Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  The Owen Stanleys were his first hurdle, and Ruby Johnston plotted a course by dead reckoning through a gap in the mountains. The Fortress, flying on fumes, slid down the south side of the range and approached Port Moresby. It was now dark, and Jackson Airfield was blanketed by fog so thick that that Jay could not even see his own wing lights, much less the flickering smudge pots lining the airstrip. With the bomber’s damaged radios emitting nothing but whiny static, he could not even inform the control tower of his predicament. He vectored the ship out over the Gulf of Papua and checked his altitude by firing tracers and dropping flares over the water. This allowed him to set his altimeter for 1,500 feet—200 feet higher than the tallest foothills surrounding the airstrip. He then turned the aircraft around to feel his way back toward what he hoped was the runway. The engines began to sputter as they burned the last drops of fuel, and Jay prepared to make an emergency water landing on instruments when he suddenly felt an increase in turbulence. He knew this meant that they had had crossed the coastline, precluding any option for a ditch into the gulf. If they crashed now, it would be into hard earth.

  The only choice now was Jackson Field or a crash landing, and Jay’s first and second passes searching for the airstrip were like flying into a black hole. On his third approach, someone on the ground recognized the sound of a bomber juddering above looking for a place to put down. Within seconds every searchlight on the base was turned on to guide him in, although Jay could make out only a “faint, blurry glow.” Finally, with the needle on the fuel gauge bouncing below “E,” Johnnie Able in the top turret spotted the faint glimmer of the two rows of runway lights through the mist.

  Jay descended to study the lights. He knew that if they glowed “fat” it meant he was coming at the strip at an oblique angle. If the lights were more elongated and narrow, the bomber was lined up on course. Jay took in the parallel rows of hazy smudge pots, sucked in a deep breath, and pushed the throttle forward. The wheels touched the runway before he could see the ground. Later, he discovered how lucky they had been—three aircraft attempting similar blind landings in his wake had all crashed and burned.

  The Eager Beavers spent the next several days working with maintenance crews to repair the damage to the plane until, on June 15, Army meteorologists informed Jay that the weather to the northeast over Bougainville was about to break. They were scheduled for takeoff at four a.m. the next day. Jay and the Eager Beavers hustled out to Old 666 to go through their preflight preparations.

  Willy Vaughan double-checked his reconstructed radios, while Ruby Johnston nervously folded and refolded his charts and maps for what seemed like the thousandth time. J. T. Britton and Johnnie Able joined Jay as he circled the aircraft inspecting the engines, tires, and patched-up fuselage and fuel lines. Back in the waist gunner’s station George Kendrick fiddled with his cameras, cleaning the lenses and loading the film he had drawn from the 8th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron’s refrigerator. Finally, Jay had all men assume battle stations and fire off a short burst from each gun. Their checklist complete, Jay urged the crew to rest up in preparation for the long flight. No one, however, could sleep that night. Joe and Pudge Pugh visited the unit’s chaplain to receive Communion, while Jay paced his tent, too jumpy to even study his maps. His reputation as a renegade pilot was well earned, but even the renegade could not keep tomorrow’s mission from tugging on the loose ends of his imagination. Only two weeks earlier one of the 64th Squadron’s Fortresses, piloted by his friend Ernie Naumann, had been sent up alone to photograph New Britain. It never returned. No one knew for sure what had happened, but it didn’t take much of a leap to make an educated guess.

  Jay was still awake when his phone rang at 10 p.m. It was an officer from 5th Bomber Group Operations Command; Jay did not catch his name. In a thin, clipped voice, the stranger issued an order. Naval Intelligence had received word of increased activity at the Japanese airdrome on the small island of Buka, separated from Bougainville’s north coast by a deep and fast-flowing tidal channel perhaps 600 feet wide called Buka Passage. Before photo-mapping the west coast of Bougainville, Jay was to swing Old 666 north over the passage and reconnoiter the Buka airfield.

