Target: Rabaul: The Allied Siege of Japan's Most Infamous Stronghold, March 1943 - August 1945

by Bruce Gamble

  McMurria was furious about the flawed intelligence. “We were alone,” he would later write, “looking down at all those goddamn Japanese while supposedly flying a routine reconnaissance mission.”

  Outrage quickly gave way to instinct. Up in the bomber’s glass-paneled nose, the bombardier keyed his intercom microphone. “Mac,” shouted Lt. Thomas F. Doyle, “let’s get the hell out of here!”

  McMurria’s options were limited. Typically, condensation rising from the warm Bismarck Sea formed thick white cumulus clouds, providing excellent hiding places. But this morning, the skies were clear. Miles to the east, McMurria could see a “little bit of bad weather” and quickly realized that those clouds represented his crew’s best hope for survival. Shoving the throttles forward, he rolled the heavy bomber into a sharp turn. Up forward, Doyle instinctively threw a switch, releasing the entire bomb load in a single salvo. He hoped centrifugal force might propel them toward the enemy airdrome, but the effort was more of a gesture than a calculated attempt to hit anything. Still, his snap decision aided the whole crew. Freed of its heavy bomb load, the Liberator accelerated.

  Roaring across the harbor, McMurria hauled back on the control column to get above the guns of the anchored warships. Shells began exploding nearby, one so close that it peppered the right inboard engine with shrapnel. Excited chatter on the intercom announced the arrival of fast-climbing Zekes. In the tail turret, Sgt. Frank O. Wynne called out three fighters approaching from astern. Three more were reported overhead by Burnette, who now manned the upper turret.

  The Liberator had ten .50-caliber machine guns for defense, but even that relative arsenal was not enough to deter six of the Imperial Navy’s best fighters. Within moments the Zekes initiated a well-coordinated attack, charging in from several directions simultaneously. McMurria tried every trick he knew, rolling the big aircraft and then skidding it from side to side, but the carrier-based pilots were savvy. “They came at us from above, below, from head-on, from the rear and from port and starboard,” McMurria would later recall, “… and in spite of any evasive action I could take, we were getting shot up badly.”

  The antiaircraft shell that exploded near the number three engine sealed their fate: the damaged engine began losing power. Though the B-24 had no realistic chance of escape, McMurria continued out to sea. The crew desperately hoped the Zekes would turn back, but the rain clouds were still fifteen miles distant. It would take almost six minutes to reach them at the bomber’s reduced speed—an eternity if the fighters kept up their disciplined attacks. During those few minutes, the Zekes could pump thousands of machine-gun bullets and dozens of explosive 20mm shells into the Liberator at point-blank range. Dreams of Sydney evaporated.

  But the gunfire suddenly stopped. Scanning the skies, McMurria and his crew wondered why. Martindale glanced out his side window and saw a Zeke to his right, maintaining a loose formation with the Liberator but otherwise making no aggressive moves. In the upper turret, Burnette reported that another enemy fighter, directly above them and slightly to the front, “was doing the same thing.”

  The pilots looked up just in time to see a black object tumble from the Zeke overhead. Martindale mistook it for an external fuel tank until the device exploded, sending out brilliant streamers of burning phosphorus that hung in the air like long, white tentacles. Luckily the weapon, a Type 3 aerial burst bomb, had detonated to the side of the Liberator’s flight path. The astonished crew barely had time to react before another Zeke joined the one overhead and boxed in the bomber. One by one, three more bombs tumbled down. Martindale called out their release, giving McMurria ample time to veer away. The busy pilots had no idea they were among the first Allied airmen to witness the use of the spectacular but ineffective weapon.

  Having failed to stop the Liberator, the Japanese pilots resumed conventional gunnery attacks. Soon thereafter, McMurria had to feather the prop on the number three engine, further reducing the bomber’s speed. They finally reached the rain clouds, which proved pathetically small, hiding the aircraft for only a few seconds.

  Unable to outrun the enemy, McMurria and his crew fought back. The left waist gunner, Pfc. Patsy F. Grandolpho, hollered on the intercom that he’d shot down a Zeke. No one else saw the action, nor could anyone confirm a second fighter claimed by Doyle, the bombardier, a few minutes later. The lack of witnesses supports the kodochosho (combat log) of the fighter detachment from Junyo, which lost no planes that day.

