by Bob Drury
Jay and his fellow fliers were naturally excited—most of the men had never ventured out of their hometowns before, much less beyond America’s shores. When they reached Oahu, however, their elation was numbed by the breadth and depth of destruction still in evidence. Even with newspapers back home heavily censored since the Pearl Harbor attack, it proved impossible to keep secret the full story of the devastation. Still, it was one thing to hear the scuttlebutt and quite another to see Hickam Field’s smashed hangar line, the rooftops torn away, and the hundreds of shell holes that still pocked the landscape. The flight lines at Hickam Field remained littered with piles of bulldozed wreckage. Most alarming to Jay was the sight of the 151 army aircraft either badly damaged or completely destroyed on the ground during the surprise attack. None of the 22nd’s Airmen were allowed near Pearl Harbor itself, where six of the eight burned and battered battleships were still being repaired and refitted.
It took some time for the Bomb Group’s Marauders to be uncrated, reassembled, and flight-tested, and meanwhile Jay and his squadron took shifts flying both day and night patrols in a fleet of B-18 Bolos. They flew into and out of the army’s nearby Bellows Field, whose dusty facilities reminded Jay a little too much of the base back at Muroc Dry Lake. Some of these reconnaissance flights lasted over 10 hours, the time it took to circumnavigate the island chain on the lookout for any sign of the Japanese. Jay had become accustomed to the speedy B-26s, so the Bolos struck him as lumbering and plodding. Some aircrews even experimented with waxing their fuselages, wings, and tails to see if that would add a few miles per hour to their airspeed. It did not.
Jay, who had been promoted to captain by this point, was billeted with the other officers of the Bomb Group in a tent camp adjacent to Hickam Field and later in barracks whose broken windows had been boarded up and whose walls remained pocked by machine-gun bullets. Their days were spent in makeshift classrooms where a succession of instructors drilled them in lesson plans ranging from aircraft and ship silhouette recognition to the geography of the South Pacific. Although they were officially kept in the dark about their next deployment, it was hard to miss the hints that the topograhy instructors offered when they placed particular emphasis on recognizing landmarks scattered about the Solomon Islands and the Bismarck Archipelago.
When Jay was not on submarine patrol or attending class, one of his favorite haunts was the base’s pistol range, where ammunition for his .45-caliber sidearm was plentiful and free. He spent his off-duty nights playing cards and chess or viewing the Army training films shown nightly on-base. A treat was the occasional trip to the local movie house, which ran a steady string of B movie westerns. He managed to reach his parents several times through the base’s telephone exchange, and one day he wangled a pass to visit Honolulu and Waikiki Beach, which had been strewn with barbed wire to protect against a Japanese invasion. He watched with great amusement as local surfers shimmied with their boards under the wire to ride the waves.
One highlight of the Bomb Group’s stay in Hawaii came on February 24, when a shipment of beer and liquor arrived at the officers club. It was the first such delivery, Jay was told, since December 7. But the raucous celebration that followed was tempered by the news trickling out of the Philippines 5,000 miles to the west.
Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, strategists in the U.S. War Department had expected Japan’s first strike against American interests to be on the Philippines, where the United States had maintained sovereignty since the Spanish-American War. Eleven days before the assault on Pearl, on November 27, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Marshall had even warned his forces at Manila, “Negotiations with Japan appear to be terminated to all practical purposes . . . hostile actions possible at any moment.” To that effect Gen. Douglas MacArthur had been called out of retirement to organize the defense of the island chain and had immediately petitioned for, and been granted, a flotilla of over 225 American aircraft, including 33 B-17s, to beat back the expected Japanese invasion. This air fleet was, in the words of Gen. Marshall, the greatest concentration of heavy bomber strength anywhere in the world.
This did not stop the Japanese from invading the Philippines on December 8. Many of the veterans in Jay’s 22nd Bomb Group had friends among the flight crews operating those Philippines-based bombers, and despite the Army’s attempts at censorship, they were well aware of MacArthur’s dire straits. What did come as a surprise was how quickly the Allied defenses across the Pacific crumbled. When the 22nd had departed from San Francisco, the British still occupied the vaunted “Fortress Singapore”—the “Gibraltar of the East,” it was called—and the rump end of MacArthur’s army was still holding out on Corregidor, an island in the mouth of Manila Bay. Singapore fell on the very day Jay’s Bomb Group disembarked at Honolulu Harbor, and rumors swirled about MacArthur’s imminent demise.
