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

by Bruce Gamble

  MacArthur was likewise complimentary of Halsey, but as always, he demanded absolute loyalty. Fortunately, Halsey was willing to play the part of faithful subordinate. Without much difficulty, therefore, they synchronized MacArthur’s next advance, the occupation of Woodlark and Kiriwina islands, with Halsey’s planned invasion of New Georgia. The revised plan, Elkton III, called for the dual operations in mid-May. However, the schedule was subsequently delayed because Halsey’s requirements were much greater than MacArthur’s. Woodlark and Kiriwina were not occupied by the Japanese, whereas New Georgia would require a full-scale amphibious invasion. D-day for the twin operations was set for June 30.

  General Kenney did not attend the conference, having traveled to New Guinea to run ADVON while General Whitehead took some well-earned leave. But when Kenney returned in late April, he quickly got up to speed. His diary reveals some insight about his relationship with MacArthur—and the latter’s true opinion of Halsey.

  Saw General MacArthur in the evening at his flat. He was full of praise about what the air forces were doing and was as glad to see me as I was to see him. A few days ago Admiral Halsey was over for his first meeting with General MacArthur. The general says the “Bull” is a real fighting admiral. He has some faults, likes a headline, thinks a lot of himself, not dumb but neither is he brilliant, and sometimes might be erratic. Has color and is a showman. However, he is a fighter, and as a general thing people like him. Lots of them will follow him blindly. I met him in San Francisco when he came back from a raid on the Gilbert Islands, and I sized him up about the same way. He and MacArthur get along fine, principally because the general knows how to handle him.

  MacArthur’s opinion of Halsey, presuming Kenney’s summary is accurate, was hypocritical but predictable. No one liked a headline more than MacArthur, and few had an ego like his. Whatever MacArthur said about his subordinates, it was always calculated. He went to great lengths to make sure that no one in his inner circle became more famous than him.

  Kenney was equally insincere in his characterization of Halsey. No stranger to big headlines, Kenney constantly sought ovations for the Fifth Air Force, either by surrounding himself with top-performing individuals, or by publicly proclaiming their accomplishments.

  But unlike MacArthur, Kenney didn’t care if his subordinates received greater accolades. For example, his replacement for Howard Ramey, the missing ADVON chief of staff, was more famous than any of them. A decorated World War I pilot, then a volunteer in the Polish Air Force (and twice a POW), Col. Merian C. Cooper was a bona fide Renaissance man. He also cowrote, codirected, coproduced, and acted in King Kong (1933). It was the signature film of Cooper’s stint as the head of production at RKO Pictures.

  Personal opinions aside, the meeting between MacArthur and Halsey had a direct impact on Kenney. The day prior to his return from New Guinea, GHQ issued a set of preliminary “warning orders” for the various Allied commanders who would take part in the forthcoming operation. “The general scheme of maneuver is to advance our bomber line towards Rabaul,” the document stated, “first by improvement of presently occupied forward bases; secondly, by the occupation and implementation of air bases which can be secured without committing large forces; and then, by the seizure and implementation of successive hostile airdromes.”

  One of Kenney’s key tasks would be to keep pressure on enemy air forces from Bougainville to Wewak. Heretofore, Rabaul represented the outer limit of the combat radius for Kenney’s heavy bomber, but the development of airstrips at Dobodura and advance airfields on Woodlark and Kiriwina islands would soon allow medium bombers and even fighters to conduct missions deep into enemy territory. Although Buka Island was a new target, the big island of Bougainville had been visited periodically by long-range reconnaissance aircraft and occasional bombing raids. Many missions that originated from New Guinea covered southern Bougainville, including the big enemy airbase at Buin, and the seaplane base at Faisi in the Shortland Islands.

  Until recently, the Thirteenth Air Force, headquartered on Guadalcanal, had provided surveillance of Buka, which lay across a narrow passage from the northern tip of Bougainville. Before Kenney’s heavy bomb groups could add Buka to their target list, Fifth Air Force units would have to thoroughly reconnoiter the island. Buka posed a real threat. It was home to a sizeable Imperial Navy airdrome, which meant that reconnaissance aircraft faced a good chance of interception by land-based fighters. Presuming the bomber fought its way clear, it still faced five hundred miles of unbroken ocean while crossing the Solomon Sea to reach the nearest base, Dobodura.