  The Zekes continued swarming, nimble carnivores nipping at a crippled beast. Despite its great size, the B-24 shuddered from the impact of bullets and 20mm projectiles. One shell exploded in the nose compartment, puncturing a hydraulic reservoir. Buzzing shrapnel flayed Doyle’s back while he stooped to fire his machine gun. He staggered up to the flight deck, shocking the pilots with his gory appearance. A large chunk of flesh hung from his left shoulder, and his flight suit was soaked red. But the wound wasn’t life-threatening. Most of what stained Doyle’s flight suit turned out to be hydraulic fluid. Martindale ordered the navigator, Lt. Alston F. Sugden, to man Doyle’s machine gun. The running gunfight continued.

  Another 20mm shell exploded at the rear of the fuselage, cutting control cables to the rudders and horizontal stabilizers. Out on the main wing, bullets shredded the fabric-covered ailerons. Unable to hold the wings steady, McMurria noted grimly that “the ship was getting harder to fly.” The Zekes made two more firing runs, knocking out another engine, after which the Liberator was nearly impossible to control. Smoking badly and losing altitude, the B-24 descended below a thousand feet—too low for anyone to bail out safely.

  McMurria alerted the crew to prepare for ditching.

  The men in the nose compartment were to move to the relative safety of the flight deck, but one did not comply. Private First Class Walter R. Erskine, manning a machine gun to fend off frontal attacks, “was frozen to his .50-caliber and wouldn’t leave it,” reported a crewmember. A nearly identical situation occurred in the rear compartment. While the tail gunner, ball turret gunner, and one of the side gunners moved to the forward bulkhead to brace for impact, Grandolpho held tightly to his waist gun. Described as “looking extremely frightened,” he refused to budge.

  Up in the flight compartment, McMurria and Martindale struggled to control their faltering leviathan. For a few heart-stopping moments the B-24 staggered through the air, barely above stall speed. McMurria may have been the first to attempt a two-engine ditching in a B-24, and there was no way to finesse a water landing. With the bomber on the verge of a stall, McMurria lowered the nose and added power to gain speed, which gave him some control; then, at the last instant, he pulled the throttles to idle and hauled back on the control column, hoping to settle tail-first in a reasonably soft landing.

  But a B-24 was almost impossible to ditch without major structural damage. The problem was the Liberator’s design, which combined a high main wing and a cavernous belly with flimsy bomb bay doors that slid open and closed on vertical tracks. During a water landing the doors invariably collapsed, often leading to the failure of the aft bulkhead in the bomb bay. It was not uncommon for B-24s to break in two on impact with the water.

  McMurria’s Liberator struck the surface of Huon Gulf with a thunderous splash and promptly broke in half behind the main wing. The forward section, weighted by the main wing and four engines, sank immediately. The men on the flight deck, dazed by the impact, found themselves underwater and going down fast. McMurria crawled through his side window and ascended what felt like “thirty or forty feet” before surfacing. Only the tail section of the bomber remained afloat. Neither of the two automatic life rafts had deployed properly from compartments in the main wing. One didn’t surface at all, and the other was tangled in its own lanyard, about to be pulled under by the sinking nose section.

  Just then, Staff Sgt. Fred S. Engle, the radio operator, popped up. Realizing that the raft’s lanyard had to be cut immediately, he discovered that his survival knife was missing,
evidently torn away in the crash. Doyle, the bombardier, surfaced twenty feet away, and Engle shouted to him for help. Unfortunately, Doyle had also lost his survival knife. A moment later, however, he remembered that he had a backup—a dime store keychain with a pocketknife attached. Pulling it from his clothing, he threw it to Engle without a moment’s thought about the possible consequences. Mesmerized, the other crewmen watched the little knife flip end-over-end through the air. Doyle had a nasty shoulder wound, was treading water, and wore a bulky Mae West, yet his twenty-foot toss was perfect. So was Engle’s one-handed catch. Diving underwater, Engle cut the lanyard. The raft popped to the surface.

