Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  Prioritizing these efforts required continual face-to-face interactions with his commanders on the ground, and Kenney became such a frequent flier between Australia and New Guinea that every day two lunch tables were set for him, one in Brisbane and one in Port Moresby. His memories of flying missions over Western Europe during World War I were never far from his mind. During his shuttles to and from the front lines he could not help noticing that while his bullet-catching air squadrons were being commanded by green captains and even greener lieutenants, MacArthur’s desk jockeys back in Brisbane were displaying enough stars, bars, and fruit salad to stock a commissary. He remedied this by wrangling from the Supreme Commander the authority to hand out decorations up to and including the Distinguished Service Cross without having to go through MacArthur or his staff.

  “Our only excuse for living was to help them,” Kenney wrote of the “youngsters” who were actually fighting the war. “The payoff would be Jap ships sunk and Jap planes shot down. As far as I was concerned, the ones accomplishing that job were going to get top priority on everything.”

  He was true to his word: a rash of field promotions and combat-ribbon awards ensued, and even maintenance crew chiefs were presented with wristwatches, donated by Arde Bulova himself, for keeping their planes in the air.

  The food, however, never got any better.

  12

  A MICROSCOPIC METROPOLIS

  THE JAPANESE RETREAT OVER THE Owen Stanley Range and back to Buna proved both a psychological and a tactical victory. The setback, however minor, was the first land defeat the Empire had suffered since the war began. Perhaps more important, the Americans now considered Port Moresby secure enough to permanently house B-17s. Among the initial planes to arrive in September 1942 for one-week “cycles” was a heavy-bomber squadron from the 43rd Bomb Group. Accompanying it was Capt. Jay Zeamer.

  Although Port Moresby was the capital of Papua New Guinea, its prewar population had barely topped 4,500, divided between a small band of hardy Australian and European copra and rubber traders living near the snug little harbor and a larger contingent of indigenous Papuans hunting wild pigs and farming small plots of pawpaw and yams in outlying villages composed of thatched bamboo huts built on stilts six feet off the ground. The traders had since been evacuated by military order, and to the arriving American Airmen their new base seemed an alien world. In Australia the Yanks had split their deployments between coastal enclaves such as Townsville, surrounded by a fertile and temperate plain; and, beyond the low, rugged Queensland mountains, the vast inland area known as the “outback.” The palettes in this hot, bone-dry environment ran to rusty ochers, dull umbers, and smoky taupes—with the occasional ruddy glow of a blood-orange sunset shattering the dusty monotony. It was no wonder that the rum sights, sounds, and aromas of New Guinea were guaranteed to confound the Americans, whose conception of the mysterious South Pacific might have been formed by equal parts King Kong and Dorothy Lamour.

  More than 40 species of birds-of-paradise wandered Port Moresby’s outlying rain forest, their honeyed whistles combining with the scraggly carillon cries of dazzling companies of hookbill parrots to produce a sound track melodic enough for one of Lamour’s “Sarong Girl” pictures. Amid this cacophony seemingly endless flocks of magnificent birdwing butterflies flitted between the twining branches of towering fig trees, their pink-and-white canopies shading groves of scarlet orchids. And the native Papuan women sported more color than most Americans were accustomed to seeing on their girls back home. They used a mixture of berries and betel nuts to dye their hair and clothes in an electric mélange of greens, blues, purples, and reds, while their teeth glowed scarlet from betel nut juice. At first glance nothing was missing but hurricanes, tidal waves, and headhunting cannibals (some of whom, in fact, still practiced anthropophagy, mostly for revenge, in remote corners of the bush).

