by Bob Drury
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CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I
1. Wanderlust
2. The Wild Blue Yonder
3. Jay & Joe
4. “The Sacred Duty of the Leading Race”
5. The Fortress
6. The Winds of War
7. The Japanese Citadel
8. Into the Fight
PART II
9. Breaking the Code
10. The Renegade Pilot
11. The Bulldog
12. A Microscopic Metropolis
13. Ken’s Men
14. A Place Where Trouble Started
15. “Clear as a Bell”
16. The Missing General
17. Pushing North
18. A Fine Reunion
PART III
19. “A Motley Collection of Outcasts”
20. Blood on the Bismarck Sea
21. The Flight of the Geishas
22. Old 666
23. The Outlaws
24. No Position Is Safe
25. New Additions
26. “Hell, No!”
27. Buka
28. “Give ’Em Hell!”
29. The Desperate Dive
30. Get It Home
31. “He’s All Right”
32. Dobodura
Epilogue
Afterword
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Notes on Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index
For Susan Margaret Drury
B.D.
To the memory of
Nancy Clavin Bartolotta and
Jacquelyn Dayle Reingold
T.C.
PROLOGUE
THEY WERE CLOSE NOW, THE zeros. Running him down from behind.
Thirty minutes ago his belly gunner had counted over 20 on the Buka airstrip, close to a dozen kicking up dust as they taxied for takeoff. They would be on him soon; they should have been on him by now.
“Give me forty-five more seconds.”
It was Kendrick, over the interphone. The waist gunner and Photo Joe. Asking, begging, for just a little more time to get his pictures. The photographs, they’d said back at the base, that could change the course of the war. Almost four hours in the air and this is what it had come to. Forty-five seconds.
Below him the low sun caused the stunted eucalyptus trees to cast dappled shadows on the flowering frangipani of Japanese-held Bougainville Island. Far to the east the active volcano, Mount Bagana, spewed slender flutes of black smoke into the cloudless sky, like veins in blue granite. But it was neither the island’s flora nor its topography that interested Captain Jay Zeamer and the anxious crew of his B-17 Flying Fortress this morning. It was the hidden reefs of Empress Augusta Bay. The reefs that lay submerged just beneath the breaking waves where the Marine landings would take place. The reefs waiting like bear traps to snag their LSTs.
The reefs, the airfields, the enemy defenses: these were the reasons why Jay and his men were here. A lonely B-17 600 miles from home. Soon to face the might of the Japanese Imperial Navy’s most elite fighter pilots, a desperate enemy determined to prevent the Americans from returning with their photos. The impossible mission, someone had called it. Now Jay Zeamer knew why.
Not that every recon flight wasn’t a deadly gamble. No fighter escort. Not even a friendly formation to help ward off the swarms of bogeys. Jay knew too many recon crews who had never returned. That was the rub. Scouting enemy positions was only half the job. Getting the information back would be the “impossible” part. The Zero pilots knew it as well.
Jay scanned the bay again. Visibility was clear. Just a scrim of ground haze over the shore, which the infrared camera filters would cut through with ease.
Now the tail gunner’s voice crackling over the interphone. Another fighter squadron lifting off, this time from Bougainville. A dozen at least.
Jay thought about cutting and running. No one would blame him. No one could. He had volunteered for this job with the clear understanding that he’d run the operation his way. His way meant any way—any way—he wanted. They had already reconnoitered Buka Island. The flight wouldn’t be a total waste. Hell, Buka was where the wolves behind him had picked up his scent.
Why hadn’t he trusted his gut, gone with his initial response? At first he’d said no when they’d tacked on the Buka run at the last minute. Just Bougainville, he’d told them. Forget Buka; Buka was suicide. He should have held firm. What could they have done? Grounded him? He’d been disciplined before, too many times to count. Washed out of one Bomb Group for being too flaky, nearly court-martialed by another for that stunt over Rabaul. A lot of people didn’t like Jay. Aloof, they called him. A screwoff. No respect for authority.
