by Bob Drury
Though Australia is roughly the same size as America’s Lower 48 states, there were only seven million people living on the continent in 1942, and the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) had lost 16,000 at the fall of Malaya alone. With the rest of its small army, including its two most professional divisions, currently being chewed up by the Germans in North Africa, nearly everyone in the country had been affected by the war. Families who had lost fathers and sons, or who had not heard from them for months, came to treat the American boys as not only saviors but surrogates who filled a dark void. This was particularly true in a small places like Townsville. “If you happened to be downtown on Sunday morning, folks would stop you on the street and invite you to dinner,” wrote one of Jay’s fellow Airmen from the 22nd. “I can’t say enough about the people of Townsville. Kind, caring, extremely generous.”
The inhabitants’ cordiality, however, masked an anxiety that lingered just below the surface. Like their British cousins after most of Europe was overrun by the Nazis, Australians saw themselves as the lone holdouts—in their case, against Japanese aggression in the Pacific. And in reality, just as so many Englishmen and -women feared an imminent invasion, the idea of Japanese landings on Australian beachheads was by no means far-fetched. Enemy bombers had already struck the continent, inflicting particularly heavy damage on the port city of Darwin. In the winter months of 1942, as the American correspondent John Lardner put it, Australia was staggering and “wiping blood from her mouth.”
Lardner, a son of the acclaimed writer Ring Lardner, was part of the first wave of adventurous reporters sent to cover the war in the Southwest Pacific. His description of unopposed enemy dive-bombers virtually “lounging over their targets, calling their shots, at will” was particularly evocative to the American troops pouring into the country. Those troops, Lardner wrote, “found the thought of invasion in the air.” They were in fact merely taking their cue from Australian government leaders, who Lardner added, “knew how thin were Australia’s resources to meet a full-dress attack by a foe prepared for the job.”
What this meant for the United States was apparent to the country’s defiant Prime Minister John Curtin, who was left to declare what had become frighteningly obvious: “Australia is America’s last bastion between America and Japan.”
True as that was, the country’s unsettled mood inevitably caused cracks in the goodwill between Australian servicemen and their American counterparts. For Jay and the U.S. Airmen at Garbutt Field, it was only a matter of time before trifling national tics blossomed into larger annoyances. Thousands of miles of air travel had left the 22nd Bomb Group’s B-26s in need of substantial repair, for instance, and the lack of maintenance personnel throughout the theater became a point of contention. The 22nd’s ground support teams, around 600 men, had sailed directly for Australia from San Francisco eight days before Jay and the other pilots and flight crews departed for Hawaii. But most were still delayed in a makeshift camp converted from a racetrack outside Brisbane by the time the B-26s began flying their first combat missions. It did not take long before the Americans began to sense that the RAAF mechanics regularly prioritized their own planes with the few spare parts allocated to the Garbutt Field base.
This was a far cry from the situation in Europe. American bomber flight crews stationed in England could count on having their own crew chief, and often an assistant crew chief, responsible for tasks as disparate as recalibrating an engine’s prop speed and patching up bullet holes. In the European Theater these maintenance men were often complemented by a small platoon of sheet metal specialists, grease monkeys, armorers, and refueling crews. But in the Southwest Pacific, with Australian mechanics suspected of favoring their own aircraft, American flight crews were left to perform tasks ranging from the basic to the complex.
Jay and his fellow officers became adept at overhauling balky engines, patching blown fuel lines, and refurbishing broken electronics systems with Rube Goldbergian ingenuity. They discovered, for instance, that women’s sanitary napkins, Kotex in particular, made excellent air filters. And in a pinch the Australian sixpence coin provided just the right spark for an engine’s ignition magneto. Given the urgency imposed by the Japanese advances, the anxious Yanks were particularly galled by the Aussie habit of dropping everything twice a day for a leisurely smoke and a billycan of tea. As one of the 22nd’s navigators complained, “Of all the damn nonsense! These screwball Aussies and their tea!”
