Fortress Rabaul: The Battle for the Southwest Pacific, January 1942-April 1943

by Bruce Gamble

  Before flying back to Brisbane that afternoon, Kenney spent some time watching Major Larner’s squadron practice against the SS Pruth. When the dress rehearsal ended, Larner boasted that his squadron wouldn’t miss. Kenney admired the major’s cockiness but felt compelled to warn Larner that his crews had better take their mission seriously.

  OPERATION 81, as the Japanese called the new convoy, assembled in the anchorage at Rabaul on February 28. Six transports, packed to the limit with approximately six thousand soldiers and many tons of weapons and supplies, rode low in the water. They were joined by an old navy supply ship carrying six hundred SNLF troops, and by a small “sea truck” loaded with 1,650 drums of aviation fuel for the airdrome at Lae. The merchant ships would be escorted by eight veteran destroyers, all of which had fought valiantly in the waters around Guadalcanal.

  Admiral Yamamoto, who in February had shifted his flag to the new super-battleship Musashi in Truk Lagoon, had misgivings about committing so many first-rate warships to the convoy. “The Commander of the Combined Fleet kindly spared eight of the latest type destroyers,” wrote Lt. Gen. Kane Yoshihara, the Eighteenth Army chief of staff, “though the thought of dispatching them made his heart bleed.”

  Soon after midnight on March 1, Rear Adm. Masatomi Kimura led the convoy from Rabaul. Just as Kenney had predicted, the ships steered northwest around Crater Peninsula and entered the Bismarck Sea. Steaming parallel to the northern coast of New Britain, the convoy was limited by the speed of the slowest ship, in this case a leisurely seven knots.

  The pace must have been agonizing for the men aboard the jam-packed transports as they pitched and rolled in the storm-tossed Bismarck Sea. Kyokusei Maru, a merchant ship originally built in Canada in 1920, was by no means large, yet an estimated 1,200 soldiers were crammed aboard. The 5,943-ton vessel, which had been used at least once to transport POWs from Sumatra to Burma, had been modified to carry humans by fitting the box-shaped cargo holds with multiple levels of wooden decks, each containing row upon row of narrow sleeping platforms.

  The other transports in Operation 81 were no different. As early as 1905, the Japanese had adapted a method called the tsubo system for calculating the minimum amount of space an individual needed aboard a transport ship. By 1941, the original meager allowance had been cut by a third. Packed into the troopships like sardines, soldiers were expected to withstand days or even weeks of excessive heat and unsanitary conditions without complaining. They called it chomansai, “extreme overload,” and shrugged it off as part of military life. Under the circumstances, the soldiers of Operation 81 were no doubt praying for a fast voyage.

  ON THE AFTERNOON of March 1, a B-24 of the 321st Bomb Squadron/90th Bomb Group weaved between thunderheads while flying over the rugged mountains of New Britain. Lieutenant Walt Higgins, piloting Miss Deed on a methodical reconnaissance of the island, had found nothing of interest off the south coast. He encountered strong storms towering as high as forty thousand feet while crossing the island to examine the north coast, and more by accident than design he stumbled across the convoy at approximately 1500 hours. In the nose of the Liberator, the excited bombardier counted fourteen vessels. Higgins, shot down the last time he’d attempted a solo attack on a convoy, was content to orbit overhead and report the ships’ position.

  For the past two days, General Ennis Whitehead had scheduled only essential missions to conserve his air units, and had an impressive number of planes available for the coming battle: 75 light and medium bombers, 39 heavy bombers, and about 130 fighters. At Jackson airdrome, 7 B-17s were airborne within forty minutes of Higgins’s initial sighting report, but they failed to find the convoy in the rapidly settling darkness.

  Early the next morning, while short-range bombers and fighters attacked Lae to suppress enemy air support, Major Scott led eight Fortresses of the 63rd Bomb Squadron aloft from Jackson at 0630. Finding the convoy three hours later, they commenced a conventional attack at 6,500 feet. Scott and his two wingmen targeted a large transport, and for once the bombardiers achieved remarkable accuracy. Of the twelve 1,000-pounders dropped, at least four and possibly six were direct hits, and several of the remainder scored as damaging near misses. The exploding bombs tore the guts out of Kyokusei Maru, which carried tons of munitions in addition to 1,200 troops. It burned for two hours, then broke in two and sank with heavy loss of life. The destroyers Yukikaze and Asagumo picked up survivors and dashed ahead to Lae, delivering about 850 troops. None were in fighting form, having lost virtually all of their weapons and equipment.

