamura’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Yoshihara Kane, later noted his commander had “no alternative” but to send the division to Lae if he was to keep that vital location out of Allied hands. There was also the possibility, however remote, that once established, the division might be able to march on Wau and capture the airfield.27
On February 14, Imamura issued his order for the deployment of the 51st Division and the Eighteenth Army headquarters to Lae. The actual date of departure would depend on reports from meteorologists at Rabaul.
Preparatory to the sailing of the convoy, plans were made to launch attacks on enemy airfields to reduce the danger from that quarter. Photoreconnaissance flights overflew Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and Buna. The commanding officer of the 6th Air Division, Lieutenant General Giichi Itabana, learned there were ninety-seven bombers and eighty-one fighters at the Allied bases. Photos of Port Moresby in particular convinced him the town was too heavily defended and the aircraft at the airfield too widely dispersed for a quick, successful raid. Plans for airfield attacks proceeded anyway, but bad weather grounded the Japanese air fleet.28
On February 19, MacArthur received a report from the radio interception and translation operation at Melbourne that the Japanese were planning a major convoy to New Guinea soon. The information was based primarily on radio traffic in and out of Rabaul and on ship movements. MacArthur met with General Kenney on the twenty-fifth to review what they knew. In his opinion, MacArthur said, the enemy was going to reinforce the troops at Lae. Kenney tended to agree that it seemed the logical place for a large troop insertion. MacArthur also expressed the opinion that the convoy would be at least twice the size of the one that brought the Okabe Detachment to Lae.29
The next day Kenney ordered as many aircraft as possible to congregate at the airfield near Buna. He wanted to reduce the possibility that any of his planes would be unable to participate in the attack on the convoy. MacArthur had made it clear to his air chief that he wanted the reinforcing troops stopped before they reached New Guinea. Kenney met with his second in command of the Fifth Air Force, Brigadier General Ennis Whitehead, to lay out the tactics they would use for the attack on the convoy. Most important, they wanted to locate the convoy as soon as possible after it steamed from Rabaul.
Their goal was to begin attacking the ships day and night with heavy bombers until the convoy steamed within range of the commerce-destroying B-25s. Once they reached this point, the heavy four-engine B-17s would drop their bombs from eight to ten thousand feet just seconds before the B-25s pounced. Flying in at two hundred feet and at speeds between 200 and 250 mph, the B-25s would attack, using a new “skip bombing” tactic many of the pilots had been practicing. Behind them would be Douglas A-20 light bomber/intruders with all guns blazing. Then it would be the turn of the Bristol Beaufighters from the RAAF 30 Squadron, speeding in at mast level with their four 20mm nose cannons and six wing-mounted 7.7mm machine guns suppressing enemy fire by strafing the warships’ antiaircraft guns, bridges, and crews. Meanwhile, every P-38 they could put aloft would provide air cover against Japanese fighters.
Skip bombing had been developed because of the ineffectiveness of high-altitude bombing against moving targets such as ships. In the early part of the war, Army pilots had very little, if any, training in bombing ships at sea, and less than 1 percent of their bombs hit the targets. American major Paul Gunn had modified several B-25 Mitchells at Townsville by removing the bombardier and replacing him with four .50-caliber machine guns. This gave the plane added protection as it swept in on an enemy ship at what would normally be considered a dangerously low level and released its bomb with a four- to five-second delay fuse at a distance of sixty to one hundred feet from the ship. The plane would then lift up over the vessel as the bomb “skipped” across the surface of the water and slammed into the side of the ship. It was said this method improved target hits to 72 percent.
