by Bob Drury
Four-engine bombers like the Flying Fortress and, later, the B-24 Liberator—which the Airmen dubbed the “Big Boxcars”—would prove the only aircraft capable of reaching targets in the Pacific Theater that the Japanese assumed were beyond America’s range. In an effort to attack Japanese installations even farther afield, the Allies’ plan was for several of the 43rd’s squadrons to eventually be housed at Port Moresby. For now, however, with Port Moresby so close to enemy airbases and so lightly defended, the risk to the Bomb Group was too great. Gen. MacArthur understood that his first priority was to secure Port Moresby.
To that end, the War Department was finally forced to confront the fact that it could not allow the feud between Gen. MacArthur and Gen. Brett to continue. The sniping between the Southwest Pacific’s Supreme Commander and his top Airman had become more vociferous in the months since MacArthur’s arrival, and so it was that in the summer of 1942, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Marshall consented, fairly or not, to MacArthur’s fevered demands to dismiss Gen. Brett. As Brett’s successor was later to admit, “[Brett] had not had much to work with, and his luck had been mostly bad.” But as military leaders since Napoleon had known, in war you make your own luck.
In the peculiar manner in which military organizations often operate, Gen. Brett was awarded a medal—a Silver Star for “gallantry in action,” pinned on by MacArthur himself—before being sacked. The next day Brett boarded a B-17 and, with his medal, flew from Australia for the final time. Within weeks he took up his up his new command as head of the Army Air Force’s Caribbean Defense Command, the ultimate backwater.
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I Jonathan Crowe’s Open Culture reports that Geisel was also a vocal proponent of the internment camps for Japanese-American citizens in the western United States during the war. Geisel’s racialist views took a 180-degree turn when he visited Hiroshima in 1953 and observed the aftermath of the atom bomb’s destruction. The following year, when his book Horton Hears a Who! appeared in print, it was dedicated to “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan,” and the narrative’s refrain is a pointed: “A person is a person no matter how small.”
II Even Divine’s apparent triumphs came with an asterisk. On June 9, two days after the successful conclusion to the Battle of Midway, a Texas congressman named Lyndon Baines Johnson used his political connections to wangle his way onto a bombing run over Lae as an observer. Johnson, a commissioned U.S. Navy officer who had persuaded President Roosevelt to send him on an inspection tour of the Pacific Theater, saw the raid as a means to burnish his combat résumé. But before the Marauder in which the future president was flying could reach its target the plane’s generator failed, forcing the pilot to turn back. MacArthur, no stranger to politics, nonetheless awarded the congressman the Silver Star, citing Johnson’s coolness under fire after his aircraft was intercepted by “eight hostile fighters.” Most of the 22nd’s Airmen at Garbutt Field knew the story was baloney, but Divine and the rest had little choice but to go along with the tale.
11
THE BULLDOG
FINDING GEN. BRETT’S REPLACEMENT WAS not easy. Few competent officers viewed the prospect of working under MacArthur as appealing. After Chief of Staff Marshall’s old friend and first choice, Gen. Frank Andrews, turned him down flat, Marshall submitted two candidates to the Supreme Commander. One was Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, by now famous worldwide for his raid on Tokyo and soon to receive the Medal of Honor for the bombing mission. But the last thing “Dugout Doug” needed in Australia was the spotlight shining on a man who had actually taken the fight to the enemy. And it is doubtful that Doolittle, headstrong himself, would have found the offer compelling. Instead he successfully lobbied for an assignment to the European front. Doolittle was placed with the nascent 8th Air Force, based in England, from where he was rapidly promoted to commanding general of the 12th Air Force, soon to be operating in North Africa.
This left the job under MacArthur open for a comparatively unknown 53-year-old general, George Churchill Kenney. It was a serendipitous selection. Like Jay Zeamer, Kenney had caught the aviation bug while studying engineering at M.I.T., in his case prior to World War I. When the United States entered combat in Europe in 1917, Kenney, again like Jay, wanted nothing so much as to fly. He got his wish when, after enlisting in the U.S. Signal Corps, he was assigned to a reconnaissance squadron of the newly formed Army Air Service that specialized in photo flights behind enemy lines. These were dangerous runs; Kenney flew 75 missions and was shot down twice, earning both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star.
