Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  However vigilant a reconnaissance pilot might be, fate, chance, and luck played an equally important part in any mission. It was a scout bomber crew blown off course that first spotted the Japanese construction of Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field. And in the run-up to the Battle of Midway, a Japanese reconnaissance pilot’s inexplicable failure to immediately report his sighting of the American Pacific Fleet—and an American recon flier’s nearly simultaneous alert that he had located the Combined Imperial Fleet—resulted in the time delay between strikes and counterstrikes that proved critical to the decisive outcome.

  In these recon Airmen, Jay recognized shards of himself, as if looking into a broken mirror. For their part, the men who flew reconnaissance missions were drawn to both Jay’s aggressive piloting and the play of his wits. It was only natural that, together with Joe and the navigator Rocky Stone with whom they had reconned Finschhafen, Jay began to invite certain Airmen with whom he felt such simpatico back to his tent “to shoot the breeze and hatch schemes to outsmart the Jap.”

  Jay rarely raised his voice during these bull sessions—“he always spoke as if he were quietly reading an essay in a classroom,” wrote an American war correspondent who sat in on some of the informal gatherings. Paramount in the lessons Jay strove to impart was his belief that teamwork among a flight crew could trump any obstacle. Quaint as that notion may have seemed even at the time, the group whom Jay had begun referring to as his “skeleton crew” lapped up his Tom Swift philosophy. Given his growing combat record, he was looked upon as the “Old Man” of the outfit. He was twenty-four years old.

  Like Jay, several of his new acolytes, notably the copilot Lt. Hank Dyminski, had seen combat since arriving in the Southwest Pacific. But there was one man among the group whose experiences trumped even Jay’s. The radio operator William “Willy” Vaughan was a shy 22-year-old with a jaw like a curbstone and a cool, penetrating gaze set off by a pair of eyebrows the size of fruit bats. Vaughan was a sphinx without a riddle during Jay’s informal chin-wags, preferring to sit quietly in a corner and listen and observe. His reticence belied the fact that he had been in-theater since the outbreak of the war and had over 200 hours of flight time under his belt.

  Like both Jay and Joe, Vaughan had grown up with a passion for airplanes. As a teenager he was a fixture around the flying fields of his hometown: Youngstown, Ohio. Neighbors recalled the young Willy constantly pestering the local pilots for a ride, and remembered him taking a quiet pleasure in discovering the mechanical aspects of any aircraft. Vaughan was a consummate tinkerer, something that Jay noticed straight off. The M.I.T. engineer who had rebuilt his own jalopy in high school could not help admiring the way Vaughan always seemed to be fooling with one gadget or another, usually an old radio, taking it apart and putting it back together just to learn how it worked.

  Vaughan had enlisted in the Air Corps three weeks before the attack on Pearl Harbor and had seen action at Corregidor, Java, and Singapore. He had also been a member of the flight crew that evacuated President Manuel Quezon from Manila to Australia just before the Japanese captured the Philippines capital. Unlike MacArthur, Quezon had not been too proud to jump onto an old Flying Fortress to flee the Imperial Army’s advance.

  But buried in the radioman’s combat history there was another, more compelling story that caught Jay’s attention. The giveaway was the angry scar that ran down the right side of Willy Vaughan’s neck.

  Six months earlier Vaughan had been part of the advance air echelon flown in to assist the American and Australian infantry defending against the Japanese landings at Milne Bay. During the height of the fighting Vaughan’s bomber squadron had put down to refuel at a primitive forward airstrip and come under heavy shelling. Before they could hand-pump enough aviation fuel into their tanks they were ambushed by a force of 500 Japanese soldiers and Imperial Marines. The American fliers detached their .30- and .50-caliber machine guns from their gun mounts, holstered their sidearms, and set up a defensive perimeter. They held off the assault for more than 10 hours. Finally, with both sides running out of ammunition, the fight devolved into hand-to-hand combat.

  Vaughan had already shot close to a dozen Japanese—the last two with the final bullets from his .45-caliber—when an enemy soldier charged at him. He ducked to avoid a bayonet thrust to his face, and the blade sliced his neck. He swiveled and killed his attacker with his jungle knife. He also knifed to death an Imperial Marine just as Australian reinforcements arrived and drove the Japanese back into the bush.

