“Thus, the four-day mission was completed,” states the official report. “Without the loss of a single man and with the loss of only one B-17 on the ground, the ten B-25s and two B-17s had sunk or badly damaged four enemy transports (one large, one small, and two medium), and scored direct hits on two others and near misses on eight others; in addition, they had succeeded in badly damaging the warehouses and docks at Davao and Cebu, and in damaging Nichols Field and buildings in the city of Davao. General MacArthur’s promise to send aid to the Philippines had seen its initial fulfillment. . . . But this remarkable aerial feat, which had given new hope to the Filipinos and Americans on the islands, could not be repeated. The Japanese immediately tightened their hold on Mindanao. The alternate base which the fliers from Australia had planned to use was taken on the day of their arrival in Mindanao, and the main field was taken only one week later.”
The official opinion that the raid was worth while because it had renewed faith and hope in the Filipinos and Americans on the islands was not shared by the men who carried out the mission. One of the pilots who flew a B-25 in the attacks summed up the opinion of the men who were there:
“The trip was not worth while. We never got to Bataan on time. The flight was conceived to show the boys on Bataan that they hadn’t been forgotten—to bring them medicine, cigarettes and hope. As usual, it was too late. It only caused the Nips to invade Mindanao earlier. Back at Melbourne, General Royce called in the reporters. If the news had been withheld, the Japs might still be guessing.”
THE LONG NOSES
The invasion of Guadalcanal on August 7, 1942, marked one of the pivotal points of the war in the Pacific—the first major offensive against the Japanese carried out by air, sea, and ground forces, and a story of incredible valor and skill carved out by the pilots of the U.S. Navy and Marines, and the AAF. The saga of the fight on Guadalcanal is not a part of this book; notwithstanding the terrible conditions under which men fought and the savage fighting against the enemy, it was the beginning of the road back, in which we were the attackers and the Japanese the defenders.
Part of the preparations for the Guadalcanal struggle, however, are very important to our story—for it is of another battle carried on without guns. This was the fight to prepare for the beginning offensive—a fight of logistics, supplies, and readiness for combat. The 67th Fighter Squadron of the Army Air Forces, which fought alongside the Marines, Navy, and other AAF units on Guadalcanal, went through a thousand kinds of misery getting ready for its combat test. The 67th flew the Bell P-400 Aira-cobra, the export version of the P-39; they were stuck with the P-400 because these models had been snatched from foreign shipments and rushed to American fighter pilots who needed planes with which to fight. Finally, the squadron ended up with a polyglot mixture of both the P-400 and P-39 models—airplanes that became well known for their long noses, and for a deficiency in performance that has contributed much to the guidebook of American military profanity. Much of this chapter is directly as it was written during the war by anonymous members of the 67th and preserved in its official but unpublished history, which was found in manuscript form in 1956.1 It is a story that has long needed telling.
One unknown historian of the 67th noted, six months after the invasion of Guadalcanal:
“How the squadron helped [on Guadalcanal] ... is a story of ingenuity and perseverance and stamina. The 67 th had lived and flown alongside a total of eight Marine and Navy squadrons which had arrived, fought like wild men in their Wildcats, and gone home to re-form, to reequip and recuperate, .and perhaps come back to fight another day. But the 67th, by flying skill and the grace of a special providence who takes care of pilots, is still there plugging away. It has been in the hell of Guadalcanal for six months so far and has now been given to understand that it will be there ‘for the duration plus six months.’ So it is high time the story of the 67th was told.
“But first there is another story of how it prepared for combat. There is the chronicle of a bunch of pilots and mechanics who were dumped in the mud and mosquitoes of a tropical island in the rainy season with some airplanes—in crates—which most of them had never seen except in magazine illustrations, who hauled them over torturous mountain roads and assembled them without instruction books; who built their own flying fields in cow pastures nestled in the mountains and operated under hazards which would have horrified peacetime pilots; who alone for months were the sole aerial protection for the important South Pacific base of New Caledonia, and who at the same time taught themselves combat tactics and gunnery and prepared themselves to fly into their baptism klunkers called P-400s—without the oxygen to keep them alert and alive at combat altitudes.”
