Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  As the historian Samuel Eliot Morison would later record, Yamamoto’s death resulted in “wild if restricted elation” among the Allies. The killing was also something of a vindication for American airpower. A mere 16 months after Japan had rocked the United States at Pearl Harbor, the vaunted Empire of the Rising Sun was now showing hints of strategic as well as tactical vulnerability. From the Allies’ point of view, this made the invasion and capture of Bougainville all the more urgent.

  24

  NO POSITION IS SAFE

  IN LATE APRIL, AFTER SEVERAL recon flights, Jay flew old 666 on its first bombing mission. It was the lead plane in formation during a raid over Simpson Harbour, taking out the tops of trees and, one crewman recalled with not a little alarm, “brushing the town’s housetops” on its approach. A week later, on a daylight patrol over the Solomon Sea, Jay made a skip-bombing run on a Japanese cruiser, with Joe releasing his ordnance when Jay took the plane down to just 50 feet off the deck. The crewmen saw several explosions but could not fully assess the damage before they were swarmed by Zeros. Jay managed to lose the bogeys by escaping through what looked like an upside-down ocean of low-hanging clouds.

  It was not uncommon for the 43rd’s B-17 pilots to encourage their copilots to take control of an aircraft on the return trip from a long mission. This enabled the junior officers to gain the experience to qualify for the left-hand seat. Jay, remembering his “boredom” while he was copiloting Marauders for the 22nd Bomb Group, took the practice a step further. Once beyond the range of any trailing enemy fighters, he invited any crewman who showed an interest into the cockpit to receive personal instruction. This usually occurred with Jay and his crew flying borrowed Fortresses—including one named Blitz Buggy and another dubbed The Old Man—as the 43rd was loath to risk the loss of Old 666’s valuable trimetrogan cameras on routine bombing runs.

  Although a few of the flight crew showed an affinity for piloting, none proved a more willing and adept student than Johnnie Able. So evident were his skills that Jay would often slip into the right-hand seat while copilot Hank Dyminski napped on the catwalk and allow Able to fly the plane almost all the way to the Owen Stanleys. Having a crewman take the controls, however, was not always an option. One night during a bombing run over Madang, flak from anti-aircraft fire tore 60 holes in their bomber’s left wing, exploded the stabilizer, and knocked out the central oxygen system. Jay brought the plane home with no injuries to his crew in large part because the pilot in formation beside him turned on his running lights to draw away some of the ack-ack. Back at Port Moresby the Eager Beavers worked overnight side by side with maintenance personnel repairing the stabilizer, replacing the oxygen bottles, and patching the shrapnel damage with flattened tin cans. By the next morning Jay was back in the Operations Hut looking for work.

  It was during these initial missions that Jay perfected his technique for countering the frontal attacks that Zeros had used on Allied bombers since the onset of the war. As the faster enemy fighters overtook his plane and lined up on either side in preparation for a head-on run, Jay waited patiently until they rolled into their turns. That was his cue to throw the aircraft directly into their paths on his own collision course—“jumping them first.”

  The astonished enemy pilots were forced to break off their flight patterns and sail past on either side of the American bomber. This exposed the Japanese fighters to successive .50-caliber fire as the bombardier’s and navigator’s machine guns handed them off to Johnnie Able in the top turret and Willy Vaughan in the radio compartment, who in turn passed the targets to George Kendrick on the waist guns until, finally, they flew into Pudge Pugh’s tail gun sights. If an alert Zero pilot chose to flee beneath the Fortress, Forrest Dillman’s twin .50s and Kendrick’s extra guns mounted on the underside of the fuselage were waiting for him. It almost wasn’t fair.

  Jay and his crew took their toll on the enemy in punishing bombing runs and flaming Zeros, but his “eccentricities” were still never far from the surface. During another night raid on Rabaul, for instance, Jay was tasked by the Bomb Group’s psy-ops officer with circling back over the town after making his bombing run and dropping propaganda pamphlets citing the recent Japanese defeats, particularly on the Bismarck Sea, and calling for the enemy to surrender. This was a rather daffy idea, and it is doubtful anyone expected anything to come of it. Yet never one to leave a stone unthrown, Jay told the crew, “I’ll go down low enough so you can throw the whole bundle on their heads—tossing one pamphlet at a time won’t hurt anyone.” There is a common axiom: “Whoever is calm and sensible in the midst of combat is insane.” If such be the case, Jay’s crew welcomed their skipper’s idiosyncrasies as long as he got them home in one piece.

