Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  This was just another reason why many of the American aircrews at Port Moresby eschewed the base’s tent city and instead slept (or tried to sleep) on sodden blankets beneath their bombers, with only wings for roofs. Even so, one of the pilots and another crewman always remained inside near the cockpit, ready to kick over the engines at the first thrum of enemy aircraft reverberating off the nearby hills. It was not unusual to see planes with cold motors reeling down the runway and clawing for air as bombs and machine-gun fire rained down among them.

  The Australian government in Melbourne recognized that Port Moresby remained the last, precarious line of defense for the country, and had already made secret plans to cede the top half of the southern continent, from Brisbane up through the Northern Territory, should the Japanese use it to stage an invasion. To Airmen like Jay Zeamer, however, such grand strategies were well beyond their pay grade. He and his squadmates had only one priority—to keep themselves alive and inflict enough damage on the enemy until the United States could devote its full might and resources to the war in the Pacific.

  13

  KEN’S MEN

  IN 1942, AND FOR MUCH of the remainder of World War II, press coverage of the “Mighty” 8th Air Force in Europe overshadowed that of George Kenney’s ragtag outfit in the Pacific. Kenney’s assemblage, which had been redesignated the 5th Air Force shortly after his arrival in Australia, was generally considered to have been thrown together from leftover Airmen and other replacement parts and hurriedly deployed to the Southwest Pacific Theater almost as an afterthought.

  This was not far from the truth. Early on, even MacArthur described the airpower allotted to his Southwest Pacific Command as “a rabble of boulevard shock troops whose contribution to the war effort was practically nil.” And though to some extent the force would remain the “Forgotten Fifth” for the remainder of the war, the Airmen’s achievements throughout the theater were gradually gaining notice within the halls and planning rooms of the War Department. Much of this was due to Kenney.

  Unlike the 8th Air Force, which flew strategic offensive strikes against the Nazi war machine, Kenney and his 5th had been tasked merely with waging a war of containment while the European campaign took priority. Chief of U.S. Naval Operations Adm. Ernest King estimated that only 15 percent of all Allied war resources were being distributed throughout the Pacific Theater. Worse, this trickle of equipment and weapons being shipped southwest had to be shared with the defenders of India and China. Fortunately, King’s sharp public hints that further Japanese advances might prompt a reevaluation of America’s commitment to the European Theater so alarmed the British that they did not put up much of a fight when in late 1942 President Roosevelt agreed to at least attempt to double the amount of men and matérial dedicated to the Pacific. This was a comparatively small triumph, as there remained no doubt that victory in Europe was foremost in Roosevelt’s, and America’s, thoughts.

  The perception of the 5th Air Force as a second-class unit did not stop Kenney from using his distinctive combination of energy, personality, and intelligence to turn it into a feared and respected fighting machine. Even MacArthur, the die-hard infantryman, came to regard Kenney as his most important tactician, and the Supreme Commander once remarked that had his air general been born three centuries earlier he would have made a fine pirate. Accordingly, MacArthur, rarely a man to bestow nicknames, made an exception for Kenney by dubbing him and those under his command “Buccaneers.”

  It happened when Kenney called MacArthur late one night to report that he had ordered his planes into the air to disrupt a supply convoy of five enemy destroyers heading for New Guinea. After apologizing for waking the general, Kenney told him that, so far, it was “one down, four to go.”

  “Don’t apologize for news like that,” MacArthur replied. “Call me any time you can tell me that you’re making some more Japs walk the plank.”

  An hour later, Kenney again telephoned. “Two down, three to go,” he reported.

  MacArthur laughed and said, “Nice work, Buccaneer.”

  Gradually the sobriquet was expanded to encompass all of Kenney’s Airmen.

  All in all, following Gen. Brett’s disastrous tenure, Kenney’s effect on the once listless 5th was no less than astonishing. He was well aware that according to unofficial statistics, an Airman serving in the Pacific Theater stood a 50 percent chance of being killed before fulfilling the fluctuating combat-mission requirement assigned to bomber crews.I Group and squadron commanders tried to give their flight crews short respites after a dozen or so missions, but the lack of trained Airmen in-theater made that difficult. Kenney’s reputation as the enlisted man’s friend was clearly confirmed when, several months after his arrival, he proposed that flight crews should be granted a week of R&R in Sydney for every 20 missions flown. MacArthur agreed, apparently warming to his air chief’s way of doing things.