When the squadrons arrived at New Caledonia, their new “island paradise,” they discovered that they had 45 P-400s and two P-39s with which to prepare themselves for combat. The pilots groaned in a chorus of dismay— in volume exceeded only by the mechanics—when first they examined their new machines. “The P-400 was a cheap version of the early P-39s, manufactured for export to the British,” sourly noted a pilot. “Only two of the 67th pilots had ever flown a P-39, and not a single one of the mechanics who were faced with the task of not only assembling, but maintaining a strange airplane [had ever seen the P-400]. And, when they pried the crates open, they found that the Handbook of Instructions for the P-400 type aircraft was missing.”
The unpublished squadron history continues with this description of life and work at the squadron’s base:
“With trucks and drivers mostly finagled from other outfits, the squadron hauled its equipment to a spot in the woods two miles from the field. Due to the invasion scare [the fear that the Japanese would invade New Caledonia], no large tentage was allowed during the months of March, April and part of May—until the Coral Sea victory. Everything had to be camouflaged and invisible from the air, so the men slept under shelter halves rigged as lean-to’s under the tree branches. The officers slept in a farmhouse. There were forty-four of them crammed in the parlor, the bedroom, and on the dirt floor of the basement. The tropical rains were frequent and unpredictable. The clothing and bedding consistently became soaked, mildewed, fly-blown and ruined. Many nights were spent in soaked clothes under sopping blankets while rain dripped through the shelter halves and trickled in rivulets underneath. Trucks crunched the camp site into a mush of miasmic mud.
“But the most agonizing were the mosquitos [sic]— the damned mosquitos. They were so thick, one swipe of the hand over any part of the body could be made to kill at least three. Customary dress was a headnet to protect the face and neck, gloves for the hands, and boots or trousers tucked into heavy sox for the ankles. But they bit through shirts and pants and switches of tree leaves were used to slap them off the back. When they got under the headnet you were really busy.
“Several men in nearby outfits went out of their heads due to the intolerable, agonizing worry from the stinging and had to be hospitalized. Then there was the long epidemic of diarrhea [sic] and cramps which caused suffering and enervation of much of the personnel. A wad of paper—for emergency use—was carried at all times. The combination of diarrhea and mosquitos was intolerable, since the former made tender parts of the body especially vulnerable many times a day, to the latter. The phrase then was, ‘my mother told me there would be days like this but she didn’t tell me there would be so many of them.’...”
There Were Days Like This
“But the squadron knew its job and started to work. The airplane crates were scheduled to be the first equipment unloaded from the first deck. The squadron lacked the rank to press its demands and it turned out that the airplanes were the last crates to be unloaded from the last ship.
“Then came the wearing job of hauling airplanes. Only one combination truck and trailer was available. It took eight hours to jockey the airplane crate on the trailer at the dock, to wrestle the big truck around the narrow, twisting, mountainous ‘little Burma Road/ 35 miles from Noumea to Tontouta,
unload the crate, then return. Eight hours round trip! That meant three trips each day and night. So the big truck ran continuously 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until the 47 airplanes were delivered. It was accomplished without serious accident.
“Pilots rode the truck and a jeep which preceded it, riding 24 and 36 hours [at] a stretch. The ones in the jeep carried a red flag and shooed all traffic out of the way. They spoke softly to the command cars—‘Sir, would you mind pulling off the road a minute?’ They hollered Brooklynese to the dogface driver—‘Hey, we’ve got a big semi coming; pull over!’ To the native cars, they spoke a sort of pidgin French. . . . Day after day, night after night, the big prime mover whined and groaned as it crept up the mountains, and roared as it highballed down the other side and the natives and the Frenchmen and the American soldiers cheered as it passed because that meant one more airplane was on the way.
