by Bob Drury
Like Willy Vaughan, Dillman was blessed with an innate ability to grasp the workings of almost anything mechanical. He puzzled over Jay’s request for a day or so before hitting on the idea of mounting a fixed .50-caliber on the cheek of the nose deck below and forward of the cockpit. This bore-sighted gun—its sights aligned with its barrel, which in turn aligned with a row of rivets on the plane’s nose—would be charged to fire by the bombardier below and activated from a button mounted on Jay’s control wheel. Jay loved the idea. No other B-17 carried what he took to calling his “Snozzola Gun.”
By the time every weapon was installed, Old 666 bristled like an angry porcupine, the six-foot barrels of the 17 machine guns—with two to spare—protruding from the fuselage like deadly quills. The modifications took the term “Flying Fortress” to the extreme, and Jay’s B-17 was now the most heavily armed bomber in the USAAF. The Bible warns that at the time of the Apocalypse, “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.”
As far as Jay and his crew were concerned, the Japanese were about to discover the number of the beast. Unfortunately, the tone and tenor of the entries in Jay’s combat diary took a more somber turn when, days after Dillman installed his personal nose gun, he learned that Ken McCullar and ten members of his crew had been killed on a predawn takeoff.
23
THE OUTLAWS
KEN MCCULLAR WAS MORE POPULAR and respected than ever at the time of his death. He had recently been promoted to major and placed in command of the 43rd Group’s 64th Squadron. Black Jack, a bullet magnet, had only just been retired, which is why McCullar occupied the left-hand seat of a Fortress named Blues in the Nite as it taxied to the downwind end of Jackson Field shortly after midnight on April 11, 1943.
McCullar and his crew had been tasked with acting as the weather and observation ship for his squadron’s bombing run over Rabaul. As was customary, he was lifting off an hour before the bulk of the formation. Blues in the Nite was midway down the runway when personnel in the flight control tower saw a tongue of flame shoot from its right inboard engine and lick at the right wheel assembly. The spark lasted no more than an instant, and the B-17 continued liftoff. It was several hundred feet into the air when it swiveled into a tight chandelle, stalled, nosed over, and dropped like a 36-ton stone.
The crash was followed almost instantaneously by a huge explosion as a full complement of 2,400 gallons of fuel burst into a towering fireball. This in turn set off the aircraft’s bomb load. There was not much left of either metal or flesh for the medics and meat-wagon volunteers to gather as they picked through the charred debris.
The shards of Blues in the Nite had barely been bulldozed into a hole by the side of the runway before a somber ritual was under way back in the tent city where McCullar’s crew had bunked. It was the Italian poet Petrarch who observed that placing a body in the ground after a good death does honor to the deceased’s entire life, but in a combat zone with few formal funerals, the best a compatriot could do was to open a fallen comrade’s footlocker, lift his stashed bottle of liquor, and toast his memory. As a bottle was being passed on this particular occasion someone noted that McCullar’s squadron had recently established a record for the number of bombing runs in a single month, having successfully completed 104 sorties in March.
When word of the crash reached Brisbane, Gen. Kenney was again devastated. First Bill Benn, now Ken McCullar. What were the odds that two men who had survived so many harrowing combat missions would both perish in accidents? Kenney was told that a mangled animal corpse, either a wallaby or a tree kangaroo, had been discovered on the runway at daybreak. It was assumed that McCullar’s plane hit the animal, whose carcass then ruptured the aircraft’s hydraulic system and set alight the thick, flammable fluid.
In his service obituary McCullar was credited with sinking five Japanese vessels with skip bombs, and his death reverberated out from Port Moresby like the downbeat of an ax. Jay was hit particularly hard by the loss of the bold friend who flew with a panther’s grace and whom he would later call “the greatest fighting flier I ever knew.”
Yet the war went on, the only constant, and Jay was left to console himself with a cautionary lament as old as flight itself, memorized by American Airmen since boot camp: There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.
