by Bob Drury
As Johnston spoke, J. T. Britton groaned and lifted his head. His face was as pinched as a hatchet blade and he opened his eyes in stages, like a boxer coming to after the count. Britton gathered his wits and patted himself down. There were no wounds other than the large egg on the back of his head. He took in the damage to the instrument panel. It took him a moment to comprehend that the plane’s control cables were smashed and its rudder pedals obliterated. The only instruments still working were the manifold pressure gauge and the magnetic compass in the center of the charred dashboard.
With no tail rudder, Jay’s control of the pitch and roll of the aircraft had virtually vanished. He could still try to steer the Fortress by slowing the engines on one wing to make the plane turn. If he stayed conscious. He had never felt such pain in his life; he wanted to scream. But he wouldn’t. He needed to keep his head. He was the only one who could fly them out of this mess.
Britton unclasped his safety belt and ducked back onto the catwalk. He returned within minutes and informed Jay that George Kendrick had stowed the camera film and was manning the waist guns against a series of furious attacks. He also said that a shell had destroyed the yellow, keg-like oxygen tanks behind the cockpit. They had only seconds before the little air left in the personal bottles supplying their masks ran out. Unless they got below 10,000 feet they would all pass out and die, either from hypoxia or in the subsequent crash.
At this Jay rolled the bomber hard right and used his ailerons and elevators, miraculously still functioning, to push the nose straight down. The plane dived at 275 miles per hour. The engines screamed and the fuselage groaned. Johnnie Able, thinking the bomber was out of control, jumped down from his top turret to see if the pilots were wounded or dead. The rest of the crew maintained their positions. None of them donned parachutes.
The altimeter on the instrument panel was hanging limp by its wires, but Jay knew he could estimate his altitude by the increases in the engine’s manifold pressure. Old 666’s rivets were rattling when it reached what he guessed was close to 6,000 feet. Jay leveled off, removed his mask, and took a deep breath. His body contorted with pain at the mere act of forcing oxygen into his lungs, but at least now the crew would be able to breathe.
Johnnie Able, who had hoisted himself back into the top turret, yelled that more enemy fighters were screaming down after them.
Jay banked left, and George Kendrick counted 17 Zekes on either side of the Fortress, flying three and four abreast. Jay saw them a moment later as they raced out in front of him in columns of two. They were setting up another frontal assault. One more big hit, he knew, and Old 666 was done for.
Up in the turret, Johnnie Able cleared a jam from his ammunition belt and lined up a bogey with his twin .50s. He let loose a burst. Jay peered up through the glass ceiling hatch and saw the Zero’s engine erupt into orange flames that winked along its fuselage and spread to its fuel tanks. When the fighter spun toward the sea, a funeral pyre of jagged flame leaving a contrail of greasy black smoke, it barely missed clipping Old 666’s right wingtip.
Jay wanted to shout to the young flight engineer. But he didn’t have the strength. He tried lifting a thumbs-up, but Able had already dropped out of his swing-seat harness and crumpled to the ground behind him. He had been hit in both legs by machine-gun fire. When he landed on the catwalk Able saw that the damaged hydraulic tubes and the oxygen bottles behind the pilot’s seat were on fire. He crawled toward the flames, tore the bottles from their stabilizing hinges, and began beating out the blaze with his bare hands. He was joined a moment later by Ruby Johnston, who had scrambled up from the navigator’s compartment in search of bandages to stem the bleeding after shrapnel from an exploding shell had punctured his left forearm and creased his skull.
Jay used the morning sun over his left shoulder to set a southwest course. Over the next 30 minutes he lost count of how many head-on runs, one after another, the Zekes made on his bomber. Six? Eight? A dozen? The enemy pilots formed a rotating circle around Old 666’s nose and attacked from 11 o’clock to 1 o’clock. When one dropped out, another took his place. Jay felt as if he were flying through a vortex of iron rain—at first a light patter, then a heavy downpour.