It came as something of a release valve for explosive tempers in both camps when the Yanks were finally allowed to take their frustrations out on the Japanese. Sundry formations of the 22nd’s Marauders scrambled almost daily, and though Jay had yet to be assigned to a specific crew, he was designated as either a fill-in copilot or a flight engineer for the first of the Group’s squadrons to become combat-ready. So it was that on April 6 he eased into the right-hand seat of one of eight Marauders taking part in the 22nd’s first combat mission, a night raid on Rabaul. It would be the first American combat operation of the war by a B-26.
In Europe and North Africa, American bomber runs were accompanied by fighter protection as often as possible, but a variety of circumstances precluded this in the Southwest Pacific Theater. The most obvious was the vast distances flown on missions, generally 1,000 to 1,400 miles, well beyond the range of the Allies’ fighter planes. The harsh, unpredictable weather was also a factor. Fighters like the American P-39s and P-40s could not stand up to the heavy storms and turbulence a bomber often encountered over the Coral, Solomon, and Bismarck Seas. Finally, the exigencies of the war itself played a part. Port Moresby, for instance, was the ideal location for attack and pursuit fighters to fuel and stage. Yet most of the Allies’ available fighters could not be spared to screen bombing missions when they were so desperately needed to defend the continual enemy air attacks on the base.
So on his initial combat mission, Jay’s bomber formation flew without a fighter escort. As a sop to the inexperienced Americans, and as a show of solidarity, the Australians did volunteer to send along the pilot who had led the RAAF’s first PBY Catalina raid on Rabaul two months earlier. The offer was accepted, and the Aussie Airman joined the Marauder squad leader, Lt. Albert Moye, in the cockpit of his B-26.
Earlier in the day the flight crews had been briefed on primary and secondary targets—the largest ships in the harbor and parked aircraft, particularly bombers—as well as where they were likely to confront the heaviest anti-aircraft fire over the town. In essence, that was everywhere. Then, while the navigators were called together to map out the best route home should their aircraft become separated from the formation, the bombardiers headed out to the runway to oversee the loading of the ordnance. All the pilots had been warned to expect rough weather, and that night, after topping off their fuel tanks and staging at Port Moresby, the fleet of bombers encountered trouble almost immediately. Two of the planes were forced to turn back for Australia when a curtain-drop of whiteout fog prevented them from locating the passes through the Owen Stanley Range, the cloud-shrouded cordillera that forms the miles-high spine of the Papuan peninsula. The remaining six emerged from the mist on the north side of the mountains beneath a palette of random stars, as if they had flown into a Miró painting.
Hoping to evade the enemy radar installations at Gasmata as well as the observation stations and listening posts that crosshatched New Britain, the formation flew well east of Rabaul before doubling back and approaching the target from the channel that separates the northeast coast of the island from the southwest coast of neighboring New Ireland. As the sun rose over Simpson Harbour the ring of enemy anti-aircraft batteries threw up a hailstorm of what American Airmen called ack-ack as the bombers droned on and released their ordnance.
One B-26 was said to have exploded a troop transport, although this was never verified. Jay’s plane claimed no hits, but neither did it sustain any damage from ground fire. Not so Lt. Moye’s lead aircraft. Shrapnel penetrated his fuselage, wounding his radio
operator and slicing into one of the Marauder’s fuel lines. Before Moye could reach Allied territory both of his engines quit from a lack of fuel, forcing him to splash down into the Solomon Sea.I
Back at Port Moresby the five remaining Marauders had barely touched down to refuel when a formation of enemy bombers accompanied by a flight of Lae-based Zeros appeared overhead. There was no time to get the B-26s into the air, so the Americans jumped from their planes and ran for the bush. Jay was being buffeted by pressure waves of bursting bombs when he saw the tail gunner from another aircraft cut in half by machine-gun fire. Moments later he was crawling toward his own plane’s navigator, who had taken a bullet in his arm, when he heard the whine of different engines overhead.