IN RESPONSE TO MCCULLAR’S FATAL crash and the subsequent plummet in morale, Gen. Kenney began relieving as many flight crews from the 43rd Bomb Group as he dared spare. Some of these Airmen had been stationed at Port Moresby for over six months and it showed, in both their physical appearance and their mental acuity. There was one problem. So few newly trained B-17 crews were arriving from the States that several B-24 Liberator crews had to be temporarily assigned to fly the 43rd’s Fortresses.
With the replacements came a smattering of new maintenance personnel, and Jay warned his crew to be on alert. Word had spread throughout the base about the scrounging oddballs rebuilding their own plane, and as Jay expected some of the new crew chiefs began lurking about the 65th’s flight line hoping to snatch the occasional working part from Old 666 for use in their own bombers. Jay was so wary that he had his men take round-the-clock shifts guarding their Fortress. Then, just when he felt that Old 666 was nearly ready to make its first flight test, Jay picked up a rumor that someone at Bomb Group Headquarters was considering assigning his airplane to a pilot and flight crew who had just arrived at Port Moresby from Australia.
To forestall any hijacking Jay and his crew began sleeping on their plane while letting everyone know that their guns were, in the lingo, cocked and locked. As a fellow bomber pilot wrote of Jay and his men, “They told everyone to stay the hell away from that damn airplane. Everyone was talking about [Zeamer] and his renegades and their loaded fifty-calibers.” Their reputation as outlaws spread rapidly, as did the suspicion that they would indeed use those guns if a trespassing crew approached.
A round of bureaucratic wrangling ensued that reached all the way to Bomber Command. In the end the new crew was assigned another aircraft, and Jay and his men continued their restoration project in peace. As the reclamation of Old 666 proceeded, Jay and the crew discovered that living together on the aircraft intensified their sense of mission. The Fortress became their second home, and while Joe Sarnoski continued overseeing their physical training, Jay’s constant lectures and pep talks instilled in the crew an overriding confidence in precisely what their aircraft was capable of.
Blown engines? Jay liked to recount the story of Lt. Harry Brandon, who over a year earlier had been among the five pilots to stage the first B-17 run over Rabaul. A Zero’s cannon shell had exploded the right inboard engine of Brandon’s Fortress at the same time as the right outboard engine inexplicably died. Yet Brandon kept the plane aloft for several hours on just his two left engines until the right outboard could be restarted. Jay also recalled how he had personally flown with another pilot who had remained aloft, albeit tenuously, with only one working engine.
One of every Airman’s greatest fears was that his plane would fall into an uncontrolled spin. But Jay taught his crew that even spins are not necessarily fatal. He used Paul Lindsey’s experience as proof. Early in the war Lindsey was piloting his shot-up Fortress home from an attack on shipping off the Philippines when he ducked into a thunderstorm over the Java Sea to evade pursuing bogeys. The convective energy threw Lindsey’s plane into a vortical dive so frightening that his copilot and navigator panicked and jumped at 7,000 feet. But Lindsey continued to wrestle the yoke, and after another 3,000 feet of free fall he was able to stabilize the ship and fly it home. The crewmen who bailed were never heard from again.
This story often prompted Jay to reiterate his belief that despite all their jump training, bailing out was always the last resort. He stressed that no matter how hopeless a situation might seem, he preferred to ride a sturdy bomber down for a crash landing. It was safer, he f
elt, than jumping, and he made certain that each of his crewmen knew his crash station should their aircraft be forced to either crash-land or ditch into open sea. He even wrote up a checklist of what each man was expected to carry for postcrash survival—flares, flashlight, medical kit, sidearms—and he would pull surprise inspections to ensure that these items were stored properly in the aircraft.
Most aircrews stationed in the Southwest Pacific had heard apocryphal tales of men staying alive by sticking together after a crash. But Jay had actually witnessed this. Less than a year earlier two B-26 Marauders from his former Group had gotten lost in severe weather over the north coast of New Guinea. With the engines running on fumes, the crew of one ship bailed while the crew of the other remained with their plane as its pilot belly-flopped into a jungle clearing at 100 miles per hour. No one from the second crew was seriously injured, and within a month all nine men had found their way back to Port Moresby as a group. As for the crew who had jumped, only half of them were ever heard from again, and at that it had taken the separated, emaciated survivors close to six months to trickle back into the airbase one by one.