30
GET IT HOME
IF JAY KNEW IT, THE Japanese knew it. With the nose of his flying Fortress shot to hell, the bomber was in effect defenseless against frontal attacks. Joe was either dead or dying next to his gun. Johnnie Able was back on the catwalk tending to his leg wounds and burned hands, leaving the top turret empty. And the wire that connected Jay’s .50-cal “snozzola gun” to its solenoid had been snapped by the cannon shell.
Though Ruby Johnston had returned to his .50s in the navigator’s compartment, he was basically firing blind. The blood from his head wound had clotted over his eyes—his face reminded Jay of a “red beet”—and Johnston’s only recourse was to wheel his gun barrels in the general direction of the distinctive whine of a Zero’s radial engine and clutch the triggers in fits of firing.
Behind Jay, Willy Vaughan’s twin .50-cals had gone silent after a shell fragment sliced open his neck not far from his bayonet scar, but at least Pudge Pugh’s tail guns continued to repel attacks from the rear. The enemy pilots had also learned to give Old 666 a wide berth when circling for frontal assaults after George Kendrick flamed one Zeke at four o’clock with his starboard .50-cal, spun, took up his port gun, and shot up another at eight o’clock. He watched it roll on its back and “fall like a leaf,” trailing a ball of flame.
The Japanese onslaughts, however, were coming too fast and furious for Kendrick to operate the extra machine gun mounted in the floor behind the wheels, a situation that was exacerbated when a bullet sliced the power line to Forrest Dillman’s high-speed rotator, leaving his belly turret stuck facing aft. There was a hand crank to turn the turret on the catwalk behind the bomb bay, but with J. T Britton still woozy—and needed in the cockpit in case Jay passed out—there was no one to operate it.
At least Kendrick’s deadly accuracy was buying them some time. The Zeros were capable of closing speeds of nearly 500 miles per hour, but because of Kendrick’s waist guns the enemy pilots were being forced to take almost ten minutes to circle out before turning for their strafing runs on Old 666’s nose. During these slack periods Jay used his magnetic compass and the position of the sun to make sure he remained on a southwesterly course, the throttles opened to the firewall. Just before he’d lost his sight, Ruby Johnston had checked the rpm of each engine on the tachometer. None, he’d reported, looked to be failing. So with all four engines running on full power Jay felt confident enough to wait until he saw an enemy fighter bank into his turn in front of him before cutting back his throttles and rolling hard either right or left.
This was where all his bull sessions about teamwork would need to pay off. He had convinced his crew that as long as he remained in the pilot’s seat nothing could happen to the ship. But with the interphone gone, Jay had no way of signaling the aft gunners which evasive maneuvers he planned to take. They would have to intuitively recognize the zigzagging aiming runs he was attempting in order to give them the maximum opportunity for a shot. And it was working. As Zeke after Zeke swept past, either Kendrick’s waist guns or Pudge Pugh in the tail would rake the bogey. Yet still they came, flying into and through the curtain of fire his gunners were throwing up. In a way, Jay could not help admiring their sense of duty.
Yet without their squadron leader the attacks were uneven. No longer were they coming at Old 666 with the coordinated strikes that had caused so much early damage. Now they flew almost in single file, swooping dead-on at him one at a time, splashing their ammo all over the sky. It was their biggest mistake, allowing time for Jay’s maneuvering to set them up for his waist gunner and tail gunner. When they raced out in front and turned toward him, the leading edge of their wings suddenly blazing with fire and spitting black smoke, Jay would wait, gritting his teeth, waiting, waiting, until the enemy pilot committed
himself totally. Only then would he yank hard on the yoke and skid out to either side.
But Jay was bleeding out at an alarming rate. His legs were useless, and both of his boots had filled with blood. The wheel was also slippery with blood from the bullet holes in his wrists, and he could grip it only with his fingertips. During one lull in the attacks he pulled off his belt and tried to tie a tourniquet around his left thigh. The effort proved too painful and time consuming; the Japanese would not give him enough breathing room to concentrate. Then he became aware of a stroke of luck—the icy wind whistling past his legs through the plane’s open skin was fast coagulating his wounds.
