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

by Bruce Gamble

  I had bellied up to the target and was fair game. The ship was firing at us, fire we couldn’t return. I couldn’t even drop my third bomb.

  I looked down and saw her gunners training their pom-pom guns to follow our flight path. They did hit us. And hard. But, because either they had underestimated our speed, now about 250 to 260 miles per hour, or their aim wasn’t sharp, they only struck the tail assembly.

  The hit caused rudder control problems. I strained to push full right rudder but couldn’t push hard enough. Probably some of the control cables were damaged. My copilot, Don Frye, also jumped on his right rudder, and fast. The double effort did the job. The plane was again under control.

  The next two elements of the 90th Squadron, led by captains Richard H. Ellis and Charles W. Howe, got through the hailstorm of gunfire over Simpson Harbor. But virtually every B-25, like Notre Dame de Victoire, had sustained damage. Collectively the squadron claimed no ships destroyed, although the crews did record hits on a cruiser, two destroyers, and nine transports.

  Unfortunately, after Henebry led the 90th Squadron through the gap between the mountains, the carefully arranged plans began to unravel. The next squadron did not follow the prescribed route.

  EARLY THAT MORNING, the 13th Squadron’s mission leader fell ill. His replacement, Capt. Walter J. Hearn, had not attended the group-level briefings. Described as “a less experienced flight leader,” he was not thoroughly familiar with the plans. When the 90th went through the gap, the enemy gunners had responded with an intense barrage. Captain Webster, leading the second element of Wilkins’ tail-end squadron, saw the fireworks. “If the Japanese shore batteries had been momentarily surprised by the 345th and 38th groups, they were fully recovered by the time the 90th Squadron came through the slot,” he recalled. “Those batteries set up a tremendous stream of flak and machine-gun tracers across the slot, anticipating correctly that the next squadrons would also take the same path.”

  Seeing that curtain of antiaircraft fire, Hearn followed the path taken earlier by the 38th Group, turning away from the gap to circle around The North Daughter.

  Behind the 13th Squadron, Wilkins waited for the planned left turn to a heading of 225 degrees that would take his gunships through the gap. His eight aircraft were in a loose echelon to the right, ready to make the turn, but it never came. Then he saw the gap sliding past his side window, and realized what was happening. Furious about the deviation in plans, Wilkins took his eight B-25s the long way around the volcano, following approximately a mile behind the 13th Squadron.

  Leading the 13th around The North Daughter, Hearn did not turn due south as the previous group had done, but extended his turn almost to the west side of the caldera. One of his elements did cut to the south out of necessity. Lieutenant Walker, who had been troubled by the warnings at the briefing, led his three-plane element over the harbor:

  Wheeling a line of eleven airplanes into a wide turn while flying line abreast puts a lot of pressure on the inside man. Carrying a heavy bomb load and making a tight turn without stalling out or getting ahead of the rest of the line is tricky, so just before we reached our designated turning point, together with my wingman … I initiated a turn.

  When I completed my turn and started my bomb run, I looked for the rest of my squadron and the only thing I saw was my wingman going down. Our squadron commander, for some reason, never turned in to attack. Instead he circled the city and dropped his bombs somewhere other than against the shipping. The rest of the squadron followed him and none of them hit the target.

  By that time I was out in the harbor alone. Prior to this, my heart was in my mouth. To say I was scared would be an understatement; but for some reason, at this point I was now more calm. Maybe it was because I was resigned to my fate or because I was fully occupied concentrating on my bomb run. I don’t know, but I quickly reasoned that my best chance to survive was to stay low, where I was a difficult target, while flying between ships rather than above them.

  Walker’s two wingmen had started the bomb run with him, but Lt. Joseph F. Meyers veered away, and the plane flown by Lt. John Cunningham was mortally damaged. He slid out of formation, leaving Walker to weave by himself among the anchored ships. Picking out a merchantman with a superstructure that seemed to rise “like the Empire State Building,” Walker claimed a direct hit—possibly on the transport Hakusan Maru. He and Meyers cleared the harbor and headed for home independently, but Cunningham’s B-25 crashed near Kokopo with no survivors.