  Recognizing this, Whitehead wrote to Kenney on May 24: “We are going to try to cover Buka with F-5s. Buka is a hotspot and, like Rabaul, Kavieng, and Wewak, would be very expensive if reconnoitered by heavy bombers in daylight. I will bet that SOPAC was glad to turn that one over to us.”

  Whitehead was referring to the photo-reconnaissance version of the twin-engine P-38 Lightning. The only unit so equipped in the Southwest Pacific was the 8th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron, which flew the F-4 and F-5 variants of the modified Lightning. In place of the gun package in the fighter version (four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20mm cannon), the newer F-5s carried a pair of factory-installed vertical cameras in the center section and two oblique cameras on each side of the nose. The aircraft were defenseless but relatively light, so pilots took advantage of their great speed—upwards of 430 miles per hour at thirty thousand feet—to get out of trouble.

  Photo Lightnings as well as heavy bombers continued to be used extensively for reconnaissance. And both types experienced significant losses. The “Eightballers” of the 8th Photo Reconnaissance Squadron lost five aircraft and their pilots in the first year of combat operations, the most recent occurring on May 21, just three days before Whitehead wrote to Kenney. A sixth loss was narrowly averted on June 1, when an F-5A received contaminated fuel at Dobodura. Its right engine lost power while Lt. Frederic G. “Hargy” Hargesheimer accelerated down the runway, and he almost crashed into the control tower. Dedicated to the mission, Hargesheimer returned to Schwimmer airdrome, got the issue corrected, and then completed his assignment to photograph Rabaul.

  Not that the bomber crews had it any easier. That same morning, a B-17E of the 64th Squadron took off from Port Moresby for an armed reconnaissance over New Britain. Piloted by 1st Lt. Ernest A. Naumann, Texas #6 was heading southward near Wide Bay when a dozen Zeros attacked. The crew fought back, but enemy gunfire hit the fuel tank near the left inboard engine, starting an uncontrollable fire. Approximately ninety seconds later, near Waterfall Bay, the B-17 exploded, ejecting five crewmembers from the aircraft. Naumann and the radio operator, Staff Sgt. Paul J. Cascio Jr., were wearing their parachutes and pulled the ripcords, thus landing safely in the jungle. Two other crewmen, Tech. Sgt. Thomas H. Fox and Pfc. Charles H. Green Jr., miraculously survived the crash as well—Fox with severe burns, Green with minor knee injuries. All four survivors were located by islanders and spent a week in their care, during which Green’s wound became gangrenous. The fliers were subsequently turned over to troops of the 81st Naval Garrison Unit, which had a detachment at Gasmata. Fox and Green, allegedly taken to a medical facility at the airdrome, were never seen again. Naumann and Cascio were moved to Rabaul and confined in the navy prison.

  HARGESHEIMER, HAVING CHEATED the Grim Reaper on June 1, flew his next photographic mission four days later—and this time his luck did not hold. Flying an F-5A named Eager Beaver, Hargesheimer reconnoitered the north coast of New Britain on the afternoon of June 5 in decaying weather. The JAAF airdrome at Cape Gloucester was all but deserted, so Hargy continued eastward, paralleling the coastline. Near the village of Ubili, about eighty-five miles from Rabaul, he discovered a new airfield under construction and set his camera controls to shoot overlapping pictures. Just after he commenced a wings-level pass over the new strip, Hargesheimer was attacked from behind. Gunfire from the enemy plane, probably a Type 2 two-seat fighter (Kawasaki Ki-45
“Nick”) of the newly arrived 13th Flying Regiment, set the left engine of the Lightning ablaze. Hargy successfully shut it down, but another round of slugs smashed into the cockpit area and disabled the fuel system, stopping the right engine. Bleeding from a scalp wound, Hargy bailed out over New Britain and drifted down into a forest of eucalyptus trees. After the excitement wore off, he began thinking of “fantastic escape schemes,” never dreaming that he had just started an eight-month jungle adventure.