The unofficial military grapevine had it that even as MacArthur was transferring half a million dollars into his American bank account as a “reward” from Philippines President Manuel Quezon for his defense of the islands,II nearly 100,000 American and Filipino soldiers were fighting a doomed rearguard action across the Bataan peninsula. MacArthur had visited those troops precisely once in the interim, and they in turn had bequeathed him the disdainful nickname “Dugout Doug.” Those who were captured and survived the notorious Bataan Death March offered harsher epithets.
In Hawaii, it was impossible for Jay and the others to ignore the reports that even some members of the general’s own officer staff were put off by MacArthur’s egocentricity. In his definitive biography, American Caesar, the historian William Manchester makes the telling observation that of the 142 communiqués dispatched by the general during the first three months of the war, 109 mentioned but one soldier: Douglas MacArthur. And after MacArthur escaped from Corregidor, he wrote to his starving subordinates still in the field in the Philippines, “If food fails, you will prepare and execute an attack on the enemy.” This was too much for Gen. William Brougher, who complained to what was left of his staff that the order was a “foul trick of deception played on a large group of Americans by a commander-in-chief and his small staff who are now eating steak and eggs in Australia.”
Naturally, Jay and his fellow Airmen of the 22nd followed intently the fate of their brethren under MacArthur’s command. They were astounded to learn that during the first 48 hours of fighting across the Philippines, half of MacArthur’s bombers and three quarters of his fighter planes had been destroyed—most while sitting on the ground. Particularly troubling to Jay was the fate of the 16 Flying Fortresses stationed at Clark Airfield on the island of Luzon. The planes constituted half of the 19th Bomb Group’s fleet in the Philippines; the remainder, hangared farther south on Mindanao, had managed to escape to Australia’s Port Darwin.
In the early hours of the invasion the Luzon B-17s had been ordered into the air without bombs to escape the fate of the American aircraft at Pearl Harbor that were caught defenseless on the ground. But when the expected Japanese air attacks on Clark Field were delayed by weather, the Fortresses had landed to refuel and, on MacArthur’s direct orders, their crews went off duty for lunch. Moments later three waves of Imperial bombers arrived over Luzon, annihilating every Fortress.
As Jay patrolled for submarines off the Hawaiian coast in his lumbering old Bolo, the thought of those beautiful B-17s exploding in a pyrotechnic display as they sat defenseless before their hangars was almost too much for him to bear. So much for “the greatest concentration of heavy bomber strength anywhere in the world.”
HALF A WORLD AWAY, JOE Sarnoski had more immediate matters on his mind as the converted steamship SS Argentina bobbed and groaned through a cyclone in the Indian Ocean. Two months earlier, while still stationed in Bangor, Maine, the 43rd Bomb Group had received a belated Christmas present—they were going to war somewhere in the Pacific. Some of the men, including Joe, found this odd. The 43rd had been hunting U-boats in the Atlantic since the onset of the war, and common sense dictate
d that they would eventually be folded into the 8th Air Force in England. But as one of Joe’s fellow bombardiers noted, “Nothing in this war hardly ever makes any sense,” and throughout January 1942 the Group gathered and crated its gear, with its deployment scheduled to be made in stages. A part of the Group’s flight echelon had traveled to the West Coast, from where selected pilots and flight crews were assigned new B-17s to fly to Hawaii. Others, including Joe and all the Group’s ground personnel, would sail from the East Coast. Joe’s 403rd Squadron was chosen as the vanguard.
The 403rd traveled by train from Bangor to New York and sailed from New York Harbor on January 23 aboard the Argentina,III one of the largest and fastest vessels plying the New York–South America routes before being requisitioned by the government’s War Shipping Administration and refitted into a troop carrier. Elements of the 43rd’s three remaining squadrons—the 63rd, 64th, and 65th—were scheduled to depart about a month later from New York on the French liner Normandie.