Jay was a natural storyteller, and his instructional yarns, always delivered in a professorial, low-key fashion, could not fail to leave a lasting impression. His credibility as an officer who would ensure the survival of his crew was enhanced by the fact that the rigors of living in a combat zone seemed to agree with him. Not only were the exhausted flight crews of the 43rd in the air nearly constantly on missions, but Port Moresby had suffered more than 100 aerial attacks since the war began. The whole base would shake with the rolling concussions of the Japanese carpet bombing—even men who had never actually been in Africa compared it to the footfalls of a charging rhino. After being stationed at Port Moresby for only a few months a frightening number of Allied Airmen began to have the gaunt if not ghostly countenance of dead men walking. It was not unusual to see entire flight crews with bags like heavy satchels of flesh under their eyes.
Jay was not immune to the physical rigors and demands of the Southwest Pacific, and had indeed lost a dangerous amount of weight. Yet one visiting reporter, struck by the vibrancy of Jay’s blue-gray eyes, noted that despite Jay’s near-skeletal appearance he somehow managed to retain the mien of “a cultured gentleman with bedroom eyes.” Photographs from the time suggest that Jay’s facial features had matured, making him a dead ringer for the matinee idol Lew Ayres. And to take the analogy a step further, like an actor inhabiting a new role, he was not afraid to stretch the limits of his craft. As he later told a friend, “Some people thought I took too many chances. But I didn’t regard them as chances. I simply found from experience that a Flying Fortress was a pretty indestructible thing, and that there were ways to pull through some seemingly desperate situations.”
That April, Jay informed his squadron commander, a brash major from Texas named Harry Hawthorne, that Old 666 was finally ready for a combat-ready flight test. With a fresh coat of neutral gray camouflage paint reflecting the dawn rays of the sun, the refurbished Fortress lifted off from Jackson Airfield and soared into the sky above Papua Bay. Despite its added armament, enough weight had been jettisoned to make it the most agile B-17 in-theater. To prove this, Jay could not resist showing off its maneuverability, at one point cutting the throttles and nearly standing the plane on one wing to demonstrate how he could turn inside an attacking bogey by pulling back “for all I was worth” and meeting the Zero head-on.
“The airplane was faster than any other in the squadron, and could pivot on a wing tip,” he wrote. “This was important because my method, when jumped by fighters, was to jump them first by turning hard into them and forcing them to pull up so they couldn’t shoot at us but we could get under their belly with our .50-caliber guns.”
Old 666 passed its shakedown cruise with ease, and Jay, Joe, and what a fellow pilot referred to as their “outlaws” wasted no time getting into the game. The next morning the crew arrived outside the Operations Hut, volunteering for any “lousy mission” no other flight crews wanted. At first they were ignored, but they repeated the routine until it became as regular as the Angelus. Their persistence paid off. Since Jay had never discarded Old 666’s time-lapse cameras, he and his crew were finally assigned a succession of daylight reconnaissance flights without a fighter escort. With each successful flight their stock rose within the Bomb Group, and they became known as the crew to call when photos were needed of virtually any enemy installation. Because of their zeal they also acquired a nickname: “Eager Beavers.”
“You couldn’t keep them on the ground,” wrote the flight commander Walt Krell. “It was the damnedest thing.”
Most American bombers at the time flew with camera configurations of some sort either fastened to their bays or mounted on their top turret or belly turret. In a neat bit of mechanical ingenuity, the filming devices of turret cameras were activated whenever the machine gun fired. It was one sure way to verify a flamed bogey. But the trimetrogons with their long-focus optics—one vertical and two oblique—were the preferred lenses for high-altitude reconnaissance missions. The K-17s mounted in Jay’s bomber took high-resolution nine-by-nine-inch “trimet strip” images, which could penetrate as deep as 30 feet below the surface of the sea.