“Unloading the huge 10,000-pound crates at Tontouta was an engineering feat itself. They were slid gently to the ground without any crane or hoist equipment except the truck’s winch.
“The job of putting a strange and complicated bunch of parts together into an airplane in which a pilot would risk his life test-hopping was one long nightmare of tedious work in mosquitoes and mud and rain. Inside the crates were instructions for P-39s—D, F, and K models —but none for this type, the P-400. One day, the engineering officer hopefully opened a big batch of handbooks which had just come, only to find they were the Handbook of Instruction and Maintenance of the Automatic Pilot....”
During this period the line-chief of the 67th Fighter Squadron was veteran Army Master Sergeant Robert Foye (later promoted to major); as the work went on Foye scribbled notes to keep a record of what was going on:
“Assemblying rig built from old timbers picked up around Tontouta. Mechanics had only the simple 1st Echelon maintenance tools and only about ten kits of these for the entire squadron. No special tools of any kind. Even the truck tools were at a premium.
“No replacement parts. Every fifth crate was designated ‘spare parts’ before it was uncrated.
“Rain, mud and mosquitos [sic]. Mechanics worked sopping wet. Pvt Jones worked on tail assembly sitting in six inches of water, so wet from rain he never knew the difference. Rain poured down their faces and necks —still they worked on, passing the scanty wrenches from one to another. Not a growl from any man.
“Work day from five a.m. until dark. Cold (sometimes hot) chow at noon, and back to work right away. No transportation during the first five days and men had to walk two miles to work and home again through the mud.
“No Technical Order or Manuals of Instruction but started producing airplanes at the rate of 1.5 a day after the first week.
“Frequent troubles. One prop was missing from crate. Sometimes vital fuel and pressure lines found to be mysteriously plugged with scotch tape. One airplane had electrical circuits hooked up at the factory evidently by a maniac. Press, and wheels would retract. Press wheel switch, flap switch, and guns would fire. Took days to straighten things out. Promptly named plane ‘Rube Goldberg Special.'
“Mechanics became production-conscious and still section chiefs would urge them on. Assembly run like a factory—all in the open and in the mud. Would put any depot to shame, with Initial Assembly, Empennage Section, Wing Section, Engine Run-In Section, Rigging Section, Radio Installation Depot, Armament Installation Department, then Field Inspection Department, and Test Flight Section. Every man to his job, and never a growl except when one section chief would hold up another: ‘Come on! This is war—keep ’em rolling!*
“From crate to flying in one day. Thirty airplanes assembled by the 67th—which was not equipped or required to do the work—and eleven by the 65th Materiel Squadron. All in twenty-nine days, and in twenty years in the Army, I have never seen it done before.
“One mechanic (Hartfield) improvised tools by cutting wrenches and welding on extensions. Servicing funnels made from gallon cans with makeshift spouts soldered to the comers. (Incidentally, 67th should have patent on the gas drum washing rack—one drum split in half and resting on a V-shaped cut in the other. Door cut in bottom half for the fire. Result: A practical G.I. messkit wash stand.)
“During the second week of assembly, officers and men began to come down with dysentery. Men literally dropped on their knees with cramps at the rig before they would ask for relief. Had to be ordered home, sometimes even threatened with trial for disobedience of orders to leave their place on the line. Why hasn’t Washington designed a decoration for men in the Air Corps who, far above and beyond the call of duty, perform feats on the ground?
“It would be impossible to pick out outstanding men during this period—when they worked from five a.m; until dark in the mud and rain and then volunteered to go back at night. The whole damn outfit was outstanding. An outfit like this could be the nucleus for six Air Corps groups and with recruit fill-ins could start operating tomorrow. ..
