Fortress Rabaul

by Bruce Gamble

  The Johokyoku (Information Bureau), which had direct control over all news published or broadcast in Japan, made certain the people never knew the truth about the battle, which had been an absolute disaster for the 24th Air Flotilla. In the span of a few hours, Rear Admiral Goto’s air groups had lost thirteen Type 1 bombers and two Type 97 flying boats in combat, and two additional bombers were forced to ditch with dead crewmen aboard. Later it was learned that the third flying boat on the morning patrol had failed to return. Although its disappearance was evidently not combat-related, the names of ten more crewmen were added to the long list of the dead. In what was by far the worst day yet for the Imperial Navy’s air arm, more than 120 highly trained aviators lost their lives on February 20, including a group commander and two division leaders.

  DESPITE THE FACT that the planned raid on Rabaul had been canceled, the Lexington’s air group had plenty to celebrate as the task force withdrew to safer waters. Fourteen pilots and at least one rear gunner were officially credited with shooting down sixteen bombers and two flying boats. In exchange, Fighting Squadron 3 had lost only two Wildcats and one pilot.

  Recognition for the victory came quickly. The Navy’s highest medal for combat valor, the Navy Cross, was awarded to no less than seven pilots, including Thach and Gayler. Eight others received the next highest award, a Distinguished Flying Cross. The achievements were certainly important, even spectacular, but for the most part the deeds were blown out of proportion. Had the events occurred later in the war, when the guidelines for combat medals were much more rigid, most of the pilots would have received lesser awards.

  And then there was Butch O’Hare, whose amazing exploits purged a family scandal. Less than three years earlier, while Butch underwent flight training at Pensacola, his father had been murdered in a gangland hit ordered by the most notorious criminal in American history, Al Capone. The assassination was not unexpected. Edgar O’Hare, known to the Chicago underworld as “Eddie,” had made a fortune from the dog tracks he operated during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was well entrenched in Capone’s gang as an attorney and business partner, but he decided to cooperate with the federal government in bringing the mobster to justice. Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and served most of his sentence on “the Rock,” the infamous Alcatraz Island federal penitentiary. Later, while finishing out a separate sentence at Terminal Island for a misdemeanor conviction, he ordered the hit on Eddie O’Hare. The stigma for Butch, aside from his father’s association with Capone, was a persistent rumor that his appointment to Annapolis had been part of an arranged deal with the government in exchange for his father’s testimony.

  Wherever the truth lay, O’Hare’s brilliant gunnery erased all doubts about his reputation. With just three firing passes he had knocked six bombers out of formation. At first he claimed all six as victories. He was initially supported by Thach, who reported seeing three bombers falling simultaneously, but then people began to recall that three bombers had attacked the Lexington while a fourth attempted to bomb the Minneapolis. Therefore, because everyone assumed the formation had consisted of nine planes to begin with, O’Hare was officially credited with shooting down five, making him the first American “ace-in-a-day.”

  Assessing the accuracy of his claims is fairly simple. The combat log of the 4th Air Group shows that the 1st Chutai consisted of eight bombers, not nine. O’Hare fired into six, of which only two crashed as a direct result. The other four were damaged, some severely, but Ito’s bomber was finished off by Lexington’s antiaircraft batteries; Kojiku and Maeda landed intact at Rabaul; and Mori ditched his aircraft in Simpson Harbor. As a result, O’Hare should have earned only partial credit for the aircraft flown by Ito and Mori.

  In O’Hare’s defense, he had no time to confirm whether his victims fell to the sea or stayed in the air. “I figured there wasn’t much to do except shoot at them,” he later told correspondents. “I would go for one, let him have it, then pull out quick so that the exploding, burning plane would not fall on top of me. Then I’d go for the next one like the first.”

  More importantly, only three bombers attacked Lexington, unsuccessfully at that, because of O’Hare’s aggressive attacks. Everyone was eager to proclaim him the ship’s savior, and the American public desperately needed good news along with a live hero. In O’Hare, they got both. Initially he was recommended for a Navy Cross, but Admiral King upgraded the award to a Medal of Honor, and it was approved by Congress on April 16, 1942.

