by Bob Drury
For as long as their fuel and ammunition held out, American bombers continued to buzz the floundering survivors. They also gleefully reported the floating survivors being devoured by thick schools of sharks as “the sea ran red.” As another pilot noted, “We could see big clusters of men struggling in the water and the sleek brown sharks striking at them.”
The feral response to the execution of Moore and his crew continued into the next day as enemy infantrymen who had abandoned the smoldering merchant cargo ships continued to litter the sea. Clad in full jungle uniforms, clinging to any debris that floated, they were “blown to bloody rags” by the Fortresses’ blistering nose and ball turret guns. All told, the Americans expended 100,000 machine-gun rounds on the floaters. In a last indignity, on the final night of the battle five American PT boats steamed out of New Guinea to finish off any survivors they could find. Despite reports of Australian Airmen being “sickened” by their counterparts’ no-quarter reaction, the 43rd Bomb Group was awarded a Presidential Citation Unit for its outstanding performance during what came to be known as the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. A marker had been set—against the “heathen” Japanese, too much was never enough.
By the end of the three-day battle all six troop transports and both cargo ships had been sent to the bottom of the sea, as were four of the eight destroyers. The surviving Tin Cans had managed to land just over 1,000 troops at Lae, but the effort proved futile; they were the last contingent to ever reinforce the Japanese base. Allied aircraft had dropped 253 1,000-pound bombs and 261 500-pounders during the relentless attacks, including 37 500-pound skip bombs, 27 of which hit their targets, an astonishing kill ratio.
The Japanese death toll was mightily exaggerated by MacArthur and Kenney, but it was true that at least 3,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers perished. In addition, Kenney claimed at least 60 enemy planes shot down, with another 25 “probables.” This constituted about two thirds of all aircraft stationed at Rabaul. A postwar analysis deemed this figure highly inflated, but no one disputed the Allies’ relatively light losses. Including the air operations over Lae, the final tally was 13 Allied Airmen dead, 12 wounded, and six planes lost. The crews of two of the lost planes were recovered after crash landings.
Midway had indeed been a profound setback, but the Japanese considered the furious onslaught during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea as the most decisive air-sea debacle they had suffered to date. When Emperor Hirohito learned of the disaster he demanded to know why his naval staff had not diverted the ships’ course and landed the troops elsewhere on New Guinea. He also ordered a shake-up of the Imperial Naval Command. And as one of Adm. Yamamoto’s chagrined aides noted, the convoy’s destruction “opened the way” for the Allied advance into the Philippines.
The American press virtually ignored the massacre of the floating Japanese and celebrated the victory as it had none before. General Kenney, who two months earlier had been on the cover of Time magazine, now appeared on the cover of Life, standing erect as a ship’s mast before a huge B-17 propeller, his protruding bottom lip hinting at a smug smile. The New York Times hailed the battle as “one of the greatest triumphs of the war” and ran several follow-up articles chronicling the step-by-step lead-up to the engagement. And MacArthur’s description of “one of the most complete and annihilating combats of all time”—along with his own inflated body count—was flashed by wire services to newspapers around the world.
More important, the smashing victory allowed MacArthur to seriously begin contemplating the first stages of Operation Cartwheel, with the landings on Bougainville Island as the plan’s first key acquisition. With the conquest of North Africa currently faltering, Washington may have considered the war in the Pacific the minor leagues. But MacArthur, Nimitz, Kenney, Halsey, and the rest had different ideas.
For after a solid 15 months of unabashed success, Japan’s great Southern Offensive was about to turn defensive.
THE BATTLE OF THE BISMARCK Sea also marked another milestone of sorts, serving as what Jay called Joe Sarnoski’s “baptism of fire.” Jay had been selected to fill in for a sick pilot during the second day of the attack, and it was pure serendipity that the B-17 to which he was assigned also needed a bombardier. Joe had flown on several recon missions by this point but had yet to drop any ordnance. Naturally, Jay arranged for Joe to man the Greenhouse when the 65th Squadron went aloft late in the afternoon to pursue what was left of the Japanese convoy.