Kenney and Whitehead then turned to the all-important question of where they would find the convoy. As Kenney described, they “went over all the information at hand and tried to guess how we would run the convoy if we were Japs. We plotted all the courses of all Jap ship movements reported for the past four months between Rabaul and Lae, checking both the route around the north coast of New Britain and the one around the south. The courses followed regular grooves. The weather forecaster still insisted that during the first three or four days of March the weather would be very bad on the north coast and quite good along the south coast.” That settled it. They would focus on searching for the convoy in the Bismarck Sea, off the north coast of New Britain, where the enemy was expected to take advantage of the inclement weather.30
When Kenney explained his plan for attacking the convoy to MacArthur, the commander in chief smiled and said, “I think the Japs are in for a lot of trouble.”31
At Rabaul, the meteorologists were telling General Imamura virtually the same thing: good weather on the south coast, bad weather on the north coast. Just as Kenney and Whitehead had predicted, Imamura decided to use the route through the Bismarck Sea.
During the night of February 28 the convoy steamed out of Rabaul, headed around Crater Peninsula and entered the storm-tossed Bismarck Sea. Eight transports packed with six thousand soldiers, plus their equipment and supplies, sailed toward Lae, escorted by eight destroyers under the command of Rear Admiral Masatomi Kimura. Aboard the destroyers were an additional 958 soldiers. One hundred army and navy fighters assigned to local air groups were to take turns flying cover if the weather cleared. An additional eighteen fighters from the carrier Zuiho, stationed at Truk, were to offer added protection. Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi, commander of the Eighteenth Army, was aboard the destroyer Tokitsukaze, while the commanding officer of the 51st Division, Lieutenant General Hidemitsu Nakano, was on board the Yukikaze. Admiral Kimura’s flag flew from the Shirayuki. The convoy traveled at the speed of the slowest transport, seven knots per hour, an agonizingly slow pace for the destroyers, which had top speeds of thirty-five and thirty-eight knots.
All went well with the convoy—except possibly for the soldiers packed inside the tossing and plunging transports—until four p.m. on March 1, when a sudden clearing of the thick clouds above revealed the presence of a B-24 Liberator from the 321st Bomb Squadron/90th Bomb Group. Nicknamed “the Jolly Rogers,” the group’s aircraft each had a distinctive skull and crossbones painted on the outside of the vertical stabilizers mounted on its tail. Soaring above the convoy was a plane with the name MISS DEEDS painted on its nose, piloted by twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Walter E. Higgins. After taking off from Ward’s Strip at Port Moresby at noon, Higgins had patrolled along the south coast of New Britain before moving north over the island to get away from a developing storm. He had been circling around to return south when his navigator, Lieutenant George Sellmer, caught
sight of the ships. It was pure luck on their part that the clouds had briefly opened, and unlucky for the convoy.32
Higgins was not about to launch a single-plane attack on the convoy. He had already attempted that once before. On January 5, during the same operation in which General Walker’s B-17 was lost, Higgins had attacked the convoy carrying the Okabe Detachment to Lae. When flak from an escorting destroyer crippled his aircraft, Higgins was forced to ditch the plane near a small island off the southern coast of New Britain. Two members of his crew perished as the plane’s belly caved in on impact. A search plane rescued the survivors the following day. Most likely, because of that incident, an order had gone out to all pilots in the group not to attempt a single-plane attack on convoys. Higgins obeyed the order, instead radioing the position of the convoy, which was sixty miles off the coast near Cape Hollman.33
After receiving Higgins’s report at Port Moresby, a flight of seven B-17s that Kenney and Whitehead had standing by was immediately dispatched to the area. Unfortunately, the weather had turned back to rainstorms and clouds, and night darkness set in, so the heavy bombers never found the convoy.
One destroyer in the convoy intercepted Higgins’s report, and the information was radioed to Rabaul and to the convoy commander, Admiral Kimura. The admiral informed General Adachi, aboard Tokitsukaze, who passed the word to his army officers aboard the transports. Kimura did not appear to be too concerned about the sighting—after all, he had expected they would be found eventually. Perhaps the bad weather would keep up until they reached Lae. As a precaution, he issued more rigid security and blackout orders.