Jay had ordered J. T. Britton back to the catwalk to see to the wounded, yet several times Britton stuck his head back into the cockpit and pleaded to take over the controls so Jay himself might be patched up. Each time Jay refused. He felt that only he, with his months of experience flying the Fortress like an agile fighter plane, could keep Old 666 in the air. At least the pain was keeping him awake.
After 40 minutes and 100 miles or so the enemy fighters, low on fuel and ammunition, began to peel away. Finally the last of them made one more ineffectual run before it, too, turned back for its base. There was no way the Japanese pilots could have known that the American “Boeing” was down to its final few bullets.
FLIGHT PETTY OFFICER SECOND CLASS Suehiro Yamamoto, Yoshio Ooki’s subordinate, was the last flier to break off from the dogfight. That made it his job to file the After-Action report to his squadron commander. Yamamoto reported that the squad had unleashed over 500 20-millimeter cannon rounds and more than 700 machine-gun bullets at the American bomber. The Japanese fighters out of Bougainville flying under Lt. Cmdr. Naboro Hayashi had expended another 35 cannon shells and 1,400 machine-gun rounds.
“Enemy aircraft generates smoke and disappeared in the cloud,” Yamamoto wrote. “Later, it was found having crashed in the mountains of Bougainville.”
Before filing Yamamoto’s report to his own superior, Ooki amended the last sentence. The American bomber, he wrote, was last seen struggling not to crash into the ocean.
THE JAPANESE AFTER-ACTION REPORT WAS nearly correct. With close to 500 miles of shark-infested waters still to cross before they reached New Guinea’s north coast, Jay knew that their ordeal was far from over. He was sitting on his parachute, and he eyed the open sky to his left. Under normal circumstances, a pilot and copilot deciding to “hit the silk” would make the three-foot drop behind their seats, crawl through the tunnel leading past the navigator’s table to the nose, pop off the front hatch of the chin turret, and leap. It struck Jay that in this situation none of that would be necessary—he would merely have to lunge sideways. But he never gave serious thought to activating the bail-out alarm, if it still worked. Under the circumstances, he thought, he probably could not have survived a jump even if he tried, and he was not yet ready to allow his crew to jump into the sea without their captain. Still, given Old 666’s shot-up condition, he calculated that there was a better than even chance they would have to ditch. He also estimated their chance of surviving an ocean crash landing at about 50 percent.
Unlike the B-26s with their elevated wings that he’d flown with the 22nd Bomb Group, a B-17 had wings that extended evenly from its fuselage, theoretically making it able to “surf” onto the water while ditching. And as its bomb bay doors were built flush to the fuselage’s belly, it tended to stay afloat longer than even the newer B-24 Liberators with their protruding bomb bays. This structural modification was credited with keeping three quarters of the B-17s that had glided into the sea from breaking apart—compared with about two thirds of most other American bombers. Jay felt a deep personal responsibility for each of the men who flew with him, and he simply wanted them to have the best chance possible to return alive from this mission. He knew that he had trained the crew well, and if it came to an ocean ditch, he could count on them to brace themselves correctly and to remember their postcrash duties precisely at the instant the plane stopped in the water. If they did that, they would all be likely to live through any ditch. That was the good news.
The bad news was that Pacific Ocean currents could carry a life raft dozens of miles a day in so many directions, depending on wind and tide, that grid searches by rescue aircraft could expand to cover thousands of miles. All Allied aircrews recognized that the larger the search grid, the less chance of spotting downed Airmen. Rescue teams might pull out every stop for a missing general like Ken Walker or a famous touring celebrity or politician. But for ordinary Airmen who ditched into the sea, the rule of thumb was that if no survivors were found within 24 hours, chances are none would ever be.
But all of Jay’s hypothetical calculations were pushed aside by one paramount thought: they had completed only half the mission. If they did not return with the photographs, the entire exercise, the blood expended, would have been for naught. Jay had heard stories of Airmen who’d been forced to ditch their damaged aircraft after successful bombing runs. Some who’d survived told tales of at least having had the satisfaction of watching their ordnance take out an enemy installation or ship before losing their plane. There would be no such solace for Jay or his crew if they went down now. Not with that vital film resting at the bottom of the sea.