  Later that day an even larger attack was conducted by eighteen Fortresses of the 64th and 65th Bomb Squadrons, but the results were embarrassing. Out of sixty-nine heavy bombs dropped, only two direct hits and four near misses were claimed. Despite the dismal percentage of hits, one or two of the near misses caused hull damage to the 6,800-ton Teiyo Maru, killing or wounding upwards of fifty men.

  The twenty-four sorties by the 43rd Bomb Group accounted for one transport sunk and another damaged on March 2, yet the day’s action represented little more than preliminary jabs; a couple of telling blows that drew blood. The next day would be different. For once, the Allies had the equipment and the manpower for a major brawl.

  DURING THE NIGHT of March 2-3, surveillance of the convoy was maintained by a flying boat of 11 Squadron piloted by Flt. Lt. Terry Duigan, who had made the first air-sea rescue with a Catalina eleven months earlier. Arriving over the convoy just before midnight, the radar-equipped flying boat shadowed the enemy for several hours before handing the duties off to a B-17 flown by Lt. William B. Trigg, 63rd Bomb Squadron. Trigg and his crew endured repeated attacks by fighters throughout the early morning hours but remained over the convoy by ducking in and out of rain clouds.

  Well before dawn, seven Beauforts of RAAF 100 Squadron took off from Milne Bay to attack the convoy with torpedoes. The British-built attack aircraft, the same basic design from which the Beaufighter was derived, encountered heavy weather en route. Only two located the enemy ships, and one was unable to release its torpedo due to a malfunction. The other dropped its single “fish” but the crew observed no indication of a hit.

  The next effort by the Allies was far more successful. More than one hundred aircraft took off from Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and Dobodura, and then assembled over Cape Ward Hunt before heading toward the coordinates provided by Lieutenant Trigg. Upon sighting the convoy, the crews followed the procedures rehearsed a few days earlier. First, at 0955 (0755 Japan Standard Time), thirteen Beaufighters of 30 Squadron swept in from the southwest at five hundred feet. When they got within range of the ships’ antiaircraft guns, they descended almost to the waves and formed a line abreast while accelerating to 250 miles per hour. The destroyer captains, thinking another torpedo attack was underway, reflexively turned toward the Aussie fighters. This was normally a good defense against torpedoes, but it played right into the Beaufighters’ strength, allowing them to rake the ships from bow to stern with their heavy armament. Exploding cannon shells and ribbons of machine-gun fire scythed across the decks, wiping out numerous Japanese gun crews and forcing the survivors to dive for cover.

  Moments later, while the remaining Japanese gunners concentrated on the Beaufighters, thirteen B-17s of the 64th, 65th and 403rd Bomb Squadrons roared overhead at seven thousand to nine thousand feet and unleashed their bombs. Directly on their heels came thirteen B-25 Mitchells of the 38th Bomb Group, which also bombed from medium altitude. The results of the level bombing were mixed—a few hits, many misses—but the convoy was forced to break apart as individual ships maneuvered wildly to dodge the falling bombs.

  With perfect timing, the modified B-25s of Ed Larner’s 90th Bomb Squadron reached the scene. Larner peeled off and lined up on a destroyer, then noticed that three other B-25s were following him. “Dammit,” he growled on the radio, “get the hell off my wing and get your own boat.”

  Racing in at full throttle, the B-25 gunships maneuvered to set up bea
m runs on the scattered transports and destroyers. At a distance of a thousand yards, in some cases less, the pilots squeezed the triggers rigged to their control yokes. The switch activated the electric firing mechanisms of eight Browning M2 machine guns, each with a cyclic rate of eight hundred rounds per minute. Spitting more than one hundred slugs from the combined guns every second, each of the B-25s shook to its rivets.

  During the Pacific war, .50-caliber cartridges were typically belted in repeating sequences, of which two out of every five projectiles were armor-piercing. Highly effective against lightly armored warships and unarmored merchantmen, each bullet was 1.5 inches long, measured 0.5 inch in diameter, and weighed 700 grains, equivalent to about 1.6 ounces. At a casual glance, the dimensions of a single bullet might seem rather insignificant. How much damage could something the size of a pinky finger do?