  While Hearn led the rest of the 13th Squadron on a wide turn around the rim of the caldera, Wilkins and his eight planes cut to the inside, heading southeast over Rabaul—and through the thick clouds of smoke. When he emerged and saw that he was near the eastern shore, Wilkins initiated a sudden, hard turn to the right that caught many of his pilots by surprise. The extreme maneuvering, recalled Bill Webster, came at a price:

  First thing I knew, he had racked his plane into a vertical right bank to get lined up on a destroyer. I don’t know how his wingman avoided hitting him.* Each pilot had to do a similar vertical right turn to miss the plane on his left—and hoped the pilot on his right was alert enough to do likewise. By the time we recovered our balance and went to max power (36 inches of manifold pressure), we were doing about 240 miles per hour thundering out over the harbor on a heading roughly southwest (the prescribed course). By now, at least five minutes had elapsed since the 90th’s attack and the surprise element was totally gone. The defenders definitely were waiting for us. Wilkins was over the approximate center line of the harbor and the rest of us were more or less in an echelon formation to his right, with possibly 50 yards between each plane.

  Heading south by southwest across Simpson Harbor, Wilkins on the extreme left and the rest of the formation stepped back to the right, the strafers found a warship directly in their path. Described as a “destroyer,” it may have been W-26, damaged earlier. Wilkins dropped his first bomb on this vessel and reportedly scored a direct hit, but antiaircraft fire damaged the right wing of his B-25, Fifi.

  Continuing southward at wave-top altitude, the bombers drew renewed fury from the Japanese gunners. As the 3rd Group’s postwar history put it, “Antiaircraft gunners on the vessels stood ready, and Simpson Harbor was ringed with living steel through which the Mitchells flew.”

  According to the original attack plan, which Wilkins had fully endorsed, the 8th squadron was to egress from Simpson Harbor near Vulcan crater, just as Henebry’s squadron had done. But now the squadron was committed to head south across the harbor before escaping via Blanche Bay. A high-speed turn to the west would have dangerously crowded the planes farther back in the formation, potentially putting those on the extreme right in jeopardy of hitting the water. Thus, from a formation leader’s standpoint, continuing straight ahead was the right thing to do.

  Unfortunately for Wilkins, the flight path took him close to at least two destroyers anchored off Lakunai airdrome and the heavy cruiser Haguro, picking up speed on her way out of the harbor. Somewhere nearby, her exact position unknown, the light cruiser Agano was also running for safety. Wilkins’ next target was a large merchant vessel, which he strafed and bombed, though his wingman was unable to confirm it as a definite hit.

  Webster, leading the second element in the number four position, was concentrating all his attention on acquiring a target when he suddenly felt emptiness. “About half way across the harbor,” he recalled, “I became aware that there were no B-25s to my left, where there had been three just a few moments earlier.”

  The entire lead element—Wilkins, with Flight Officer Woody H. Keyes on his right wing and Lt. William C. Mackey in the number three position—had flown straight at Haguro. But there were just too many guns. As Wilkins and Mackey began strafing the cruiser, a burst of fire damaged Wilkins’ left vertical stabilizer. Still he did not deviate. He bored ahead, firing his eight machine guns at the massively armed warship. Perhaps, as the only pilot from the original 8th Squadron to have
survived so much aerial combat, Wilkins believed he was invincible.

  But as he closed on Haguro, he got no mercy from its gun crews. Bright muzzle blasts sparkled from dozens of weapons, and a torrent of shells converged on the B-25, blowing off its left stabilizer.

  Instead of swerving to the right, which might have caused a chain reaction among his own planes, Wilkins “threw his plane into a turn to the left in order to avoid cutting us off or forcing us to make a violent turn right over the cruiser,” remarked Keyes. “This caused his belly and full wing surfaces to be exposed to the direct fire of the cruiser and, as a result, antiaircraft fire caught his left wing, causing one third of it to fold up. The plane then rolled over on its back and split-Sed into the water.”

  All that remained was a frothy white ring at the entrance to Simpson Harbor. Moments later, just to the south, Mackey’s B-25 also slammed into the water.

  Keyes’s aircraft was staggered by gunfire but remained aloft, the only plane in the lead element to get through. Keyes managed to fly all the way back to New Guinea. When he landed at Dobodura, emergency personnel pulled one dead crewman from the plane and treated another for wounds.