  O’Hare, the first pilot of World War II to receive the nation’s highest military award for valor, was not destined to survive the conflict. He was killed in late 1943 during night combat operations in the Central Pacific, ironically while intercepting a raid by the same type of bombers.

  After the war, the city of Chicago honored him by changing the name of a local airfield from Orchard Depot to O’Hare International. In the decades since, millions of travelers have passed through the airport, one of the world’s busiest, unaware of the historic links to Fortress Rabaul and the ill-fated “land attackers” of the 4th Air Group.

  CHAPTER 10

  Carmichael’s Raid

  BY THE MIDDLE OF February 1942, Japanese forces had captured vast amounts of territory. Guam, Wake, the Bismarcks, and Malaya had already fallen like so many ten-pins; and Burma, the Philippines, and the Netherlands East Indies were about to follow. Imperial General Headquarters, pleased that the Southern Offensive was “making better progress than expected,” ordered Vice Admiral Inoue to capture “various important points in British New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands … as quickly as possible.”

  There was no reason to doubt that Inoue would succeed. All of his previous operations had achieved the required goals with little opposition. When the Rising Sun flag flew over New Guinea and the Solomons, the lines of supply and communication between Australia and the United States would be severed, forcing the Australians to sue for peace. With the Commonwealth out of the war, the Americans would no longer have a viable base in the theater for opposing the Southern Offensive.

  Inoue’s grand plan for the conquest of New Guinea was to begin with the simultaneous invasions of Lae and Salamaua, originally scheduled for March 3. However, the disastrous losses suffered by the 24th Air Flotilla on February 20 forced Inoue to delay the landings while Rear Admiral Goto rebuilt his air strength. As soon as enough aircraft and flight crews were available, Inoue intended to “inflict strong pressure on Australia by means of air power,” a euphemism for pounding Port Moresby into submission.

  As part of Inoue’s strategy, the first attack on the Australian continent had been conducted on February 19. Once again the Japanese employed overwhelming force, sending 190 carrier planes from Nagumo’s First Air Fleet, supplemented by fifty-four bombers from the Celebes, to attack the port city of Darwin. Damage was severe: eight Allied vessels sunk, thirteen others beached or damaged, and approximately two dozen aircraft destroyed, including nine USAAF P-40s shot down. The death toll exceeded 250 civilians and military personnel.

  That same morning, the B-17s of Major Carmichael’s 14th Reconnaissance Squadron arrived at Townsville, Queensland. At a time when Australians were sick of constant bad news, the sight of a dozen Flying Fortresses must have thrilled the local populace. Each of the four-engine bombers seemed enormous and bristled with machine guns: two .50-caliber weapons in a dorsal power turret, another pair in a remote-controlled belly turret, two more in the tail, plus individual guns at the waist positions on both sides of the fuselage. A ninth gun could be extended from a hatch above the radio compartment, and two .30-caliber guns protruded from panels in the Plexiglas nose.

  Carmichael and his flight crews immediately began to prepare the bombers for action. One of the navigators, 2nd Lt. John J. Steinbinder, wrote excitedly in his diary: “Tomorrow we go on our first mission. We are to bomb Rabaul.”

  The original plan to attack the stronghold in coordination with Task Force 11 was still in effect, or
so Carmichael thought, but the enemy raid on Darwin changed the squadron’s priorities. “Mission called off due to great concentration of Japanese naval and aerial forces,” noted Steinbinder. “We are to move on to Cloncurry, 450 miles in the interior of Australia, so that if the Japs bomb Townsville we shall be out of the way.”

  There were no Allied fighters or antiaircraft guns at Townsville to protect the B-17s, which were far too valuable to risk. So the 14th Reconnaissance Squadron moved to Cloncurry, deep into the outback, where they found little of interest except wild kangaroos, stifling heat, and hordes of flies. Recreation consisted of an open-air movie theater, and one old hotel had a small pub with enough room at the bar for perhaps ten patrons. Steinbinder described the town as “a hell hole,” and who could blame him? “Flies fly into your mouth, up your nostrils, into your eyes & ears,” he wrote. “Oh! They sure are hell. It’s terrifically hot here: 40° Centigrade or 105 Fahrenheit.”