  From a strategic point of view, the request made perfect sense. When the invasion of Bougainville commenced, the Japanese defenses would consist of aircraft from both islands. Intelligence reports from previous missions flown by the 13th Air Force out of Guadalcanal indicated that no more than a dozen or so Zeros were stationed on Buka. That information had been confirmed by the Australian coastwatcher hiding in the northern jungles of Bougainville with a clear view of the Buka airdrome. But both of those dispatches were weeks old. Who knew what changes the Japanese had made under the cover of bad weather? Jay certainly recognized the need for updated intel on Buka. Still, this new proposal sat in his stomach like a broken bottle. Detouring north would add almost an extra hour to his Bougainville mission, and for a single plane, spending so much time in the air over enemy-occupied territory was tantamount to a suicide run.

  In the next moment a million thoughts raced through Jay’s mind. He and the new navigator, Ruby Johnston, had already roughed out the Bougainville calculations. They reckoned that if Old 666 were to maintain a constant airspeed of around 200 miles per hour in accordance with the needs of the trimetrogon cameras, it would require 22 minutes to photograph the 127 miles of the island’s west coast along Empress Augusta Bay. Over that time it would be necessary to keep Old 666 on a straight and level beeline at 25,000 feet to ensure the proper percentage of overlap with each photo frame that George Kendrick snapped. American bomber pilots knew that Japanese ack-ack gunners were often inaccurate in the early stages of bombing runs, whether conducted at night or by day. But 22 minutes of level flight would be more than enough time for even the most inept gunners to fix their sights on a lone aircraft. As the west coast of Bougainville was a blank slate to Allied intelligence, Jay could only hope that the Japanese had not yet installed any anti-aircraft batteries there.

  But ground fire was a secondary concern. A slow-moving target like Old 666 flying steady and straight would certainly attract its fair share of enemy fighter planes. And Jay would have no leeway to take evasive action if he wanted to get those photos. When he was intercepted by Zeros—as Jay was sure he would be—he would just have to pray that a few of the Zekes strayed directly into his gunners’ paths. During the entire mapping run the lone bomber would be a big, fat target. And now Group Operations wanted to widen that bull’s-eye by adding a Buka recon? Why not just radio the Japanese their course and arrival time?

  Jay lifted the phone back to his ear. “Hell, no!” he barked at the Operations Officer. Even if Buka was as lightly defended as reported, he said, it would be “sheer foolishness” to alert the Japanese prior to the main goal of photo-mapping Bougainville. “I’m only doing the one mission and I’m not letting anyone fool with that.”

  He then cut the conversation off before the officer could ask again, surprising himself by the violence with which he slammed down the receiver.

  Jay was so riled by the request that sleep was now out of the question. His emotions ricocheted like live ammo; it was another one of those moments when the service to which he had sworn allegiance seemed irrelevant, even cracked. If the Bougainville mission was so important, why would anyone think to compromise it by ordering an extraneous recon over Buka? He was tired, and he was angry. He had no way of knowing, much less understanding, that these sensations probably stemmed from some form of battle fatigue.

  There was little precedent for the physical punishment borne by men in combat in 1943 under the harsh conditions of the Southwest Pacific, where the neuropsychiatric disorder rate for American soldiers was the highest of any theater in the war. As a subsequent report from the U.S. Army Center of Military History notes, “Men on both sides collapsed, exhausted from the debilitating tropical heat and humidity; soldiers shook violently from malarial chills or from drenching in tropical downpours. Others s
imply went mad.”

  Jay had flown more than 45 combat missions and lost hundreds of comrades and friends. He certainly qualified for the “changes in personality” that the 43rd Bomb Group’s own flight surgeon noted in men with far fewer missions in their ratings jackets. Whatever the cause of his foul mood, he was still brooding over the telephone call when he forced himself to crawl into his bunk. But after a few moments of fitful tossing he rose, grabbed his gear, and headed over to the deserted mess tent for coffee. There he met the Eager Beavers as they trickled in over the next several hours.