The Argentina had been repainted a dull camouflage gray and designated the flagship of a seven-ship convoy capable of transporting 22,000 American troops. Its berths and suites, originally designed for 200 passengers, were reconfigured to carry well over a thousand men as well as over 200 tons of cargo. The 13-year-old steamship’s first-class cabins had been reserved for officers, so Joe’s home aboard for the next 35 days was a poorly ventilated second-class stateroom around which rows of triple-decker bunks fitted out with thin, lumpy mattresses were arranged like stacked tins of sardines. He slept with his barracks bag and an old Enfield rifle he’d been issued jammed under his bunk, and the only water to wash in was salt water sucked up from the ocean—freshwater was reserved for drinking. Because the American Airmen were well familiar with the frequent and deadly German submarine activity up and down America’s East Coast, not much sleep was to be had as the vessel zigzagged south.
The mess room, one Airman wrote, “was like slopping the hogs,” and whatever mystery meat constituted the hot meals—Joe could never quite figure it out—was plopped into their camp bowls from a huge metal pot. At first Joe tried to stick to the equally tasteless baloney and Spam, but soon came to rely almost exclusively on bread and jam. He just wished he had peanut butter to go with it.
Every Airman was expected to work during the voyage. Lookout positions were the prime assignments, drawn by selective servicemen who kept a constant watch for periscopes. Joe drew garbage duty. Since the convoy could not take the chance that an enemy sub might run across their debris slick, every evening just past dusk the loudspeakers would blare that it was safe to dump trash overboard. Joe knew enough about fish from his days of putting food on the family table to assume that there were great schools of sharks following them and feasting on their leavings. He would have liked to see that, but he couldn’t. Each night the Argentina sailed under strict blackout conditions, with no lights on deck, all portholes covered, and lit cigarettes forbidden.
No one knew where the ship was heading. If the Airmen tried to pry information out of the Merchant Marines working belowdecks the answers would range from a noncommittal grunt to a knifelike finger drawn across a throat. The Argentina made refueling and resupply stops somewhere in Florida—Joe guessed Miami—and then at Cape Town, where they’d taken on mutton carcasses “stacked like cord wood.” No one was allowed on deck, much less off the ship, during the layovers.
At some point in the mid-Atlantic they had crossed the equator, and the event kicked off an initiation rite. Joe and the rest of the novice “Shellbacks” were summoned topside and addressed by a deckhand carrying a makeshift trident and decked out in the crown and cape of King Neptune. At the end of his short welcoming speech each Airman was handed an “Ancient Order of the Deep” certificate attesting to the crossing. But any gods of the sea had saved the worst for last, as the rough weather in the Indian Ocean had the big liner rolling like a toy boat in shore surf. The only consolation was that by this point their anxiety over their destination had been eased; they were all fairly certain that it was Australia.
As part of his garbage duty Joe had been assigned to a kitchen police detail, which seemed to consist of washing every tin dish and cup that had ever been cast. Joe was no stranger to what he called “the dreaded KP,” as he’d pulled the duty many times both at Langley and in Bangor. Now, however, as he dipped what felt like the millionth dirty cup into a tub of soapy salt water, he wondered if this was any way to fight a war. Within weeks he would have to wonder no more.
* * *
I A simultaneous shelling of San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco by all nine enemy boats scheduled for Christmas Eve, 1941, was canceled at the last moment after Japan’s Imperial General Command deemed the assault too risky, owing to the American Navy’s intensifying antisubmarine efforts.
II Which was true.
III Four years later nearly to the day, on January 26, 1946, the Argentina would sail from Southampton, England, to New York carrying the first official contingent of 452 English war brides, 30 of them pregnant, and one war groom. The transport acquired several nicknames, including “The Diaper Run” and “Operation Mother-in-Law.”
