Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  MacArthur well knew that Brett was a member of the Army’s aviation contingent who were critical of the way he had handled both the Philippines debacle and his subsequent ignominious escape.II This “insult” to the Supreme Commander festered, and a full-blown feud developed when MacArthur discovered that while he was stranded on Corregidor, Brett had argued against sending any more supplies to his fighters on Bataan, considering the peninsula campaign a lost cause. In retaliation MacArthur confided to his aides that he was “disgusted with the unaggressiveness (sic) and disharmony manifest in the leadership of the American-Australian air organization in the Southwest Pacific Area.”

  The two generals’ mutual enmity reached its breaking point when MacArthur learned that Brett had thoroughly ingratiated himself with Australia’s politicians and service chiefs, who had unanimously recommended that Brett, and not MacArthur, be chosen to lead the Southwest Pacific Force. Thereafter MacArthur snubbed most of Brett’s frequent requests for strategic and operational meetings, while instructing his chief of staff to fire off derogatory “eyes only” memos to Washington questioning the competence of his Air Force chief.

  It was into these dual conflicts—the one against a surging enemy, the other an intramural affair between MacArthur and Brett—that Jay and his 22nd Bomb Group put wheels down in Brisbane, each man seeking to begin to take his own personal revenge for Pearl Harbor.

  DESPITE THE CONTINUED INFIGHTING BETWEEN MacArthur and his air chief, the second and third tenets of the War Department’s “Hold Hawaii; Support Australia; Drive Northward” strategy remained the Supreme Commander’s priority. This, in essence and reality, meant securing Port Moresby, the lightly defended Australian base rising from the Gulf of Papua on the southwestern tip of New Guinea. The town, the Allies’ only holding within air range of the Japanese bastion at Rabaul 500 miles away, boasted several airstrips as well as an excellent anchorage for Australia’s few American-made Catalina flying boats.

  The Japanese Imperial Command, however, also studied geography, and had scouted Port Moresby rigorously. Aware that the entire town was defended by a mere seven anti-aircraft guns and a scattering of Lewis machine guns, they bombed the base with impunity. These air raids became immeasurably more efficient in mid-March when, as MacArthur was still organizing his staff in Melbourne, Japanese troops landed at LaeIII and Salamaua on New Guinea’s northeast coast and captured both Australian bases virtually unopposed.

  The loss of Lae in particular was a devastating blow. Enemy construction battalions rapidly transformed the prewar facilities, including the anchorage on the Huon Gulf, into a major airbase that the Imperial Command envisioned as a hub from which companies of infantry could spread into the island’s interior. In a bizarre development, men of German stock posing as missionaries had laid the groundwork for these incursions by circulating among the villages of northern New Guinea and encouraging the Papuans to welcome the Japanese as liberators, going so far as to teach and encourage the Nazi salute. Many natives volunteered as guides and porters for the newcomers. Those who did not, and could not manage to take refuge in the jungle, were rounded up and forced on to work gangs.

  Meanwhile, as Imperial forces solidified their toehold on New Guinea, back in Washington the “Chief” of the Army Air Force, Gen. Hap Arnold, commissioned a trusted subordinate to undertake a secret fact-finding mission to Australia to assess the working relationship between MacArthur and Brett. The results were disheartening, if predictable. Arnold’s man returned with a blunt report—their association was untenable. More important, it was hampering the war effort. One of them, he suggested, had to go. He doubted that Arnold planned to relieve MacArthur.

  It was amid this complex arithmetic of war that the 22nd Bomb Group accustomed itself to evading enemy fighter planes over the Coral and Bismarck Seas and to dodging anti-aircraft fire in the skies above Lae and Salamaua. Yet as perilous as these missions would prove to Jay and his fellow Airmen, there was nothing that could prepare them for their bombing runs on the enemy’s strongest redoubt, the Japanese-held town of Rabaul. For the Americans, even the name came loaded with awe and dread.

