by Bob Drury
III According to the magazine Air Power, one of those sons, Douglas Walker, has for years conducted what has thus far been a fruitless search for his father’s missing bomber. The ongoing search has attracted the assistance of a diverse group of experts, including a Japanese diplomat, the daughter of a 5th Air Force pilot who has had previous success in locating crash sites, and an Australian geologist who has done 35 years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. The geologist has created a reconstruction of the flight path of the San Antonio Rose that suggests Gen. Walker’s bomber went down in a mountainous area of extremely rugged terrain, which to date has proved too costly and time-consuming to search.
17
PUSHING NORTH
THE COMING OF THE NEW year saw the corpses of nearly 20,000 Japanese soldiers rotting in the fetid jungles surrounding Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field. This, combined with the Allies’ advances through the nearby islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo, prompted Imperial General Headquarters to finally declare Guadalcanal and the lower Solomons a lost cause.I
In Rabaul’s Simpson Harbour and Bougainville’s Tonolei Harbour—quickly establishing itself as Japan’s second most important holding in the South Seas Force sector—a rescue convoy began assembling to evacuate any troops that had escaped the meat-grinding combat. The ships would also deliver a fresh battalion of infantry to cover the retreat. But American recon flights detecting the nearly two dozen enemy vessels lining the wharves at both anchorages misinterpreted the movement as the beginning of another run down The Slot to reinforce Guadalcanal.
Three months earlier Adm. Nimitz had placed Adm. Halsey in charge of all combat forces in the South Pacific Theater, which included the Solomons, on the reliable assumption that if any man was capable of reversing the Japanese momentum, it was “Bull” Halsey. Now, when the erroneous intelligence about the enemy shipping reached Halsey, he ordered his own resupply convoy, screened by a cruiser task force, to steam west to Guadalcanal.
At 60, Adm. Halsey was the self-proclaimed scion of “seafarers and adventurers, big, violent men, impatient with the law, and prone to strong drink and strong language.” He sailed determinedly in their wake. A stateside headline writer had nicknamed Halsey “Bull,” and newsmen the world over picked up the sobriquet. Though he disliked the epithet—“I got that name from some drunken newspaper correspondent who punched the letter ‘u’ instead of ‘i’ writing Bill”—he tolerated it, and among his admirers he certainly lived up to the snorting connotation.
When he was presented with his new South Pacific command, for instance, Halsey’s first recorded reaction was, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson! This is the hottest potato they ever handed me!” And when word spread throughout the South Pacific that Halsey had been appointed the theater’s new commander, a young Marine officer on Guadalcanal summed up the effect on morale. “One minute we were too limp to crawl out of our foxholes,” he said. “The next we were running around, waving the dispatch, and whooping like kids.”
Halsey had already borne much of the Allied cause on his shoulders, from the first flickering hours when, less than two months after Pearl Harbor, his raids on the enemy-held Marshall Islands and Gilbert Islands constituted America’s initial offensive assaults of the war. He solidified his stature twelve weeks later, in April 1942, with his daring transport of Col. Doolittle’s Mitchell bombers to within hailing distance of Tokyo. The raid had been, as one war correspondent wrote, a dose of vitamin B-25 for a nation still staggering under the trauma of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl.
Unfortunately for the Allied cause, ordering the task force to Guadalcanal in January 1943 was one of the few errors Halsey committed during his first months on the job. For two days the exposed American vessels were stalked and attacked by Japanese torpedo aircraft, which ultimately sank the cruiser USS Chicago. At this Halsey reversed course and instructed the limping convoy to turn back and reconfigure out of enemy aircraft range in the Coral Sea. This gave what was left of the Japanese 17th Army on Guadalcanal the time and space to withdraw to the island’s western coastline.
From there, on the first night of February, the emaciated enemy soldiers began clambering onto 20 fast destroyers lying off the beaches. Within a week, with the fresh battalion acting as a rear guard, the remaining 10,000 Japanese troops who had fought for the island were in retreat. It took the Americans two days to realize that the territory was now theirs. On February 9, the Allied commanding officer on the ground at Guadalcanal, Gen. Alexander Patch, declared the island secured, and the Marines were relieved by Army infantrymen.
