by Bob Drury
On July 21, as reconstruction was nearly completed on Guadalcanal’s new airfield, 13,000 Imperial Army troops accompanied by 1,000 conscripted indigenous bearers came ashore at Buna, on New Guinea’s north coast. After establishing a beachhead, the five enemy battalions immediately began the 100-mile trek south, up and over the Owen Stanleys along a serpentine pack trail that had been tramped out of the rain forest over centuries and was known as the Kokoda Track.
Their march was stalled the very next night when the Japanese advance party—hacking its way with machetes through the jungle-choked footpath—mistook an ambush by a small company of Papuan militiamen for a much larger resistance party. These New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, recruited by the Royal Australian Army from the area’s best hunters and marksmen, continued to harass the invaders over the next 24 hours, enough time for swarms of American B-17s and B-26s to get into the air. The aircraft initially had difficulty locating the Japanese troops in the thick rain forest, but with the Papuans radioing location coordinates, they finally found the main body of infantry and began bombing and strafing them as they cut across the face of a steep-sloping forest of eucalyptus and allspice.
The Allied counterattack was enhanced by the fact that the Americans had swiftly expanded Port Moresby’s facilities. Two new runways had been graded and matted, including one 6,000-foot strip capable of accommodating heavy bombers. Now, with four airstrips operational for planes arriving from Australia, the Americans started a campaign of near-constant bombing runs against the Japanese soldiers gingerly picking their way along what came to be known as the “Bloody Track,” as well as against the steady stream of resupply ships sent from Rabaul.
Despite their continuing losses in the mountains and on the coast near Buna, the enemy managed to land thousands of reinforcements, crest the Owen Stanley Range, and begin a slow descent toward Port Moresby. Admiral Nimitz, desperate to relieve the pressure on New Guinea, chose this time to unleash Operation Watchtower, landing 11,000 Marines on the beaches of Guadalcanal at just past dawn on August 7. It was the first amphibious landing by U.S. forces in nearly half a century, and within 24 hours the Marines had captured the airstrip that was to become known around the world as Henderson Field.
This small victory was merely a presage to five months of hard fighting on Guadalcanal. The assault on Port Moresby proved similarly vicious, particularly as it dragged on through New Guinea’s rainy season. Although the Japanese attack down the south slope of the Owen Stanleys advanced to within 25 miles of the town, it was slowed by swollen streams and sodden turf. After a final firefight whose gunshots could be heard at the U.S. bomber base at Jackson Airfield, Imperial troops were beaten back by a combination of U.S. airpower and Australian and American infantry reinforcements flown in on American cargo planes. The fighting at Buna, however, was destined to rage for months.
Stateside newspaper reports of even such minor victories, coming as they did on the heels of the successful sea battles on the Coral Sea and at Midway, gave the folks back in America a spark of hope after so many months of depressing dispatches from the Pacific. And when another attempted Japanese landing on New Guinea was thrown back into the sea, this time at Milne Bay on the thin neck of Papua’s eastern tip, some Americans stationed in the Southwest Pacific experienced a slight quake of excitement, as if the war’s filament had shifted ever so slightly. A few cocky U.S. politicians even began to speak of getting their boys back home in time to see spring flowers blooming in the victory gardens that more than 20 million people were tending in their backyards.
The War Department knew better. Despite the loss of four carriers at Midway, Japan’s Combined Fleet still greatly outnumbered the U.S. Pacific Fleet in destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. And the confrontations on the Kokoda Track, at Buna, at Henderson Field, and at Milne Bay had been skirmishes at best, opening gambits in a much larger chess match expected to end well over 3,000 miles away in the streets of Tokyo, where President Roosevelt and his generals assumed “the last battle will be fought.”
Meanwhile, during the Battle of the Coral Sea, Jay Zeamer’s exhausted 22nd Bomb Group had run nearly continuous bombing raids over Rabaul to keep enemy planes there occupied while the two task forces slugged it out. Then the Group had taken the lead on nearly as many of the daily runs over Buna and, later, at Milne Bay. Now, after catching their breaths, they were striking even farther north, stabbing at Lae and Salamaua with regularity.