The rain had picked up, and Joe could hardly see through the Plexiglas canopy when his bombs put the finishing touch on a limping troop transport—all he could make out were the pillars of black smoke swirling nearly three miles high from the sinking vessel. From that day on Jay and Joe finagled to fly together whenever possible. This was not too difficult, as the usual combination of deaths, injuries, illness, and transfers continued to diminish the 43rd’s aircrews.
From that moment on the two became, in Jay’s words, “close enough to feel that we were born to fly together.”
It was a connection that would soon prove invaluable.
21
THE FLIGHT OF THE GEISHAS
WHILE JAY’S BURGEONING REPUTATION AS a B-17 combat pilot flourished, he continued to straddle the line between glory and insubordination. That dichotomy was encapsulated one day in late March, when he was ordered on a bombing mission over New Guinea’s north coast.
Navy code breakers had relayed an urgent message to Port Moresby about a fleet of Japanese “Betty” bombers that had just arrived at Wewak, a port town some 500 miles from Port Moresby. The intercepted decryptions indicated that they had been ordered to strike Jackson Airfield the next morning. The 65th Squadron, with Jay and Joe flying together in a borrowed Fortress, was instructed to take the enemy bombers out that night before they could get off the ground again. The squad’s B-17s were loaded with 100-, 200-, and 300-pound fragmentation bombs, which, at Gen. Kenney’s suggestion, were wrapped in thick concertina wire, whose shards, upon detonation seconds before contact with the ground, could obliterate a plane and cut a man in half.
At the operations meeting prior to the mission the American Airmen were shown reconnaissance photos of the enemy airstrip on Wewak that ran parallel to the shoreline. The pilots were told make their runs at between 6,000 and 7,000 feet, at seven-minute intervals. This elevation left the Fortresses extremely vulnerable to ground fire, but the Operations Officer stressed that there were to be no strafing runs because the Wewak complex was too heavily defended by anti-aircraft batteries. The thinking was that if a plane and its crew were going to be lost over Wewak, they were going to be lost blasting the hell out of the Japanese Bettys and not unnecessarily exposing themselves to ground fire.
Jay’s aircraft was on point when the squadron reached its target. He lowered the nose and, with a maneuver bomber pilots called “running downhill,” swooped in parallel to the enemy runway. Joe, now a battle-tested bombardier, scored several direct hits on the parked Japanese bombers. The innovative frag bombs exploded at revetment height and sparked a chain reaction of bluish-orange fires from detonating gasoline tanks whose heat Jay and his aircrew could almost feel. With bombs away and the bays closed it was almost as if the Fortress had found a new gear, and Jay pulled away at a tremendous clip, the needles on the plane’s altimeter nearly bobbing into the Do Not Exceed limit. Seasoned pilots knew that the first bomber on a night raid ran the least risk from anti-aircraft fire; the enemy crews were more often than not “caught with their heads up their revetments.” But inevitably, as Jay noted, “For the following planes, all hell breaks loose.”
With his run complete, Jay circled out over the Bismarck Sea and awaited the approach of the second bomber in the formation. Before the plane even reached the airstrip, fulgent fingers of white light lit up the night sky. The enemy’s crisscrossing arc lamps were interspersed with pinkish-orange tracer rounds that reminded Jay of the Fourth of July fireworks displays arcing over Boothbay Harbor. Ignoring his orders, he dropped hi
s Fortress to 1,000 feet, fell in a little ahead of the attacking B-17, and escorted it in with a strafing run, his forward and belly gunners raking the searchlight batteries with their machine guns. He noticed what looked like cubes of frozen moonlight reflecting off the sea as he vectored back out over the water, once again preparing to provide the same cover for the next bomber, and the next, and the next, until each had released its payload.
On the flight home Jay tallied his “kills.” In addition to Joe’s scores, his machine gunners counted three batteries of searchlights completely destroyed, and two others severely damaged. With so many anti-aircraft lamps disabled, every bomber from the 65th returned safely from the run. Still, Jay had disobeyed a direct order, and there was hell to pay back at Port Moresby. What seemed to irritate his superiors the most was his insouciance; when confronted with the infraction Jay merely shrugged it off. He believed it was the end, not the means, that counted. The mission had been a success, the Bettys destroyed. He did not see the problem.
