The Ragged, Rugged Warriors

by Martin Caidin

  “Weeks later, a very thin little blond pilot wearing dark glasses came to Woodstock* seeking a ride south. He was going blind, and’ was on his way to a General Hospital in Melbourne. Combat was over for him.

  “He was Don Mitchel* an old friend and classmate of mine, the sole survivor of the five bombers shot down on May 24. He told a fantastic tale, too long to go into now* except that he was riding in the co-pilot’s seat, the formation got split, his ship was being shot up—both engines out and burning, the cockpit full of smoke, everybody yelling, nothing working—when somebody hollers, ‘Bail out!’

  “Don remembered that somebody jerked the emergency release panel over his head. He stood up on his seat, getting ready to leave, when somebody gave Mm a powerful boost on the fanny, and shoved him clear of the ship. He jerked madly on the D-ring of his parachute; the silk banged open with a terrific jerk. Don must have been right on the deck when he went out. He was still in mid-air when his ship hit the water with a roaring explosion. His body then made only one swing and he was in the water himself. He looked toward his plane, but all he could see was that little cloud of steam the planes would leave when they went down.

  “Now for the payoff" His legs were useless, having been injured somehow. He was several miles offshore, and a few of the Zeros came down after him. They strafed him repeatedly while he kept pushing himself underwater to duck. Finally they got tired of the game or figured he was dead, and flew away.

  “Don was in the water for a long time before some natives picked him up. How he got back over the Owen Stanley Range to Port Moresby without the use of his legs is a fantastic story all in itself.

  “You know, it’s particularly interesting for me to get Sakai’s point of view, since it’s nice to know that we weren’t the only people in the air to be worried over New Guinea. Sakai tells of a Zero pilot who was determined to get a B-26 by ramming; he even gives his name—Suitsu.

  “Don’t question what Sakai says about this because, believe me, I know.

  “I remember this guy coming in from the right front. There was a flight of four B-26s on me, and another flight of four right behind. I kept waiting and waiting for this guy to fire so I could kick the formation down and spoil his aim. I’ll be hanged if this Zero didn’t slide right over the left wing of my airplane. He was nearly inverted, and still trying to pull down. Had he been a little more on center, he might have clipped our tail, but he missed us and slammed into Moe Johnson’s ship.

  “Joe Morningstar and I went over the full report by Saburo Sakai. He tells how the Zero, after the collision, went through a series of slow rolls and went into the sea at full speed. Then he describes how the B-26, without its vertical fin, yawed and rolled crazily, flipped over on its back, and plunged into the water with what Sakai called a blinding explosion.

  “Well, he’s right. Every single detail checks out; there isn’t a shred of conflict about that episode as the Japanese pilot told it—and as we saw it.

  “Not until I saw Sakai’s story did I know why I wasn’t killed myself on that mission.”

  Several days after the loss of the five B-25 bombers, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Divine, commander of the 22nd Bomb Group, wrote in his diary:

  “The lads had some tough luck today. Five went over Lae—two from 18th Sq. were Ellis and O’Donnell, two from 33rd were Coleman and Lanford, and there was Burnside from the 19th. Ellis* ship was riddled, the navigator (Kallina) killed. O’Donnell lost an engine, came all around the tip of New Guinea to get back and landed two hours late. Coleman’s ship made emergency landing at Moresby. Lanford crashed into the ocean on fire near Lae. Bad show, and for several reasons. Moresby must not have given them any definite plan, and no one was in charge. Bad.”