  Jay knew that once a pilot began exhibiting any signs of stress, the edginess familiar to all Airmen as the “pucker factor” became contagious among his flight crew. So as each of his men joined him in the mess tent he tried to mask his anger at the last-minute phone request—to “shake it off,” as he put it—and greet them with a few optimistic jokes or quips. This hail-fellow facade continued through the preflight briefing in the Operations Room. Finally, as the Eager Beavers filed out of the meeting under a bright “bomber’s moon,” they went through the morbid ritual of handing over their wallets and any other valuables to the intelligence officers standing by the truck that would deliver them to Old 666. By 3:30 a.m. they had pulled their own chocks from beneath the aircraft’s wheels and boarded the plane in the silence typical of men preparing for a flight that might be their last.

  There were no other planes prepping for takeoff that morning, and the new day greeted the crew with the melodic yowls of the wild jungle. New Guinea’s eerie “singing dogs” competed against the distinctive drums of red-cheeked palm cockatoos beating their sticks against dead boughs. Moments later the cacophony was drowned out by the sound of Old 666’s 48 cold motor cylinders coughing to life. Jay was taxiing the Fortress from its hardstand toward the runway at a walking pace when he nearly collided with a Jeep swerving in front of his nose. The driver waved frantically, and a courier jumped from the vehicle. Jay idled the bomber as the man ran to the belly hatch and passed a piece of paper to George Kendrick. Kendrick hurried past the flight engineer Johnnie Able monitoring his panel of gauges and up to Jay on the flight deck.

  The cockpit was dark, and Jay squinted hard at the message. It was an order to jump Buka Passage and make the recon run over the airdrome on Buka before turning south to photograph Bougainville. Someone was trying to make it official. It appeared to be signed by Col. Ramey, the same officer who had assured him full autonomy to run this mission as he saw fit.

  Jay doubted the colonel had ever even seen this order, much less signed it. But he said nothing. He nodded toward the officer on the tarmac, pointed Old 666 toward the downwind end of the runway, and awaited the flash of the green flares signaling that he was good for takeoff.

  27

  BUKA

  JAY REVVED THE FOUR RADIAL engines to full, feeling their familiar vibrations as they worked up to speed. He released the brakes and the bomber lunged forward, the dust from the takeoff coating the fronds of the nipa palms with a fine powder. Johnnie Able called out the speed at intervals as the big plane lumbered down the runway before Jay horsed the ship into the air and banked toward an unnamed pass through the Owen Stanleys that topped out at 7,000 feet.

  Despite the forecast for clear skies over Bougainville, the New Guinea mountains were shrouded in their customary mist. No matter how many times a pilot negotiated those heights, feeling his way through the peaks by instrument, it remained a nerve-racking experience. It was as if the mountains were not quite there and yet everywhere at the same time, hidden within wisps of brown haze. The Americans stationed at Port Moresby, like men in combat from time immemorial, countered their existential dread of the dark and unknown with black humor. The best joke was that meteorologists had discovered a new type of cloud hovering over the Owen Stanleys, and had designated it cumulogranite. It was a much funnier line back on the ground.

  Once Old 666 broke through the clouds every man in the ship exhaled, and Jay took the occasion to pass around what he had come to consider Col. Ramey’s “alleged” order. After each crewman had read it—Forrest Dillman even crawled back into the tail to hand it to Pudge Pugh—Jay announced over the command intercom that he had no intention of complying. Their mission was Bougainville, and Bougainville alone.

  Jay set the Fortress on a north-by-northeast heading. It struck him, not for the first time, how difficult it was targeting even familiar islands over dark stretches of the featureless Pacific Ocean, what the poet Robinson Jeffers called the “unsleeping Eye of the earth.” Jay and his crew had never before set course for Bougainville, and over such alien seas the water below took on the semblance of a great, gray sinuous muscle, swelling and contracting with the rhythms of the planet. Every one of his crew recognized the importance of this mission to the next step in the Southwest Pacific campaign, perhaps even to the entire war, yet flying over so great an expanse made them feel lonely and small.