  The last man to come up was Martindale. Just before impact he had turned off the master switches to prevent a fire, but he was briefly knocked unconscious. Revived by seawater rising in the cockpit, he found himself pinned in his seat. Wriggling free only after the cockpit was fully flooded, Martindale escaped through the side window and discovered that he wasn’t wearing a Mae West. He had taken it off when they stopped on the runway at Port Moresby and subsequently forgot to put it back on. The oversight nearly killed him. Burdened by wet clothing and the .45 automatic he wore in a shoulder harness, he barely reached the surface. After a quick gasp, he sank. Kicking back to the surface one last time, he came up behind Sugden, the navigator, and in desperation seized Sugden’s harness. This gave Sugden a terrible fright: he thought a shark had grabbed him.

  In all, eight men got out of the Liberator. Erskine and Grandolpho, evidently trapped in the broken bomber, never appeared. The survivors—McMurria, Martindale, Doyle, Sugden, Burnette, Engle, Wynn, and Sgt. Raymond J. Farnell, Jr.—gathered around the single raft, assessing their injuries. Most were minor, but Tom Doyle was bad shape. In addition to the wound in his back, he had a deep gash in his right thigh. A piece of jagged metal had sliced all the way to the bone when he escaped from the sinking plane. While McMurria tried to administer first aid from a small emergency kit, Doyle lay bleeding on the floor of the raft. The rest of the crew, glancing around nervously for sharks, clung to the raft’s sides.

  It was barely midmorning, the sun still hours from its zenith, as the eight survivors came to grips with their situation. They were alone in the middle of the Bismarck Sea, their world reduced to a few square yards of yellow neoprene and some meager supplies, which did not include fresh water.

  No one was thinking of Sydney anymore. Nor could any of them have imagined, even in their worst nightmares, the terrible odyssey that lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Pirate Goes to Washington

  LIEUTENANT GENERAL GEORGE Churchill Kenney was on a roll. At age fifty-three, as commander of all Allied aerial forces in the Southwest Pacific Area (SOWESPAC) and commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Fifth Air Force, he had just achieved one of the most decisive air-sea victories in history. During a three-day battle in early March 1943, his American and Australian squadrons practically annihilated a major Japanese convoy in the Bismarck Sea. Sixteen ships were en route to New Guinea with thousands of fresh troops and tons of food and supplies for the desperate, starving garrison at Lae. Kenney’s aircraft sank all eight transports and four of the eight escorting destroyers, killing about 3,500 Japanese troops. American losses were one B-17 and three fighters shot down, totaling thirteen airmen killed or missing.

  The lopsided victory came at an opportune time for Kenney. Seven months earlier he had arrived in Australia to replace Lt. Gen. George H. Brett, sacked by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific Area, for substandard performance. Although a capable administrator, Brett had not demonstrated the loyalty that MacArthur demanded, nor had he earned the respect of the men who flew the missions. Most of the bombing raids he sent out were haphazard and ineffective. Brett’s reputation also suffered because he feuded openly with Brig. Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur’s irascible chief of staff. This wasn’t Brett’s fault: Sutherland tended to meddle with matters outside his bailiwick.

  Unlike Brett, Kenney was a hands-on leader. A highly decorated pilot in World War I (and an accomplished engineer known for solving problems), Kenney earned a reputation as an innovator and an “operator” during the developmental years between the wars. The first to install machine guns in the wings of an aircraft, he also invented the parafrag: a small, parachute-retarded fragmentation bomb that could be released at low altitude without undue danger to the bomber’s crew.

  Despite these credentials, MacArthur subjected Kenney to a long rant at their first meeting in Brisbane on July 28, 1942. Kenney sat for nearly an hour while the imperious general expounded on what was wrong with every aspect of the war—especially the air war. When the tirade finally spooled down, Kenney pledged his loyalty and promised to make immediate improvements. Encouraged by this, MacArthur said, “I think we are going to get along all right.”