ALTHOUGH GEN. PATCH MAY HAVE been taken aback by the swiftness of the Japanese evacuation of Guadalcanal, Allied war planners had sensed its inevitability for several weeks, as nearly simultaneously the Japanese had also withdrawn most of their forces from Buna and distributed them among their holdings at Lae and Salamaua.
It was obvious that the enemy was cutting its losses at Buna in order to strengthen its hand in northern New Guinea. Yet however tactically sound the moves, in a metaphorical sense the dual retreats constituted the first cracks in the Japanese military’s hitherto impregnable reputation. The evacuations of Guadalcanal and Buna meant surrendering territory for which the Empire had sacrificed many lives. It was left to an Englishman commenting on similar Allied advances half a world away in North Africa to frame what Americans back home felt on receiving the news about the victories in the Pacific, particularly the triumph on the “Bloody ’Canal.” “Now is not the end,” said Winston Churchill. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Churchill’s turn of phrase was apt. In late 1941, only weeks into the war, the Navy’s Adm. King had briefed President Roosevelt and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on his strategy for triumph in the Pacific. He acknowledged that the Dutch forces in what is now Indonesia had been routed; and despite England’s hold on the Asian subcontinent, for all intents and purposes the British, too, would be of no help in the Pacific Theater, having committed nearly all of their resources to battling Germany. Stalin was now an improbable ally of the United States after Hitler’s offensive into the Soviet Union, but the Russians would continue to devote all of their efforts to defeating Germany. That left the United States, and to a small extent, Australia and New Zealand, to counter the Japanese. King concluded that the path to Japan itself and ultimate victory in the Pacific Theater was straightforward: “An assault into the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Bismarck Archipelago.”
This would begin with a two-pronged strategy that the Joint Chiefs were soon to dub Operation Cartwheel. Now, with Guadalcanal retaken, the strategic and tactical road King had laid out came into sharper focus at Gen. MacArthur’s headquarters. The Supreme Commander well understood that geography was destiny, and even a cursory glance at a map made it obvious that the Solomons were stepping-stones leading to New Britain and the viper’s nest surrounding Rabaul.
So while Halsey’s Marines island-hopped northward through the Solomons, MacArthur would begin a remorseless advance along northern New Guinea’s 1,600-mile coastline. Both campaigns would serve the dual purpose of not only reversing the Imperial Command’s vaunted Southern Strategy, but also diverting to the Southwest Theater precious enemy ships, planes, and men who would have otherwise been available to reinforce the Empire’s defense of the Central Pacific Theater against Nimitz’s navy.
In theory, Operation Cartwheel would leave the Allies poised to achieve their penultimate and ultimate goals—the recapture of the Philippines and, from there, an assault on the Japanese homeland. And in some quarters it was beginning to seem as if the major obstacle standing in the way of this endgame was not Rabaul after all, but the island of Bougainville, at 350 square miles the largest in the Solomons chain.
Bougainville rises a mere 150 miles south of New Britain, and if the Allies could establish airbases on the island, this was more than close enough for Kenney’s fighter planes to provide screening es
corts to shield his bombers as they pounded Rabaul into irrelevance so that American ground troops could eventually bypass this Japanese stronghold entirely. Halsey was already considering the idea, although MacArthur proved hesitant. His Bomber Command had expended so much blood and treasure on missions over Rabaul that the notion of letting it sit, unconquered, stuck in his craw. He even gave thought to commencing simultaneous assaults against Rabaul and Bougainville. But before committing to any strategy, the Army and Navy commanders would have to resolve their own intramural rivalry.
MacArthur had never forgiven Admirals King and Nimitz and the perceived “Navy cabal” for depriving him of the unified authority he was certain he deserved as Supreme Commander of the entire Pacific Theater. The general vociferously and publicly dismissed the reliance on U.S. sea power for conducting the war as a panacea and argued instead that the defense of Australia and all subsequent offensive campaigns required an amphibious army supported by a concentration of land-based bombers under his command. He already had his air forces, and in Gen. Kenney a capable officer to command them. Now all he needed were boots on the ground, and to that end he even advocated for the abolishment of the Marine Corps, postulating that its troops could better serve his army—a viewpoint not forgotten, nor forgiven, by veteran leathernecks to this day.
