Lucky 666

by Bob Drury

  American intelligence knew that at least one Japanese Air Group had been deployed to the Buin airfield in the south of the island, and Halsey informed Nimitz that he needed confirmation of the enemy’s strength on Bougainville’s western coast. The few maps he had of the area contained numerous unexplored regions, and he had to know if the terrain was firm enough to support his landing forces and their vehicles. More important, he wanted the precise locations of the coral reefs lacing Empress Augusta Bay should his landing craft need to traverse those waters. At the moment Halsey was still weighing his options for invading Bougainville. With the Japanese having constructed airbases in the north, east, and south ends of the island—where, near Buin, an anchorage at Tonolei Harbour was also in place—Marines landing on the southern beaches could be rushing into the teeth of an entrenched defensive force. An end run around this bulwark to Bougainville’s Cape Torokina in the west was looking more and more like an ideal way to establish an Allied presence.

  Empress Augusta Bay near the cape was a somewhat protected harbor, perhaps not as ideal as Tonolei, but passable. But what made the site particularly inviting for a landing was the tangle of nearly impassable mountain ranges and jungle that ringed the plain abutting the beachhead. This would make mounting a counterattack difficult, particularly considering that the American invasion force would be small for the operation, consisting of fewer than 40,000 Marines and soldiers. But before making any decision, Halsey needed to know where those reefs were; he could not have his landing craft hung up and exposed.

  Prior to the war, Bougainville had been administered by the Australian government, and following the Japanese landings there two intrepid coastwatchers remained behind. One, a former cattle rancher, had concealed himself in the northern jungles. The other had established a secret camp atop a forested hill near the south end of the island. Their terse, coded radio reports were relayed across a circuitous route from Port Moresby to Townsville to Pearl Harbor before arriving in Brisbane, and their warnings of enemy bombing formations passing overhead had been integral in alerting the Americans from Fletcher’s task force on the Coral Sea to Halsey’s Marines on Guadalcanal about incoming enemy aircraft. But even if the coastwatchers had been able to make their way to Bougainville’s western coast, the Allies could not rely on these brave men to supply them with the precise locations of the Empress Augusta Bay’s submerged reefs. Moreover, the invasion planners required more than just ordinary photographs.

  The cartographers from the Army Corps of Engineers charged with developing the charts and tactical maps that would guide any landing force would have to see beneath the bay’s surface. This was a matter of some urgency as summer approached, because the Bougainville landings were already scheduled for mid-autumn. The Eight Ballers from the 8th Reconnaissance Squad had made several attempts to photo-map the island in a borrowed bomber, but a combination of bad weather and malfunctioning equipment had resulted in blank strips of film. Now Gen. Kenney and his Bomber Command decided to send a plane of their own. As Bougainville was 600 miles from Port Moresby, it would have to be a Flying Fortress equipped with trimetrogon cameras as well as supplementary fuel tanks.

  The mission would need to be flown on a day with no cloud cover and, given the distance, without a fighter escort. Even the P-38s out of Guadalcanal fitted with extra fuel tanks that had intercepted Adm. Yamamoto near Buin had reached the end of their tether on that mission. Further, in order for the trimetrogon’s photo images to be properly aligned, the pilot of the recon aircraft would have to keep his plane on a steady course with pinpoint precision, his compass needle glued to the glass no matter the circumstances. If he dipped his wing even a single degree, the ground focal point on his cameras would shift over a mile, rendering the photos useless.

  In all, such a pattern was a flight crew’s nightmare. Owing to any and all of these variables, the mission was deemed too perilous to officially order anyone to take it on. It would have to be completed by volunteers.

  When Jay learned of this he gathered the Eager Beavers and laid out the situation. He emphasized the journey’s hazards—a 1,200-mile round-trip over large uncharted stretches of the Solomon Sea, with no fighter escort or mutual support from the guns of fellow bombers. No one knew what kind of defenses the Japanese had stood up in western Bougainville, and they could very well be flying into a wasp’s nest of anti-aircraft batteries in perfect weather without the option of ducking into a cloud or even taking evasive action. He stressed that between the enemy strips carved out of Bougainville and nearby Buka and New Georgia, as well as the Japanese bases in northern New Guinea, Old 666’s flight path would take it perilously close to half a dozen hostile airdromes. He guessed that the odds of returning alive were about one in 10. There was a brief silence when he finished his pitch. Then the entire crew stepped forward.

