Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  Then it hit like a cartoon lightbulb going on over his head. He double-checked the wind’s direction to be certain. Sure enough, Mount Tavurvur, the active volcano abutting the harbor, was emitting a stream of hot air blowing northwest and clearing a passage. That’s why he could see Kavieng protruding from the weather mass. He also realized that the same vaporous corridor would keep the airspace clear directly over the harbor if he could only get below the medium cloud cover.

  Jay conferred with his navigator, who plotted a course to swing around and approach Rabaul from the north. As they neared New Britain’s coastline Jay eased back his throttles and descended slowly into the cloud bank. Aside from the navigator, the rest of the crewmen were bewildered; they were aware of the command not to go low. Yet a few moments later the Fortress popped out of the soup at 8,000 feet on the north edge of the harbor. Visibility, Jay wrote, “was clear as a bell.”

  Jay oriented his position using the two volcanic rocks encrusted by razor-sharp kunai grass that protruded from the middle of the harbor like enormous stelae. American pilots had nicknamed them the “beehives,” and they were all that remained of an indigenous enclave that had disappeared beneath the water during a volcanic eruption six years earlier. In the opening weeks of the war the rocks had occasionally been mistaken for enemy ships and erroneously bombed during night missions over Rabaul. Most American Airmen, including Jay, now knew better. Off his port side, perhaps a mile east and safeguarding the entrance to Blanche Bay like a menacing sentry, the squat, gaping crater of Mount Tavurvur belched plumes of gas and steam.

  The photographer clicked away as the bombardier marked 110 vessels beneath them, from cruisers to destroyers to scores of cargo ships lining the wharves and jetties. Anti-aircraft gunners on the vessels opened up within seconds—it seemed as if every ship was firing at them—and the gauntlet of exploding shells shaded the sky outside the cockpit with a Bosch-like tapestry of ugly black smoke. Then the waist gunner’s voice crackled over the interphone: “Zeros above.”

  The top turret gunner counted 16 Zekes circling like vultures. Jay pushed forward into a paint-peeling dive so hard and steep that the suction ripped the belly gunner’s hatch off its hinges. The descent took the aircraft through even thicker ack-ack, but Jay felt as if they were safe for the moment. The enemy fighters, he knew, would not follow him into that hellspout. He also understood that shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells exploded outward and upward, so he needed to get below those detonations before the enemy gunners had a chance to recalibrate their aim. Once closer to the deck, he leveled off at 3,000 feet so his photographer could get the last of the pictures he needed.

  When the photographer reported his mission accomplished, Jay sent the B-17 screaming south over the harbor, shoving all four throttles wide open and throwing the plane into a series of violent S-turns at 300 miles per hour. Not only were the Japanese ships firing at will, it seemed as if every shore battery had turned its guns on them. But the bomber was losing altitude faster than the gunners could wheel their sights. After two minutes “that seemed more like two hours,” Jay again leveled the aircraft. At this the anti-aircraft operators ceased fire to allow the Zeros to attack.

  As the Fortress neared the southern end of Simpson Harbour, Jay’s tail gunner reported three Zekes closing fast. Jay kicked the rudder hard, hurtling the bomber into a vicious midair skid to one side, and then to the other, at the same time the three bogeys dived. Streams of pink tracers flashed outside his cockpit windows.

  Jay banked the plane right and his port waist gunner flamed the closest fighter out of the sky. Then he banked hard left and his starboard waist gunner blew the tail off a second. As the third Zeke swooped in from above and behind, two rivulets of .50-caliber machine-gun fire from the top turret gunner and the tail gunner converged on the fighter’s fuselage. The Zero did not so much blow up as disintegrate. The crew barely had time to see the aircraft’s remnants swirl into the sea before Jay pointed the bomber toward a lone cumulus cloud a few miles south of the harbor.

  Some pilots might have thrown their aircraft into a steep climb to make for the wispier cloud bank almost directly above them, the same bank through which they had descended. But Jay knew that if he tried to duck into that bluish-gray altostratus sheet, the Japanese fighters would be able to spot his shadow while he remained blind to their whereabouts. Instead he reached the fat cumulus cloud and vanished into its Rembrandt gloom. He spent the next 50 miles jumping from one dark cloud to another until the remaining Zeros finally turned back.