In turn, Navy brass allowed it to be known that they considered the general an unhinged megalomaniac with a corncob pipe. They remembered how as early as July 1942, MacArthur had scoffed at the idea of the Guadalcanal landings and how he had instead demanded that Adm. Nimitz cede him two carrier task groups for a daftly conceived invasion of Rabaul. Admiral King in particular wondered if MacArthur had learned nothing from his Philippines debacle and if he still failed to comprehend the horrors of jungle warfare against an entrenched and ideologically rabid enemy. In fact, King objected so vehemently to MacArthur’s Rabaul invasion plan that Gen. Marshall had the MacArthur-Nimitz boundary of authority “adjusted” by one degree of longitude, about 60 miles, in order to transfer supervision of the entire Solomon Islands chain and not just Guadalcanal to Nimitz and Halsey.
Such bureaucratic maneuvers, however, could not make the issue of Rabaul disappear. Even as Halsey’s troops swept up the Solomon Islands toward the ultimate goal of Bougainville, any campaign against New Britain relied on MacArthur fortifying the Allied facilities on New Guinea, particularly at Milne Bay and up the coast at Dobodura, near Buna. These bases would serve as a precursor to clearing the Japanese from the entirety of northern New Guinea. With New Guinea under Allied control, this would in theory put either MacArthur’s soldiers or Halsey’s Marines in position to land on New Britain’s southern coast, from where they would hack their way across the island and into the heart of the enemy’s Rabaul citadel.
Halsey considered this option premature. He suggested that if his landing forces could secure even a portion of Bougainville on which to carve out an airbase while MacArthur cleared the Japanese from New Guinea, New Britain would be encircled in such a manner as to forestall a needless fight for Rabaul, certain to cost thousands of American lives. Halsey reasoned that with the enemy forces on Rabaul made irrelevant, Operation Cartwheel could be kick-started from Bougainville instead of from New Britain, further hastening MacArthur’s northern offensive.
The one strategy everyone agreed on was that any push north was contingent upon clearing the Japanese out of New Guinea and the Solomons. And as those bases were reliant on Rabaul for men and matériel, even as the last of the bloody fighting had continued on Guadalcanal, Kenney’s bombers had begun to step up their near-nightly runs on Rabaul.II So anxious were the Allies to incapacitate the fortifications at Rabaul that nearly any tactic, however harebrained, was considered. One such idea was a plot to bomb Mount Tavurvur in hopes that the detonation would trigger a massive eruption in the active volcano or, failing that, perhaps shudder open a new volcano.
The man chosen to carry out this plan was Capt. Carl Hustad, one of the 43rd Bomb Group’s most experienced pilots. One day in January 1943, as the rest of his squadron’s bombers were loaded with regular ordnance for a mission over Rabaul, Hustad’s Fortress was armed with two 2,000-pound bombs specifically constructed with delayed fuses for the purpose of exploding the volcano.
The operation began as planned. Hustad held his B-17 back while the planes preceding him attacked the town and shipping in Simpson Harbour. Hustad then swooped in behind the formation and, circling what he believed to be Mount Tavurvur, released his blockbusters. Nothing happened. Not only were the bombs, per the 43rd’s combat diary, “not seen to explode,” but it was later speculated that Hustad had mistakenly hit a dormant crater two miles northwest of Mount Tavurvur.
It was also around this time that some innovative bomber crews from the 43rd began dropping rolls of toilet paper and empty beer bottles along with their lethal ordnance. There was a belief that the unspooling toilet-paper sheets might disrupt enemy searchlights. As for the empty bottles, that was just a way to blow off steam, and no higher-ups seemed to object. An ingenious Airman whose name is lost to the mists of time had discovered that as the bottles hurtled toward the earth they emitted a shrieking whistle eerily similar to that of a falling bomb. If they could not kill the enemy on the ground, maybe scaring them to death was the next best thing. Many of the beer bottles were the Iron City brand, rumored to have been shipped from the company’s Pittsburgh brewery with enough formaldehyde to stun a mule. At the very least, as Jay noted in his diary not long after the failed volcano mission, “the chemicals in the Iron City had a better shot at exploding that volcano.”