  Jay was familiar with the base from his staging and refueling stops while he was flying with the 22nd, and he cautioned his new mates in the 43rd not to be fooled by the exotic if superficial beauty of Port Moresby’s blooming frangipani and hibiscus, its dazzling waterfalls, its frolicking tree kangaroos and fuzzy-eared koalas that resembled nothing so much as plush toys. They were, he told them, about to stake billet in a mosquito-infested hellmouth that was encompassed on three sides by malarial jungle, and where the main dirt road dead-ended at the edge of a leech-infested swamp crawling with crocodiles and deadly snakes. The entire coast, he added, was a humid inferno alternately baked by the parching sun—“it was like walking into a shower with all your clothes on,” wrote one Fortress pilot—or scoured by walls of wind-driven rain that could split rocks. It was the kind of heat, Jay knew, that could melt reality into unfamiliar shapes, and it was not for nothing that a melancholy English navigator had christened the waters that flanked Port Moresby’s jug-handle harbor Caution Bay and Bootless Inlet.

  Clouds of mosquitoes competed with hordes of black flies for insect primacy. The crunching of their dead husks underfoot after the nightly DDT spraying reminded some Airmen of the sound of walking on popcorn in a filthy movie theater. The base’s “Diggers,” as the Aussie soldiers had been known for at least a century, taught the Yanks how to rig the mosquito tenting over their cots “as tightly and handsomely and complexly as a three-master under full sail,” as one war correspondent put it. Still, there was no escaping the “New Guinea Salute”—the constant gesture of brushing away the hovering swarms of biting and stinging pests. It was not unusual for a single swipe of the hand to kill three or four insects, and at one point over a third of the 43rd’s aircrews were hospitalized with either malaria, beriberi, or dengue fever, a particularly pernicious viral disease characterized by fever, debilitating joint pain, skin rash, and searing headaches. Disease ran so rampant at Port Moresby that the Americans soon nicknamed the base “Death Valley.”

  After the 43rd’s forward echelon settled in, Jay was officially posted to the Group’s Headquarters Squadron as a “supernumerary” to the intelligence staff. He was also unofficially instructed to begin roaming among the bomber crews as a “pilot-at-large,” filling in for fliers grounded by injury or illness. Given the attrition rate, Jay found plenty of work among the patchwork crews, usually flying as either copilot or flight engineer, but in a few cases commanding one of the Group’s B-17s. Although construction had begun on at least five more airdromes around the town, Port Moresby’s primary airstrips remained the two Kenney had visited months earlier, Kila Kila and Seven Mile. Both were still in deplorable condition, with the latter proving particularly problematic for the 43rd’s bomber pilots.

  The searing equatorial sun baked the runways so dry that billowing eddies of sand kicked up by the propellers blinded pilots taking off and landing, engulfing their windshields like great, amorphous tumbleweeds. And when it rained, as it did almost daily for a good half of the year, many a skipper fought to avoid skidding off the slick, muddy track and into the mangrove swamps that lined the coast. More ominously for American fliers trained on the flat, forgiving surfaces of spacious runways back in the States, the foreboding Owen Stanley Range rose only a few miles from the end of Seven Mile, shouldering the near horizon like a natural backboard.

  About a third of the way up the steepening slopes, the lowland rain forest gave way to a thick tanglewood of oak, beech, and red cedar before it abruptly ended at the tree line in what must have appeared to the Airmen as a precipitous blade of granite peaks soaring to 13,000 feet—if they could see them at all, for these jagged declivities were almost invariably hidden by thick clouds and luminous swirling mists. Though Australian cartographers had mapped the few passes bisecting the towering mountaintops, rare was the day when the clouds parted long enough for a pilot to actually see where he was flying, and this lack of visibility forced all but the luckiest navigators to rely entirely on instruments when negotiating the heights. The crew would go dead silent as a pilot listened to the sound of radio beam signals bouncing off the mountains to m
ake his bearings—“flying on the beam,” this was called, and it was at times more harrowing than the idea of any enemy gunfire.

  Prior to the 43rd’s arrival, Port Moresby had been occupied by a small Royal Australian Air Force contingent and maintained by a skeleton staff of ground crews. So primitive were the conditions that these men were often forced to chase loitering wallabies from the runways before takeoffs and landings. Aside from a refueling depot and staging area between the Australian mainland and Japanese targets farther north, the base had been used by the Americans primarily as an emergency landing site for disabled planes or flights socked in by weather. Bombers like the Townsville-based Marauders of Jay’s former 22nd Group would put down at Port Moresby and, while flight crews scrambled to roll out 55-gallon drums of high-octane aviation fuel to hand-pump into the tanks, their pilots would scan the sky with engines idling. Since the Japanese bombed the port almost daily, these “top-offs” were performed with alacrity.