  Kenney’s presence brought out a heretofore well-masked sense of humor in the Supreme Commander. Once, when asked at a press conference where the 5th Air Force was bombing that day, MacArthur suggested that the newsman ask Kenney.

  “General,” the reporter followed up, “do you mean to say you don’t know where the bombs are falling?”

  MacArthur allowed himself a smile. “Of course I know where they are falling,” he said. “They are falling in the right place. Go ask George Kenney where it is.”

  This magnanimous attitude toward his air commander extended to Kenney’s Airmen. On another occasion, a group of American fliers on leave were picked up in Sydney for starting a bar brawl. When a seasoned quartermaster complained to Kenney that it was about time “these brats grew up and behaved themselves,” the general exploded at the officer. The last thing he needed, Kenney said, was for his “kids” to grow “too old, fat, and bald to shoot down Nip planes and sink Nip ships.”

  In the middle of his lecture Kenney looked up to see a grinning MacArthur standing in his doorway. “Leave Kenney’s kids alone,” MacArthur said. “I don’t want to see them grow up either.”

  Of course, not all of Kenney’s charges qualified as “kids.” Age did not matter, as long as they brought new ideas to the table. This was never more evident than in the innovations to the 5th Air Force proposed by the aviator Paul Irvin Gunn, an “ancient” 43-year-old flier who had served in World War I as a Navy aircraft mechanic. After he was demobilized and returned from Europe, Gunn acquired his pilot’s license and reenlisted in 1923 to become a naval aviator. He distinguished himself as a member of the “Tophatters,” one of the U.S. Navy’s first fighter squadrons, and later as a flight instructor at the naval base in Pensacola, Florida. But with no war to fight, Gunn grew bored, and upon his retirement he opened up a business flying freight throughout the Philippines.

  After Pearl Harbor, Gunn’s fleet of cargo planes was commandeered for evacuation missions, lifting American civilians and military officers to safety as the Japanese advanced on Manila. He later flew transport runs carrying medical supplies to MacArthur’s beleaguered forces on Bataan, and for his actions he became one of the rare civilians to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. In April 1942, weeks before America’s official surrender in the Philippines, Gunn again reenlisted, this time in the U.S. Army Air Force, and was commissioned a captain. He became one of the USAAF’s oldest B-25 bomber pilots and, naturally, acquired the nickname “Pappy.”

  Gunn had a sharper enmity than most against the Japanese. He was piloting an evacuation flight to Australia when Manila fell and his wife and four children were taken prisoner. From that point on he made it a personal mission to ensure that as many of the enemy were killed as possible, and when Kenney arrived in Australia later that summer he discovered the gray-whiskered Gunn experimenting with attaching an extra four .50-caliber machine guns to the noses of the light, fast A-20 Havoc bombers of the 3rd Bomb Group. Gunn had collected the machine guns from damaged fighter planes that would never fly again, and rather than see the armaments go to waste, it was h
is idea to convert the A-20s from bombers to gunships capable of strafing the hell out of their targets.

  Kenney was mightily impressed with Gunn’s innovation, and when the upgraded A-20s subsequently proved devastating in combat, he pulled Gunn from his squadron, appointed him staff Supervisor of Special Projects, and assigned him an entire maintenance crew to help him similarly convert a dozen of the Group’s B-25s from medium bombers into pure strafers. With mechanics and supplies now but a phone call away, Gunn no longer needed to cadge stray machine guns from disabled fighter planes, and he soon hit upon the idea of modifying the B-25s with tail gun turrets welded onto their noses. After flight tests gauging the balance and weight of this new kind of “cargo buster” proved successful, Gunn’s initial demonstrations so delighted Kenney that he awarded Gunn the Silver Star.II

  For all Gunn’s innovations with the 3rd Bomb Group, the tip of Kenney’s spear remained the 43rd Bomb Group, whose aerial feats and innovations were to become integral to creating the legend of “Ken’s Men.” It was the 43rd’s transport planes that had conducted the momentous troop airlift which helped blunt the Japanese advance on Port Moresby from Buna, and it was the 43rd’s bomber crews who had perfected the method Kenney had first proposed back at the Air Corps’ Tactical School of dropping parafrag bombs over enemy airfields on New Guinea.