And this was where it had gotten him.
When they wouldn’t give him a plane he’d foraged one, plucked from the boneyard at the rump end of the runway, and rebuilt it from the wheels up. When they wouldn’t give him a crew he’d recruited one, men like himself; misfits they called them at first, but each now an Airman with whom he’d entrust his life. And when they wouldn’t give him assignments he’d volunteered for them, recon missions no one else wanted, missions they all had to be a little crazy to take on. Missions like this one, which right now his every good sense was screaming at him to abort.
But then Jay envisioned the Marines. It was the middle of June 1943, and the war in the Pacific hung by a thread. In the 18 months since Pearl Harbor the Japanese had controlled the game, spreading like algae across the vast, watery theater, securing far-flung bases with impunity. Yet now the tide just might be turning. First at Midway, then on Guadalcanal. Small steps. But steps. And the island below him—Bougainville—was next. The key to unlocking the stranglehold of the Empire of the Rising Sun.
After Bougainville there would be New Guinea, and from New Guinea a return to the Philippines, until finally the ships of the U.S. Navy would be lapping at Japanese shores. Forget the great and grand strategies transmitted from Washington, pushpins on a map. The turnaround in this war would begin with boots on the ground at Bougainville. Marines depending on his photos in order to reach that beachhead. If he didn’t do the job, if he throttled and fled, someone else would have to come back and do it all over again. He could not live with that.
Then another thought, creeping into his mind on cat’s paws. A man’s character is his fate. He hadn’t been much for philosophy back at M.I.T. He was an engineer, a maker, a builder, with little use for pious pronouncements. But he never forgot that line. A man’s character is his fate. One of the Greeks. Heraclitus? He considered himself a man of character, a pilot of character. He was the captain of a United States Army Air Force bomber crew, a leader of men. Well, he’d soon find out his fate. Their fate.
The first wave of Zeros hit them from the front. Through his port window he caught the bright yellow strobes of the twin 7.7-millimeter machine guns winking from the Zeke’s nose. Then the larger red flare from one of its two 20-millimeter cannons flashed from the wing. The sound of the shells like shotgun blasts fired into a bucket of sand as they smashed into his plane.
They were going for the bomber’s front bubble, blasting it with cannon fire. But the bombardier Joe Sarnoski down in the Greenhouse was giving as good as he got, the red tracers from his twin .50-cals cutting bright curving arcs through the
azure sky. Joe nailed the lead Zero, sending it into a spin, and now the entire crew opened up, even Kendrick at the waist windows, finished with his photos. Seventeen machine guns streaking the sky with evanescent streams of gray-black smoke. The old Fortress juddered and wheezed from their recoil.
The rumble reached the cockpit first from the nose and then converged on him from behind, up from the belly gun and down from the top turret. Finally it growled through the fuselage from the tail gunner’s blister all the way to the flight deck. It was the kind of noise you never forget, accompanied by the familiar odor, the smell of the fight, the grease and powder.
From the corner of his eye he saw Joe Sarnoski blast a second bogey, raking the Zeke from the engine cowling to the wing tanks, the enemy fighter’s aviation fuel erupting into orange flames that streaked to its tail. It was as if the bombardier were plowing a highway. The irony was not lost on Jay—Joe was his best friend and had insisted on coming along on this one last mission before cashing his golden ticket back to the States, his kit already packed back in his quarters.
Jay silently thanked God that he had just as another Zero hove into view in front of him. He pressed the trigger button on his wheel that fired the special nose gun he’d installed just for this purpose. The bullets punctured the Zeke’s fuselage, and he watched the aircraft flame out, making certain that it spiraled into the Solomon Sea.
He was still craning his neck when the flash erupted in the cockpit. There was the briefest effusion of colors.
And then everything went dark.