  There was this entry for the day following:

  “May 28th, 1942. - came back today, and gave

  me some dope on his mission. He said he doesn’t want to go over Lae again without fighter cover, and I certainly don’t blame him. .. .”7

  Walt Krell, more than any other one man—so state the members of the 22nd Bomb Group—had a deep and intimate sense of identification with the job that he, the other pilots, and the crewmen were expected to carry out in the war against the Japanese. The sense of identification, an unflinching devotion to the uniform he wore, enabled Krell to record, through the years, the words that best describe what the angry skies over New Guinea were like:

  “There were many struggles in that war,” Krell said. “And it’s still amazing to me, after all the years have gone by, how many of them had to be fought just to get the airplanes off the ground and on their way to the target. At the end of a long line of obstacles, of which more than a few were maddening to people who were overworked and overtired, and who saw no way out of the maw of continuous missions ...... well, at the end of it all waited the Japanese. There were moments when they seemed to be only part of that great over-all picture so glibly described as ‘the enemy'

  “For the lads hanging around under the wings of the B-26s, waiting for the word to go, a lot went on in the Operations Shack they never knew about. For example, time and again I would be ordered to depart Townesville with a flight of six, eight, or ten ships, having been told by the Group Powers that no specific targets were known. All we were told was to hit some enemy point like Lae or Rabaul. Nothing else! What kind of a way was that to fight a war?

  “Once in Port Moresby, I would again check with Aussie Intelligence, only to find that their reconnaissance planes had picked up nothing new in the way of targets. Time and time again our missions resolved themselves into nothing more than raids to expose ourselves to ground fire and the engagement of Zeros, with no specific ground targets. And no matter what size bombs we used, we were never able, it seemed, to tear up their runways enough to prevent the Zeros from getting off the ground.

  “In the absence of specific targets and because the Japanese on the 90-mm. antiaircraft guns were awfully good, I sometimes decided to take the flights through the target area flying defensively instead of holding a straight and level course. Our aircraft losses were far exceeding our replacements as it was and from the standpoint of pursuing the war, I couldn’t reconcile the deliberate and prolonged exposure of a standard bombing run on nothing but a strip of dirt with 100-pound bombs.

  “We had been told that most of the enemy installations and stores were concealed some distance back from the runways—just where, no aerial photograph ever seemed to show. I reasoned that anywhere that our bombs might hit within working distance of the runway might do good and, at the same time, obviate the straight and level flying.

  “One time at Lae we set off an ammo dump that nobody seemed to know was there—except the Japs. Often the boys on my wing couldn’t see this philosophy, and I was criticized for not following the standard, textbook, Emily Post procedure for delivering bombs. The facts were that, when we did have something to go after, we did follow the instruction book on the Norden bombsight.

  “Because of this lead policy of mine, there were certain crews and craft on hand to fly another day, when our purpose was of greater import than ‘Douglas Mac-Arthur’s Smashing Raids’ headlines. The low-level attacks really came into their own a little later, when ordnance came out with the delayed fuse. Often our sheet-metal people had more work to do patching up holes from our own bomb shrapnel than from enemy ground fire.

  “All the foregoing is background for the idea that as combat airmen we didn’t think we were doing any good because of the obscure and elusive targets. We felt like misfits and stepchildren. In fact, it wasn’t until George Kenney came over to command the new Fifth Air Force later in 1942—that guy was a real cock-of-the-walk—that we started to get some true indication that people really knew we were even in the Southwest Pacific and fighting pretty much of a wild war down there.

  “Any semblance of organization or leadership from the group level on up to Air Force level was pure fiction. At one time our own group even received orders, in the middl
e of all that miserable way of life and the staggering losses we were taking, that commissioned officers would carry swagger sticks and grow mustaches and that squadron commanders would not fly combat. We’d heard all kinds of weird things, but this really topped it off. I leave to your imagination just how much attention we paid to that.

  “General Brett was barely on speaking terms with Mac-Arthur. There was a host of old Air Corps brass dumped into our combat area who negated, confused, and compounded problems by the score. It took several months of operation to weed this latter group out, away from the forward combat areas.