  Soon after Yamamoto’s death, with the entire Army Air Force seemingly reinvigorated, the Eager Beavers took part in a raid on the distant harbor of Kavieng in New Ireland. Twenty-one B-17s from the 43rd and nine B-24s from the 90th Bomb Group surprised the enemy at dawn and sank two Japanese cruisers and a destroyer, further degrading the Imperial Navy’s ability to resupply its bases on New Guinea. The raid elicited an unusual congratulatory message to Kenney from MacArthur, who wrote that he considered the Kavieng mission “a real honey.” Shortly thereafter, perhaps in anticipation of a visit to the front lines by MacArthur, Kenney issued a terse General Order to the 43rd stating, “Beards must go.” As the Group’s official history records, “Tears mingled with the falling foliage.”

  IN MAY 1943 NEW B-24 Liberators of the 90th Bomb Group arrived in-theater from Hawaii, ensuring that no Japanese position in the Southwest Pacific was safe. Rabaul and the bases on the north coast of New Guinea remained constant targets, and American bombers were now venturing as far afield as the Dutch East Indies to pound enemy airfields, fortifications, and rail lines. At the same time, the deep, distant thrum of heavy aircraft pistons was a constant presence over the shipping lanes of the Solomon, Bismarck, and Coral Seas.

  The presence of the Liberator crews also instigated a good-natured feud with the men of the 43rd. It was well known that Gen. Kenney’s long-range plans included turning much of the 43rd Bomb Group’s duties over to Liberator crews. This did not sit well with the Fortress fliers, and when one B-24 crew mistook a string of rocks for a Japanese convoy and attacked, the 43rd’s Airmen were merciless in their mockery. Offering to make peace, the officers from the 90th invited their counterparts from the 43rd to a dinner at their camp seven miles away, near the newly completed Durand airstrip. The main lure for the B-17 Airmen was a fresh shipment of Australian beer.

  That night, traveling up the road to the 90th’s officers club, the Fortress fliers noticed an outhouse festooned with a sign that read, “Headquarters, 43rd Bomb Group.” No one mentioned this over the strained conversation at dinner, but the next morning a mysterious B-17 appeared in the skies above the camp and set the shitter ablaze with .50-caliber incendiary bullets. When news of the incident reached Kenney, he passed word through back channels to both Bomb Group COs that he would not tolerate any more intramural live fire.

  This did not stop the officers of 90th from erecting a sign outside their camp proclaiming themselves “The Best Damn Heavy Bomb Group in the World.” They were playing off a throwaway line that Kenney had uttered at a press conference when asked about the Liberator’s greater speed. It was true: the B-24 was faster than the B-17, and could fly farther with the same payload to boot. But the official logs told quite a different tale. Since arriving in-theater, the 90th had an appalling combat record, with half of its crews either shot down or missing, including the loss of 11 Liberators and 84 men in the Group’s first six weeks of operations.

  It was no secret that Kenney held a soft spot for the 43rd Bomb Group, his deceased protégé Bill Benn’s old 63rd Squadron in particular. They were, after all, known as Ken’s Men,I and the general recognized that the Airmen of the 43rd were not amused by the newcomers’ insolence. He warned them to let it go, citing their losses as well as invokin
g the spirit of camaraderie. The Fortress officers were not so forgiving, and retaliation was swift in the form of a Jeep raid on the 90th’s camp. Airmen from the 43rd splattered the offending sign and “bombed” the camp’s huts and tents with old lightbulbs filled with red paint. Each Group continued to steal or trash the signs outside the other’s camp until Kenney once again, this time in an official reprimand, warned the commanders to tone down the antics.