  Ken McCullar had taught Jay well, but the day’s adventures were hardly over. In that morning’s briefing the American crews had been told that the airstrip at Buna had been captured by Allied ground forces. When Jay’s B-17 neared Buna he lined the plane up with the airstrip in order to offer a congratulatory flyover. Suddenly, however, his bombardier screamed over the interphone that there were eight Zeros below strafing the American and Australian troops. Within moments the Japanese spotted the lone “Boeing” and peeled away to attack.

  Jay was unaware that his belly gunner had squeezed back into his now hatchless station, and dived for the trees to protect his underside. The tops of most of the coconut palms had been blown off by naval gunfire during the previous weeks of fighting, but their gnarled and sickly trunks would at least keep the fighters from getting under him. The ensuing dogfight was waged only several feet above the ground, with the wash from the bomber’s props creating a vacuum that lifted huge whirlpools of earth and gravel, which eddied behind the plane in smoky vortexes.

  On the enemy’s first pass Jay’s tail gunner scored a direct hit, blowing the engine cowling and wings off a trailing Zeke. The fighter’s fuselage spun languidly, as if in slow motion, before its fuel tanks exploded, salting the Solomon Sea with a million shards of glass, metal, and flesh. Jay’s entire crew “whooped like Dodger fans.”I

  Their cries faded when they spotted two more bogeys racing to overtake them in order to execute a sort of midair pincer movement. Jay caught the glint of one Zero on his port side; his copilot reported the other to starboard. Jay assumed that they were trying to get out in front of him before turning for a coordinated head-on attack. He dived his plane even lower while speeding through and around a dragon’s back of low-lying hills. The maneuver threw off the pursuit enough for Jay to notice that the enemy pilots were now out of sync—the Zeke on his left had fallen perhaps 30 seconds behind the plane to the right.

  When the lead Zero finally overtook him and turned to attack, Jay wheeled the Fortress on its left wing and lunged straight into him as his nose gunners opened up. Jay and the Japanese pilot found themselves playing a high-speed game of chicken. The Japanese pulled up first, and as he swooped above the bomber the top turret gunner raked his exposed belly with his .50-cals. The fighter plane exploded in a bright orange ball of aviation-fuel flames.

  Handling his aircraft “like a peashooter,” Jay now rolled his bomber directly toward the lagging Zero. Again he found himself on a collision course. Again the Japanese pilot pulled up. Again his machine gunners flamed the bogey. The fighter plane hit the water in a vicious spin. At this the remaining five Zekes, probably running low on fuel and ammunition, peeled north and disappeared over the horizon. Not until Jay’s B-17 landed hard at Port Moresby did its crew realize one of its front tires had been shredded by machine-gun fire that had punctured the fuselage.

  For their actions that day Jay and the entire crew were awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest award for valor. Not everyone was thrilled. As the turret gunner recorded after Jay put the plane down, “I got out, went up to the pilot, asked his name, and told him I wasn’t ever going to fly with him again.” More important was the lesson Jay took away from the running gunfights. If his final flight with Ken McCullar had served as his graduation ceremony, this photo run had been something of an awakening, like the first day at a new job. “That mission,” he wrote, “instead of scaring our crew, made us really believe
that we would never get into a situation where there wasn’t some way out. I believe other crews developed the same feeling.”

  It was a wonderful thought to carry through Christmas and the new year. Twelve months of desperate fighting, however, had provided ample evidence that a flight crew’s esprit de corps—or its honor or loyalty or kindness or obedience or fortitude or any of the other virtues Jay had sworn to uphold as a Boy Scout—often counted for little in a combat zone. Sometimes it all came down to luck. A few weeks later, on the fifth day of 1943, Gen. Ken Walker’s ran out.

  * * *

  I After years of futility, the Brooklyn Dodgers had won the National League championship in 1941, sending the borough into a frenzy. Alas, the infamous ball dropped by Mickey Owen contributed to “da Bums’ ” loss to the New York Yankees in the World Series.