  “In the final analysis, it was the persistence of the individual pilot and his crew to get to the target that kept the war alive and the enemy engaged. We were, very simply, doing our best It wasn’t a matter of being gung-ho; it was a lousy war and things were rough no matter how you looked at it

  “Time gives you perspective. But one truth hasn’t changed a bit The determination and resourcefulness of the flight crews and the ground crews was the greatest single deciding factor in relation to the number of times a plane got out on a mission,n

  A vivid picture of combat tactics is given in crew reports on the mission flown by the 22nd Bomb Group on June 9, 1942, against Lae and Salamaua. On this mission Lieutenant Commander Lyndon B. Johnson, U.S.N.R., then on fact-finding assignment for President Roosevelt, flew with the crew of the B-25 Heckling Hare, commanded by Captain Walter H. Greer. During the mission the plane in which the future President of the United States rode was hit by generator trouble. Heavily attacked, while in this condition, by no fewer than eight Zeros, the Heckling Hare survived only by dint of a stubborn defensive fire and brilliant evasive tactics. Excerpts from reports by pilots of other planes on this mission follow:

  Johnny Ewbank: ‘Those Zeros coming in is the most vivid thing I’ve remembered ...., You know right away when you’re in trouble, and we were in it up to our necks. They hit Krell's formation like a ton of bricks. They were all over them and coming in from the side and the front and whipping through the formation and then they were coming wide open for us.

  “Right there I switched from Lae to Salamaua for our target Krell's formation just bored right on through the Zeros to the primary. We started going downhill now because we had not only the bombing to worry about but getting out of there as well. My objective was to get the formation down low. To hell with the precision-bombing run at ten thousand feet Up there, we were sitting ducks for the Zeros. I wanted to get our bombs out and get low, real low, right down on the deck, just as soon as possible. Down there, we had real speed with this B-26 and we could close off our blind spot which is our belly, and our turret and tail guns could really work on the Zeros.

  “So we pulled out the plug and went downstairs for everything we had. Man, we were really picking up airspeed with a tremendous clip, really unwinding the altimeter needle and bringing our airspeed to the Do Not Exceed limit—and then going right on past....”

  Jerry Crosson: “They were up at eighteen thousand feet . . . and then they came straight for us, coming down to where we were at fourteen thousand feet. We were just starting to pick up some speed, but nothing like those Zeros in their dives. They were accelerating so fast you could really see them getting up steam. We got the yokes forward in the cockpit and we all started going downhill. We were real anxious to let the old ’26 really unwind and pick up her head to run.

  “About five miles out from Lae they plowed in a wild, loose mass right into and through Krell’s flight directly ahead.

  “I watched them really start chewing at Krell’s formation. In the lead position of my flight, Johnny Ewbank saw all this, of course. Suddenly he ordered a change of course. We veered off to the right, away from the attack, and now I knew we were going to try to hit Salamaua. We actually passed right over Lae and the airfield, but we were going downhill like a bunch of locomotives dropping down a mountainside, and there wasn’t a chance of our own flight hitting the primary target. We went all-out for Salamaua and the bombardiers were working frantically to set up for the final run, because with a sky full of two dozen or more Zeros there wouldn’t be any second chance for us.

  “They were all over us and around us and trying to get under us where we were blind, and we were really whipping up the steam and getting up our speed. They were making passes at us from the sides. Towards the field at Lae, they started coming in with some pretty wild frontal passes, their wings and noses blazing, guns and cannon hammering away at us.

  “On our actual bombing run the Zeros broke away suddenly and gave the flak crews a chance to get in a few licks at us. It was like leaping from one bed of hot coals into another, with everyone just itching for their turn to work you over. The moment we came out of the bombing run, the Zeros came slicing back in with those frontal and side passes at us, and all this time we were doing our utmost—with all our bombs gone now—to let the B-26s grab for all possible speed.

  “When the guns fired . . . from the cockpit you could hear a steady rumble. The whole plane was shaking from the recoil. The rumble came at you from the nose and then up and behind or directly behind, and they merged in and out, and there was all the noise of the engines and propellers and, of course, the kind of noise you always hear and never forget That was the sound of the 20-mm. cannon shells from the Zeros as they exploded against us. They sounded like a shotgun blast going off in a bucket of sand that was being keld right next to your head.