Kenney’s combat experience gave him a keen sense of the chaos and uncertainty of war: and the fact that he was one of only four pilots from his unit to survive the conflict left a lasting impression regarding the importance of adequately training young men, many of them still in their teens, before sending them into actual combat. After the armistice, Kenney, by then a captain, opted to make the military a career. He proved both an able strategist and an innovative tactician, and as his star rose he acquired a reputation as an engineering wizard whose grasp of the new science of aeronautics was responsible for helping to modernize the Army’s aviation wing. In the early 1920s, while test-flying several versions of prototype bombers for the Air Service’s Engineering School, he not only studied how aircraft were actually built but immersed himself in the possibilities of modifying them to be more effective in combat.
He then went on to teach classes on low-altitude attack techniques at the premier military school for Airmen, the Air Corps Tactical School in Langley, Virginia, where he emphasized the destructiveness of forward-firing guns against a variety of targets. It was at the tactical school that he drafted and devised the concept of mounting two fixed .30-caliber machine guns on the wings of an old de Havilland bomber. His engineering background was also integral to the development of both the leakproof fuel tank and a bomb fuse that would explode ordnance in the air, showering a greater area with deadly shrapnel.
While experimenting with these tactical aeronautical improvements, Kenney also honed his reputation as a strategist. It was during a teaching stint at the Army’s War College that he published a groundbreaking paper, years ahead of its time, detailing how the service’s air wing should be composed and used. And during his 1940 deployment to France as a military observer he angered some of his superiors when he went on record predicting that the U.S. Air Corps “as presently constructed” would never compete “with the kind of war the Germans are going to have here.” Blunt opinions were typical of the man.
Kenney stood only five feet, five inches tall, which perhaps lent credence in some circles to a theory that his boundless energy was fueled by a Napoleon complex. Even George Churchill Kenney’s name swaggered, and relaxing with him, a colleague once noted, was an exhausting experience. Despite his relatively short stature he supercharged any room he entered with a Cagney-like energy. This aura was enhanced by his deep-set hushpuppy eyes and the jagged scar that ran across his teardrop chin, a vivid souvenir from one of the crash landings he barely survived.
Newspapermen and magazine writers consistently used terms such as “feisty,” “tenacious,” and—no doubt in homage to his protrusive lower lip—“bulldog” to describe Kenney in their dispatches. There is no evidence, however, that the general displayed any of the overly aggressive or domineering behavior commonly associated with the so-called short-man syndrome. At bottom, he was known throughout the service as an officer more concerned with the welfare and morale of his men than with his own advancement. In contrast to what had been predicted for Doolittle, Kenney would prove able to work with MacArthur.
By the time Kenney’s plane touched down in Australia on a cold winter day in late July, MacArthur had moved his headquarters from Melbourne to Brisbane. At their first face-to-face meeting, Kenney listened patiently as the Supreme Commander ranted for a good 30 minutes about Brett, Brett’s staff, and the overall sorry state of Allied airpower in the Pacific. The ineptitude
of the Allies’ airpower during the Battle of the Coral Sea was a particular grievance. When MacArthur was angry his voice could scour a stove, and he ended his tirade with one overriding demand. His highest expectation for Kenney, he said, was utter and complete loyalty to himself, Gen. MacArthur.
When it came Kenney’s turn to speak he assured the Supreme Commander that he recognized who was in charge and would certainly respect the chain of command—as long as, he added, the respect flowed both ways. “I didn’t ask to come out here,” he told MacArthur. “You asked for me. My gang is always loyal to me, and through me they will be loyal to you. You be loyal to me and my gang and make this fifty-fifty, or I’ll be calling you from San Francisco and telling you that I have quit.”