  Now, with American Airmen moving in permanently, Navy Seabees overseeing a company of African-American stevedores arrived to grade and extend Seven Mile—soon to be renamed Jackson Field in honor of an RAAF fighter pilot killed the previous April. Incredibly, with Australian cities such as Darwin being bombed with regularity and a Japanese invasion looming just over the northern horizon, the Australian government continued to hew to the maintenance of a “white Australia” policy.

  As the U.S. Army Air Force Historical Study No. 9 noted (somewhat matter-of-factly), “The establishment of barriers against the immigration of black, brown, and yellow races has received the support of all [Australian] political parties, and could not be ignored by American military authorities.” This law was in fact responsible for barring two “Negro” companies of the U.S. Army’s 31st Truck Battalion from entering the country, and it was only the personal intervention of President Roosevelt that calmed the racial storm.

  Yet even the American president was forced to accept a caveat stating that in exchange for the Australian government’s permission to admit the urgently required “colored troops,” they were to be withdrawn immediately after they were no longer needed. To the African-American stevedores, it must have appeared much ado about nothing, as after they installed interlocking steel planking known as Marsden matting over the rough dirt and brown grass of Jackson Airfield, their work came to little avail. Despite the metal overlay, nature prevailed, and the strip remained as dangerous as ever to navigate. Even a third parallel runway built by the construction crews was, in Jay’s words, “a tire swallower. As sandy as a beach or as mucky as a swamp depending on the weather.”

  Many of the rickety white and yellow wooden houses that overlooked Port Moresby’s tiny harbor still stood—albeit with most of their windows blown out from explosive concussions. However, the military “bases” that rose farther inland on the coastal lowland were bombed-out shells. Since capturing Rabaul the Japanese had, with impunity, launched continual air raids on the town, attacks that proliferated with the taking of Lae and Salamaua. During the month of May alone Jackson Field withstood no fewer than 21 separate attacks. During these assaults scores of enemy bombers dropped their loads against minimal resistance. Zeros swooped in to strafe at all hours of the day and the enemy’s own version of flying-boat seaplanes, reconfigured to carry earthshaking 2,000-pound bombs in their large fuselages, were a continuing presence in the skies above.

  After each attack, work crews would fill the bomb craters with non-compacted gravel, sand, and earth to create a soft, dry mush that proved a further hindrance to the sinking wheels of a fuel-and-bomb-laden B-17. One of Jay’s fellow pilots recalled, “A number of times we had to take off downwind and we’d clip grass for a mile or more getting the wheels up and bleeding up the flaps before we really could figure we were flying. Nothing like a good thrill first thing—why wait to get to the target?”

  Jay had never seen it happen, but he heard credible stories about Japanese pilots on bombing runs also releasing bundles of letters written by Australian POWs at Rabaul. These communications, though certainly comforting to forlorn families back home wondering if their sons, husbands, and fathers were still alive, had no impact on the Australian veterans of the fighting, particularly those who had hidden out in the jungles of New Britain before making their escape. They had witnessed Japanese atrocities firsthand, and a few handwritten notes dropped from the sky were certainly not enough to put them in a forgiving mood.

  The Japanese, after all, could afford such magnanimous gestures. Their bombing runs over Port Moresby had destroyed every permanent structure around the airstrips, leaving the Americans to make do with storehouses and all manner of huts thrown together by native “camp servants” paid in forks and spoons, the occasional ax, and even an aircraft’s broken engine rods, from which they fashioned hunting spears. These shacks—which served as headquarters, operations, and intelligence centers—were constructed of jungle grass and rough planking that rotted and mildewed within weeks. In a dubious attempt to hide their aircraft the Americans were forced to construct palm-frond revetments, as flimsy as they were obvious.