7
THE JAPANESE CITADEL
IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER the February beer bash at Hickam field when Col. Divine summoned Jay Zeamer and the other officers of the 22nd Bomb Group to a rare night briefing. They were assembled in a large classroom and, after being sworn to secrecy, given their flight orders. Their destination: Brisbane, Australia, via an island-hopping route that included refueling stops at Palmyra, Canton (Kanton), Fiji, and New Caledonia. Each man was handed a notebook containing Navy charts of the route—magnetic headings, distances, latitude, and longitude. The 22nd would be the first medium bomb group to fly across the Pacific and at this point in the war radio communications and navigation aids in that part of the world were virtually nonexistent. The pilots were also ordered to maintain radio silence unless they became separated and lost, in which case they were to use the command radio system to request “Lost Plane Procedure.”
Over the next few weeks, 57 B-26 Martin Marauders lifted off from Hawaii in various stages to begin the six-day, 4,700-mile journey to Brisbane. Fifty-one arrived safely. Jay had seen men die in training mishaps before, the causes ranging from pilot error to equipment failure to sudden storms. Indeed, his first commanding officer and that officer’s entire crew were one of the estimated 400 Army Air Force flight crews who would be lost to accidents over the course of World War II. But six bombers in one journey? Jay knew many of those men. He had shared beers with them, played cards with them, bitched with them. And now his outfit, yet to see a bullet fly, counted half-a-hundred dead. It was small consolation that the 22nd had become the first complete American Air Group to reach Australia. It was also a harbinger.
Only weeks before Jay landed in Brisbane, Gen. MacArthur had also alighted on Australian soil from the Philippines. As Jay would rapidly learn, if to err is human, to blame it on someone else was military politics. This was a strategy at which MacArthur apparently excelled. Australian newspapers, which many of the guileless American Airmen were surprised to find printed in English, trumpeted the story of MacArthur and his “Bataan Gang” being escorted off the Adelaide express train in Melbourne with the all the pomp reserved for a conquering hero. And in fact when MacArthur set up his headquarters in the city’s swank Menzies Hotel, he bore the official title of the U.S. Army’s Supreme Commander in the Far East.
Despite his famous promise to the Philippine people—“I came through, and I shall return”—his primary goal for the foreseeable future was the defense of Australia and New Zealand. “Hold Hawaii; Support Australia; Drive Northward” became the War Department’s slogan. Unfortunately, the general had few troops with which to fulfill the mandate. So he was left to swanning about the antipodes in his garrison cap and khaki blouse holding press conferences, giving speeches to the Australian parliament, and making scores of radio broadcasts; a “He
ro on Ice” in the words of a Time magazine headline writer.
If Jay and his fellow fliers’ ardor for their new boss was somewhat less than enthusiastic, their feelings were not shared back in the States. For it was MacArthur’s relentless self-promotion, aided not a little by the delight the Axis powers took in ridiculing his retreat from the Philippines, that prompted Congress to award him the Medal of Honor.I This made MacArthur and his father, Arthur, a Civil War hero, the only father and son to have received the nation’s most prestigious military award. The general nonetheless stewed incessantly over his failure to be appointed supreme commander of the entire Pacific Theater. It was not for the Army’s lack of trying.
As early as October 1941, two months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Marshall recommended to Secretary of War Henry Stimson that MacArthur be appointed the “Eastern Ike” and given overall authority over the American land, sea, and air forces in the Pacific. Marshall’s proposal was rejected outright by the bluff and ornery Adm. Ernest J. King, chief of U.S. Naval Operations. King argued that the Navy had been preparing for two decades to wage war against Japan, and unlike the great land battles certain to be fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, combat in the Pacific Theater would be primarily a naval and air campaign. He hated the idea of an Army general dictating orders to his admirals.
Thus in Washington’s corridors of power a compromise was reached. MacArthur was designated Commander in Chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas west of the 160th meridian—Australia, New Guinea, and most important to the general, the Philippines—while Adm. Chester Nimitz would lead all U.S. forces stationed east of that line. Since there were so few ground troops under MacArthur’s command—of the 25,000 Americans in Australia, the vast majority were Airmen—for the moment any military objectives would have to be accomplished with airpower. This presented another major issue. MacArthur had no use for the officer whom the War Department had recently placed in charge of the Army’s Far East Air Force, Gen. George Brett.