One week after the squadron disembarked from its troopship the men received their first crate. Six days after receiving the first crate, Lieutenant Dale D. Brannon took the first P-400 into the air for a successful test flight. Everyone sighed with relief, and redoubled his efforts. Then, notes the squadron history, “Such was the rush that on two nights they rigged up field floodlights for an attempt at twenty-four-hour assembly. But mosquitos were driving the men insane and it had to be stopped. Once there was an air raid scare and pilots and men spent all night dragging uncrated planes around with trucks to dispersal points.”
Then there were the unique problems—without spare parts, instruction or maintenance books, or proper tools—of keeping the 67th’s klunkers in the air. The historian of the 67th was quick to notice that “every airplane in commission soon became an example of the ground crew’s ingenuity and resourcefulness.”
Ignition harnesses, normally in good supply, were scarce items, and those in use quickly became frayed and developed short circuits. Since there were no replacements, mechanics had to take harnesses from wrecked airplanes, which were already in a poor state of repair, and try to bring these back into usable shape. The crew chiefs violated every imaginable rule in the book just to keep the airplanes flyable. Among them—it “would have given the experts at Chanute Field the holy horrors,” notes the squadron history—was the habit of patching up high-voltage spark plugs with ordinary friction tape. The P-400 pilots were often to report a “sudden stoppage of the heart” when their Allison engines sputtered and cut in and out (especially at takeoff), “but that was part of the excitement of a day’s flying."
The Long Noses in Battle
Months before the P-400s of the 67th Fighter Squadron went into battle at Guadalcanal, a mixture of P-400s and later-model P-39s were thrown into the air fighting over New Guinea. The 35th and 36th Fighter Squadrons of the 8th Fighter Group moved into Port Moresby at the end of April, 1942, to relieve Australian units (flying P-40s) which were down to a handful of exhausted and ailing pilots flying patched-up wrecks for fighter airplanes.
In the first mission for the P-39 Airacobras, 13 fighters took off from Moresby to strafe the Japanese airstrip at Lae, 180 miles to the north. Within a very few minutes, approximately a dozen Zero fighters were mixing it up with the Airacobras in a wild, scrambling dogfight extending from 50 to 1,000 feet, which ran for 30 miles along the northern coast of New Guinea, and then reversed itself to continue the same distance back toward Lae. In the wild melee, the American pilots claimed four Zeros shot down—three of them to one man—at a cost of three P-39s.
What made the fight even more significant was the quality of the pilot who led the Airacobras into battle. The leader was none other than Lieutenant Colonel Boyd D. (“Buzz”) Wagner, who had distinguished himself brilliantly in combat during the early days of the war in the Philippines. Wagner, of course, was not only a sensational pilot, but also a man with extensive experience in fighting the Zero—explaining in great part why three of the four fighters sho
t down dropped before his guns.
Although there were characteristics of the Airacobra which brought some pilots to prefer them to the P-40 (such as greater level speed and the heavy punch of the 37-mm. cannon in the nose), there was still little doubt about the fighter-to-fighter superiority of the Zero. The official histories of the AAF in Australia and New Guinea note of the pilots who engaged the Zero in April and May that all thoroughly respected and admired the flying qualities of the Zero.
Late in May, 1942, Colonel Wagner submitted a report that stated in part:
..... there has seldom been an even fight between Japanese Zero type fighters and our own. Only by virtue of armor plate protection, leak-proof fuel tanks, and ruggedness of construction of our fighters, has there not been a great many more of our pilots killed and airplanes destroyed. Our fighter pilots have proven their courage and ability to fight continuously against superior odds and still maintain a very high morale. This high morale, however, has been with fighter pilots a forced one, with the knowledge that Japanese fighters would be just as high above tomorrow as they were today, and that the first enemy combat would be an attack from above out of the sun.”
Many of the fighter combat missions flown against the Japanese Zero with the P-39 and P-400 airplanes went badly for the same reason—inability to meet the enemy on his own terms. But the most damning indictment of the Airacobras quite possibly came from the Japanese themselves (unknown at the time to our pilots, of course): of all the American fighter planes to be encountered in battle, the Japanese most preferred to meet the Airacobras I
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