The Group’s Operations Officers viewed the incident through a harsher lens. Jay was ordered confined to his quarters pending a disciplinary hearing. It was only the presence of an Associated Press correspondent visiting Port Moresby that saved him. The reporter got wind of the story and in his dispatch quoted several of the 65th’s pilots crediting Jay’s inventive intuition with the success of the mission and their safe return. A congressman on a fact-finding tour of Australia read the article and began making his own inquiries. With the political pressure building, Jay was released from his quarters and he and his entire crew were awarded the Silver Star.
With his second Silver Star stowed away in his barracks bag, Jay now had more leverage than ever to ensure that his “skeleton crew” would fill the slots whenever there was an opening on a mission he piloted. Rocky Stone had been transferred back to the States, and Joe had established himself as Jay’s regular bombardier, and it was not unusual to find Pudge Pugh manning the tail gun, or the young Johnnie Able pulling double duty at the navigator’s table and up in the top turret, or Willy Vaughan operating the radios.
Once, albeit quite by accident, Jay found himself on a bombing run over Rabaul with his entire cast of misfits aboard. The flight began as a simple “grocery run.” One of Jay’s primary concerns since his appointment as the 65th Squadron’s Operations Officer had been the men’s health and morale. The sanitary conditions at the Port Moreby base were atrocious—running water, for example, was an occasional luxury. The engineer in Jay discovered that he could at least stem, if not eradicate, the ubiquitous jungle rot by constructing a makeshift shower room from a large canvas spread hanging between poles that caught the rain and funneled it into 50-gallon drums with holes punched or shot through the bottoms. Still, a variety of stomach ailments, particularly dysentery, continued to run rampant through camp, and there was not much he could do about that.
The steady intake of horrible rations, however, was another matter. A man could stomach only so many green bananas and fricasseed cassowaries, and the squad was sick of rancid hardtack, mealy potatoes, and the “shit on a shingle” served at every mess and memorably described by one Airman as a “pinkish-looking meat in some sort of gravy poured over a single slice of five-day-old bread.” One day the squadron pooled its cash and asked Jay to use the money to procure some decent food. He would have to skirt formal requisition channels to do it, but he had an idea. After all, he reasoned, it was Napoleon himself who had noted that “insubordination may be only the evidence of a strong mind.”
Jay had retained a connection with the quartermaster at his former base at Townsville, and through him he managed to purchase a cache of fresh beef, mutton, and vegetables from local farmers. Now it was just a question of delivering his haul. At the time the Americans were recycling stripped-down B-17s no longer fit for combat to ferry equipment and men to and from Australia and the New Guinea bases, and Jay arranged for one of these planes to transport the food. In order to avoid the red tape such a semi-legal shipment entailed, he also filed a flight plan stating that the bomber’s mission was a refueling stop at Port Moresby en route to a raid on Rabaul. It was just “bad luck,” he wrote, that the 43rd Bomb Group’s Operations Officers chose that particular aircraft to inspect when it landed at Jackson Field.
His superiors confiscated the groceries. Jay suspected someone from one of the other squadrons, or perhaps even from the 90th Bomb Group, had ratted him out. But that was the least of his worries. By reporting that the bomber was on its way to Rabaul, he had deliberately “misrepresented” a flight plan, a serious offense. He now faced either a court-martial or the prospect of piloting the unarmed Fortress on its stated purpose. As it happened, there was a bombing mission over Rabaul scheduled for that night. No one from the 65th wanted anything to do with going up in an airplane lacking guns and armor plating, so Jay turned to his skeleton crew. Yet even they balked at flying such a dilapidated old crate on a combat mission. Finally they relented, on one condition—Jay had to agree to carry an extra 2,000 pounds of fragmentation and incendiary bombs that they could toss out by hand when Joe salvoed his regular ordnance. The bombing run went off without a hitch and the grocery plane and its crew returned to Port Moresby unscathed—and Jay unprosecuted. Naturally, no one from the 65th Squadron ever saw the meat and vegetables again. But in a surprising development, Jay’s devil-may-care attitude toward authority seemed to be rubbing off on at least one member of his crew.