  Less than a week later, general headquarters (GHQ) issued detailed orders for a bombing mission against Rabaul—one that Kenney had already planned. A little sleuthing revealed that Sutherland had intervened. Kenney stormed into his office for “a showdown.” Although Kenney stood less than five and a half feet tall, he bawled out MacArthur’s chief of staff, growling that the top airman in the Southwest Pacific was not named Richard Sutherland, and that headquarters had better keep its nose out of his business. When Sutherland reacted defiantly, Kenney issued an all-or-nothing challenge: “Let’s go in the next room and see General MacArthur and get this thing straightened out.”

  Sutherland, who relied on MacArthur as his source of power, backed down immediately. Thereafter, Kenney had no interference from Sutherland. As the alpha dog of the air program, Kenney enjoyed direct access to MacArthur and worked closely with him for the next two years.

  More importantly, Kenney made good on his promises. In addition to visiting the forward airbases—which his predecessor had failed to do—Kenney rewarded his men for bravery and performance. Personnel regarded as ineffective, particularly officers in administrative positions that Kenney considered “deadwood,” were reassigned or sent packing. With a unique combination of energy and enthusiasm, he restored the morale of the air units almost singlehandedly.

  Kenney also demonstrated improvisational brilliance. In late 1942, he turned conventional wisdom on its ear by using C-47 transports to airlift masses of supplies, equipment, and troops to remote airstrips in the mountains, ultimately helping win the battle for Buna.

  Perhaps his best innovation, one that captured the imagination of the public back home, was skip bombing. When Kenney took over for Brett, only two heavy bomber groups were operational. Their performance had been disappointing—especially against enemy shipping. A proponent of aggressive, low-level tactics, Kenney worked out the techniques for attacking ships at extremely low altitude. With his aide, Maj. William G. Benn, he demonstrated that if an aircraft released a bomb while flying only fifty feet above the water, the bomb would skip off the surface like a flat stone before detonating against the side of the targeted ship. Kenney placed Benn in command of a B-17 squadron to teach the tactics to others. In time, the crews began using their four-engine Flying Fortresses like stealth bombers. On moonlit nights, they glided quietly down to the wave-tops and skipped their bombs into enemy ships with great success.

  But the B-17s weren’t built for such tactics. Due to their enormous wingspan and cumbersome performance, they would have been shot out of the sky had they tried skip bombing in broad daylight. Committed to the concept, Kenney turned his attention on the more agile twin-engine planes in his inventory, the Douglas A-20 Havocs and North American B-25 Mitchells. He had Maj. Paul I. “Pappy” Gunn, a genius at field modifications, convert several bombers into “commerce destroyers.” With multiple heavy machine guns installed in the nose compartment and along the outside of the fuselage, the aircraft became highly effective gunships, yet they still retained the capability to drop bombs. Whether the planes skipped conventional bombs or scattered clusters of parafrags,
the combination of low-level tactics and massed forward firepower proved devastating to enemy targets.

  Within months, MacArthur regarded Kenney as his most important general. The two men differed dramatically in appearance and personality, yet their unique characteristics meshed almost perfectly. Each respected the other, both as military professionals and individuals. Kenney often dined with MacArthur, who occupied (with his wife, son, and Chinese amah), the top floor of the posh Lennons Hotel in Brisbane. When the war required them to visit the forward area, Kenney dined with MacArthur at Government House in Port Moresby. Their meals were often accompanied by spirited discussions on a broad range of political and socioeconomic topics. Sutherland usually participated as well, for he was never far from MacArthur’s side.

  Following a dinner at Government House in late November 1942, the three generals debated the essential elements of democracy. MacArthur sided with Kenney on a particular argument, which irritated Sutherland. Seeing this, MacArthur teased him, “The problem with you, Dick, is you’re a natural-born autocrat.”

  Embarrassed by his boss’s reference to his overbearing personality, Sutherland attempted to redirect MacArthur’s attention. “What about George, here?”

  “Oh,” replied MacArthur with delight, “George was born three hundred years too late. He’s just a natural-born pirate.”

  Coming from MacArthur, one of the twentieth century’s most compelling personalities, the remark became a source of pride for Kenney. MacArthur appreciated it, too. Whenever one of Kenney’s air units accomplished something praiseworthy, MacArthur would say, “Nice work, Buccaneer.”