  ON JANUARY 22, A MONTH before Jay’s arrival in Australia, 5,000 troops from the Imperial South Seas Force had executed a night landing on the crescent-shaped island of New Britain, the largest landmass in the Bismarck Archipelago. They were the first military units in Japan’s history to cross the equator. Within hours they had overrun a small Australian garrison and seized the capital of Rabaul on the island’s northern tip.IV

  Australia had administered the Bismarcks, a former German territory, since the conclusion of World War I under a League of Nations mandate. This mandate included a portion of what would become the country of Papua New Guinea as well as hundreds of atolls and islands dotting the Western Pacific. Some were mere specks of coral in the ocean, others home to thriving port towns. But Rabaul, with its two airstrips and large, natural harbor, was the strategic jewel in the crown.

  Rising a mere 300 miles across the Bismarck Sea from New Guinea, Rabaul had been chosen by Tokyo as the ideal site from which to commence the campaign to extend the Empire’s southern perimeter. On paper these expansion plans were simplicity itself—after securing Rabaul, Imperial troops would next seize control of the green puzzle of the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, then make landings on New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa. But the key to the entire enterprise was Rabaul. The town’s deep anchorage, capable of handling up to 300,000 tons of shipping at one time, would be the hub from which the ferocious spokes of Nippon’s South Seas Force would emanate. Then, with supply lines between the United States and Australia severed, the encircled southern continent would be eliminated as a military threat and ripe for invasion.

  The Japanese high command, intoxicated by the ease with which its military machine had already conquered wide swaths of Asia, was confident in this South Seas campaign to the point of hubris. Yet wiser heads, particularly keen strategists such as Adm. Yamamoto, recognized that global conflict often tended to overturn the rosiest predictions. Prior to December 7, Yamamoto had suspected that the attack on Pearl Harbor would awaken a sleeping giant, and weeks after the strike he had written to a cousin, “The first stage of operations will, I am sure, prove no trouble; the real outcome will be determined after that, in the second stage. I wonder if we will have the men of ability to carry this through?”

  Yamamoto had gone so far as to advise the Imperial General Command that if an armistice with the United States could not be reached by eighteen months into the war, Japan itself—heretofore “an octopus spreading its tentacles”—would be in danger. So it was that Yamamoto and a few like-minded thinkers recognized that Rabaul’s capture was as important to Japan as a defensive maneuver as it was as an offensive base. Specifically, Rabaul served as a bulwark against America’s heavy bombers.

  Since 1940 the Imperial Navy had berthed its Combined Fleet either in homeland waters or at the atoll of Truk, roughly 700 miles north of New Britain in the Caroline Islands. America’s long-range B-17s and twin-tailed B-24 Liberators could not reach Truk from the Australian mainland. But they could from Rabaul’s two airstrips. With Rabaul in Japanese hands, that threat was eliminated.

  Situated a steamy five degrees south of the equator, New Britain’s capital city—the name Rabaul means “the place of the mangroves” in the native Melanesian language—rests atop a rare seismic fault geologists call a ring fracture, essentially a subterranean kettle of churning magma that causes the ground to tremble with small earthquakes almost daily. The surrounding terrain is pocked with active fissures and fumaroles that emit a steady flux of noxious gases and steam, and units from the South Seas Force had even used the light from a minor volcanic eruption to guide them into Rabaul during their invasion.

  But these modern eruptions paled in comparison with an event some 1,400 years earlier, when the magma blew through its fragile planetary capstone of earth and rock with such ferocity that every human being within a
30-mile radius was killed instantly. The explosion, recorded half a world away in the chronicles of the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, rivaled that of the more famous Krakatoa six centuries later. All that remained after the discharge was an empty bowl on the northern tip of New Britain. It was into this caldera, 600 feet deep and about 20 miles in circumference, that seawater poured. The thumb-shaped body of water, three times larger than Pearl Harbor, is encircled by a serrated series of ridges and hills denuded of all growth and composed of both active and extinct volcanoes rising to 1,600 feet. Named Simpson Harbour by a self-aggrandizing nineteenth-century English sea captain, it was the finest deepwater anchorage in the Southwest Pacific Theater.