  16

  THE MISSING GENERAL

  BY ANY METRIC, DECEMBER 1942 was a vast improvement on the Allies’ plight of a year earlier in the devastating and confusing aftermath of what President Roosevelt called the “dastardly and unprovoked” attack on Pearl Harbor. Still, even after their debacle at Midway the Japanese retained the upper hand throughout the Southwest Pacific. And with Rabaul as a virtual Tintagel from which to launch landings on New Guinea—as the enemy did in mid-month, at Wewak and Madang, where airdromes sprouted immediately—they could hardly be viewed as giving ground. Imperial troops also continued to ramify south, establishing firmer footholds in the upper Solomon Islands of New Georgia and Bougainville.

  The enemy’s seeming superiority on paper, however, masked the fact that between the Allied counterattacks at Guadalcanal and Buna, Japan had also lost more than 30,000 troops killed and tens of thousands wounded, a dispiriting sacrifice. The war in the Southwest Pacific Theater was close to becoming one of attrition for the Japanese. Vice Adm. Nobutake Kondo, second in importance only to Adm. Yamamoto in the Imperial Navy, appeared to admit as much when, noting the setbacks, he wrote that if the Americans continued to press their accumulating advantages “enemy air attacks consequently would result in sacrificing our important striking force which could hardly be supplemented afterward.” Or, as another aide to Yamamoto put it more succinctly, Japan’s ambitions for rapid and total conquest throughout the theater “have all scattered like dreams.”

  Perhaps it was this growing sense of confidence that led Gen. Ken Walker to begin accompanying his bomber crews on more and more raids. After all, the recent Japanese setbacks had shifted the initiative for Allied operations in the Pacific from a purely defensive posture into at least a limited offensive mind-set. And if future plans included taking back more and more territory from the enemy, its precious airbases in particular, Walker was just the sort of general officer who would want to be in the van. This attitude, however, did not sit well with Gen. Kenney.

  As far back as October a Fortress in which Walker was flying as an observer had taken heavy flak during a raid on Lae. Kenney had warned his bomber commander then that he did not want him going up on any more combat missions. He was too important to lose.I But when Walker blithely ignored what he considered his superior’s “suggestion,” Kenney made it official, ordering him in November to stand down.

  Whether Walker’s continued disobedience stemmed from arrogance, an inflated sense of his own infallibility, or even his long-held belief that it was only fair play to confront the same danger as his aircrews—there is ample evidence to suggest it was a combination of all three—he continued to fly without informing Kenney. The situation came to a head early in the new year when Kenney, having rolled his wooden dice and watched them come up six-one, ordered Walker to plan an “all-out attack” against yet another convoy assembling in Simpson Harbour. The raid, on Kenney’s instructions, was to take place at daybreak on January 5.

  There were problems from the start. Despite the proven success of the 43rd’s skip-bombing missions, Walker remained a vociferous proponent of high-altitude bombing. Like a stubborn dog worrying a bone, he decided that the only way to fulfill Kenney’s mandate for an “all-out attack” on Rabaul was from 8,000 to 10,000 feet. In other words, no skip bombing. The timing of the raid also bothered him. In order to reach the target at Kenney’s prescribed dawn hour, his bombers would have to take flight soon after midnight. He feared that the darkness would play havoc with the aircraft attempting to rendezvous into formation once they had cleared the Owen Stanley Range.

  To that end Walker asked that the time of the raid be delayed several hours, so that his planes would arrive over Rabaul at noon. Kenney denied the request. He knew that Japanese fighter planes patrolling the skies over the harbor were rarely in the sky at dawn. He would, he told Walker, rather risk a loose formation than the certain interceptors a midday strike would face. Incredibly, Walker decided to go ahead with a midday strike anyway.

  When Walker laid out his plans during an operational meeting, Bill Benn became angry. A daylight raid, he argued, was tantamount to being led to slaughter. The next day Benn discovered that his 63rd Squadron had been excluded from the mission. This was more than odd. Not only had the 63rd racked up a stellar combat record, but what kind of major attack could Walker be carrying out without employing every serviceable bomber at his disposal? It is likely that Walker was afraid that Benn would use his personal pipeline to Kenney to voice his objections. For their part, Benn and his Airmen—including Jay, who was scheduled to copilot one of the 63rd’s bombers—blamed Walker’s vindictiveness.