  But it was in the air that bragging rights mattered most, and with the 43rd’s low-altitude skip-bombing techniques having been accepted as standard attack procedure, there really was no contest. The Flying Fortresses of the 43rd were hitting airbases and sending Japanese vessels to the bottom of the sea at a rate the Imperial Navy considered alarming, and a perusal of the Group’s official Combat Diary from the spring of 1943 reads like a laundry list of sunken destroyers and troop transports. Emblematic of the outfit’s proficiency was the frequent use of one phrase in particular that began to appear with more regularity in the Combat Diary: “Target obliterated, area plastered.”

  Still, it wasn’t enough. In late March, during a military conference held on New Caledonia, the Army and Navy had finally found common ground on at least one aspect of the war—that airpower alone would never be enough break the Japanese grip on the Southwest Pacific. Yet sending infantry divisions into Japanese-held New Guinea was not promising. The coastline terrain north of the Owen Stanley Range was a tangled mass of vast mangrove swamps through which prewar Australian engineers had despaired of building any roads, much less a railroad line. Any movement of men through this morass would have to be along dirt footpaths, most barely more than a yard wide, with their equipment and supplies carried by pack animals. Frequent violent downpours dissolved these trails into calf-deep mud with a gluey consistency that would halt even the most willing mule. The same storms would turn the numerous streams and brooks running out of the mountains into raging, impassable torrents. And there was no use waiting for the end of the so-called “rainy” season, which the Aussie infantrymen referred to simply as “The Wet.” As one American Airman noted, “It rains daily for nine months and then the monsoon starts.”

  Back in Brisbane, George Kenney was already at work on a solution to this problem with the help of one of his oldest and most trusted friends, Col. Merian C. Cooper. Cooper was to adventure what the Ancient Mariner was to storytelling, and Kenney trusted implicitly in Cooper’s “ability to come up with more ideas in an hour than most people get in a month.” Their friendship extended back over two decades, to 1917, when they had both enlisted as cadets in the Army’s nascent Air Service. Cooper, a Naval Academy dropout, was fresh from chasing Pancho Villa through Mexico with the Georgia National Guard, and Kenney had immediately been taken by the stout, dark-eyed raconteur with an ever-present pipe stem clamped between his teeth.

  When America entered World War I, the two young officers were deployed to Europe together. Cooper’s bomber was shot down on the wrong side of the Rhine soon afterward, and he spent the remainder of the conflict in a German POW camp. Upon his release he and a cadre of American volunteer pilots formed the Kosciuszko’s Squadron to fly for the Polish air force in its war against the Soviets. Somewhere over the shifting Polish-Soviet border his plane was again brought down and he was captured by sword-wielding Cossacks. If anything, nine months in Russian captivity only enhanced Cooper’s wanderlust, and after escaping from his prison camp and making it to Latvia he returned to the States and plunged headlong into the new motion picture industry.

  The silent-movie adventure documentaries he directed took him from the plateaus of northern Persia to the jungles of Thailand, and he filmed his classic feature The Four Feathers among the actual warring tribes of the Sudan. In 1933, he introduced the world to King Kong, which he produced, codirected, and acted in. (Cooper is one of the pilots who mortally wound the giant ape as he clings to the top of the Empire State Building.) Between making movies he found time to become one of the founding board members of Pan American Airways as well as run several film studios.

  Cooper reenlisted following Pearl Harbor and spent the early months of the war in India, Burma, and China, where he served as chief of staff to Gen. Claire Chennault’s roguish Flying Tigers squadron. When Kenney learned that his old friend had been shipped home from Yunnan Province in order to recover from a severe bout of dysentery, he immediately requested his presence in Australia. “Coop,” Kenney wrote, “could visualize and plan a military operation with the best of them.” This is precisely what he did when Kenney brought him to Port Moresby. Kenney and Cooper recognized that any Allied gains on the ground would require not only close air support, but more than a soupçon of stealth. By this point in the war the Japanese airbase farther up the north coast of New Guinea at Wewak had eclipsed Lae in strategic importance. Wewak, however, lay beyond the effective range of American fighter planes. Kenney was loath to risk losses to his bomber fleet with unescorted runs over this new stronghold guarding Rabaul’s western flank; the only solution was to build an airfield closer to Wewak.

