by Bob Drury
So it was that on the morning of January 18, Benn slid into the left-hand seat of a B-25 Mitchell and filed a flight plan that would take him up New Guinea’s northern coast. Coastwatchers and Airmen returning from missions that morning reported heavy thunderstorms crashing over the mountains, but no one could believe a flier as experienced as Benn could be taken out by mere weather. Yet that was exactly what happened. A subsequent investigation surmised that Benn’s aircraft, possibly flying with one or more failed engines, had attempted to follow a headwater valley through an uncharted pass in the mountains. His likely plan was to clear the range and power-glide back into Port Moresby. But he misjudged the elevation of the pass by a little over 150 yards and slammed into the face of a sheer cliff.
When news of the fatal accident reached Gen. Kenney, he felt as if he had lost a son. He was not the only grieving Airman. Ken McCullar was devastated. Two weeks later McCullar was joined in mourning by Jay, whose good friend Maj. Thomas Charles was lost with his entire B-17 crew during a run over New Britain. It was not long before the two pilots’ sadness turned to an anger that began to agitate and flow, like water coming to a boil. So they hatched a scheme to make an unofficial bombing raid to vent their rage. McCullar and Jay took off in Black Jack on a solo run to “strafe the hell out of Rabaul,” with McCullar’s crew all volunteering.
They made it back to Port Moresby safely, with Black Jack suffering no more than a few shrapnel holes pocking the fuselage. However, as word of their off-the-books flight spread, some of the other Americans on the base were put off by the stunt. These included friends of the colonel whom McCullar had beaten up in the officers club. This group pressed the 43rd’s commanding officer to file court-martial charges against McCullar and Jay. But by this point in the war McCullar’s combat exploits were approaching legendary status throughout the Southwest Pacific Theater, and his reputation was enough to allow him and Jay to escape punishment. The unsigned court-martial papers were buried deep in a filing cabinet.
For Jay, who had already been dismissed from one Bomb Group for his cavalier attitude, the incident was just another day in the war. As he told a relative, “I never took the pressure from the higher-ups very seriously. It wasn’t so much outright disobedience as it was just trying to do what we thought was the right thing. Ken McCullar was just like me when it came to that. I suppose that’s why we got on so well.”
THE POUNDING MISSIONS OVER RABAUL and the near-constant runs on the remaining enemy garrisons on the north coast of Papua New Guinea—Madang, Wewak, and Lae in particular—continued to take a devastating toll on the American bomber fleet. By mid-February the 22nd Bomb Group, Jay’s old outfit, was down to 28 of the 51 Marauders with which it had arrived in Australia nearly a year earlier. And six months of hard wear and tear had left approximately 20 of the 43rd Bomb Group’s 55 Fortresses undergoing constant depot repair. Of the remaining 35 deemed fit for combat, five had finally been set aside and outfitted with special cameras for daily reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions.
General Kenney was able to spot-rest some of his fatigued flight crews with the trickle of fresh Airmen arriving from the States, and had even managed to wangle a few replacement aircraft out of “Hap” Arnold. Washington’s focus, however, remained on Europe, and Kenney was told he would have to continue to make do with the number of planes assigned to the theater when he’d arrived seven months earlier.
By this time Jay had managed a transfer from the Group’s intelligence staff to its 65th Squadron as the unit’s Operations Officer. Yet it continued to irritate him that he remained a flier without an official plane. The good news was that although he had never been officially checked out as a lead pilot, the combination of disease, personnel depletion, and what von Clausewitz termed “the friction of war” gave Jay the opportunity to fly with an assortment of crews from the 65th. During one mission, he was filling in for a pilot down with malaria when his Fortress sank an 8,000-ton cargo ship by means of his mentor McCullar’s skip-bombing technique. After circling the flaming ship to ensure that it was indeed scuttled, Jay was just about to rejoin his formation when he spotted a lone Zero below him on his port side. He rolled his bomber over and went into a dive. “I caught him by surprise,” he later wrote in his diary. “He was heading back into Rabaul and didn’t expect a B-17 to peel down and go after him. He looked around just as I hit him.”