PART
I
On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
—Boy Scout Oath
1
WANDERLUST
JAY ZEAMER JR.’S PARENTS SUSPECTED early on that their oldest child was a born renegade. The boy was not long out of cloth diapers, no older than four, when he began disappearing from the Zeamer household in the verdant suburb of Orange, New Jersey. Sometimes his mother, Marjorie, would find him sitting on the roof of the porch jutting from their clapboard Victorian home, having crawled out of an upstairs window to study the stars in the night sky. At other times he went missing for hours, before a frantic Jay Sr. would receive a call from a local policeman informing him that his son had been discovered wandering among the breweries and hatmakers that dominated the city’s downtown streets.
Jay’s wanderlust should not have come as a surprise to his parents, particularly Jay Sr. The branches of the Zeamer family tree were thick with wayfarers and adventurers, including at least fifteen of Jay’s German-born forebears who had fought for the Colonies during America’s Revolution. Continuing the custom, Jay Jr.’s great-great-grandfather John had become a teamster by the age of fourteen, hauling lumber and whiskey across hundreds of miles of Pennsylvania backcountry over bone-jarring tracks. And his grandfather Jeremiah had traced the Oregon Trail to California by covered wagon and sidewheeler steamer at the conclusion of the Civil War. Then he had sailed home to Philadelphia via the Cape Horn passage to edit and publish a weekly newspaper.
After Jay Sr. had served a short apprenticeship on his father’s newspaper, he too took to the road, wrangling an appointment through a family friend to Puerto Rico’s Department of Education. “The job involved bookkeeping,” he wrote back to his family, “of which I had no practical knowledge.” His government employer apparently agreed, and dismissed him after seven months.
But Jay Sr. had made use of his short stint in San Juan to become fluent in Spanish, an achievement that he parlayed into a job as a stenographic interpreter on various Spanish-speaking Caribbean islands and, later, for the Mexican Railway in Veracruz. Sensing that revolution was imminent, he left Mexico in 1911, and spent his next 42 years, he wrote, as a globe-hopping “traveling man,” selling leather belting for machinery “the world over covering all industrial countries except Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.”
Jay Sr. made his home base in the southeastern Pennsylvania town of Carlisle, not far from where his great-great-grandfather had purchased a 218-acre homestead in 1765 from the family of William Penn himself. And it was into this cosmopolitan family that Jay Jr., the first of four Zeamer children, arrived on July 25, 1918.
World War I was well into its fourth grinding year when Jay Jr. was born. Since America’s entry into the conflict a little over a year earlier, newspapers had covered the war like no other before. That July was no different, and as the Zeamers welcomed their first child into the world the front pages of newspapers and radio broadcasts were replete with reports from the Western Front chronicling the latest bloodletting at the Second Battle of the Marne, Germany’s last great offensive. Like hundreds of small towns across the country, Carlisle, with close to 11,000 residents, did its patriotic part, and had also mourned its fallen sons, including the privates Doyle Ashburn and Harvey Kelley, who were killed that week on the banks of that faraway French river.
Jay Sr. had enlisted in the Army infantry at the war’s outset and earned his “doughboy” credentials in boot camp, although the lingering effects of a childhood bout with tuberculosis had kept him stateside. Still, if the appellation of the “War to End All Wars” was to be believed, he and Marjorie hoped and prayed that babies born in 1918, including their older son, would never have to fight in another global conflict.
Jay was only two when his father pulled up stakes in Pennsylvania and moved the family to New Jersey in order to be nearer to the major transportation hubs of Newark and New York City, a mere 15 miles away from Orange. It was around this time that Marjorie, a striking, dark-eyed brunette whose cheekbones could cut falling silk, realized that if she didn’t keep a constant eye on her oldest boy she often would have no idea where he’d vanished to.