  To that end Cooper was instrumental in hiring several hundred Papuans to begin cutting and clearing an airstrip and erecting a Potemkin village of grass huts in a clearing southwest of Madang. He knew this would raise enough dust to attract the attention of Japanese reconnaissance flights. The plan was to make the Japanese believe the Americans were building an airbase there while, in actuality, construction had begun on a base being hacked out of the jungle farther to the northwest. The ruse worked to perfection, and by mid-June the enemy was bombing the sham strip daily. The misdirection allowed the other, secret airstrip to be built, and in time it would prove vital to MacArthur’s successful offensive across northern and western New Guinea.

  It was possible to conceal diffuse ground assaults on an island the size of New Guinea. A smaller island such as Adm. Halsey’s key target, Bougainville, however, presented quite a quandary. Any fake airstrip would be quickly discovered on an island about half the size of the state of Maryland, although other forms of subterfuge prior to an invasion might certainly be put into play. In order to throw the Japanese off the scent of a Bougainville invasion, for example, Adm. Nimitz and Adm. Halsey hatched a plan to land a division of New Zealand troops at the same time on the beaches of the nearby Treasury Islands, southwest of Bougainville. This landing would be shortly followed by infiltrating the island of Choiseul, a spit of land in the Solomons chain to Bougainville’s southeast. While the Japanese were trying to discern exactly what the Allies were up to, the admirals hoped, Halsey’s main landing force would sweep onto Bougainville.

  To steam an invasion force of slow and thin-skinned troop transports—“straw-bottomed scows” to the weary and sarcastic leathernecks they carried—Allied war planners would need more than mere surprise, however. They would need information. Despite the pounding the enemy was taking from American bombers across an area extending from the southern Solomon Islands to northern New Guinea, Imperial construction battalions were constantly building new bases and reinforcing old ones across the theater. But where, and to what extent? MacArthur, Halsey, and Kenney needed to know what number and what type of aircraft the Japanese could throw up against the great wheeling motion of a landing by Marines on Bougainville.

  So it was that toward the end of May word filtered down from the 43rd’s headquarters that operations would soon call for volunteers to make one of the most dangerous reconnaissance flights yet—a photo-mapping mission over Bougainville Island.

  When those rumors reached Jay, he sensed an opportunity.

  * * *

  I Although Gen. Kenney notes in his memoirs how honored he was when the members of the 43rd Bomb Group, on Benn’s suggestion, began calling themselves “Kensmen” (as Kenney spelled it), some argue that the nickname was actually an homage to the late Capt. Ken McCullar, the Group’s most illustrious Airman, or even an appreciation of Gen. Ken Walker, killed over Rabaul. There is a consensus that the nickname probab
ly applies to all three.

  25

  NEW ADDITIONS

  ALLIED INTELLIGENCE ESTIMATES OF THE number of troops Japan could pour into the defense of Bougainville varied wildly, ranging from 45,000 to 65,000. But with U.S. Marines steadfastly inching up the Solomons chain, MacArthur and Halsey suspected that Imperial General Headquarters was rushing as many reinforcements as possible onto the big island to either repel an invasion or, if the U.S. Marines managed to cling to the beaches, stage a counteroffensive.

  The airfield complex at the southern tip of Bougainville near the coastal village of Buin, the same field that Adm. Yamamoto’s plane had been making for on the day of his death, had been built up into an important staging area during the battle for Guadalcanal. At the north end of the island, across a narrow saltwater passage on the islet of Buka, a grass airstrip originally fashioned by the Royal Australian Air Force had been extended to nearly 2,500 feet with a mixture of crushed coral and asphalt. Japanese construction crews had also dug tunnels for underground fuel tanks on Buka, installed a power plant, and ringed the airdrome with anti-aircraft batteries.

  This was the Empire’s soft southern underbelly, and Halsey’s stepping-stone invasions of New Georgia, Vella Lavella, and, finally, Bougainville—dubbed Operation Cherry Blossom—were meant to tear a hole in it. If the Allies could establish bases on Bougainville, they would for the first time in the war have acquired airfields from which single-engine fighters could reach Rabaul. The decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to formally adopt Halsey’s strategy of bypassing and isolating Rabaul was still two months away, but as of June 1943, Bougainville clearly remained the key to Operation Cartwheel.