By February 1943, Rabaul was, in the laconic words of the 43rd Bomb Group’s official history, “really catching hell.” Captured Japanese documents reiterated that the raids were indeed having their desired effect. “[The American] attacks are furious,” read one such report. “Tonight’s bombing was so terrific I did not feel as if I was alive.” “The position of the command section was completely destroyed by aerial bombing,” read another. “Company Commander Yamasaki and Master Sergeant Toda are missing. They were probably killed.”
These assaults were not without setbacks. Three days after Gen. Walker’s Fortress disappeared, the notorious “Brooklyn Bombardier” Meyer Levin died attempting to retrieve a life raft for floundering crewmates after his damaged Fortress ditched into the Pacific. A year earlier Levin had made headlines back in the States when he was credited with sinking an enemy battle cruiser as a member of the famous Capt. Colin Kelly’s bomber crew, which attacked a Japanese task force near the Philippines just days after Pearl Harbor. During that action Kelly’s aircraft became the first American B-17 to be shot down in combat, and Kelly was celebrated posthumously as one of America’s earliest World War II heroes.
Now, Levin, a master sergeant, joined his old captain on the death roll. Days after Levin’s death it was revealed that he had not even been assigned to his final flight, but had volunteered to go aloft because of his expertise at identifying Japanese surface ships.III
Then, in perhaps the most pernicious blow to date for Ken’s Men, in late January, Bill Benn’s aircraft failed to return from a daylight reconnaissance mission.
* * *
I At home in Japan these retreats were portrayed in the press as long-planned realignments of Japanese forces.
II Following Gen. Walker’s disappearance and presumed death—Walker was officially classified as “missing in action” for three months—Kenney had suspended all daylight raids over Rabaul.
III Conflicting versions of Meyer Levin’s WWII actions persist to this day. Subsequent to Kelly’s mission, for which Kelly was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism and selfless bravery” for sacrificing his own life to save his crew, Airmen who flew with Levin claimed that he was resentful of that portrayal. One bombardier from Levin’s 11th Bomb Group said that Levin told him that the bombs Kelly’s plane dropped hit no enemy vessels, much less a cruiser, and that Kelly had
panicked when a fire broke out in the cockpit. Levin, his crewmate reported, maintained that Kelly bailed out through the wrong hatch, leaving his copilot to man the controls while the rest of the crew jumped to safety, and was killed by his own plane’s horizontal stabilizer. Levin allegedly kept a diary portraying this event, and vowed to make it public. No diary was ever discovered. More bafflingly, following Levin’s death a story circulated that the only reason he made his final flight was not as a volunteer to identify enemy shipping, but that he needed one more combat mission to earn a promotion.
18
A FINE REUNION
THE EARLY WEEKS OF 1943 were a period of atrocious losses for Jay’s 43rd Bomb Group. Flights of Japanese bombers continued to pound Port Moresby, and near-daily accidents plagued not only the 43rd, but every American bomb group throughout the theater. With the loss of aircraft and their crews piling up, Gen. Kenney decided to pull Maj. Benn from combat missions. He was planning on promoting Benn to an executive role in the Bomb Group and did not want to risk losing him. It was a dicey move. Benn, as Kenney himself noted, “had sunk or damaged more Jap shipping in the past month than all of the rest of the Air Force put together.”
Kenney was also aware that Benn was viewed by the other fliers as the general’s pet pilot. This was of course true. But in order to offset this notion, Kenney had gone out of his way in public to avoid displaying any hint of preferential treatment, even to the point of asking MacArthur to step in for him and pin the medal to Benn’s tunic when the major was awarded a decoration for valor. So when Kenney decided to put Benn in for a promotion to lieutenant colonel in order to smooth the transition for him to take over as CO of the 43rd, he did it by the book.
Unfortunately, that book was a bureaucratic morass into which even the most expeditious promotion requests could disappear for months. And Benn, never one to shy from the sky, refused to sit around waiting for the paperwork to make its way up through channels. He may have been barred from combat missions, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get into the air. To that end he began commandeering any available plane and its crew in order to scout locations on the other side of the Owen Stanleys that might make sites for future Allied airstrips.