He looked up to see a squadron of at least eight Australian P-40s from a nearby airbase streaking across the dove-gray sky. They had no hope of reaching the high-altitude Japanese bombers, so they instead engaged the Japanese fighter escort. The furious aerial battle that followed seemed to last hours. But in fact when Jay looked at his watch he realized only a few minutes had passed. Watching the Australian fighters chase the Zeros back toward the Owen Stanleys, Jay realized how odd it was that his formation had not encountered any Zekes patrolling the skies during the run over Rabaul. He was unaware, given the predawn timing of his mission, that despite the enemy’s numerical advantage, it would be months before Japanese fighters were equipped for night combat.
It was a different story only a few days later when Jay, again in the copilot’s seat, was assigned to a formation bound for a second night raid on Rabaul. The mission again got off to an inauspicious start when the aircraft were separated by severe thunderstorms over the Solomon Sea. The Aussies had cautioned the Americans about flying into these treacherous “monsoon troughs.” The warning did not do the reality justice.
Jay’s briefings back in Hawaii had included classes on what was known at the time as an intertropical front,II known to sailors as the Doldrums; in the equatorial latitudes, this is essentially where the northeast and southeast trade winds converge. But sitting in a classroom studying wind charts was a tame experience compared to flying through the center of the semipermanent weather system he was now traversing. This atmospheric vortex was notorious for its strong, erratic gusts and its violent, lighting-laced thunderheads, which can top out in the lower reaches of the stratosphere at 40,000 feet. Tonight his squadron was confronted by a storm so thick and visibility so reduced that the intermittent throbs of jagged lightning flashes momentarily blinded him. No B-26 was capable of vaulting above this weather—no World War II aircraft was—and all Jay could hope for was that his plane’s navigator could plot a course skirting the worst of this convective activity. As it was, his aircraft’s crew was holding tight to anything bolted down in the bucking bomber as if they were flying through the inside of a paint mixer. By the time the squad of Marauders regained formation on approach to Rabaul their mission had been delayed to the point where the sun was breaking over the Eastern Pacific.
Jay’s bombardier emptied his ordnance over the target—again, the pilot recorded no hits—and the plane began to race southwest when it was intercepted by three Zeros. This was Jay’s first encounter with the notorious A6M1 Type 0 Japanese fighter that ruled the skies during the early stages of the war. He was astonished.
The single-engine fighter plane was designed with an emphasis on speed and agility. It was referred to, for short, by its pilots as the Rei-sen, or Zero, for the last digit of the Japanese equivalent of the date when it was introduced, the Imperial Year 2600, or 1940. Weighing just over a ton fully loaded, it had a 950-horsepower radial engine that allowed it to outclimb and outrace any aircraft the Americans could as yet put into the air. The Zero also combined a long-range capability with its uncanny maneuverability. Some U.S. Army Air Force pilots noted the bitter irony that during its development the aircraft’s Mitsubishi engineers had largely followed specs initially conceived by the American aviator Howard Hughes.
By 1942 the Zeke,III as the Allies designated the plane, had already attained legendary status as an acrobatic dogfighter, achieving a kill ratio of 12 to 1 in air-to-air combat. Its seasoned pilots were well trained, with an Imperial Navy aviator averaging close to 650 hours of flying time before entering combat and an Imperial Army pilot close to 500 hours. These men, venerated throughout Japan as the “Wild Eagles,” disdained parachutes and sometimes even radios as accoutrements of the cowardly that would shred their Bushido concept of honor. Nor would they allow the by now commonplace self-sealing gas tanks to be installed in their planes. Though the foam-and-rubber liners could prevent a single bullet from exploding the aircraft, Zero pilots felt that the extra weight would slow them down.
Although they were eager for fighter-to-fighter combat, the truly big game for Zero pilots was America’s bombers, the B-17 in particular. They referred to the B-17 simply as a “Boeing” and held it in respect verging on awe. Since the beginning of the war, when Zeros had pumped round after round of cannon and machine-gun fire into Flying Fortresses over the Philippines only to watch them remain aloft, the highest achievement for an enemy flier was to take down a B-17. But flaming a B-26 Marauder was nearly as much of an accomplishment, and as time went on Japanese fighter pilots became experts at culling a single American bomber from its formation, especially one wounded and trailing smoke, and attacking it like baying wolves dragging down an injured caribou.