  After the episode, Vaughan was promoted to technical sergeant and awarded a Silver Star for his actions. Jay was in awe of the quiet radio operator’s sand. He did not anticipate many knife fights at 20,000 feet, but if on the off chance one occurred, he wanted Willy Vaughan by his side.

  Another rough character drawn to Jay’s inner circle was the suave, mustachioed George Kendrick, also a technical sergeant. Kendrick had been a champion swimmer back in his home state, California, and since deploying to Port Moresby as a waist gunner he had also become one of the 43rd’s new bomber recon outfit’s most decorated camera operators, always volunteering his services when one of Maj. Polifka’s Eight Ballers came calling. Jay came to think of him as “the screwball of the crew,” yet Kendrick was as hard as a sandbag and considered himself something of a cowboy.

  The B-17s beginning to emerge from Boeing’s manufacturing plants had staggered waist-gun windows, but in the spring of 1943 the stations in the 43rd Bomb Group’s Fortresses were still positioned directly across from each other. The standard procedure was to assign two gunners to the waist windows, and in the heat of aerial combat this often resulted in the men banging heads, shoulders, and elbows, and even tripping over each other’s feet. As a waist gunner, George Kendrick preferred to work alone, manning both machine guns on either side of the fuselage. “He said didn’t want to be bumping asses with another guy back there, and he wanted all the guns he could get,” Jay wrote of Kendrick. “He told me, ‘These are my guns and I’m going to shoot them all.’ ”

  The swashbuckling Kendrick could barely move about the airbase without being trailed, as if by a puppy, by Sgt. Johnnie Able, a 19-year-old flight engineer. Able’s most striking feature was his large eyes, their sable pupils floating in a pale-blue field, which lent him an aspect of perpetual astonishment. His father had fought in World War I, and as a youngster Johnnie had been a voracious reader of war stories. He was only five months out of high school and working as a farmhand in South Carolina when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. Ten days later he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Able’s innate mechanical talents had proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they had earned him two promotions by the time Kendrick began bringing him around to Jay’s informal gatherings, making him one of the youngest sergeants in the outfit. But they had also left him grounded on a maintenance crew, as his facility with aircraft engines was too valuable a talent to risk losing to a flight crew.

  Able was somewhat bitter about this and made no secret of his longing to go up on missions. Jay could certainly empathize when Johnnie wondered if someday Jay might have the time and patience to teach him the rudiments of piloting a bomber. Although not so precocious as Willy Vaughan, who harassed his hometown flyboys for rides, Able as a child had liked nothing better than whiling away hours on end watching the Army Air Service pilots practicing their touch-and-gos on the grass strip at Myrtle Beach. Jay and Joe recognized that if they ever secured their own Fortress, they would need a keen eye manning the top turret’s twin .50-caliber machine guns. Johnnie Able had entered the service a crack shot, and continued to practice almost every day at Port Moresby. When he said that he would love to be a member of Jay’s burgeoning crew, Jay socked his request away in the back of his mind.

  It was Joe who found their unlikely tail gunner. Back at Langley he’d hit it off with a fellow sergeant named Herbert Pugh, who also came from Pennsylvania and wore his coal-black pompadour slicked so high off his forehead it resemb
led a ski jump. The men in Pugh’s outfit had given him the ironic nickname “Pudge” because he was close to six feet tall with a body that resembled a slab of marble with four limbs and a head. Pugh had a passion for exercise and during the Bomb Group’s physical fitness competitions he invariably ran the fastest and farthest, jumped the highest, and racked up the most sit-ups, push-ups, and pull-ups. But it was more than their shared athleticism that united Joe Sarnoski and Pudge Pugh.

  Pugh hailed from the aptly named Steelton, a working-class city on the banks of the Susquehanna River dominated by the imposing redbrick walls and metal sawtooth roofs of the furnaces, mills, and machine shops of the Bethlehem Steel Company and its subsidiary, the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation. What Joe’s hometown, Carbondale, was to coal, Steelton was to the forges, foundries, and smelters of America’s steel industry, then the symbol of the nation’s industrial might. For a good 50 years European immigrants like Pugh’s Welsh forebears had flocked to the hard men’s jobs in the honeycomb of shipyards, coke ovens, and brickyards that formed the backbone of Steelton. As the son of Polish immigrants, Joe felt a connection to a working-class fellow like Pugh, not least because Pugh had also been raised as a devout Catholic, and the two often attended Mass together.