  Moments later, Jay strode into the 43rd’s Operations Hut searching for his old squadron commander, Harry Hawthorne, who since overseeing Old 666’s trial run had been promoted to colonel and succeeded Lt. Col. Roberts as the Group’s commanding officer. Jay found Hawthorne conferring with another of the 43rd’s former COs, Col. Roger Ramey. Ramey was waiting for his promotion to brigadier general to come through so he could be appointed head of the 5th Air Force’s Bomber Command. The two officers were, ironically, writing the notice that would call for volunteers for the Bougainville recon mission. It was about to be tacked up on the hut’s bulletin board.

  If the presence of such a senior officer intimidated Jay, he did not show it. He told Hawthorne and Ramey that Old 666 was the plane for the job. His crew was outside waiting to sign up. All he asked was that no one interfere with his preparation and game plan for the mission. Ramey and Hawthorne agreed.

  JAY’S SUPERIORS WERE NOT SURPRISED when he volunteered to photograph Bougainville’s reefs and whatever Japanese fortifications might exist. By now his unorthodox techniques had lent him and his flight crew a reputation as men who rarely did anything “by the book,” and it didn’t get much further from the book than a 1,200-mile round-trip run over enemy territory in a lone bomber. Similarly, neither the brass nor Jay would be concerned when, during the second week of June, two of Old 666’s regular crewmen—the copilot Hank Dyminski and the navigator Emile “Bud” Thues—contracted malaria and were confined to sick bay. There were plenty of good men on the airbase with whom to replace them. Jay was familiar with one copilot in particular, a respected young second lieutenant from Arizona named John Britton. Britton was known by his initials, J. T., and once Jay read his service jacket, he suspected he would fit right in with the Eager Beavers.

  Before the war Britton had attended the University of California-Davis for two years; there, he’d starred on the school’s boxing team while earning beer money hustling the locals at a nearby pool hall. Congress had enacted the Draft Bill in 1940, and like any good pool shark weighing the odds, Britton enlisted in the Air Cadets rather than take the chance that he’d be humping a ruck and a rifle through some godforsaken North African desert or South Pacific jungle.

  After making it through boot camp and graduating from Advanced Flight School, Britton began his USAAF career copiloting B-18 Bolos on anti-submarine patrols off the coast of the Hawaiian Islands. Since being transferred into the 43rd he’d been training on Flying Fortresses in Australia and at Port Moresby. His record showed that he took to the heavy bomber with the ease and familiarity of an old hand, exhibiting particular proficiency for skip-bombing attacks on Japanese shipping. By the time Jay approached him about stepping in for the ailing Hank Dyminski, Britton had made over two dozen missions in the right-hand seat. These included several during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Jay’s request that Britton join the Bougainville mission was barely out of his mouth before the copilot signed on.

  It was Joe Sarnoski who discovered their new navigator. Joe was an officer now, having been promoted from sergeant to second lieutenant—a “shavetail” in the parlance. The field commission had been the idea
of a group of pilots, including Jay, who had banded together and petitioned 5th Air Force headquarters to promote any bombardiers who had graduated from the Bombsight Maintenance Course. The argument behind the campaign was based on the fact that these bombardiers were flight officers in all but name, and deserved the formal recognition. General Kenney agreed, and by the time Joe sought out First Lt. Ruby Johnston and asked him to join the Bougainville recon run as flight navigator, it was an officer-to-officer request.

  During his time hitching rides as a freelance bombardier with no assigned plane, Joe had flown several missions with Johnston, and he admired the navigator’s savvy and cool head. Johnston may not have been much to look at, packing a mere 140 pounds on his 5-foot-nine frame, but Joe knew that his bantam appearance belied a man with some sand. Johnston came from Pensacola, Florida, where, like J. T. Britton, he had spent a couple of years at a university before enlisting in the Army Air Force. This was also one of the reasons Joe had thought to recruit Johnston—the Pennsylvania farm boy had never lost his childhood respect for college men. But it was the navigator’s combat history that jumped off the page.