Not only was Jay awarded an Air Medal for sinking the Japanese vessel, he was also pioneering a new flying technique for heavy bombers. As far as anyone at the time knew, never before had a bomber pilot employed dogfight acrobatics against an enemy fighter. Jay was fashioning a completely unorthodox method of flying, and not everyone was impressed. Some pilots sneered at the showboating and whispered that Jay was really just masking the fact that he wasn’t a good enough aviator to fly by the regulation manual. There were also plenty of crewmen who wanted nothing to do with flying with a commander who went out of his way looking for trouble. Most felt that the best thing about flying a B-17 mission was having flown one. Bombing runs were perilous enough as it was.
Jay was aware of the reputation he was gaining, but it was not in his nature to pass on an opportunity to engage with a bogey, to take chances that other pilots would not take. He could not blame any Airmen who did not want to go up with him, and deep down he did not want to fly with any man who refused to crew with him. But after all those years he had fulfilled his dream of piloting a B-17 whenever the opportunity arose, and nothing short of being grounded was going to stand in his way. It was a good time for fate to intervene.
Only a few days after scuttling the Japanese cargo vessel, Jay was approached by a navigator and a bombardier from the Group’s reconnaissance squadron. Their B-17 had been tabbed for a recon run over northern New Guinea to scout out a new airstrip the Japanese were rumored to be building on the tip of the Huon Peninsula at Finschhafen. But their pilot was missing in action. They asked if Jay was available. Jay was vaguely familiar with the navigator, a captain named Charles “Rocky” Stone. But it was the bombardier, only recently arrived at Port Moresby, who had been the impetus behind the invitation. It was his old friend from Langley, Joe Sarnoski.
Joe was now a master sergeant, and had grown a lot of hard bark since his days of putting on shows for the brass hats back in Virginia. Clad in his bomber jacket with his thick Airman’s goggles perched atop his snug sheepskin-and-leather trooper hat, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the Hollywood tough guy George Raft. His footwear, however, gave him away. Whereas the leather of Jay’s boots was scuffed and dull with the legitimacy of experience, Joe’s were a smooth and shiny black.
That night the two old friends dined together in the mess tent and caught up. Joe had married his girlfriend Marie just before his unit had shipped out almost a year earlier, and the bombardier’s recounting of his ocean crossing on the SS Argentina, particularly the fear every man felt of being stalked by German U-boats, left Jay not a little guilty about any complaints he’d voiced concerning his own voyage from San Francisco to Hawaii. When the Argentina had berthed in Sydney after a brief call at Perth, Joe said he had never been so happy to feel earth beneath his feet—even if it meant he had alighted in a combat zone where bombs from above, and not torpedoes from below, would be soon trying to kill him.
He and his 403rd Squadron, the first of the 43rd Bomb Group’s four units to reach Australia, had initially made camp in the oval of the Randwick Racecourse outside Sydney, which was still hosting meets for the horse-mad Australians. He described to Jay how they had been put to work as ticket vendors and ushers by the track’s operators. He was still amazed at how the Aussie jockeys ran their horses “in the wrong direction.”
When the bulk of the Bomb Group joined Joe’s squadron a month or so later, Joe found out how fortunate he’d been to have shipped out ahead of the rest. It turned out that only days before the 63rd, 64th, and 65th squadrons were scheduled to depart from New York on the Normandie, the Frenc
h liner had capsized and burned to the keel in the harbor with most of the Group’s equipment on board, including vital spare aircraft parts. The Group’s Airmen were then rerouted to Boston to make the crossing on Britain’s Queen Mary, which had also been converted into a troop transport. When the 43rd had finally assembled in Sydney, passed their flight checks, and deployed to various Australian airbases for combat assignments, Joe had been left behind to serve as a roving bombing instructor. Since then he’d remained stuck far from the front lines.