For Jay, however, a Zero’s reputation was one thing. Coming face-to-face with the wasplike whine of the fighter’s radial engine and its two 20-millimeter wing cannons and the brace of 7.7-millimeter machine guns that spit fire from its nose was quite another.
During stateside training, Jay and his fellow bomber pilots had become accustomed to their twin-engine Marauders outrunning American fighter planes. Thus, when the three Zeros broke from the clouds to the east of Rabaul using the sunrise as camouflage, Jay expected that all the Americans had to do was “pour on the coal” in order to leave the bogeys in their wake. But right after his B-26 went into a dive at 350 miles per hour Jay was astounded to see the little yellow-green fighter planes actually gaining on them, the red balls on their wings glowing and growing.
Within moments machine-gun fire shredded the B-26’s fabric-encased ailerons that shrouded the trailing edge of the wings’ aluminum ribbing, pocked across the wings themselves, and punctured the equally thin fuselage.IV When the war began it was an American article of faith that Japanese Airmen were handicapped by a “national weakness”: their eyesight. But that morning their aim appeared just fine to Jay. At first the sound of the bullets reminded him of the patter of hail hitting the roof of his old Whippet during a winter storm. But as the shells ricocheted through the metallic airframe he began to feel as if he were trapped inside a huge bass drum.
Jay’s pilot finally lost the bogeys by ducking into a thick, flat-bottomed cumulus cloud formed by condensation rising from the warm sea. They had escaped unscathed, but Jay’s recollection of his first encounter with Zeros hung over him like Banquo’s ghost. Over the next weeks the 22nd flew seven more daylight missions against Rabaul, targeting shipping in the harbor with dozens of general-purpose 500-pounders or swooping in low on enemy aircraft parked at the two airdromes to release scores of 100-pound demolition bombs. The Japanese took notice, and after a particularly successful raid that wiped out several parked bombers at Vunakanau and sparked a munitions-dump fire, one Imperial Navy rear admiral even noted “conspicuous signs of defeat in the air war.”
These early raids may have been portents, yet as the remainder of the 22nd’s Air Group squadrons became operational Jay was often the first man to pull aside a novice pilot to offer a warning that despite the racist caricatures perpetrated back home of the Japanese as bucktoothed, slit-eyed man-apes, they should never, ever, be taken lightly. That this Asian enemy was smarter and more clever than such depictions implied was driven home just weeks after Jay’s first encounter with a Zero. A few days earlier
, on April 18, Col. Jimmy Doolittle had led 16 B-25s on a 600-mile trek across the Pacific to drop incendiary bombs on Tokyo. The secret mission, accomplished by the near-impossible launching of the twin-engine land-based bombers from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, had been a tremendous morale booster that reverberated across the Pacific to America’s shores. Now, as Jay and a group of pilots and copilots from the 22nd were milling about the Ready Room at Garbutt Field awaiting a briefing, someone began fiddling with a radio in hopes of hearing more news of Doolittle’s daring raid.
But that morning, they did not find Walter Winchell or even an Australian newscaster updating news of Doolittle and his Raiders; instead the voice cutting through the static belonged to Tokyo Rose. When the lyrical propagandist had nearly completed her broadcast with her typical invective—“You Americans will all die”—she surprised the Airmen by promising a particularly hideous end for the fliers from the 22nd Bomb Group newly stationed in Australia. She then proceeded to recite their names in alphabetical order. Jay’s was last.
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I One member of Moye’s crew was killed when the lieutenant’s plane crashed just north of Kiriwina Island in the Trobriands about 100 miles north of New Guinea’s eastern tip. The rest struggled to shore in a single life raft. Hours later an alert pilot of a patrolling RAAF Catalina flying boat spotted three flares fired by one of Moye’s crewmen from his Very pistol. The Aussie flier, Pilot Officer Terence Duignan, put down in a lagoon and picked up the Americans as well as the Australian guide who had flown with them. In doing so, Duignan became the first pilot of an RAAF flying boat to perform an air-sea rescue.