  In many ways, Steinbinder was typical of the junior officers who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps prior to the war. Raised in a small town in middle-America, he spent his youth on a dairy farm near Oberlin, Ohio. Unlike the great majority of his peers, however, English was not Steinbinder’s first language. His parents were Hungarian immigrants, and he grew up speaking their native tongue first. Diligence in high school helped him earn a scholarship to Oberlin College, where he received a degree in chemistry. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for the U.S. Army with hopes of training as a pilot but failed to meet the service’s strict vision standards. He was therefore packed off to Miami for navigator training at the Pan American Airlines facility.

  A year later and ten thousand miles from home, he sat amid the flies at Cloncurry and tried to make sense of his rapidly changing world.

  ON THE MORNING of February 22, the 14th Reconnaissance Squadron was ordered back to Townsville. The B-17s were to hit Rabaul on their own. Carmichael’s squadron lacked ground support personnel, so the overworked flight crews had to perform all necessary maintenance themselves. Three bombers were scrubbed from the mission for mechanical reasons, leaving nine available to fly back to Garbutt Field outside Townsville. There, the enlisted crews spent the day preparing, refueling, and arming the B-17s while the officers attended briefings.

  Major Carmichael and his men were introduced to two RAAF Catalina pilots—Wing Cmdr. Julius A. “Dick” Cohen, commanding officer of 11 Squadron at Port Moresby, and Plt. Off. Norman V. Robertson, 20 Squadron—who would ride aboard two of the B-17s to assist with navigation and identification of targets.* The American airmen needed the help. Not only did they lack experience in the region, there were no navigation aids or even reliable charts available, and the first leg of the mission would be flown in total darkness over long stretches of shark-infested waters.

  The RAAF’s allocation of two valuable pilots demonstrated their faith in the Flying Fortress. Cohen in particular represented years of experience the Australians could not afford to lose, but he remained modest about his role. “I was there for comfort,” he said later. “Carmichael was a very competent pilot, and he had a competent navigator. I didn’t do anything significant. It just gave them comfort to know that they had a pilot with local experience on board.”

  The mission profile was essentially unchanged from the original plan, which called for the crews to take off at midnight and attack Rabaul at sunrise. While waiting for the scheduled start-up time, the men endured a few restless hours. Many wrote letters to their loved ones before heading into combat for the first time. John Steinbinder penned one to his mother and another to his college sweetheart, Margaret Gamble, expressing sentiments that he wanted to share “in case anything happens.”

  He needn’t have bothered. For his crew, led by 1st Lt. James R. DuBose Jr., the much-anticipated mission ended without the bomber moving an inch. “Our #3 engine refused to run,” lamented Steinbinder in his diary. The mechanical glitch reduced the number of bombers to eight, but the squadron’s troubles were just beginning. While taxiing in the darkness at Townsville, two of the remaining bombers collided and were scratched from the mission, one damaged so severely that it never flew again.

  As a result of all the difficulties on the ground, only six B-17s took off from Garbutt Field that night. More trouble occurred about an hour later when the formation ran into the inter-tropic front over the Coral Sea. First Lieutenant Harry W. Spieth became temporarily lost and returned to Townsville, where he explained he could not get around the wall of cumulous clouds that towered to forty thousand feet. Nobody questioned his decision. Formation flying was challenging enough in broad daylight, but at night and in bad weather the conditions could be terrifying. Visual acuity and depth perception were diminished, and the slightest motions seemed greatly amplified.

  Now down to five, the B-17s punched through the storm system in two groups. Three of the Fortresses, led by Major Carmichael, gradually fell behind the other two as they continued toward the target, costing Carmichael the distinction of being the first American to bomb Rabaul. The honors went instead to Capt. William Lewis Jr., who arrived over Simpson Harbor at 0647 with 1st Lt. Frederick C. Eaton Jr. on his wing.

  Clouds and volcanic steam obscured the anchorage, so the two B-17s orbited overhead for almost half an hour before the bombardiers were able to identify targets. Lewis made a standard bomb run, dropped his four six-hundred-pounders, and turned toward Port Moresby as planned. Eaton’s bombs failed to release, so he doubled back over the target for another attempt. By this time, enemy antiaircraft shells began to burst in the vicinity, and as Eaton made his second run a large-caliber shell punched clean through his B-17’s right wing without exploding.