The same inclement weather that protected the convoy was grounding Japanese aircraft was well, and thus protecting the Allied airfields that Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, commander of the South East Area Fleet headquartered in Rabaul, had promised to attack while the convoy sailed.
At daybreak on March 2, with the weather beginning to clear, several B-24 Liberators took to the skies in search of the convoy. Meanwhile, a flight of six RAAF A-20 Bostons (the Australian version of the Douglas A-20 Havoc light bomber and intruder fighter) attacked the airfield at Lae in an effort to prevent aircraft stationed there from coming to the aid of the convoy once the assault was under way.34
At 8:15, a Liberator from the 320th Squadron reported finding the enemy ships about thirty miles north of Cape Gloucester and heading toward the Vitiaz Strait. The plane continued shadowing the convoy until 10:15, when the first eight B-17s from the 63rd Squadron/43rd Bomb Group arrived to begin the attack. Trailing the B-17s were three Imperial Navy fighters that were quickly jumped by P-38 Lightnings from the 39th Fighter Squadron. All three were shot down.
Once over the target, the B-17s dropped their thousand-pound demolition bombs from five thousand feet. In a matter of minutes, one transport, Kyokusei Maru, was hit five times, exploded, and quickly sank with twelve hundred soldiers aboard. A second transport had fires burning amidships and appeared to be settling in the water. When the bombers withdrew, two of the destroyers began picking up survivors from the sunken transport; Admiral Kimura ordered the destroyers to then proceed at high speed to Lae and discharge the survivors, as they were too overcrowded to engage the enemy, and return immediately to the convoy. They sped away, taking 950 soldiers to Lae.35
Meanwhile, the transports kept advancing at slow speed toward the Vitiaz Strait. The day was ending as eleven B-17s arrived and dropped their bomb loads. The crews claimed two direct hits and one ship sunk. So many burning and sinking ships were reported that it was obvious many were citing the same vessel from different angles. As the bombers struck, Zeros and Lightnings tangled in wild confusion. Two B-24s from the 321st Squadron entered the scene and bombed a destroyer and transport without visible results.36
At nightfall, with one transport sunk and two seriously but not fatally damaged, the surviving convoy entered the strait. Admiral Kimura ordered the ships to circle for several hours so that they would enter Lae early the next morning. This turned out to be a horrendous decision. Had he proceeded directly to Lae, the ships would have arrived in time to discharge their troops before enemy aircraft began attacking again. One historian described this decision as having “doomed the Lae convoy.”37
To ensure the Allies did not lose the convoy, several RAAF Catalinas remained overhead during most of the night, occasionally dropping a flare and even a bomb among the circling vessels just to keep everyone aboard anxious about what was coming next. Sometime during the night a Catalina pilot, Flight Lieutenant Terry Duigan, received an unusual radio message from Port Moresby stating that he should remain shadowing the convoy so that he could guide a flight of RAAF Beaufort torpedo bombers to their targets. The message was so strange and discordant with what Duigan knew of the attack plan that he decided to ignore it. In a masterly bit of deception, Port Moresby was stating that the first aircraft in the coming attack would be torpedo bombers—a false transmission intended for Japanese radio operators the Allies expected to be listening in on their radio traffic. As it turned out, the ship captains reacted accordingly.38
Before dawn, a B-17 relieved the last Catalina over the convoy. Although reconnaissance reports were confused and differed considerably, it appears that several ships joined the convoy during the night, and at least one unknown vessel departed from it. Anxious to get a crack at the Japanese, eight RAAF Beaufort bombers had flown out of Milne Bay at four a.m. in search of the enemy ships. Rain, thick clouds, and heavy winds hampered visibility, so only two Beauforts arrived at the target. They both attacked, but with no recordable result.39
Shortly after dawn on March 3, over ninety aircraft took off from the airfields around Port Moresby. Aircraft from Milne Bay and Dobodura, near Buna, soon joined them. As the convoy received its two destroyers back from their survivor run to Lae, well over one hundred Allied aircraft were assembling over Cape Ward Hunt, southeast of Lae. Every pilot knew the mission and his place in it. Nearly all of these aircraft were tasked to attack the convoy with an important exception: Twenty-two RAAF A-20 Bostons from 22 Squadron were to conduct raids on the fighter airfield at Lae, suppressing the base’s ability to defend the convoy.40
The attack began a few minutes before ten a.m. From the start, it went off mostly as Kenney had explained to MacArthur. Thirteen B-17s from the 403rd Bomb Group struck the convoy from between seven and nine thousand feet. As expected, many of the forty Zeros assigned to protect the convoy immediately went after the big bombers. Just as quickly, a group of P-38 Lightnings from among the sixteen Kenney had sent into the battle attacked the Zeros. B-25 Mitchell medium bombers at a lower altitude soon joined the B-17s. While the bombers dropped their loads, several of which made direct hits on ships, their machine gunners joined the mayhem of the dogfights in the sky around them.