  These small bombs were attached to parachutes and timed to explode into thousands of pieces of shrapnel that, like the Japanese Daisy Cutters, would shred enemy planes in their revetments. The first time Kenney experimented with their use, ordering 240 of them dropped during one of the Allies’ initial attacks on Buna, 17 of the 22 enemy planes observed on the airstrip were reported destroyed, as well as all of the anti-aircraft batteries. “You’ve got to devise stuff like that,” Kenney boasted to a war correspondent from Time magazine. “I’ve studied all the books on these different goddam campaigns, and Buna was not in any of them.”

  In private Kenney was more circumspect. Once, after advising MacArthur that only two thirds of the 74 heavy bombers, 82 medium bombers, 36 light bombers, and 258 fighter planes that composed his 5th Air Force were actually flightworthy, he remarked to one of his aides, “I am having an interesting time inventing new ways to win a war on a shoestring.”

  For all of the “stuff” Kenney devised, the 43rd Bomb Group’s greatest breakthrough was the adoption of an attack technique against Japanese shipping known as skip bombing. As combat raged on Guadalcanal through the summer and fall of 1942, Japanese supply convoys steamed from Rabaul almost daily, transporting reinforcements, ammunition, and precious food to what Japanese soldiers had come to nickname “Starvation Island.” The final two thirds of this 650-mile route took the enemy ships through a passage, which the Americans had labeled “The Slot,” that bisected the Solomons chain. This was a natural interdiction site for the Allies, but it became apparent early on to MacArthur and Kenney that conventional high-altitude bombing was having little to no effect on the enemy’s speedy cruisers and destroyers.

  What was called Battle Damage Assessment, or BDA, was greatly inflated by all combatants during the war, but in fact secret official reports indicated that of the 416 sorties flown against Japanese shipping in the month of September, only two vessels had been sunk, and three more damaged. The 5th Air Force, unlike the “Mighty 8th,” simply did not have enough aircraft to blanket-bomb these moving targets from on high; and despite its early promise, the Norden bombsight was proving to be not as accurate as first thought. A tactical overhaul was clearly in order.

  Enter a 33-year-old major named Bill Benn, a rail-thin officer whose resemblance to the young Frank Sinatra was enhanced by the rakish tilt of his peaked forage cap. Benn was an aide on Kenney’s operations staff, a polymath who brimmed with the energy of a live grenade. While studying at Temple University in the late 1920s he had won a national essay contest in which the first prize was two weeks of flying lessons. He became so infatuated with aviation that he temporarily dropped out of college to fly mail routes for the U.S. Post Office, often with nothing more than a compass to guide him through the roughest of Northeast blizzards.

  After returning to Temple and earning his degree, Benn signed on as the aerial spotter for an American archaeological dig in Iran led by a German-born U.S. citizen named Eric Schmidt. It was during this foray to the Mideast that he became convinced that a world war was inevitable, particularly after the shah, believing Schmidt to be a Nazi spy, expelled the expedition. Back in the States, Benn enlisted in the Army Air Corps and met Kenney when the two were both stationed in California. The general was so impressed with the adventurous young pilot that when war did indeed break out he offered Benn a job on his staff. By the time they flew to Australia together to take up their new posts, Benn had become Kenney’s top confidant.

  Despite his executive position, Benn remained at heart a pilot who chafed to get out from behind his desk and into a cockpit. During their long, segmented flights across the Pacific, he and Kenney often discussed how best to improve the 5th’s dismal bombing record against enemy shipping. Benn suggested borrowing a tactic from the old British Royal Air Force: low-level skip bombing. The RAF had experimented with skip bombs against German convoys in the North Sea earlier in the war, but had discarded the technique as too dangerous and difficult. But Benn was certain it could work in the Pacific, particularly against vessels at anchorage in Rabaul’s Simpson Harbour and the heavily laden supply transports riding deep and fat as they steamed down The Slot.