At this MacArthur rose slowly from his chair and walked around his desk. Kenney had no idea what to expect. At first the Supreme Commander’s face, a patrician mask, betrayed no hint of emotion. Then the corners of his famously downturned mouth rippled into a smile. As Kenney recalled in his diary, “He grinned and put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I think we are going to get along all right.’ ”
Kenney, reacting instinctively, had played to the general’s massive ego in order to thaw what the eminent naval historian Bruce Gamble describes as MacArthur’s “frosty shell of mistrust. Perhaps his small stature was a contributing factor, but it was probably Kenney’s infectious blend of intelligence and energy that won over the Supreme Commander.”
In either case, the new man in charge of MacArthur’s air force would need to put those qualities to work immediately. Before leaving the States, Kenney had been briefed by Gen. “Hap” Arnold not to expect much in the way of reinforcements. Arnold admitted to Kenney that the weight of America’s airpower was being dedicated to defeating Germany, and that he would have to make do with the 600 or so aircraft already in the Pacific Theater. He could expect no more. Now, on his first day on the job, Kenney also learned from his new boss of the enemy landings that had just occurred at Buna. True to his reputation, Kenney wasted no time and flew to Port Moresby the next morning. What he found there was an Allied force whose morale had hit rock bottom and which was convinced that New Guinea was lost.
During briefings at the Kila Kila airstrip, Kenney was dismayed by the poor if not crippled condition of so many Allied fighter planes—fewer than 50 of the 245 in-theater were combat ready. He stewed silently as frontline officers groused about the glacial pace of a supply line that had left them without spare parts. Similarly, he had no answer when a maintenance crew chief showed him an entire cabinet of requisition forms that had been rejected and returned because they contained minor filing errors. One mechanic even said that he and his crew were forced to bring filthy and nearly spent spark plugs to their tents each night to scrape them clean with pocketknives before plugging them back into aircraft engines at first light.
The Airmen, Kenney discovered, assumed that most of the parts and materials they requested were being shipped to the European Theater. At first the general suspected that the searing heat of previous months at Port Moresby had encouraged such fevered anxieties. In any case, even if he agreed with them, he dared not say so, but he made a mental note to look into the matter.
On a more personal level, Kenney was also appalled by the wretched food being served in the chow halls at Port Moresby. So many mess cups were encrusted with strange green algae that the Airmen had simply stopped washing them; the powdered milk tasted like liquid chalk; and the barely edible potatoes and rice were often rancid and contaminated with dead flies and rat droppings. So awful was this daily regimen that the men had begun to recall with fondness the cracker-dry Spam and baloney sandwiches served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the transports that had delivered them to Australia. As a result of the terrible food the troops were losing an average of 30 pounds each per combat tour, and the occasional delivery of a shipment of canned corned beef, the once-despised “corn willy,” was now treated as an occasion to celebrate.
Spirits fell even further with each Airmen brought down by malaria, dysentery, and the ulcerous cuts and scratches that the men simply called jungle rot. The daily rations of quinine were constantly running out, and the medical tent not only smelled like the inside of a leper but reverberated with a weird, scrofulous coughing, deep and percussive, as if something was trying to claw its way out of the chests of the patients splayed across the cots.
The shoddy state of the equipment, the lousy food, the rampant illness: it was no wonder, Kenney realized, that an eerie despondency had settled over the base. Even the poker games seemed listless.
His inspection of the new Seven Mile airfield was even more distressing. Kenney was astounded to learn that raids on Rabaul had been such haphazard affairs that no flight leader had ever been designated to guide a bombing formation because a combination of bad weather and the shoddy conditions of the planes had left the Airmen doubtful that they would even reach the target anyway. The general was also told that when attacking aircraft did manage to reach the Japanese stronghold, primary targets were never predetermined. Pilots and bombardiers merely dropped their ordnance helter-skelter.
Even the weather forecasting proved slack, with the Army’s aerologists providing stormfront predictions based on historical seasonal weather patterns in lieu of reconnaissance flights. More troubling, no one seemed to find anything amiss with this lack of organization. Perhaps, Kenney began to suspect, MacArthur’s analysis of his predecessor’s shortcomings was not so far off.
Kenney remained at Port Moresby all day listening to complaints and making notes. Before departing he ordered several quick fixes—each bombing mission would now be flown in formation with a lead pilot; primary targets and at least two backup targets would be designated beforehand; weather forecasts would be based on real-time analysis whenever possible. He also promised to untangle the kinks in the inefficient supply line that was keeping planes grounded.