  An hour into the flight Jay turned over the controls to J. T. Britton and ducked down out of the cockpit for a final meeting with Ruby Johnston. He knew the navigator was expert at calibrating the intricate spherical trigonometric measurements from the array of flashing instruments at his station. But those fragile instruments could fail in an instant during a sudden storm or in the erratic wind shears that swept across the Solomon Sea. Jay and Johnston agreed that if worse came to worst, they would shoot star sightings from the Astro Tracker Dome projecting from the bomber’s nose and if need be they would plot their course using ancient navigation techniques devised by the long-ago Phoenicians in their square-rigged ships.

  As Johnston entered the names of the flight crew into his personnel folder—a duty so familiar that he had already memorized the serial number of each man—Jay crawled back up onto the flight deck, pausing for a moment to watch Joe up in the Greenhouse inspect and reinspect the wires connected to the vertical camera switches. Jay knew that there would be no singing, in English or Polish, during this flight. Once back in the left-hand seat he ordered a final gun check. Seventeen heavy .50-cals spit fire, shrouding the bomber in a sheen of smoke that for the briefest moment glowed blue in the starlight, before trailing off.

  Counting his flights with the 22nd Bomb Group, this was Jay’s forty-seventh combat mission. If one can be both bored and nervous at the same time, this was the moment. Men tended to dampen their anxiety in a variety of ways in that dark space between anticipation and the reality of an approaching target. Some wrote letters home while others read books, usually the pulp mysteries and westerns shipped from the States in bulk. Others, particularly the navigators and radio operators, busied themselves recalibrating their instruments. A few even napped. It was hardest on the ball turret and tail gunners. They knew best what was happening behind and beneath the plane but had no clue as to what might be taking place above or up front. Tonight Forrest Dillman and Pudge Pugh were literally in the dark.

  If Jay’s own experiences were any guide, he guessed that a few of his crew might be a little sick to the stomach right now. Not scared, merely uneasy. The frightening moments would come later, when they began to truly understand what the chances of survival were. Jay also understood well the adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy, and now he saw that this could come sooner than expected. With no bombs in the bay Old 666 was flying light, and the same spanking tailwinds that had swept the clouds from Bougainville now pushed the Fortress northeast like a paper airplane.

  About three hours later a thin sliver of sun appeared in the east just as Bougainville’s coastline came into view, a parenthesis of land surrounded by glistening dark waters. Jay checked his instruments. One hundred fifty-five degrees east longitude. Ruby Johnston, on the button. Then he looked at his watch. Thirty minutes ahead of schedule.

  Though he had been in-theater for more than a year, Jay had never lost his awe for the sublime daybreaks found only in the tropics. Bougainville was a mere 35 miles south of the equator, and he remembered a B
oy Scout troop leader once explaining that the startling sunrises and sunsets near the equator were the result of the sun being perpendicular to the horizon, while at higher latitudes it rose and set at a more oblique angle. That may have been the science of the phenomenon, but it did not make the tableau any less spectacular. Back in the States, particularly in the northern clime of Boothbay Harbor, the sun seemed to saunter over the horizon like a balloon carried on a gentle updraft, the black night gradually receding before subtle streaks of reddish-orange. Here the dawn was so sudden that it arrived almost without warning. One moment the eastern vista was a ribbon of dark purple the color of a mussel shell. In the next instant the sky was ablaze at every compass point.

  Jay had time to ponder the wonders of the glistening sunrise; it would still be another 30 to 45 minutes before the light would be strong enough to provide the proper exposure for the camera’s infrared filters. This also meant that he now faced a hard choice. From the first day of boot camp it was drilled into every soldier that the Army is not a democracy, and Jay understood that as the ranking officer of a B-17 Flying Fortress, he was the ultimate arbiter; any decisions were his alone. Still, the Eager Beavers were more than a mere flight crew. They had become a team, and their captain had to take that into consideration. He reached for his interphone and laid out their options. He could turn Old 666 northwest and kill the extra time vectoring over the pale green waters of the Solomon Sea. Out of sight. Safe. Or he could set a course due north and arrive over Buka Passage just as the sun was high enough to photograph the Japanese airdrome on the islet. They would use their standard camera equipment to photograph Buka before turning back south toward Bougainville and setting the more complicated trimetrogons. He put the decision to the crew.