  A year earlier, when the first of the 43rd’s units had arrived in Australia, the two had gone their separate ways as Pugh traveled to Port Moresby via Mareeba and Milne Bay while Joe shuttled about the Australian interior teaching his course. Pugh had not been assigned to a specific crew but he had flown as a tail gunner in a succession of Fortresses—an unappealing job, to put it mildly. Depictions of American bombers in movies made during World War II such as Flying Fortress, Air Force, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo show rather roomy interiors. The truth was much less grand. The inside of a Fortress in particular was in essence a thin, cramped, low-ceilinged airborne pipe, with sharp-edged projections—landing gear, piss pipes, gun mounts—at every turn. Even stable and on the ground the plane was a bruised head, elbow, or knee waiting to happen. Once in flight, buffeted by turbulence or violently swerving to avoid enemy fire, a Fortress became a mantrap. And the tail gunner’s compartment was one of the tightest on the aircraft.

  After squeezing through the claustrophobic ventral tunnel in order to reach their stations, gunners like Pudge Pugh were forced to assume an uncomfortable kneeling position for hours on end while supported by a kind of modified bicycle seat. No man prone to airsickness made a good tail gunner, as the rear of the plane so often “wallowed” and “mushed” like a dizzying carnival ride. To add to the misery, the tail was also the coldest section of the airplane. Although almost all American bombers were manufactured with rudimentary heating ducts emanating from the flight deck, the B-17 was not a pressurized aircraft, and being in a Fortress at altitude from the waist guns aft was like flying in cold storage. Tail gunners were constantly squinting through windows fogged thick with ice while fending off frostbite.

  Piled atop these indignities was the fact that the tail gunner’s station was also the least armored section of the plane. The laws of aerodynamics precluded packing too much weight into the tail of a fully loaded Flying Fortress, and it is probable that Pugh—like most Airmen based in New Guinea—had heard the story of the tail gunner who persuaded a friend in supply to surreptitiously issue him extra flak vests so he could build an armored “nest” in his station. The gunner did not realize that his cozy coop would shift the plane’s center of gravity. He also failed to inform the rest of the crew. On its next mission the unbalanced bomber stalled and crashed on takeoff, killing all aboard.

  Despite these horror stories, it took little convincing for Pugh to sign on to Jay’s and Joe’s new venture once he reconnected with his old bombardier pal from the Keystone state. For a man with a build like his, squirming into the cramped tail section of a B-17 may have felt like toothpaste being squeezed back into the tube. But it was not often that an Airman in a combat zone was offered the opportunity to be a part of a team building its own ethos—even if other pilots considered that team no more than a “motley collection of outcasts.”

  “[Zeamer] recruited a crew of renegades and screwoffs,” wrote one of the 43rd’s squadron commanders who had known Jay since Langley. “They were the worst—men nobody else wanted. But they gravitated toward one another and made a hell of a team.”

  * * *

  I The barge was named after the step-grandson of George Washington, who also happened to be the father-in-law of Robert E. Lee.

  20

  BLOOD ON THE BISMARCK SEA

  IT WAS TIME ONCE AGAIN to make the Americans pay.

  In early March 1943, the Imperial Command was staggered by the defeats on Guadalcanal and at Buna. The Japanese decided to stanch the bleeding by reinforcing their base at Lae. Less than 200 miles over the Owen Stanleys from Port Moresby, Lae was a natural site from which to launch a counteroffensive on the Allied airfields there. But first they would need to resupply Lae. It had worked before.

  Two months earlier a dozen Imperial Navy ships had traversed the Bismarck Sea to deliver about 4,000 troops to Lae—this was the convoy that Gen. Walker’s attack had barely missed on his ill-fated mission over Simpson Harbour. That reinforcement was for the most part a success—one enemy troop transport was eventually damaged by American bombers, but most of its soldiers and cargo had been recovered and disembarked. For the Allies, there were lessons to be learned.