Jay was personally witnessing the dents in the mighty Nippon Empire’s armor. Back in Australia, on the Reid River satellite airbase close to Garbutt Field, one of his colleagues expressed these emotions in a personal diary: “We feel we are not only defending Australia, but our own U.S. as well,” he wrote. “This latter thought, above all, heartens us. It helps make our aerial attacks more vicious. We eat, sleep, loaf, drink, and fight like hell together. We’ve already repulsed two invasion attempts, and believe me, the Aussies are happy to have us here.”
Jay, in turn, marked this shift in attitude with a simple, one-word entry in his own journal: “Turnaround?”
* * *
I In a preview of air warfare to come, the oiler USS Neosho was swarmed by a flight of Japanese dive-bombers. When one of the enemy planes was hit with crippling anti-aircraft fire, its pilot deliberately crashed it into the oiler’s deck, hastening the ship’s demise.
10
THE RENEGADE PILOT
IN THE AFTERMATH OF WHAT Capt. Jay Zeamer had labeled a “turnaround,” the metaphors flew fast and furious across the United States. This was most apparent in the medium that was perhaps the most popular form of political communication for the era, the editorial cartoon. The Japanese caricatured as subhuman creatures—dogs, snakes, “beastly little monkeys”—were a predominant theme.
“Well, well, seems to be a slight shifting of the Japanese current,” read the caption to one widely circulated political sketch depicting a wormlike Asian being knocked cold by a brawny American sailor wielding the “Midway Tide-Stick.” Drawn by Theodor Geisel, then the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM, this was one of more than 400 lampoons, many of them breathtakingly racist, produced by the author and illustrator who would soon become known by his nom de plume, Dr. Seuss.I In fact the subhuman Asian being knocked cold in the sketch bears a striking facial resemblance to the title character in The Cat in the Hat.
Geisel was far from alone in his relentless visual attacks on the enemy. American cartoonists could not resist portraying Uncle Sam punching a Japanese soldier, usually bespectacled and bucktoothed, in either the face or the solar plexus with his giant fist. The caption for one such cartoon in the Buffalo News—“Losing Face”—was emblematic, as was the Kansas City Star’s “Jolt the Japs at Midway.” General MacArthur also benefited from the pen-and-ink onslaught. One caricature, captioned “The Exterminator,” depicted his giant hands pumping a bug spray device shaped like an American bomber to kill hordes of the tiny “Japanese Beetle.” And in London, Punch published an editorial cartoon of MacArthur standing in the prow of a boat and spearing enemy-held islands like so many sponge fish as he sailed toward the Rising Sun. The point, however crude, was nevertheless accurate: the United States was indeed lifting itself up off the Pearl Harbor canvas and starting to counterpunch.
At Garbutt Field this muffled elation was somewhat tempered by Jay’s quirks, which continually puzzled his fellow Airmen of the 22nd Bomb Group. Jay’s laissez-faire attitude toward authority was particularly bewildering. Little did his fellow pilots know that this was the very renegade quality to which Jay’s mother and father had reconciled themselves so long ago. As one family member put it, “Jay never took his superiors very seriously, at least externally. Even when he was reprimanded severely for doing things his way, he just didn’t seem to care.”
“His way” often manifested itself in odd behavior. Even in the tropics, for instance, bombing runs at extremely high altitude usually necessitated flying in arctic temperatures t
hat could fall well below zero degrees. Airmen wore so many layers of clothing that it was not unusual for them to have to be hoisted into their aircraft by helpful ground crews. When the brass back in Australia discovered that not all aircrews were adhering to standard dress codes, however, instructions came down from Bomber Command that no Airman was to lift off on a mission without donning his “boilersuit”—the loose-fitting, one-piece coverall with a zip-in fleece lining that was standard USAAF issue. The 30-pound flak suits remained optional.
Jay blithely ignored these orders. Particularly on shorter missions, he figured that his bomber jacket was enough to protect him from the frigid temperatures, and in essence he went native, preferring to slide into the right-hand seat clad only in a pair of Australian bush shorts and boots, packing a sandwich, thermos, and his .45 sidearm in an Aussie haversack slung over his shoulder. On occasion he would deign to add a pair of long woolen socks to the ensemble.