Joe wasn’t so much angry about this as resigned. He said he understood his contribution to the greater war effort. He was good at his job and he knew it, and if something he imparted to one of his students resulted in even one more enemy ship resting at the bottom of the sea or one more ammunition dump blown sky-high, he could feel proud. Still, Jay could sense his frustration, and Joe finally admitted that the longer the war went on, the more not flying into combat ate at him. As he’d written to his sister Jennie just a few weeks earlier, “My main job here is instructing, but I do hope that I will do some bombing. I would like to sink at least five enemy ships. I have told my squadron commander that if I don’t, I’m going to be ashamed to go back to the States.”
In the meanwhile, scores of bombardiers, usually in groups of five to 10, had passed through Joe’s advanced training courses on dusty outback bases with names like Daly Waters, Charleyville, and Torrens Creek. There was no little irony in the fact that even while training his students, Joe could not get into the air. The daily eight-hour classes were strictly “ground courses only.” Eventually, Joe began pleading with his superiors for an assignment with a forward unit. His CO had finally relented just a few days ago, and had given him permission to transfer to the Mareeba Airbase up the Queensland coast from Townsville. Now, he told Jay, he was free to latch on to any mission in need of a bombardier.
Jay listened closely as Joe unwound his travelogue and spoke from the heart about wanting, needing, to feel he was contributing to the war effort from the air, and not from a classroom. He grinned at Joe’s liberal use of Aussie slang—friends, flashlights, and trains had suddenly become cobbers, torches, and trams—which struck Jay as tonally off when spoken in Joe’s thick Carbondale accent. He had not realized how much he had missed his old friend, nor how much they had in common. Here, in this strange place fighting this strange enemy, Jay realized that he and Joe were more than just comrades in arms. They were closer to brothers, in the sense that each could almost divine what the other was going to say, what the other was thinking, before the words were even spoken.
Nor was a dark irony lost on Jay. Bill Benn was gone. His pal Tom Charles was gone. So many were gone. But Joe Sarnoski, one of the best bombardiers in the Army Air Force, was back and asking him to pilot a recon mission. Of course he would accept. His mother used to say something about a door closing and a window opening, but he had never taken it this literally.
The flight over Finschhafen went off without a hitch. And the next day Jay pulled Joe and Rocky Stone aside with an idea. What if, he asked, they set out to recruit and train their own crew?
PART
III
Only those who will risk going too far can
possibly find out how far one can go.
—T. S. Eliot
19
“A MOTLEY COLLECTION OF OUTCASTS”
RECONNAISSANCE. THE WORD HAD TAKEN on a magical aura for Jay Zeamer since his reunion flight with Joe Sarnoski. And if he and Joe were now on a mission to recruit their own flight crew, there was no more fertile hunting ground than among the men who had volunteered for multiple recon runs. Even routine reconnaissance work during World War II was considered the most dangerous assignment a flier could draw. This was doubly true in the Pacific Theater, with its hellacious storms and vast stretches of uncharted ocean. Bill Benn’s death was evidence enough of this, and a man had to possess a certain kind of lone-wolf mentality to actually want to be sent aloft with no protective company. Jay had fought hard to participate in the large bombing formations that flew over Rabaul and northern New Guinea, or to be a member of the American squadrons searching for Japanese ships attempting to sneak down The Slot. But there was something about the notion of solo scouting missions over enemy territory that excited him even more. It may have been his renegade spirit, or perhaps the pull of his idol Eddie Rickenbacker, who famously roamed deep behind German lines during World War I seeking targets for Allied artillerymen.
Reconnaissance. It had never been for the faint of heart.
Rickenbacker’s exploits during the last war had been only the latest and most logical version of the age-old military practice of commanders seizing the high ground. Sometimes lost in Sun Tzu’s oft-cited counsel in The Art of War to always occupy the sunny side of the mountain is that the ancient Chinese military theorist wanted his troops on the mountain in the first place. Invading and defending armies had striven to fight from the heights ever since, but it took two millennia before a pair of French brothers conceived of scouting and mapping enemy positions from even higher ground—the sky.
When Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier first began experimenting with the idea of hot-air balloon flight in the 1780s they thought it was the smoke, and not the heated air, that lifted their egg-shaped silk-and-cotton contraptions off the ground. They soon learned better, and within a decade the Montgolfiers’ invention had been incorporated into the army of the First French Republic in the form of a new Aerostatic Corps whose balloons were used as observation posts during several battles of the French revolutionary wars, including the 1795 Siege of Mainz.
The mechanics of balloon flight became more sophisticated in the nineteenth century, and in 1861 President Abraham Lincoln urged his generals to incorporate a Balloon Corps into the Union Army. The invention of compact hydrogen gas generators made these uninflated balloons easier to transport around the front lines, and the Union aeronauts who piloted them worked with the Army’s topographic engineers to create the most accurate maps to date of potential battlefield sites. The Balloon Corps’ functions expanded during the First Battle of Bull Run, where its aeronauts were tasked as artillery spotters, using signal flags to flash the position of Confederate cannons to their counterparts in the Army of the Potomac. Thereafter Union Army balloons often took flight with a tethered telegraph line to relay instant analytical locations of enemy troop movements and encampments. The South’s attempts to match this innovation were hampered, and finally discontinued, owing to its lack of matériel—not only had the Union embargo created a dearth of available gas to get the Confederacy’s balloons off the ground, but sewing together silk dressmaking material into giant balloons was deemed too inefficient.
As the Civil War dragged on the Union’s interest in its air wing flagged, but not before several balloons and their generators were loaded onto a converted coal barge, towed down the Potomac River, and flown aloft to observe Confederate troops digging fortifications to defend Richmond. It has been argued that this coal barge, the USS George Washington Parke Custis,I constituted the world’s first aircraft carrier.
By the onset of World War I aerial reconnaissance was still considered primarily a means to discover where the enemy was hiding his big guns. Some forward-thinking officers on both sides of the Western Front recognized the opportunity that the new science of aviation provided for battlefield commanders to gain valuable situational awareness—tactical intelligence—as well as photographic information regarding the enemy’s strength, logistics, and capabilities: strategic intelligence. A French pilot in 1914 provided essential scouting information that resulted in the Allies’ victory in the First Battle of the Marne, but for the most part the prevailing military theory regarding flight kept to its original objective of guiding artillery fire.
The end of World War I ushered in an age of war-weariness that blunted almost all innovation in military aviation, including reconnaissance. The French did send a few covert photo flights beyond the Rhi
ne upon Hitler’s emergence. And English scientists quietly refined defogging devices for wide- and long-lens cameras whose mechanisms would not freeze and whose film would not crack at upper altitudes. But for the most part aviation reconnaissance became a forgotten luxury. In the United States, the Army Air Corps devoted almost no equipment, personnel, or resources to the art of aerial spying. After Pearl Harbor, this shortsighted policy came back to haunt the service.
In the Southwest Pacific Theater, for instance, Gen. MacArthur and Gen. Kenney had long made do with only the five retrofitted F-4s belonging to Maj. “Pop” Polifka’s 8th Reconnaissance, which had acquired the nickname the “Eight Ballers.” But however much Polifka squawked about the lack of spare parts keeping his planes on the ground, it did him no good. Moreover, when Polifka or one of his pilots did manage to get an F-4 aloft, they discovered that flying alone over seemingly endless stretches of ocean through the region’s terrifying storm fronts on blind tactical forays in search of Japanese naval vessels only increased the odds of a blown engine, a shorted-out fuel pump, a cracked canopy, a malfunctioning fuel or hydraulics line, faulty exhaust stacks . . . the list went on and on.
Nor could pilot error be discounted. On one recon foray over northern New Guinea, Polifka, one of the most experienced fliers in-theater, accidentally shut off his oxygen supply at high altitude and passed out. He woke up 43 minutes later flying upside down at 3,000 feet through a valley with towering mountains on either side of his plane. He righted the aircraft and made it back to Port Moresby only to be gibed at for the excellent series of photographs he had taken detailing cloud formations that his activated undercarriage cameras shot every 45 seconds for the duration of his incapacitation.