  Thanks to Wilkins, the rest of the squadron made it out of the caldera. The pilots strafed and even tried to skip or toss their thousand-pounders, but the choice targets, as Webster later put it, “skittered like water bugs trying to get out of the confines of Simpson Harbor.”

  Over the heads of the survivors from the 8th Squadron, dogfights still raged between the defending Zeros and attacking P-38s. Johnson’s 9th Fighter Squadron, with eleven Lightnings, found themselves tangled in an extended fight that added two confirmed victories to Johnson’s personal score. Other pilots added four more, but lost Lt. Francis S. Love, whose P-38 fell in flames and hit ground at high speed southeast of Tobera airdrome, leaving little distinguishable wreckage. Another member of the squadron, 1st Lt. Carl G. Planck Jr., straggled southward after colliding with a Zero. He ditched his badly damaged Lightning in virtually the same spot as Ed Czarnecki, swam ashore, and was rescued by local villagers.

  To the amazement of the strafer crews, detritus from these dogfights rained down on the anchorage. The B-25s finally escaped from the caldera after dodging around strange-looking obelisk outcroppings, known as the Bee Hives, that rose from the middle of the harbor. Racing to the southwest, the bombers were harassed by several Zeros, but the Japanese made only halfhearted passes, undoubtedly keeping one eye out for the Lightnings.

  All across the Gazelle Peninsula, down Saint George’s Channel, and even out in the Solomon Sea, individual battles occupied many pilots and crews, while others struggled with damaged engines, damaged flight controls, and wounded crewmembers. Second Lieutenant Owen Giertsen, 431st Fighter Squadron, ditched his shot-up P-38 near Wide Bay and got ashore safely. Two damaged Mitchells also ditched on the way home, including Henebry’s Notre Dame De Victoire, its left engine shot out by Zeros after he escaped from the harbor. All of Henebry’s crew got out, but two members of the other B-25 did not survive the crash-landing.

  Throughout the afternoon, returning P-38s and B-25s landed at Kiriwina or Dobodura, nearly all having suffered some damage. Pilots and crewmembers were drained. The first returnees, mostly from the 345th Group, were justifiably proud. Others, such as Webster and the survivors of the 8th Squadron, flew back to base in a trance after their horrific experience over Simpson Harbor. “I was so stiff and wrung out emotionally that I could barely get out of the plane,” he remembered. Webster and the others submitted “unenthusiastic damage claims,” and for the next few days jumped every time the telephone in squadron headquarters rang. They hoped a PT boat or PBY had picked up Wilkins and Mackey, but eventually the cold realization settled in.

  None of them were coming back.

  *Two Type 100 heavy bombers (Nakajima Ki-49 “Helens”) of the 7th Flying Regiment, attacked Port Moresby on September 20, 1943.

  *Downs, the 8th Squadron’s previous commanding officer, flew with the outfit while Ray Wilkins was on leave in Australia.

  *As the designated leader of the 345th Group on this mission, Fridge sat in the copilot seat of Red Wrath, piloted by Capt. Robert W. Judd, 498th Bomb Squadron.

  *Kirby initially claimed one Zeke destroyed and another probably destroyed, but he was ultimately credited with two victories, thus becoming an ace. They were his last two victories of the war.

  *Hara’s destroyers had sortied for transport assignments during at least one of the low-level attacks, hence his belief that previous raids had been made at high altitude.

  *Flight Officer Woody H. Keyes Jr.

  CHAPTER 14

  Redemption for the Pond Lily

  KENNEY CONCLUDED EACH day by noting the results of major missions in his diary. His entry on November 2 was cryptic, considering the importance of the day’s big raid on Rabaul: “Supporting Bougainville landing 75 B-25s escorted by 70 P-38s bombed Rabaul airdromes and harbor, destroying 12 planes on the ground, 68 in the air … and sinking 3 DDs, 8 merchant ships from 5-8000 tons. 9 B-25s and 9 P-38s lost and 3 P-38s crash landed.”