It was almost as if he were two different men. On the ground he was known as the lanky guy with the effervescent grin as wide as a badger’s stripe—a smart, well-liked, and respected officer. On one occasion, when a malfunctioning Marauder crashed on takeoff, killing all eight crew members, Jay was among the first on the scene to help remove the charred corpses and remained until the last of them had been recovered. Yet in the air he was viewed as a lazy pilot, too self-absorbed to be bothered to follow everyone else’s rules. He wrote later that he did not mean to come off as a troublemaker. He was bored, but it was more than mere ennui. It was a malaise, a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that he was in the war but not a part of it. It had settled into his soul and detached him from his surroundings. Perhaps with good reason.
After the few inaugural missions by the 22nd over Rabaul, it was decided that the B-26 lacked sufficient range to continue bombing runs over New Britain. Fuel consumption increased dramatically when the plane flew over the Owen Stanley Range with a full bomb load, and too many of the Marauders were being forced to ditch on the return flight. This left the Bomb Group consigned almost exclusively to raids on Japanese bases on New Guinea and to antishipping patrols over the Solomon Sea.
Barring emergencies on these shorter runs, a B-26 copilot like Jay was expected to take control of an aircraft only during the brief period when its commander decided to crawl down into the nose to double-check the bombardier’s flight headings and sightings. Jay wanted more responsibility. He wanted the left-hand seat. Before the war he didn’t have time to watch the world go by because he was too busy moving through it. Now he felt as if the biggest moments of his life were passing him by.
He had beaten the odds through pure resourcefulness and strength of will on so many occasions, whether it was facing a prep school disciplinary hearing or a recalcitrant university admissions board, or even overcoming a failed eye test. Now those odds seemed to be catching up with him. As his petulance grew, so did his reputation as a slacker. It reached a point that when he drew a copilot’s assignment in the Operations Hut, a collective groan would rise from that aircraft’s crew.
The situation came to a head one day in late summer 1942 during a mission over Lae. The 22nd had been making daily runs on all Japanese holdings in northern New Guinea in order to keep as many enemy aircraft as possible “at home” to prevent them from attacking the Marines digging in on Guadalcanal. On this run Jay was again assigned to the right-hand seat, flying with a new pilot named Joe Seffern, recently transferred into the squadron. After staging at Port Moresby and clearing the Owen Stanleys, the mission became what the fliers had taken to calling a milk run as Seffern’s B-26 soared north along the New Guinea coast. Since this was Seffern’s first combat mission with the Group, the squadron commander wanted to see how the new man handled himself. So he had instructed Seffern to remain close to him in the formation.
With almost nothing to do, Jay drifted off to sleep. An alarmed Seffern thumped him on the chest several times, but Jay barely stirred. On the approach to the enemy base at Lae, with thick bursts of ack-ack blackening the sky about them, Seffern’s thwacks finally woke Jay—who casually strapped on his Mae West life preserver, buckled into the parachute he had been sitting on, donned an old World War I helmet he’d picked up in Townsville, and shut his eyes again.
Though their Marauder loosed its payload and returned to Garbutt Field without damage, Seffern had briefly fallen out of formation while trying to wake Jay, and his frustration with Jay’s bizarre behavior had boiled over. Although it may sound like a minor transgression, breaking formation during a bombing run can have dire consequences. It not only negates the meticulously planned crossfire that bomber gunners plan well in advance but also strings out a bomb drop, making it easier for defending fighter planes to single out individual attackers.
Back on the ground, Seffern wrote a scathing report to the squadron’s flight commander. “The flack was really thick over the target, and then this guy goes to sleep,” Seffern reported. “I hit him in the chest to wake him up. That’s why I couldn’t keep up with the rest of the formation. He woke up and then went back to sleep again! We got hit by everything they could throw at us and Zeamer sleeps his way through it. The guy isn’t human.”