Not long after the botched grocery run, Jay and Joe were again tapped to join a formation prepping for a night mission on Rabaul in yet another borrowed aircraft. But the brass had special plans for their plane. Specifically, they were tasked with bombing the city’s Royal Pacific Hotel, an elegant prewar Georgian building on the edge of the city’s Chinatown. Most of the structures that still stood at Rabaul, from churches to libraries to private homes, had been commandeered as barracks for Imperial troops, but intercepted intelligence reports indicated that the Royal Pacific’s penthouse had been set aside as a “special purpose house” where esteemed Japanese officers, including generals and admirals, were thought to be entertaining comfort women. And not just the usual sex slaves from conquered territories. These were high-end geishas imported directly from the homeland.
During the preflight operations meeting Jay noticed that Joe was unusually quiet. And after the session broke up the bombardier spent the afternoon in the intelligence hut studying reconnaissance photos of Rabaul’s town center and the surrounding area. Jay assumed Joe was merely charting their flight path for the run on the hotel. As a bomber neared its target, it was standard operating procedure for the pilot to take his flight headings from the bombardier via the pilot’s direction indicator, or PDI, located in the Greenhouse. When the aircraft reached its preordained initial point, or IP, the pilot would “slave” the plane’s autopilot over to the bombardier’s control for the run itself. Once the ordnance was away, the pilot would take back control of the ship. Jay assumed the ever-meticulous Joe was merely studying how to best avoid the heaviest of the ack-ack batteries.
It was just past midnight when Jay’s Fortress approached Rabaul. He did not think much of it when Joe directed him well west of the targeted hotel. Again, Jay assumed that his cautious bombardier was picking his way around the most dangerous of the anti-aircraft gunners. The plane was far from the town center when Jay was shocked to hear Joe’s voice over the interphone shouting, “Bombs away!” Joe had “pickled his rocks” and turned the valve to close the bomb bay doors before Jay saw the bomb-release light flick on in the cockpit and took back the controls, still wondering what had just happened. As he banked toward home he glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of a tremendous series of explosions. The sky over above the target remained a fiery red until they cleared the horizon. Tons of bombs, torpedoes, and artillery shells were stored at various sites around the town, and Joe had just hit one of the enemy’s largest ammunition dumps.
At the debriefing back at
Port Moresby, the Group Operations Officers were incensed that Jay and his crew had ignored their orders. In fact, they were so angry that as punishment they ordered Jay’s Fortress back into the air that night, with the Royal Pacific’s “special purpose” penthouse again as its target. Again Joe spent the afternoon studying photographs. Hours later, as they approached Rabaul through a heavy cloud cover, Jay ceded control to his bombardier. This time Joe banked them even farther away from the hotel. Jay had no idea that Joe had used his control valve to open the bomb bay doors, had set the bomb rack on the “select” position, had flipped on the bomb switches, and had fixed the settings until he again heard the telltale “Bombs away.”
Once again a tremendous fire flared. Joe had bombed a Japanese fuel dump. For the second time the debriefing officers were not amused, and in the Group’s official After-Action reports they refused to credit Jay, Joe, or the crew with destroying either the ammunition depot or the fuel dump.
“But they gave up on us and did not assign us for another attempt,” Jay wrote to Joe’s younger sister Victoria. “Joe went up to his tent, did his rosaries, and went to bed happy. We had not bombed innocent geisha girls!”
WHEN JAY AND JOE COULD not manage to get their skeleton crew into the air, they made certain to keep up their training on land. Each man was told that it was his responsibility to “belt” his own ammunition, with one twist. Machine guns on most B-17s were generally armed with a sequence of two armor-piercing bullets followed by two incendiaries followed by a flare bullet, or tracer. Jay preferred that in his guns, every other bullet be a tracer. Though tracers were the least accurate shells, they shot through the sky like a meteor shower. This, Jay insisted, provided a not-so-subtle reminder to any bogeys that his gunners were aware of their presence.