  What really mattered were the ballistic properties. The M2 discharged an armor-piercing round with a muzzle velocity of 2,800 feet per second—nearly three times the speed of sound—generating phenomenal kinetic energy. On impact, each bullet exerted a force of approximately fourteen thousand pounds per square inch. Naturally, because of friction and gravity, the bullet’s velocity diminished as it moved through the air, but the B-25s were also traveling at around 240 miles per hour, or more than 130 yards per second. As the attacking planes drew closer to the Japanese ships, the relative kinetic energy of the bullets actually increased.

  The outcome was total carnage. Most of the pilots held the trigger down for about four to seven seconds, spraying upwards of a thousand rounds at the enemy ships. Many of the heavy slugs penetrated the hulls and upper works, pulverizing equipment and tearing into crewmembers. The bullets alone often possessed the destructive power to sink a sizeable vessel, but the coup de grace was still to come. Just before hauling back on the control column to zoom over the target vessel, the pilots released one or two 500-pound bombs. Larner’s squadron had not practiced skip-bombing per se, but instead perfected the split-second timing necessary for direct impact.

  Each of the B-25s made multiple attack runs, crisscrossing the convoy to bomb and strafe ship after ship. The machine guns overheated, and several crewmen blistered their hands from clearing and recharging them. Larner almost made good on his boast that his pilots wouldn’t miss. Of thirty-seven 500-pounders dropped at point-blank range, seventeen were recorded as direct hits.

  The results seem to justify the claims. In a span of fifteen minutes, all seven of the remaining transports and three out of eight destroyers were left sinking or dead in the water. The first warship hit was probably Shirayuki, flagship of Rear Admiral Kimura. Larner’s strafing run killed many of the men on the bridge and wounded most of the others, including Kimura. Of the two bombs dropped, one was a near miss; the other struck with tremendous impact near the aft main battery, rolling the big destroyer on its side. Shirayuki righted herself, but shortly thereafter an ammunition magazine blew up, tearing off her stern. In a bold maneuver, the destroyer Shikinami stopped alongside and successfully transferred Kimura and some of the other wounded just before the crippled flagship sank.

  Lieutenant General Adachi also had to be rescued. He was aboard the 2,490-ton destroyer Tokitsukaze, which lost power and was abandoned after taking four direct hits, including one that made a shambles of the engine room. In similar fashion, the destroyer Arashio was hit by three bombs and lost steering. The naval supply ship Nojima attempted to assist, but things quickly went from bad to worse as the uncontrolled Arashio rammed into it, causing mortal damage to Nojima. With seventy-two crewmen dead, including the captain, the survivors abandoned ship and were rescued by yet another destroyer, Yukikaze.

  The nightmare for the Japanese was far from over. Six B-25s of the 405th Bomb Squadron attacked with 500-pounders at altitudes of two hundred feet or less, scoring four more hits. Next came a dozen modified A-20s, which strafed and bombed at mast height, reportedly scoring another eleven direct hits. Finally, about twenty minutes after the mayhem started, four B-17s of the 63rd Bomb Squadron approached the remnants of the convoy. The vessels that were still afloat had become scattered over an area estimated to be fifteen miles in length and five miles across.

  FLYING IN FROM the north, fifteen Zeros also approached the convoy. Detached from the carrier Zuiho, whose fighter group had transferred to Kavieng the previous day, the Model 22s (code-named Zeke) were scheduled to reach the convoy at 0830, Japan Standard Time. The flight leader, Lt. Masao Sato, wanted to arrive on station thirty minutes early and therefore advanced the group’s takeoff time accordingly.

  Approaching in their dark-green fighters at eighteen thousand feet, the Zero pilots sighted the convoy shortly before the four B-17s commenced their attack. Warrant Officer Tsutomu Iwai, a veteran of the China war, watched with dread as the distant ships were suddenly enveloped by water spouts from exploding bombs. Going to full throttle, he reached the convoy within minutes, but the worst had already been done. Several ships were sinking, others burned fiercely, and columns of black smoke rose to fifteen thousand feet. The carnage on the surface, he later wrote, “was truly a scene from hell.”