  A later handwritten addendum addressed the fact that the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey acknowledged only two enemy vessels sunk by the attacking B-25s: Shinko Maru, a merchantman of 3,119 tons, and Manko Maru of 1,503 tons. But the collective damage was greater. A postwar map drawn by an Imperial Army intelligence officer noted numerous wreck sites and the date of each ship’s destruction. For November 2, Lt. Col. Masaru Shinohara sketched two additional sunken ships, Man Maru and Zingu Maru, near Simpson Harbor’s eastern shore. Additionally, most historians agree that the heavy cruisers Haguro and Myoko had been damaged by near-misses, along with Shiratsuyu, one of the destroyers in Captain Hara’s division. Well over two dozen cargo ships, transports, auxiliaries, and oilers suffered varying degrees of damage, some severe. Still, the number that sank was remarkably low.

  Kenney probably knew that his initial claims were unrealistic. He was certainly aware of the cost on the American side. Nearly fifty pilots and crewmembers were dead or missing. Several more were wounded. The date of the mission became known as “Bloody Tuesday,” and Kenney even went so far as to call it the Fifth Air Force’s “toughest, hardest-fought engagement of the war.”

  Nevertheless he and MacArthur turned Bloody Tuesday into a victory that rivaled the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Communiqué number 572 described a “desperate battle” in which planes attacking at masthead height sank three destroyers, eight large merchantmen, and four coastwise vessels. It portrayed Simpson Harbor as “a scene of utter wreckage and destruction,” and claimed ninety enemy planes destroyed or probably destroyed. The exaggerations were unnecessary. The heroic death of Ray Wilkins, who received a posthumous Medal of Honor, made a greater impact on the public than inflated numbers of destroyed ships and planes.

  To honor Wilkins and others who gave their lives—and to put the best possible spin on the mission—the Fifth Air Force produced a large-format book titled Rabaul: 2 November 1943. Featuring dozens of dramatic photos from the B-25s, it opened with a foreword that was pure Kenney: “In the space of twelve minutes a formidable Japanese sea and air armada, in the powerful, well-organized, well-defended stronghold of Rabaul, was attacked and decisively defeated. Never in the long history of warfare has so much destruction been wrought upon the forces of a belligerent nation so swiftly and at such little cost to the victor.”

  At the conclusion of the bombing campaign, Kenney declared Rabaul finished. Mimicking his rhetoric, a U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey team credited the Fifth Air Force for achieving victory: “Heavy raids in October and a final strike 2 November by B-25s and P-38s completely surprised the enemy and resulted in such heavy destruction that it was obvious that Rabaul was no longer a satisfactory base for any kind of operations.”

  However, the Japanese had quite easily shrugged off the November 2 attack. Moreover, according to Captain Hara, the aerial attack had actually improved the outloo
k of his destroyer crew:

  Considering the size of his effort, the enemy achieved very poor results with that raid. It netted 18 Japanese planes destroyed, and only two small merchant ships and one subchaser sunk. For these minor spoils the Americans paid with eight B-25s and nine P-38s definitely shot down, and many more planes which limped back to base with wings and fuselage so badly riddled that they crashed on landing.

  Gunfire from surface ships is usually of little effect on fast airplanes. But it was quite different that day. The enemy planes practically flew right into our gunfire. I saw at least five planes knocked down by Shigure.

  When my destroyers returned to Rabaul shortly after noon, every man of the crews was justifiably proud and jubilant. The depressed mood of the morning was completely gone. Officers and men alike were able to joke and laugh again.

  From concept to completion, the emphasis of the November 2 raid was on sinking ships. This varied from Kenney’s primary goal of taking out Japanese air power. He’d been thrilled with the success of the previous missions against the airdromes, but his understanding of their effect was skewed by overclaiming. Historical researcher Richard L. Dunn, who spent years compiling American claims and intercepts of Japanese message traffic, concluded that the Fifth Air Force’s P-38s “had taken a drubbing” during the offensive against Rabaul. Such conclusions do not sit well with warbird enthusiasts, who consider their favorite aircraft untouchable. (As Dunn points out, the P-38 is regarded by many as the champion of the Pacific war.) But the statistics speak for themselves. Dunn counted outright combat losses and took into consideration planes that were damaged beyond repair and those grounded by the cumulative wear-and-tear of repeated missions. As he discovered, the readiness status of P-38 squadrons plummeted during the three-week campaign. Similar circumstances applied to the Japanese, of course, but they took advantage of an influx of aircraft from Truk. The Fifth Air Force’s P-38s, by comparison, would not return to their pre-offensive strength for another four months.