  Several months back Johnston had been the regular navigator on a B-17 called Tugboat Annie—the pilot, Lt. Harris Lien, was apparently a fan of the 1933 movie of that name. During a run over Simpson Harbour in heavy weather Tugboat Annie had taken murderous flak and machine-gun fire that damaged its wings, holed the tail section, and flamed out one engine. Lieutenant Lien thought he could coax the plane home until, somewhere over the Solomon Sea, a second engine began to sputter and cough. The crew jettisoned the guns and ammunition to lighten the load, leaving the skipper a choice. He could head into the teeth of the worsening storm on two engines with a shot-up tail and wings, or attempt to fly around the most flagrant thunderheads and pray that his fuel held out. He chose the latter. He chose wrong.

  Johnston reckoned they were somewhere off the north coast of New Guinea, near Buna—where the pitched battle was still raging between American and Australian infantry trying to dislodge the town’s Japanese occupiers—when the needles on the fuel gauges touched empty. Tugboat Annie’s radio operator transmitted a final S.O.S. and everyone but Lt. Lien crawled into the forward bulkhead to assume crash positions. Lien vectored the plane toward the sea holding it as level as he could, spotted the calmest waters he could find, and ditched it near shore.

  As Tugboat Annie filled with seawater the crew successfully deployed the two life rafts and sculled through the darkness toward land. A few hours later they reached a beach north of Buna, where they spent the rest of the night hiding the rafts beneath mounds of palm frond scrub. At dawn they began to walk south through the jungle, intending to make for the Allied base at Milne Bay some 200 miles away. But within 48 hours their food and water reserves had run out, and by the fourth day two members of the crew had developed such painful blisters on their feet that they could no longer walk. Ruby Johnston volunteered to remain with the injured men while the rest pushed on.

  That afternoon their luck turned when the forward party stumbled into a circle of Papuan huts. Most Americans had picked up rudimentary words and phrases in the native Motuan language such as “friend,” “please help,” and (most imperatively) “reward.” The villagers agreed to fetch Johnston and the two stragglers with makeshift stretchers. By nightfall all the survivors were together again.

  With the aid of the Papuans, Tugboat Annie’s survivors continued their trek, jumping from coastal village to coastal village by night in outrigger canoes. Finally, they made contact with a coastwatcher, who managed to summon a small Australian launch to pick them up. That night the Airmen gorged on heaps of canned bully beef and marmalade during the sail south to another coastal town under Allied control. From there they boarded an American liberty ship returning from delivering supplies to Buna and were transported on a two-and-a-half-day journey to Milne Bay. They had barely stepped onto the pier when Japanese dive-bombers breached the horizon. They scrambled to slit trenches and watched slack-jawed as the cargo vessel from which they had just disembarked was sent to the bottom of the bay. An eight-day sail on yet another liberty ship finally returned them to Port Moresby, and Ruby Johnston was back in the air within a week.

  When Jay met with Johnston and listened to his tale, the final match was made. To Old 666’s skipper, the pool-hustling copilot and the survivalist navigator seemed the perfect duo to complement his knife-fighting radio operator, his gun-crazy photographer, his muscle-bound tail gunner, his wannabe-pilot top turret gunner, his contortionist belly gunner, and the best damn bombardier in the Southwest Pacific Theater of War.

  Preparations for the flight were well under way when Jay learned that Joe might not be flying with them after all.

  AT THE SAME TIME JAY was vetting J. T. Britton and Ruby Johnston, Joe was astounded to receive orders transferring him back to the States. After 15 months in-theater, including dozens of combat missions, he was scheduled to depart from Port Moresby in less than three weeks for a stateside assignment training recruits. His days as the Old 666 bombardier were literally numbered. Now he was faced with a decision. With Old 666’s bomb bay scheduled to be outfitted with spare fuel tanks, the plane would be hauling no ordnance on the Bougainville mission. This obviated the need for a bombardier. Yet even as he packed up his trunk and barracks bags—and received from his fellow crew members the de rigueur going-home present of a garishly decorated piss pipe—Joe refused to bow out. In a quiet moment he pulled Jay aside and told him that if the mission could be scheduled before his departure date in the last week of June, there was no way he was going to miss it.