  Within weeks of their landings the Japanese, exhibiting the terrifying thoroughness that much of the world was only beginning to confront, had transformed Rabaul into their most formidable advance base, surpassing even Truk. Naval engineers ringed Simpson Harbour with a series of modern wharves, piers, and coaling jetties extending into the anchorage’s inner and outer bays, and laced its eastern entrance to the sea with a complex skein of underwater obstacles designed to obstruct enemy landing craft.

  Simultaneously, native slave labor and more than 1,000 captured Australian soldiers and civilians were put to work repairing the town’s two airfields that had been damaged during the softening-up bombings prior to the invasion. Scores of three-sided blast walls, or revetments, were erected to protect parked aircraft at Lakunai airdrome, a grass strip that bisected a finger of land separating Simpson Harbour from a smaller inlet called Matupit Harbour. As Lakunai was only long enough to accommodate fighter planes, across the harbor and farther south the runway at the larger Vunakanau airdrome was lengthened, widened, and paved with concrete. This was in anticipation of the arrival of several squadrons of land-based Mitsubishi G4M bombers—designated “Bettys” by the Allies—which had previously sown terror over China, Java, and the Philippines. Storage buildings, barracks, and another 150 revetments sprang up around the Vunakanau strip.

  East of town, units of Imperial Army troops moved to improve and expand the primitive network of roads crosshatching the Gazelle Peninsula, guarding the harbor’s mouth. They continued, brutally and illegally, to work to death the Australian prisoners of war euphemistically labeled “special details.” The POWs considered too weak to continue on the labor gangs, accompanied by healthy captives singled out to pay for Allied bombings, were trucked to a garbage dump near the foot of the active volcano Mount Tavurvur. There they were forced to dig their own graves in the soft ash and pumice before being shot, bayoneted, or, depending on the whim of the detail’s commanding officer, beheaded with katana swords. The graves were then backfilled by natives.V

  At the same time, some 200 miles away on New Britain’s southern coast, an Imperial Navy landing force secured the village of Gasmata, which had a smaller grass airstrip. There, engineers upgraded the runway to serve as a relay site between the island and the Japanese bases soon to rise on New Guinea’s northern shores. A radar installation was also installed at Gasmata to act as an early warning system against Allied bombers en route to Rabaul.

  Nearly overnight the once sleepy port town of less than a square mile took on the semblance of a modern citadel. All told, the Japanese tripled the number of existing structures, and the military complex that mushroomed around the wide boulevards and steep side streets extending from Simpson Harbour would grow to include four airfields, barracks for more than 100,000 troops, and scores of administrative buildings, hangars, machine shops, sawmills, armories, and fuel depots. This renovation included what were regarded as three of the “fanciest brothels east of the Netherlands Indies,” staffed with over 500 Korean and Formosan “comfort women.”

  The antiquated Royal Australian Air Force had begun making bombing runs on Rabaul mere days after its capture, primarily with a tiny fleet of lumbering, American-made PBY Catalina flying boats. These raids had so far proved ineffectual. But the Imperial General Command could hardly fail to recognize that the base Japan was remaking on New Britain would be America’s top target in the Pacific once the United States established an air presence in Australia. Thus nearly 400 anti-aircraft guns were emplaced around the harbor, including dozens of 75-millimeter 88s and 80-millimeter 99s, whose shells could reach an altitude of almost 30,000 feet. These big guns were complemented by interspersed batteries of rapid-fire cannons, howitzers, mortars, and heavy machine guns, all positioned so that their kill zones, like the town’s radar installations, overlapped. This, in theory, created a protective 360-degree cocoon that could cover the entire sky. The Japanese would need it. Soon.

  AT PRECISELY MIDNIGHT ON FEBRUARY 22, Six Flying Fortresses cobbled together from disparate U.S. Army Air Corps units lifted off from the military base at Townsville on the northeast coast of Australia. Their target was Rabaul, 1,100 miles away. One of the B-17s flew into a storm over the Coral Sea and began shaking and bucking so violently—what the pilots called “porpoising”—that it was forced to turn back. The remaining five refueled and restaged at Port Moresby. They reached Rabaul at dawn.