  There was no electricity except in the mess hall, which finally had a concrete floor thanks to General Kenney. And a filthy tent city that served as the men’s living quarters sprouted like green-tarp mushrooms around this motley collection of edifices. Latrines consisted of a long trench on the base’s outskirts or, for bowel movements, a walk to the jungle with a spade or a shovel. One of the 43rd’s pilots recalled another officer from his squadron initiating a letter-writing campaign, with each Airman imploring his family back home to send cedar chips to offset the stench. “When those packages finally started to arrive it was like living in a huge hope chest,” he said. “But at least it masked the vile smell.”

  Amid this desolation and devastation one makeshift building shone like a beacon. The RAAF officers club—dubbed the “Oasis”—had been erected far enough away from the Kila Kila airfield to have escaped the Japanese bombs. The Australian Airmen welcomed their American counterparts, and by the dim light behind blackout curtains the two groups sang familiar songs and clinked pints of beer and the occasional whiskey glass if a bottle or two happened to be in stock. The Yanks taught their hosts the words to “The Whiffenpoof Song” (“We’re little black lambs who have gone astray . . .”) and the Aussies were fond of “Waltzing Matilda.” Both sides knew the words to “Bless ’Em All” (“the long and the short and the tall . . .”) by heart.

  Many of the Australian fliers had fought with the Royal Air Force over England and the Channel before trading in their Spitfires and Hurricanes for Airacobras and Kittyhawks when the war lapped onto their own country’s shore. Jay found them a reticent group, more reserved and “decorous and old-school” than the Australians he had encountered back in Townsville. Their voices betrayed a world-weariness that he decided was only natural. Jay understood that these men had experienced years of war on both sides of the globe, and their officers club was where they reluctantly counted heads, where the man you drank with one night might not be there the next.

  Port Moresby may have been a town built on mud and wrath, but every man stationed there recognized that it remained the Allies’ last stronghold in the Southwest Pacific. And though the enemy may have been defeated on the Kokoda Track, just across the Owen Stanleys still stood thousands of Japanese troops receiving regular supplies and reinforcements from Rabaul. Despite Port Moresby’s isolation, both the American and the Japanese high commands recognized its strategic importance. A “microscopic metropolis,” the correspondent John Lardner called it, “standing in bold relief on the map of the world at war.”

  To Gen. MacArthur, the “microscopic” Port Moresby was the springboard from which he would sweep the Japanese out of northern New Guinea and then from the entire Southwest Pacific. For its part, Imperial General Headquarters viewed the Allied presence in southern New Guinea as the final impediment to Japan’s invasion of Australia. War strategists in Tok
yo calculated that their forces were capable of launching amphibious operations in the area up to a maximum of 500 miles. This was the distance not only between Rabaul and Port Moresby, but also between Port Moresby and the most suitable invasion site on Australia’s northeast coast, near the city of Cairns. It was obvious to the Allies that the constant air attacks on Port Moresby were a precursor to another ground invasion by the Japanese.

  Making matters worse, Port Moresby lacked any significant radar installations. The only two stations up and running were severely lacking in range and had multiple blind spots, and, of course, spare parts were in short supply when the machinery inevitably broke down. This made the base’s early warning air raid system extremely primitive, since it relied almost entirely on radio reports from Australian coastwatchers camped in the bush on the other side of the mountains. Given the range’s near-constant cloud cover and thick rain squalls, these lonely lookouts could scarcely be counted on to spot every enemy formation heading south. Japanese planes were often atop the Americans well before the red flag could be raised over the crude Operation Tower constructed of logs.

  Jay and the rest learned soon enough that seconds after the three rifle-shot signals fired by the air raid sentry echoed through the camp, every crew had best rush its plane aloft lest the aircraft be turned into smoldering hunks of metal or chopped to pieces by Japanese fragmentation bombs. “Daisy Cutters,” the Americans’ term for this frightening ordnance, sent scores of jagged shards of metal whizzing through the air at eye level. Some thought the enemy bombs, spinning as they dropped, sounded like a piercing whirlybird. To others it was a shrill whistle. In either case, if a man heard those terrifying sounds, it was probably too late.