Once back in Brisbane he signed an order relieving most of Brett’s “deadwood” generals of their assignments, and he instructed that refrigerators, mosquito screens, and sacks of cement to pave the mess halls’ dirt floors be immediately shipped to Port Moresby. Finally, in an effort to speed the movement of supplies, he also ordered the commanders of the Army Air Force supply depot in southern Australia, over 2,000 miles away from the front lines, to move their entire warehouse complex nearer to the continent’s north coast and begin releasing the spare parts they had been hoarding on the assumption that New Guinea would soon fall.
Kenney explained his thinking to a reporter, beginning with the admission, “The Jap is a hell of a tough boy.” Then he inserted a caveat. “But he’s best when he’s attacking. That’s why our cue is to attack him. The attacker always has the advantage of surprise, and the Jap has not got any crystal ball.”
Only then did Kenney approach MacArthur with his strategic vision. The two agreed that Rabaul would remain the Allies’ primary bombing target. That, however, was easier said than done. With the Japanese on the Kokoda Track knocking at Port Moresby’s back door, any raids on Rabaul would have to be made by Australian-based aircraft. Even when it was safe enough to restage and refuel at Port Moresby, this required allocating anywhere from one to two days to make a single run. Who knew when enemy aircraft might suddenly appear overhead?
Moreover, the two generals agreed that for the moment the Allies had more pressing concerns. The enemy landings at Buna would have to be repulsed. Or, as Kenney noted in his diary, “There was no use talking about playing across the street until we got the Nips off our front lawn.”
Within days Kenney had every aircraft at his disposal aloft over New Guinea. These planes bombed and strafed the enemy troops bogged down on the Kokoda Track from treetop level, and blasted the Japanese forces assembled on the beachheads near Buna. But what really turned the situation around was Kenney’s understanding that if the enemy was without food, ammunition, and reinforcements—without a supply stem—its assault could be st
opped cold. To that effect Fortresses and Liberators, Marauders and Mitchells, even A-20 Boston dive-bombers and old Australian Beauforts—screened by waves of American P-39 Airacobras, P-40 Warhawks, and Australian Beaufighters—darkened the skies over New Guinea’s north coast and the sea-lanes leading to Buna.
It was also Kenney’s groundbreaking masterstroke to employ the 43rd Bomb Group’s cargo planes as the first heavy military airlift in history. Kenney was aware that Germany had transported troops by air from Africa to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and before his arrival Down Under small contingents of mostly Australian infantry had been ferried to specific hot spots throughout the Southwest Pacific Theater. Six months earlier, for instance, the RAAF had commandeered commercial airliners to insert a company of 300 riflemen into the New Guinea bush to stop a Japanese advance.
But now, with no seagoing troop transports or cargo ships at his disposal, Kenney ordered nearly two regiments of American infantrymen flown to emergency strips hacked out of the pit-pit grass that grew wing-deep southeast of Buna. This flanking maneuver not only eased the pressure on the Aussies making a stand on the Kokoda Track, but allowed for safe perimeters to be established around Buna. Once these bases were secure the same cargo planes were put back into the air delivering tons of food, ammunition, artillery pieces, bulldozers, mules, and even a 250-bed hospital tent to the area. It was a move that turned the tide for those the general called “my youngsters up there.”
As Kenney’s grasp of the local terrain and the logistic hurdles it presented evolved, he rapidly discerned that the air forces under his command faced a fourfold task: negating the multiple Japanese air threats that emanated in an arc from northern New Guinea to the Bismarcks; harassing Japanese shipping both on the high seas and in Simpson Harbour; providing close air support for Allied ground troops striking enemy positions in New Guinea and the lower Solomons; and airlifting troops and supplies to wherever they were most needed at the moment. Quite often these multiple challenges appeared to loop back on themselves in a deadly parabola, as when he reasoned that bombing raids over the enemy airfields at Rabaul were in fact supporting the American offensive on Guadalcanal not only by destroying aircraft, but also by keeping the enemy “home” to defend the base.