  “You could smell the fight You could smell the guns when they were firing, the powder, and I tried for years to compare just what it smelled like. But the closest thing to it is that it smells just like a subway station in New York; I swear that’s just what it smelled like up there.

  “There was one particular Zero that spelled trouble. I had watched him lead the attack into Krell’s flight, and he flew—that pilot in that Japanese fighter—as if we didn’t have a gun that could bother him. We were moving off to the right from the northeast coast of New Guinea when again I saw that one particular Zero boring in....

  “He kept coming in from three o’clock out of a shallow diving turn. He stayed in this turn, really coming in fast, and suddenly he screamed over us with tremendous speed. I’d guess he was maybe a hundred feet or so right over us, no more than that, but perspectives are rough to judge under these conditions. He was a pro; he wasn’t wasting any ammunition in that long curve, and he was just a hairsbreadth away from a skid; not skidding, but squeezing all the performance out of that airplane. A real master; he waited for just the right moment. You can spot the master at this sort of thing right away. A lot of the rookies would splash their ammo all over the sky, but the pros who’d been around for a while knew just what they were doing. And then in a blur he was gone.

  “My top turret gunner—Johnston—had been tracking this same Zero, and he called on the intercom that the Zero had suddenly flashed up and down, . . . twisting like a dervish so that he couldn’t track him with his guns...

  Walt Krell: “. . . there were the Zeros. It was a flying circus and there must have been twenty or twenty-five of them—the most enemy planes I had ever seen all at once up to that time. They were like a swarm of mosquitos."

  “We went over Lae, pouring the coal to the airplanes, our noses down and grabbing for all the speed there was to squeeze out of the engines" We went across the target at about six or seven thousand feet and dropped our eggs" and the tail gunner—John Engleman—said we were getting some pretty good strikes on the runway. A few bombs had geysered in the water, but most of them were right where they were intended"

  “We were going downhill now for everything that we were worth. really unwinding, going for that speed that now was so precious. There was one particular point when you made your run against Lae that let you know it was time to head for the deck. First you had to pass ‘Rapid Roberts’; you had to get past Mm. He was a Japanese anti-aircraft gunner at the end of the Lae airdrome. He was good; he could play an unbelievable tune of fast
and accurate shooting with Ms flak guns, and it was always a matter of holding your breath until you got past him. The Zeros would swing off for those seconds that you had to run the flak gauntlet, and the moment you did, then everything got even wilder"

  We Mt out for the water just as fast as we could get those planes to move, and thank God they were the fastest kinds of airplanes of their class on wings anywhere in the world—or there would have been a great many people who would never have gotten home. We were going downhill with everything we had and—well, I know it violated all the structural limitations - and everything else we had on the airplanes that was forbidden but we were indicating over four hundred miles per hour, the nose of the airplane way down and the Marauder pounding along like there wasn’t any tomorrow.

  We couldn’t outdive the Zeros, but we were now going so fast that in order to stay with us they couldn’t go into their long, wide pursuit curves to set up the best gunnery angles. This threw off their aim and gave us the opportunity to throw some good lead in their direction.

  “All the other B-26s had only those little .30-caliber popguns in the waist positions, but ours was a bit mongrelized in the rear. Pat Norton, our radio operator, had thrown away those little .30s and he’d cut a large hatch in the bottom of the side fuselage so that he could have a good field of fire, and he was really cutting into those Zeros with that big gun of his.

  “It’s too bad we had to turn our planes after making the bomb run, because if we could have kept on going, with everything wide open, no bombs, and much of our fuel gone, the Zeros would have been really hard-pressed to keep up with us. But we had to get home, and anytime we turned, those Zeros would cut in after the advantage with those ‘square turns’ of theirs.