  Spotting the four B-17s, the Zuiho pilots attacked vigorously. Ten or more dived in from the left on the Fortress flown by Lt. Bill Thompson, whose crew gave better than they got—or so the gunners claimed. The tail gunner, ball turret gunner, and left waist gunner all supposedly shot down Zeros, though it is possible that all three were aiming at the same plane. A pair of B-17s flown by Lt. Francis P. Denault (Lulu Belle) and Lt. Woodrow W. Moore (Double Trouble) also came under attack by an estimated ten fighters. Denault’s navigator, Roger Vargas, claimed a Zero with his .50-caliber nose gun, and one of the waist gunners also claimed a fighter. Thus far the heavily armed bombers had seemed impervious, but something different transpired in Double Trouble.

  According to American sources, a Japanese fighter came in under the wing of Moore’s bomber and fired a burst upward into the fuselage, setting the B-17 on fire. Accounts differ as to whether the cockpit area or radio compartment was hit first, but the fire was evidently intense and fast-spreading, as flames were seen “spouting from the windows and tail.” Double Trouble maintained level flight for a few moments, its bomb bay doors partially open and the fire clearly visible through a window in the radio compartment, but then gradually began descending. The bombs tumbled out, followed by seven crewmembers whose parachutes opened normally, though one man was seen to slip out of his harness and fall. Apparently three flyers remained aboard Double Trouble, including Moore, who perhaps intended to ditch the burning aircraft. However, it was still a few hundred feet above the water when the rear empennage suddenly crumpled and fell away. No longer under control, Double Trouble smashed into the sea.

  In a memoir written after the war, Iwai claimed that one of his wingmen, Flight CPO Masanao Maki, deliberately rammed the B-17. “Both planes broke in two,” he wrote, “and the four pieces fell, jumbled together.”

  His account is at odds with the recollections of the B-17 crewmen, making it difficult to believe that a Zero sneaked in and collided with Moore’s plane without anyone else seeing it. Conversely, the Flying Fortresses were famous for their ability to absorb tremendous damage but keep on flying. This makes it equally hard to believe that enemy gunfire alone caused the tail of Moore’s B-17 to break away. From that standpoint, the scenario of a mid-air collision gains credibility.

  Wherever the truth lies, Iwai’s recollection was highly sentimental: “I was struck by a deep emotion and closed my eyes in prayer as Maki fell away,” he wrote. “Maki was honored with a posthumous double promotion of rank and his feat announced to all forces.”

  To virtually all American and Australian airmen, the notion of suicidal “body crashing” was outrageous, a fanatical act that few could comprehend. But an even more shocking event transpired immediately after the downing of Double Trouble. The members of Moore’s crew who had bailed out were still drifting in their parachutes when t
hree Zeros swooped down and machine-gunned them in full view of the other B-17 crews. The enemy fighters, described as clipped-wing A6M3s, were almost certainly from Air Group 204 at Rabaul or Air Group 253 at Kavieng.

  As soon as the bomber crews returned to Port Moresby, word of the atrocity began to spread. On flight lines, in mess halls, in operations shacks and tent cities, the story of the men who were machine-gunned in their parachutes was told again and again. Men who had never heard of Double Trouble or met any of the crew were suddenly gripped by a seething hatred for the Japanese. Most were already familiar with the horror stories coming out of the jungles around Buna and Kokoda, where undeniable evidence of war crimes and even cannibalism by Japanese soldiers was being discovered.

  Emotions boiled over. The airmen wanted retribution. War correspondent Quentin Reynolds, an associate editor at Colliers magazine, narrated the reactions of Sgt. Gordon R. Manuel, a bombardier in the 43rd Bomb Group: “We got back to the base and everybody knew what had happened to the six boys from the 63rd Squadron. We ate dinner and nobody said much. We were all burning. We couldn’t wait until the next day when we might have another crack at those rats.”

  Some aircrews did not wait. Although the weather was deteriorating, Ed Scott and Jimmy Dieffenderfer took off at 1325 to hit the convoy again. Dieffenderfer turned back because of engine trouble, but Scott pressed on and joined five B-17s from the 65th Bomb Squadron. Soon two more B-17s slid into position on Scott’s wing. Australian A-20s and American B-25s also marshaled for the attack, with P-38s providing top cover.

  When the Allies located the convoy, they found five transports wallowing in the water. All were burning, little more than smoking hulks. Around them, the sea was speckled with Japanese sailors and soldiers who had gone overboard. Thousands struggled in the water, some clinging to rafts or debris, others floating in lifebelts or small boats.