  The anti-aircraft batteries ringing the town erupted. As the bombardiers dropped their payloads from above 20,000 feet, one aircraft’s wing was punctured by an unexploded shell. Another exhausted its fuel supply evading Zeros and was forced to crash-land in a swamp on the north coast of New Guinea. Its entire crew was recovered after surviving more than a month in the bush. The four remaining planes landed safely at Townsville 14 hours after takeoff. The results of the bombing run were officially recorded as “not observed.” The lead pilot’s After-Action report stated flatly, “We didn’t hit anything.” But if the raid was a tactical failure, a strategic point had been made to the Japanese. The first American long-range bombers had arrived in the Southwest Pacific Theater. There would be more, many more, to follow. These would include, within days, Jay’s 22nd Bomb Group.

  * * *

  I According to William Manchester’s American Caesar, Hitler’s Minister of Information Joseph Goebbels dubbed MacArthur the “fleeing general,” while the Italian prime minister Benito Mussolini publicly labeled him a “coward.” Manchester also reports that the “Jappie” radio propagandist Tokyo Rose predicted that MacArthur would one day be publicly hanged in Tokyo’s Imperial Plaza for his perfidy.

  II According to Bruce Gamble’s authoritative Fortress Rabaul, after fleeing Corregidor to the island of Mindanao by PT boat with his retinue, including his wife Jean and his young son Arthur’s Chinese amah, MacArthur was incensed with Brett for dispatching only one “rickety” B-17 to transport him to Australia. He fired off vitriolic communiqués to both Brett and Gen. Marshall in Washington demanding that they send the Army’s three best planes to retrieve him.

  III The port hamlet of Lae had been in the news five years earlier when the American aviatrix Amelia Earhart was last seen lifting off from its airstrip during her attempt to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by air. After departing from Lae for Howland Island, Earhart was never seen or heard from again.

  IV There is an adage in war that defeat and collapse are not the same. This was evidenced by one of the final radio messages received at Royal Australian Army headquarters in Melbourne from its commander in Rabaul as the Japanese approached the town. “Nos morituri te salutamus,” he wrote—“We who are about to die salute you”—the phrase used by doomed Roman gladiators about to enter the arena.

  V The same fate befell scores of American and Australian aviators forced to bail out over New Britain. These executed Airmen included the B-17 pilot and Medal of Honor recipient Capt. Harl Pease—the pilot who had flown to Mindanao the original “rickety” B-17 that had so enraged the retreating Gen. MacArthur.

  8

  INTO THE FIGHT

  ALTHOUGH GEN. MACARTHUR HAD BEEN placed in overall command of Allied forces in Australia, by unofficial custom the American Airmen arriving in-country during the early stages of the war were considered gue
sts of the Royal Australian Air Force, or RAAF. When in early April two squadrons of Jay’s 22nd Bomb Group settled in at the Garbutt Field airbase some 600 miles north of Brisbane, the locals’ hospitality initially buoyed and surprised the “Yanks,” some of whom were surprised that English was the Australians’ native tongue. The Aussie fliers were delighted to show the newcomers the local “swimmin’ hole” where they could bathe, fish, and wash their clothes. They helped them set up a horseshoe pitch and cut, trimmed, and donated the logs with which the Americans constructed a crude officers club complete with generator-powered electric lights, shortwave radio, card tables, and a small bar whose taps spewed Australian lagers.

  The same bonhomie was demonstrated by the civilians in the nearby port city of Townsville. The hamlet, with a population of just over 20,000, was an oasis amid a swath of cattle and sheep farms. With its wooden sidewalks, hitching posts, and swinging-door saloons, it struck the American Airmen as a town out of a Gene Autry movie. Once the visitors got the hang of exchanging their dollars for the local currency, a few shillings would buy them a bus ride into town, a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs, all the coffee they could drink, and a tall glass of cold milk. Australians did not have the same affinity for milk as American boys, and pub countermen were amazed at the Yanks’ ability to put down glass after glass as if it were beer. But most gratifying to the newcomers were the shy smiles and waves from the gorgeous “sheilas” whose men were off waging war on the other side of the globe. These often resulted in clandestine relationships, and a few of the 22nd’s officers even kept rooms in local hotels for the purpose of what they dubbed “recreation.”