  To make his point, during a layover in Fiji he commandeered a B-26 Marauder, loaded it with dummy bombs, and invited Kenney up for a demonstration. With a coral reef as his target, he made several low passes and “pickled” the inert ordnance from distances ranging between 200 and 440 yards. The experiment was close enough to a success to fire the general’s interest.

  Certainly there would be kinks to work out: on slower approaches the bombs sank like rocks; if the plane came in too high they would ricochet right over the target; and on hot approaches below 50 feet the bombs would nearly bounce back and clip the plane. Moreover, live bombs would need to be equipped with a five-second delayed fuse, about the time it would take for them to reach the target. But enough of the dropped ordnance “skipped along just like flat stones,” as Kenney wrote, to convince him that his aide was on to something. “The lads in Fiji didn’t think much of the idea,” Kenney noted in his postwar memoirs. “But I decided that as soon as we got the time I would put Benn to work on it.”

  In August, shortly after Kenney set up shop in Australia, he dismissed Benn from his staff with a wink and a nod. This freed the major to command the dozen planes from the 63rd Bombardment Squadron, the first of the 43rd Bombardment Group’s squads to come on line. In his new role Benn singled out several pilots eager to be molded into a skip-bombing unit. Over the next two months, between regular high-altitude bombing missions, Benn’s chosen few made run after run skipping dummy bombs on the rusting hull of a partly submerged British merchantman that had run aground on a reef beyond the harbor off Port Moresby. There were problems, of course, but none proved insurmountable. Benn experimented with different approach altitudes depending on the size and weight of the ordnance to be dropped, and he used his personal connection to Kenney to ensure that manufacturers sent him delayed fuses timed to detonate down to his four-to-five-second specifications.

  Benn also recognized that the Norden bombsight’s groundbreaking feature—the analog computer that calculated a payload’s trajectory based on current flight conditions such as wind shear at high elevation—would be of no use to his planes attacking shipping at mast height. Instead his crews came up with the technique of marking an X on a plane’s windshield precisely six and three-quarter inches from the top and using the bombardier’s Plexiglas nose blister—the “Greenhouse”—as the pilot’s forward point of reference. “Just as one would use the sight on the nose of a shotgun barrel to shoot a flying duck,” wrote one of his pilots.

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bsp; After a pilot and his bombardier decided on a target, preferably a ship backlit by the sun or moon, Benn instructed them to throttle back to an approach speed of no more than 220 miles per hour. He explained that the enemy’s anti-aircraft batteries were generally pointed skyward, and coming in so low and slow would catch them off guard. Then the bombardier would release his load, usually a 100-pounder, when the X on the windshield lined up with the middle of the vessel anywhere from 60 to 100 feet away. If all went successfully—as, after weeks of practice, Benn expected—the bombs armed with their delayed fuses would bounce across the water’s surface and explode beneath, above, or, ideally, against the hull.

  In mid-September, when Benn’s squadron became the first from the 43rd to move into Port Moresby, Kenney flew in from Brisbane to personally oversee a skip-bombing exhibition. Knowing that the general carried a pair of small wooden dice in his fob pocket as a good-luck charm, Benn awarded the honor of leading the exercise to another man not unfamiliar with a craps table, his handsome and popular wing man Capt. Ken McCullar.

  In an earlier time the broad-faced, 24-year-old McCullar might have been a riverboat gambler plying the Mississippi with what Mark Twain called “the confidence of a Christian with four aces.” Beloved in his outfit for his sophisticated charm and easy smile, McCullar was an avid poker player whose deep, booming laugh usually signaled that he was raking in a pot. When the squadron had lain over in San Francisco en route to the Southwest Pacific, he had purposely chosen as his aircraft a B-17 whose serial number ended with 21. Naturally, he had the ace and jack of spades painted on its nose. He named the bomber Black Jack and drove the plane with the same reckless abandon with which he bluffed his way through high-stakes card games.