  From this inauspicious beginning the situation deteriorated. On the day of the mission, heavy storms over the theater grounded several bombers scheduled to take part in the raid. Three of the 90th Bombardment Group’s four squadrons of B-24 Liberators, which had been rotated back to Australian bases as a safety precaution, found themselves socked in by bad weather. Also scratched were a scattering of Fortresses that had relocated to Queensland bases for maintenance. With Benn’s squadron inexplicably grounded, this left Walker with a grand total of 12 planes at Port Moresby—six B-24s and six B-17s from the 64th Squadron. Hardly enough to constitute Kenney’s “all-out attack.”

  In a final show of either disrespect, frustration, or insane bravado, at eight a.m. on January 5, Walker hoisted himself into the hatch of a Fortress nicknamed the San Antonio Rose piloted by the 64th’s executive officer, Lt. Col. Jack Bleasdale, and flew off for New Britain. Four hours later, under a blindingly sunny sky, the faster Liberators were the first to reach Rabaul. Anti-aircraft batteries erupted and screens of Zeros buzzed as the B-24s selected their targets, dropped their bombs from 8,000 feet, and turned to hightail it home.

  When the 64th’s B-17 formation arrived over Simpson Harbour less than ten minutes later, legions of Japanese fighter planes awaited them. Five of the six Fortresses managed to scope their targets and drop their payloads as the Zekes attacked from all angles. The last anyone saw of the sixth aircraft, the San Antonio Rose, it was trailing smoke from the left outboard engine, losing altitude, and racing east toward a far-off cloud bank with between 15 and 20 Zekes swarming after it like a ravage of gnats. It never sent out a radio message.

  Later that afternoon, back at Port Moresby, everyone waited anxiously until it became apparent that the San Antonio Rose and Gen. Walker were not returning. Eleven of the 12 bombers had made it home to Jackson Airfield with only minor damage, their crews suffering barely more than scratches. The mission’s combined After-Action reports claimed ten vessels bombed to varying degrees, and seven Zeros destroyed. This technically constituted a success, but all knew better. The enemy convoy had hardly been nicked, and the Southwest Pacific Theater’s bomber commander was missing.II

  When Kenney discovered that Walker had disobeyed not one but two direct orders, he was livid. Yet his anger was tempered by anxiety, and he ordered a vast grid search in the hope of locating his bomber commander, or at least the wreckage of his plane. In a fitting if depressing coda, four of the search planes sent out after the San Antonio Rose never returned, and n
othing connected to the aircraft was ever discovered.

  It was War Department policy not to declare a missing Airman killed in action until he had been lost for 13 months. But Kenney knew better. The general, who had been prepared to punish Walker’s insubordination with an official reprimand, instead heeded the sage advice that would later be uttered by the Marine Corps’ revered Gen. Lewis “Chesty” Puller: “There is only a hairline’s difference between a Navy Cross and a general court-martial.” He put Walker up for the Medal of Honor. MacArthur approved Kenney’s recommendation, and two months later President Roosevelt presented the nation’s highest wartime honor posthumously to Walker’s two surviving sons.III

  Up at Port Moresby, the death of such a popular general overcame any lingering anger felt by the members of Maj. Benn’s 63rd Squadron. That night Jay entered a somber single sentence in his diary: “Today we lost a good officer, and a better man.”

  Two days later, in retaliation for Walker’s raid on Rabaul, the Japanese blasted Port Moresby with a bombing run carried out by an armada of 104 aircraft. It was, his subordinates reported to Kenney, an all-out attack.

  * * *

  I In a touch of irony, Kenney had been chastised by MacArthur back in August for doing precisely the same thing, after Kenney had personally scouted a site for a new airfield inland from Buna from a bomber that flew 100 feet off the ground.

  II Years later, researchers combing through Imperial Japanese Navy war records confirmed Gen. Kenney’s prescience. The convoy Kenney had ordered “taken out” with a dawn attack had in fact sailed from Simpson Harbour two hours before Walker’s formation reached Rabaul.