  Joe felt that Old 666’s vulnerable nose section should be protected on such a perilous recon run by a gunner who knew the plane best. He also recognized that given the precision with which Jay would have to pilot this particular mission, it would never hurt to have an extra pair of eyes in the navigator’s compartment to help Ruby Johnston monitor the bomber’s drift, speed, and altitude as well as man the vertical camera switches located in the nose that activated George Kendrick’s trimetrogons. Finally, he felt, the introduction of two new crewmen—Johnston and Britton—no matter what experience they had, only heightened the need for his presence. As his fellow Pennsylvanian Pudge Pugh put it in a letter, “Joe never shirked his duties and never did he even hint or suggest that anybody take his place if there was any one job that was a little tougher than another.”

  Men fighting beside one another have throughout history developed an esprit de corps that runs wide and deep, and Joe was no different. He had gone through so much with his brothers in arms; how could he cut and run from this final mission? The fact was, he could not. Further tipping the scales was his relationship with Jay. Over the months the bond between them had grown stronger. They were no longer amiable captain and bombardier; they were, in Jay’s words, “best friends.”

  An insight into Joe’s mind-set might be taken from a long poem he sent home to his younger sister Agnes not long before the Bougainville photo run. Entitled “We Swoop at Dawn” and written by a pilot from Jay’s old 22nd Bomb Group, the poem had been copied and passed around to Airmen in-theater, many of whom flew with it stuffed into a pocket of their boilersuits. It includes the stanzas:

  No matter how many missions a man may fly,

  He never gets over being afraid to die.

  It’s a funny feeling, hard to explain,

  You tighten all up from your toes to your brain

  Your stomach’s all empty, and your face feels drawn.

  When you hear the old cry, “WE SWOOP AT DAWN.”

  But the men who went out into the morning cold

  Thought not of medals and heroes bold.

  Most likely they thought of their girls and their homes

  And the hell they’d give those yellow gnomes

  For causing the war, the pain, and the strife,

  And for taking away the best years of their life.

  The poem went on for
18 more stanzas and included the line “We’ll all go to town and get drunk as a skunk.” Joe, fearing that the image of a staggering American Airman might upset the deeply religious Agnes, hastened to scrawl in the margin of the letter next to the stanza, “This line was only a dream.”

  It was amid this conflicting rush of emotions that Joe made his decision to fly a final mission. The only question that remained was which would arrive first, the day of the Bougainville mapping run or his scheduled departure date.

  26

  “HELL, NO!”

  JUNE 1943 WAS ONE OF the wettest months on record in the Southwest Pacific. As the days and weeks progressed, Old 666’s mapping mission was postponed time after time as a succession of tropical storms settled over Bougainville, making photography impossible. Even when it wasn’t raining, Navy meteorologists could not forecast a day when the island would be free enough of cloud cover to allow the trimetrogon cameras to snap usable photos. To reduce their restlessness, Jay and his crew honed their expertise by flying a slew of disparate reconnaissance flights in borrowed bombers.

  They photographed Japanese installations on the Admiralty Islands west of Rabaul, and days later they flew a recon run over New Britain just east of Simpson Harbour. Before and after these solo missions they also took part in several of the 43rd’s regularly scheduled bombing runs. It was during one of these, against a convoy carrying supplies to the Japanese-held island of New Georgia, that Jay and his crew had its closest shave yet.

  Coastwatchers had spotted and alerted the Americans to the presence of the enemy ships steaming for New Georgia, and Jay’s 65th Squadron was tabbed to find and destroy them. It took the squad close to six hours to locate the vessels, which were sailing without air cover, and the job initially looked like another milk run. During one of the squadron’s skip-bombing attacks, however, the guns from a flanking Japanese destroyer homed in on Jay’s bomber and the enemy fire tore up the fuselage and disabled the radios. What appeared to be the worst damage was incurred when a shell blasted, just above the landing gear, a hole that one war correspondent later described as “large enough to jump through.” But a piece of shrapnel had also nicked the fuel line, and on the way home, as the plane drew near the north coast of New Guinea, Jay realized that he was running dangerously low on fuel.