Joe Seffern’s complaints kicked into motion a series of consequences that would change Jay’s life forever. Jay would later gloss over the incident, writing to a friend that he had merely “finagled a transfer.” But the truth was that Seffern’s report packed such an emotional wallop that when Jay heard about it he demanded a move to another outfit. Meanwhile, Col. Divine, the 22nd’s harried CO, had finally had enough. He was fast running not only out of airworthy B-26s but also out of patience with the Eagle Scout whose evident intellectual brilliance was offset by what a magazine writer called Jay’s “screwball stunts.” Today the adjective “screwball” does imply a minor transgression, perhaps a light, comic breach of etiquette. But at the time, and given the context, it was a serious charge to level.
Col. Divine was under a lot of pressure. His outfit seemed almost jinxed from the outset of its deployment, having lost six bombers during the jump from Hawaii. He had also presided over a string of mishaps that included losing three more of his planes and their entire crews to tropical storms during training exercises before the Group had even reached Garbutt Field. Adding to his woes, Divine had the dubious distinction of being the commander of the first Americans from MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command to be captured by the Japanese, when two noncommissioned officers—a technical sergeant and a corporal—bailed out of their damaged B-26 near Rabaul.
Even after the 22nd’s runs over Rabaul were scaled back and limited to missions over northern New Guinea, the Group had the misfortune to face the toughest opposition of any American air unit based in Australia when the Japanese Navy’s famous Tainan Wing, a handpicked unit of aces, moved its base of operations from Rabaul to Lae. During a bombing run over Lae on which Divine flew as an observer, Zeros from that squadron had so badly damaged his plane’s landing gear that he was forced to take over the controls and belly-land. No one was seriously hurt, but the Marauder became one of the nearly half of Divine’s original 51 aircraft that had been either lost or semipermanently hangared since their arrival in Australia.
The outfit’s travails had reached a point where even other units felt sorry for it. After two of the 22nd’s bombers crashed on takeoff on successive days, the official combat diary of the 8th Photo Squadron noted, “The B-26s are receiving a lot of unjust criticism because they are cracking up so often. But it must be remembered, these are 1940 planes flying combat. Because the U.S. considers this front secondary, the finest B-26 pilots and crews are losing their lives.”II
In fact, over 100 men from the 22nd Bomb Group had already been killed in just two months of fighting, and by this point Col. Divine was not averse to jettisoning one more. The colonel sensed that Seffern’s complaints were emblematic of the general bitterness his men were beginning to feel over being, as one pilot wrote, �
��picked off one by one, nearly alone.” Another pilot from the 22nd added that “observers from the States and from the High Command were relatively few and far between, [and] the lonely manner from which the Group operated had created the conviction among our crews that we were carrying the war load in the Southwest Pacific.”
One of the Bomb Group’s senior officers summed up quite succinctly the dreadful miasma that had encompassed the 22nd’s Airmen: “If they do not relieve us we’ll all be dead, the whole Group, in another six months. We need rest and some help. We hear and we read in the papers of great fleets of planes to come over here to fight, but we never see them. We do the suicidal work, and I guess I’m getting a little bitter.”
If the transfer of one man, even an inherently good man like Jay, would ease even an iota of the duress his Airmen felt, Col. Divine was more than happy to accommodate the request. That is how and why, in September 1942, Jay was cut lose from the 22nd and reassigned to the 43rd Bomb Group. The 43rd consisted of four squadrons, and as it happened the first of those was just then touching down in Australia with its brand-new B-17 Flying Fortresses.
JAY WAS OVERJOYED. THE IRONY of his redeployment was not lost on him. Back at Langley he had originally been assigned to the 43rd after graduating from Advanced Flight School. But the unit’s heavy bombers were slow to arrive in Virginia, and in the interim he had been ordered to Ohio to test-fly the new B-26s. By the time he returned to Langley, the 43rd had been officially activated, or “stood up,” but because of Jay’s experience with Marauders he had been folded into the 22nd.
While he had flown west with his new Group, the 43rd had taken up its own submarine screening missions along the New England coastline and, later, in the Panama Canal Zone. But Jay had always missed the B-17 Group. Even the acronym formed from the outfit’s motto—“Willing, Able, Ready”—resonated with Jay’s desire for combat in a Flying Fortress. Now he was back with the Bomb Group and his anticipation ran high.