  During that operation Australian intelligence officers charged with plotting the course of Japanese shipping had received information from their coastwatchers about an increase in the number of aircraft at three enemy bases—Wewak, Madang, and Salamaua—along the convoy’s route. Now, less than a month later, the coastwatchers were reporting similar buildups. Nearly simultaneously, U.S. Navy code breakers informed MacArthur and Kenney that a major Japanese operation appeared to be scheduled for New Guinea in late February or early March. When Allied reconnaissance flights confirmed an inordinate amount of merchant vessels capable of transporting troops and supplies amassed in Simpson Harbour, it was obvious that something was afoot.

  The American signals officers had still not broken the entire Japanese code system, so they had no idea of the size of the convoy about to depart from Rabaul. But decrypted message fragments seemed to rule out Wewak or Madang as a destination, a strong indication that Lae was the landing spot for what the Allies increasingly suspected was a large force of infantry. They took this as a sure sign of another overland offensive on Port Moresby. And in fact on the last day of February a fleet of six Japanese troop transports carrying 7,000 soldiers and accompanied by two merchantmen laden with cargo set sail from Simpson Harbour beneath an aerial escort of 100 or so Imperial Army and Imperial Navy Zeros. They were screened by multiple warships, including three cruisers and eight destroyers.

  Kenney ordered an array of search flights into the air over the waters surrounding New Britain, but a gale-force tropical storm swept through the area that day, grounding the Zeros though still providing initial cover for the flotilla. On the afternoon of March 1, however, a B-24 Liberator flying a zigzag recon patrol called a “creeping line search” spotted the procession of vessels rounding New Britain’s Cape Gloucester. The ships, the bomber’s pilot reported, were riding low in the water and spread over 15 miles. The next morning an Allied armada of 129 bombers and 207 fighter planes took flight.

  They lifted off from Port Moresby, from Milne Bay, and from Dobodura, spearheaded by 27 Flying Fortresses from Jay’s 43rd Bomb Group. While a small formation of Australian bombers was diverted to Lae to distract the enemy fliers there, the main force of Allied aircraft intercepted the convoy steaming into the Vitiaz Strait, the lead ships within sight of New Guinea’s coast and some 100 miles from their destination. It was a slaughter.

  So laden with men and supplies were the vessels that they were capable of making only around seven knots. For 72 hours Allied aircraft pounded the convoy, attacking in waves—the 43rd’
s B-17s in the vanguard, followed by B-24s from the 90th Bomb Group, A-20 Havocs, and even a few old Australian Beaufighters armed with torpedoes. Finally, the coup de grâce was administered by a formation of Pappy Gunn’s low-altitude cargo busters, the B-25 Mitchells specifically modified with the tail-gun turrets grafted onto their noses. One of the American pilots compared the scene to sinking “toy boats in a bathtub. One minute a ship would be sitting as pretty as could be, and in the next the top would lift off in a cloud of debris and smoke.” He added that the carnage “went on until every ship was sunk or burning, and the sea was littered for miles with every conceivable sort of wreckage.”

  For the most part, American and Australian P-39s and P-40s managed to keep the hosts of Zeros screened from the Allied bombers during the battle. But on the second day, after the fighters withdrew to refuel, a Fortress from the 43rd piloted by Lt. Woody Moore was engulfed by at least 10 Zekes and shot to pieces. Just as Moore ordered his crew to bail out, one of the Zeros rammed his B-17, severing its tail from the fuselage. The subsequent carnage was witnessed by several nearby Fortress crews. As one of the outfit’s pilots recorded in the 43rd’s Combat Diary: “We had no fighter protection today. Lt. Moore’s plane was set on fire by attacking Zeros and it plunged into the sea. Seven of the crew were seen to bail out, one man slipped through his harness as the chute opened. The others were strafed by Zeros as they floated helplessly down.”

  Later that afternoon, after another Japanese destroyer was crippled and its crew forced to abandon ship, the 43rd’s revenge was swift and savage. As the Combat Diary continued, “The other B-17s went down to 50 feet strafing the Japs who were in life boats, rafts, and floating around in life jackets. Everyone in the Group would have given much to have been in on the strafing after what had happened to Lt. Moore and his men.”