With George Kendrick operating the cameras (as well as the waist and undercarriage gun when they got into trouble), Old 666 successfully photo-mapped the Admiralty Islands and the north coast of New Britain, and once returned from New Ireland with evidence of a new Japanese airbase being constructed on the outskirts of Kavieng. Old 666 was initially so active that its crew took pride in the fact that, unlike most of the bombers in-theater, it was never on the ground long enough to acquire the traditional nose art.
Eighteen months into the war the Pacific Theater remained a chaotic area scattered over thousands of square miles. The enormous span of the war zone combined with the dearth of personnel to make enforcing Army Air Force rules and regulations nearly futile. In Europe, for instance, the Eager Beavers would certainly have been prosecuted for insubordination if not mutiny for their stunt of sleeping on Old 666 with loaded guns. But the Southwest Pacific was a different reality. Most COs on the front lines were willing to look the other way, even past an “outlaw crew” led by a captain who had yet to earn his pilot’s wings, as long the Airmen were willing not only to volunteer for risky missions at a moment’s notice, but to complete them with alacrity and competence. Moreover, it wasn’t as if the brass further up the chain of command were beyond bending, or even breaking, the conventional rules of warfare. Perhaps no example of this was starker than the decision to assassinate the man who had planned and coordinated the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto.
IT WAS THE UNITED STATES, at the direction of President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, which became the first government to formulate a military code of conduct forbidding the assassination of enemy combatants, referring to such acts as “relapses into barbarism.” John Wilkes Booth notwithstanding, a half century later Lincoln’s tenets had been codified into international law, which affirmed that soldiers may be killed only provided that they are not “individually singled out.” Yet the U.S. Army’s World War II field manual, citing Article 23(b) of the Fourth Hague Peace Conference of 1907—to which the United States was a signatory—appeared to reject this accepted international doctrine by stating that forbidding attempts to target and snuff out a specific life during wartime “does not preclude attacks on individual soldiers or officers of the enemy whether in the zone of hostilities, occupied territory, or elsewhere.”
Such was the confusing mélange of moral choices facing Adm. Chester Nimitz when, on the morning of April 14, 1943, Navy signals officers in Pearl Harbor handed him a top secret report detailing an upcoming “morale-boosting” inspection tour that Adm. Yamamoto planned to make through the upper Solomon Islands. Yamamoto was known for his punctuality, and the decrypted communiqué in Nimitz’s possession rather amazingly listed
his itinerary down to the minute. The Americans now knew that the admiral, whose prominence in Japan was second only to that of the emperor, would be landing four days hence at precisely 0800 hours on the tiny island of Ballale, an arrowhead-shaped speck some 14 miles south of Bougainville.
Nimitz deferred any decisions about what to do with the information to Washington, where Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox consulted with a group of religious leaders about the morality of assassinating a specific enemy commander. The churchmen gave the attack their blessing, and Nimitz handed the assignment, dubbed “Operation Vengeance,” to his South Pacific Theater commander, Bull Halsey, with the message, “Good Luck and Good Hunting.” Four days later, on Palm Sunday, April 18, 1943—coincidentally, the first anniversary of Doolittle’s raid—seventeen P-38s fitted with extra wing tanks launched from Henderson Field at dawn. Two hours later they intercepted Yamamoto’s squadron of two Mitsubishi bombers and six Zero escorts near the southern coast of Bougainville. Yamamoto’s flight formation was heading for the airfield at Buin on the southern tip of that island—not for Ballale as the code breakers had reported. This was of little consequence.
Eight of the American fighters engaged the Zekes. The rest sped after the olive-painted Bettys, now diving for a spinney of treetops. The American squad leader, Maj. John Mitchell, had not expected two bombers. Which one carried Yamamoto? Mitchell took no chances: machine-gun and cannon fire sent one Betty flaming into the jungle canopy; the other, also hit and trailing black smoke, pancaked into the sea. The next morning Japanese troops hacked through the undergrowth and recovered the remains of Yamamoto. The admiral’s body, clad in a pressed green khaki uniform and brand-new Airmen’s boots, was still strapped into its seat, unblemished except for two tidy holes, encrusted with blood, left by the bullet that passed through his jaw and exited his temple. He was still gripping his ceremonial samurai sword, a gift from his deceased older brother.