  The bombers’ loitering, not to mention Eaton’s second run over the target, gave the Japanese ample time to scramble several fighters. Six Zeros and two Type 96s rose up from Lakunai, and while Lewis got away cleanly, Eaton was chased almost to New Guinea in a prolonged gunfight. His crew claimed two enemy fighters shot down and another “crippled,” but no corresponding losses were recorded by the 4th Air Group that day. Conversely, Eaton’s bomber was struck by a single cannon shell, but the crew escaped injury and the aircraft sustained only minor damage.

  The bigger problem for Eaton was high fuel consumption. Calculations provided by the mission planners had been based on peacetime experience; but in actual combat the B-17s were using far more fuel than estimated. This was compounded when both Lewis and Eaton spent more than thirty minutes over the target. The second bomb run cost Eaton a lot more fuel, and after evading the fighters he discovered there wasn’t enough in the tanks to make it over the Owen Stanley Mountains.

  Looking for a suitable landing place northeast of the great range, Eaton spied what appeared to be a grassy plain just inland from the New Guinea coast. He made a textbook wheels-up landing, as uneventful as a crash landing could be, but the bomber decelerated quickly and then sank several feet into muck. The solid-looking field turned out to be the Agaiambo Swamp, a vast wetlands. Although Eaton and his crew climbed from the bomber unhurt, their adventure was just beginning. Five weeks later, after battling malaria and 220 miles of wretched terrain, they finally returned to Port Moresby.*

  BY THE TIME Carmichael’s element of three B-17s arrived over Rabaul, several minutes behind Lewis’s flight, interceptors were waiting. “I don’t think the Japanese were yet ready to fight,” recalled Carmichael, “so it wasn’t a real severe attack.”

  The enemy fighters became more aggressive after the B-17s dropped their bombs. Dick Cohen, accustomed to the barebones Catalinas of the RAAF, was glad to sit on an armor-plated seat in the cockpit of Carmichael’s B-17. “Some Japanese fighters came by,” he remembered. “I could see the Zeros struggling to get enough height to make a pass at us. Their bullets were small, but there were quite a few holes in the B-17, and a couple of the crew were wounded.”

  He was right: Zeros peppered Carmichael’s aircraft, causing superficial wounds to the radio operator and tail
gunner, but the Flying Fortress lived up to its reputation for ruggedness. “We were a formidable platform for the Japanese to approach,” Cohen added. “Our gunners were very good, the aircraft maintained good defensive formation, and I think the Japanese had a pretty rough time.”

  The B-17 hit hardest was flown by 1st Lt. Harry N. Brandon, who needed every bit of skill to control the bomber after his right inboard engine burst into flames and the outer engine was shut down by mistake. The forgiving B-17 stayed aloft on the two left engines while the fire was extinguished, and eventually the right outboard engine was restarted. A pilot from the 4th Air Group at Rabaul, FPO 2nd Class Motosuna Yoshida, claimed a B-17 and was credited with a victory; however, no Flying Fortresses except Eaton’s were lost.

  After a long return flight, four B-17s crossed the Owen Stanley Mountains and landed at Port Moresby. Cohen and Robertson returned to their RAAF squadrons, and the bombers were refueled before taking off again for Australia. Reaching Townsville on the afternoon of February 23, Carmichael’s small clutch of bombers completed a mission of more than fourteen hours’ duration.

  For all the effort, the first American raid on Rabaul was a big disappointment. The results were officially recorded as “not observed,” and Carmichael’s personal assessment of the mission was equally modest. “We attacked Rabaul with whatever number of planes we had available,” he said years later, “but we didn’t hit anything.”

  Other sources support Carmichael’s statement, if only by omission. Australian prisoners in the Malaguna Camp stockade were completely unaware that Simpson Harbor had been attacked by B-17s that morning, likely because of the cloud cover and the bombers’ high altitude. Similarly, there was no mention of the B-17s in the diary kept by Private Hisaeda of the 55th Field Hospital, though he recorded virtually every other raid during that period. Less than twenty-four hours later, for example, he wrote of an attack by three enemy aircraft, noting that one was shot down. As usual, Hisaeda’s information was accurate. Flight Lieutenant Ernest V. Beaumont and his eight-man crew, flying one of three Catalinas that raided Rabaul on February 24, failed to return from the mission.