  WITH YET ANOTHER empty cot in the squadron encampment, the Eightballers were hard-pressed to add Buka to their target list. Their first attempt, on May 31, had been spoiled by bad weather. The next opportunity, on June 6, was a successful run. Captain DeLasso Loos landed at the new airstrip on Goodenough Island for fuel, crossed the Solomon Sea and photographed Buka, then stopped at Goodenough again on the return leg. He logged six and one-half hours on the mission, a long time in the saddle for a single-seat aircraft. Another effort three days later was similarly productive, but on June 11 the mission was aborted due to compass failure. Flying without an accurate compass would have been suicide, as the whole expanse of the Solomon Sea had “nary a spit of land to show a beckoning finger in case of trouble.”

  Despite Whitehead’s concerns about sending heavy bombers over Buka in daylight, the need to map the northern Solomons was critical. The process started with aerial photographs, required by the cartographers and intelligence personnel who created tactical maps—a procedure that took months. The assault on New Georgia would begin in two weeks, after which Admiral Halsey would require accurate Bougainville maps to plan the next campaign. There was no time to waste.

  The 8th Photo Recon scheduled its specially equipped B-17, nicknamed R.F.D. Tojo, for the next photographic mission. Its crew made two runs over Buka Passage and a mapping pass down the center of Bougainville on June 15, but the film yielded only blank images. “We don’t mind flying for the cause,” wrote the squadron diarist, “but this no-picture deal is for the outhouse.”

  Bomber command decided to send a crew from the 43rd Group on the next mapping run. The assignment went to a crew in the 65th Squadron who called themselves The Eager Beavers. Their pilot was an enigmatic twenty-four-year-old, Capt. Jay Zeamer Jr., who had flown B-26 Marauders in the 22nd Bomb Group but never passed the command pilot check ride. In all fairness, numerous fatal crashes marred the reputation of the early Marauders, which had an abnormally high landing speed and were unforgiving of mistakes. According to a fellow pilot, Zeamer repeatedly failed the check rides because he slowed the plane down to practically a full stall on every approach, thinking his technique was perfectly acceptable. In fact, it scared the hell out of the check pilots.

  After shipping overseas with the 22nd, Zeamer remained stuck in the copilot’s seat. By late summer 1942, he’d had enough. Bored and frustrated, he convinced the commanding officer to transfer him into the 43rd Bomb Group, newly arrived in Australia. By moving over to B-17s, Zeamer was matched with a plane he greatly admired. But acceptance by the other pilots was another matter. To the rest of the 43rd Group, Zeamer was a castoff. He spent months doing odd jobs that no other pilot wanted, even serving as an intelligence officer, until he began to earn grudging approval. He flew several missions in the coveted left seat as the command pilot, though he allegedly never received a formal check ride.

  Zeamer acquired his own crew, cobbled together from replacements and holdovers that didn’t belong to anyone else. The youngest was Tech. Sgt. Johnnie J. Able Jr., a nineteen-year-old flight engineer/top turret gunner from South Carolina. Master Sgt. Joseph R. Sarnoski was the oldest crewmember at age twenty-eight. He grew up with sixteen siblings in a big Catholic family near Carbondale, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal country.

  The crew lacked a B-17 of their own, but fate brought them a war-weary Fortress. Dropped off at Jackson Field, it was parked to one side to be cannibalized for parts. Its olive drab paint was faded to a color Zeamer described as “shit-brindle,” but he and his crew rehabilitated the B-17E (serial number 41-2666), and made a few improvements. They stripped out two thousand pounds of nonessential weight, then mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns in place of the single mounts in the waist positions, and replaced the two flexible .30-caliber guns in the nose with .50-caliber machine guns. Yet another .50-caliber was mounted in a fixed position in the “cheek” of the nose section, rigged so that Zeamer could fire it from the pilot’s seat. He claimed on numerous occasions that with sixteen guns, Old 666, as the crew called her, was the most heavily armed B-17 in the Pacific.

  After test-flying the refurbished bomber on May 18, Zeamer and his crew did not fly it again until the 28th, when they completed a mapping mission over southeastern New Ireland. They next flew Old 666 on June 2 to map the Admiralties and reconnoiter the Buka Passage—a mission lasting more than twelve hours. Their fourth flight in the bomber would be the risky mission to map Bougainville, scheduled for a predawn takeoff on the morning of June 16.

  CREWS WERE NORMALLY awakened about two hours before takeoff for reconnaissance flights, which required less time to brief than bombing missions. Zeamer’s crew was scheduled to depart at 0400, but at midnight the phone in his tent jangled. Group operations told him that a photo reconnaissance of Buka was needed in addition to the mapping requirement. “Hell no,” Zeamer growled. “I’m going up there to do a mapping, and that’s it. Nothing is going to interfere with that.”