While many of the crews aboard the ships were looking skyward at the action, their attention was suddenly drawn to the arrival of thirteen Beaufighters from 30 Squadron. The fighters sped toward their targets at between one hundred and two hundred feet above the sea’s surface. This was to give the Japanese captains the impression that they were Beaufort torpedo planes (both craft had similar nose configurations). The ship captains fell for the deception, and many turned their vessels to face the enemy planes. That was the best defensive move against a torpedo attack, giving the enemy the narrowest target. Instead, the fighters found just the target they actually wanted as they raked the ships from bow to stern with their four 20mm nose cannons and six wing-mounted machine guns, killing and wounding many of the antiaircraft gun crews aboard the destroyers and transports.
Then came the twelve B-25 Mitchells, whose crews had been practicing skip bombing. With the ships facing the Beaufighters, the skip bombers attacked from their sides at just above sea level. Firing their cannons and machine guns as they approached, they released their fused bombs at the last second to skip along the water’s surface and slam into the hull of the targeted ship
. Behind them flew twelve A-20 Havoc light bombers, attacking from a lower level than the other bombers.
On the surface, ships were exploding and burning. Some quickly settled in the water, yet others, with their engines and steering seriously damaged, swung back and forth. At least one destroyer slammed into another, and both burned together.
Sometime during the attack, an event occurred that changed forever the face of the air war over New Guinea. One B-17, the Double Trouble, piloted by Lieutenant Woodrow W. Moore, collided with a Zero. Both planes immediately burst into flames and began to fall apart and tumble into the sea. Seven members of the bomber’s crew managed to get out and release their parachutes. In full view of nearby bombers and fighter crews, several Zeros broke off from combating enemy planes and machine-gunned the seven men hanging from their chutes, killing all of them as they floated helplessly down.
As the attackers ran low on fuel and ammunition, they returned to their bases to restock. At three p.m. the attack was resumed, but by then few target ships remained afloat, and most of them were burning furiously.
That night, word of the machine-gunning of men hanging from parachutes spread from aircrew to aircrew and air base to air base. Revenge was on everyone’s mind. Many of the aircrews had heard the horror stories of Japanese torturing prisoners and even cannibalizing the remains of Australian soldiers along the Kokoda Track and during the fighting at Buna-Gona. Some had heard of the massacres inflicted on civilian populations in Chinese cities, but these seemed distant and almost impossible to comprehend. Now they had witnessed the enemy at his worst. Moreover, it was seven of their own, even if they did not know a single member of the crew of the Double Trouble—regardless, they were all a part of the aviators’ brotherhood.
Several heavy and medium bombers returned to the scene later in the evening, accompanied by several Lightnings for cover. They found one destroyer still afloat, busily picking up survivors from the water. The Asashio had on board an estimated five hundred men plucked from the sea when Allied bombers swept down and almost completely obliterated it with bombs. The ship became a burning, blackened hulk that eventually turned on its side and sank. Few on board could have survived.41
War at the End of the World Page 22