Despite its proximity to New York, Orange in the 1920s had only recently shed its pastoral roots. And though its main streets were by then crowded with breweries and thriving boot- and shoemaking factories taking advantage of the tannic acid produced by the town’s thousands of hemlock trees, spinneys of thick oak enclosing small farmsteads were only a short distance away. These rural areas virtually called out to be explored by a boy who was, as Marjorie wrote of Jay Jr., “brimming with an almost unrestrained energy, a curious spirit of investigation and adventure.”
At the same time Jay also exhibited a natural mechanical bent. His parents marveled over the toy trains and automobiles he built in his father’s workshop, mobile facsimiles propelled by springs or elaborate elastic-band motors that the boy concocted from scratch. Foremost in the Zeamer family’s memory, however, was Jay’s fascination with airplanes; his brother Jere, three years younger, described the model planes Jay constructed as “impressive for both their complexity and quality.”
In 1926, when Jay was eight, his father’s successful career had allowed the family to put away enough money to purchase a clapboard vacation cottage in the bucolic seaside hamlet of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. By this time the Zeamer family had expanded to six with the arrivals of Jere and two sisters: Isabel and Anne. The first summer that the family packed into their station wagon and headed north, it was as if an entire new world opened up to their eldest child. In fact, Boothbay Harbor would have a hold on Jay for the rest of his life.
The Zeamer cottage was hard by the seashore and surrounded by a seemingly unending forest that made the outlands of Orange seem sparse. This heightened young Jay’s innate curiosity. It was as if the little New England hamlet had sprung from the ground solely for his amusement, and he would disappear for hours on end exploring the ancient Abenaki Indian trails that crosshatched the thick north woods. There was also a timeless aspect to the harbor itself, and the buzzing hive of fisherman and shipbuilders made it seem to Jay like the busiest place on earth.
On summer afternoons, when the prevailing southwe
st breezes strengthened to form thunderheads to the north, Jay imagined being transported back in time. One day he fancied himself fighting in the Revolutionary War, perhaps as the captain of the ship of the line in the Continental Navy which had traded shot with a British antagonist right outside the cove; the next, he was a mate aboard the Confederate schooner that sneaked into Portland Harbor a few miles down the coast at the height of the Civil War and made off onto the high seas with a captured Union revenue cutter.
Jay’s love of the water came to fruition with the rowboat that he built from scratch, like his toy cars, trains, and airplanes, shortly after his tenth birthday. He had nailed it together from cadged planks and stray building material he found lying about the village—even its oars had been fashioned from hardwood scavenged from behind an abandoned sawmill—and it was the joy he took in sailing this flat-bottomed dory that sealed his parents’ suspicion that he was a different kind of boy.
Though Jay Sr. took his older son’s adventurous nature in the spirit of a proud father, Marjorie hated it when Jay rowed off alone during the predawn hours in what she referred to as “the tub,” sculling across the placid cove, dipping out of sight into the harbor’s every rocky nook. She would watch nervously from her front porch as he weaved among the rows of tall-masted schooners, survivors of the Great War’s Merchant Marine fleet, lying at anchor far off in the Gulf of Maine. Jay’s little rowboat, she remembered, “was no masterpiece, to be sure,” but it was watertight and shipshape, and Jay never seemed to tire of tying onto those old schooners and clambering up through their rigging, staring out to sea. It was if something was beckoning him to make a mark in the wide world.
Soon Jay became a regular sight prowling the fishing wharves down at the harbor. His mother was taken aback one afternoon when, as she walked into the village center with her son, several fishermen and lobstermen waved and paused to chat with her boy about everything from the tide tables to the day’s catch. On special occasions, such as a birthday or holiday, Jay would even be invited to accompany these hard, leather-skinned men out on their day trips. Later, when the Zeamer family sat down to dinner, Jay regaled them with fishing lore and the rudiments of navigation he had soaked up like a sponge. He made certain, of course, to leave out the salty phrases his new friends were teaching him. Jay’s parents sensed that it was on these day trips that their son was discovering what it was like to be part of a crew working together toward a shared goal.