  He hung up before learning the caller’s name. A few hours later, as Old 666 was taxiing for the mission, a courier pulled up in a jeep and delivered official orders to photograph Buka. Informed during the briefing that earlier photo runs showed no great number of enemy planes on the airdrome, Zeamer instructed his navigator, Lt. Ruby E. Johnston, to plot a course for the distant field.

  It was a nearly cloudless day, ideal for mapping. Johnston’s precise navigation brought the B-17 directly over Buka at 0830. In the belly of Old 666, Sgt. George E. Kendrick began taking photographs. Contrary to the briefing information, the airstrip was packed with planes. Crewmembers noted “a string of 15 or 20 fighters” parked alongside the single runway and approximately ten more either taxiing or getting airborne.

  Unknown to the Allies, the Japanese were about to launch a strike against shipping at Guadalcanal. Reconnaissance aircraft had discovered Admiral Halsey’s invasion fleet, assembled at Lunga Point for the forthcoming assault on New Georgia. The aircraft at Buka were part of a preemptive strike that would commence that very afternoon—and the count by Zeamer’s crew was accurate. Air Group 251 had arrived from Rabaul the previous day with thirty Zeros (A6M3 “Hamps”), and one chutai (typically a nine-plane division) was on alert. The combat log of Air Group 251 reveals that a total of eight Zeros scrambled to intercept the B-17, which threatened the secrecy and success of the pending attack.

  Although the enemy fighters would reach the bomber’s altitude within minutes, Zeamer told his crew to commence the mapping run over Bougainville. The weather was unusually good, and it might not be as favorable for many days. Upon reaching Buka Passage, Zeamer turned southeast and started the mapping—a long, straight run of approximately eighty miles that would terminate at Empress Augusta Bay, two-thirds of the way down the west coast of Bougainville.

  At the navigator’s station, Johnston quickly spun his circular slide rule and calculated that the run would take twenty-two minutes at their current ground speed. Due to the nature of photographic mapping, Zeamer would have to hold the aircraft absolutely steady for the entire distance. With enemy fighters closing, the minutes would seem like hours.

  WARRANT OFFICER YOSHIO Oki, a twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the China campaign and an original member of the vaunted Tainan Air Group, led the eight Hamps aloft from Buka. With at least sixteen victories to his credit, Oki was one of less than a dozen pilots of the Tainan Group who survived the months of attrition over New Guinea and the Solomons in 1942. The other pilots in his chutai, none below the rank of flight petty office
r second class, had ample experience. One of his shotai (three-plane section) leaders was also an ace. Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Ichirobei Yamazaki had downed more than a dozen Allied planes after joining the Tainan Group the previous year.

  Wearing dark green paint schemes with black engine cowlings, the Model 32 fighters climbed hard into the sun after the lone bomber. Oki and his fellow pilots were obsessed with B-17s, long regarded as the ultimate foe in the Allied arsenal. Like Captain Ahab chasing down a great white whale, there was no greater accomplishment for a Japanese fighter pilot than to shoot down a “Boeing.”

  Already four miles high, the B-17’s ground speed exceeded two hundred miles per hour, and the Zeros burned a lot of fuel during the long climb at full throttle. The strain, in fact, was too much for the Hamp piloted by Flight Petty Officer 2nd Class Shunichi Yahiro: its engine suffered a complete failure, forcing him to ditch. The remaining Zeros pressed ahead, gradually reeling in the B-17. After reaching its altitude, they closed the distance quickly. However, Oki and his fellow pilots were puzzled that the pilot of the Boeing did not attempt to evade them. Instead, the huge bomber maintained a rock-steady flight path. The intercept would be easy.

  Indeed, it was illogical to hold the wings absolutely level while enemy fighters closed in. But from four miles up, a tilt of the camera’s lens by just one degree would induce an error of one mile on the ground, ruining the mapping effort. The goal was to generate accurate maps for the troops who would invade Bougainville in a few months. To buy some extra time, Sgt. Herbert W. “Pudgy” Pugh fired a burst with the twin fifties in the tail position; likewise, Sgt. Forrest E. Dillman cut loose with the guns in the ball turret.