Once more Jay envisioned the Marines and soldiers being torn apart before they even reached the Bougainville beaches. Or, at the very least, another American recon bomber crew being sent back up over the island to fly through the same hell that he had just survived. He looked down at Joe, lying still in the nose. He thought of the blinded Ruby Johnston, and Johnnie Able’s shot-up legs.
No, he would get this plane home. Only one question remained. How?
31
“HE’S ALL RIGHT”
EVEN WITHOUT HIS ALTIMETER JAY could sense that Old 666 was steadily losing altitude. It was “mushing”—the tail dragging below the nose—and the lower it descended, the more fuel it would eat up plowing through the thicker atmosphere. He could jockey the prop pitch and “lean” the air-to-fuel ratio only so much for fear of the engines either starving or running too hot. And even if the aircraft somehow managed to remain aloft for the next few hours, it would never be able to clear the Owen Stanleys and make Port Moresby. Given the amount of blood Jay was losing, he doubted he would live that long anyway.
Their only hope, he knew, was to try to reach the Allied airfield complex hacked out of the jungle at Dobodura, some 100 miles closer than Port Moresby on the north side of the mountain range. The main grass strip at Dobodura was just under 7,000 feet long. They would need every foot of it. Even at that, with no brakes or flaps Jay would have to ground-loop the landing on the slick surface and maybe even open the bomb bay doors in order to let the plane suck in air to slow down. It would be dicey, but it was their best chance of survival. Yet where the hell were they in relation to Dobodura?
Jay was contemplating this question when Willy Vaughan, his bleeding neck bandaged with a rag, lurched into the cockpit. Jay didn’t know that Vaughan had even been hit, but the radioman waved off the wound. He looked more surprised than hurt, and said that the rest in the back were fine, although machine-gun fire had holed the fin badly and Forrest Dillman’s turret remained stuck. Jay asked for a morphine syrette. Vaughan shook his head. They were all gone. Then he reported that the plane’s command radio and radio compass were shattered, knocked out by a cannon shell. The only set still working was an experimental Navy-issue liaison he’d picked up in Port Moresby and had been tinkering with ever since. Its voice mode was inoperative, but he could try to send Morse Code signals.
Jay nodded and told Vaughan of his plan to make for Dobodura. The radio operator hobbled back to his wrecked compartment. A moment later Dillman emerged from the belly bubble to the sight of Vaughan “working the key and dials with his left hand while holding a bloody patch on his neck with his right hand.”
Jay was still pointing Old 666 southwest when Vaughan reappeared in the cockpit 30 min
utes later. He handed Jay a scrap of paper. On it was written the heading “222 degrees M.” Two hundred twenty-two degrees magnetic north, as opposed to true north. (True north and magnetic north vary over time.) Vaughan’s Morse Code messages had been picked up by an American patrol vessel and Australian coastwatchers, who had shot azimuths to triangulate the transmissions in order to get a fix on the bomber’s position. This allowed Vaughan to plot a course to Dobodura. Jay swung the nose to 222 degrees magnetic north and stayed on it.
A moment later Johnnie Able limped into the cockpit and slid into the copilot’s seat. Jay managed a grunt and said, “Pretty tough time.” Able informed Jay that J. T. Britton and George Kendrick had broken out clean bandages to patch up Vaughan and Ruby Johnston, and asked how he could help. Most American Airmen arriving in-theater learned quickly that navigation by radio was of little use to pilots over the trackless Pacific, and dead reckoning was the most useful skill a pilot could rely on to bring his aircraft and crew home alive. Jay, his pain spiking, handed over his compass to the teenage flight engineer and showed him how to cut back the throttles to conserve gas. Then he gave him control of the aircraft.
Britton and Kendrick now squeezed into the flight deck and turned their medical attention to Jay. They cut away his pants legs and the sleeves of his boilersuit and applied tourniquets to his limbs. Jay never completely lost consciousness, but his vision was strained as he squinted in search of any sign of shoreline on the western horizon. He was falling deeper into that liminal state between wake and sleep, but he fought with all his willpower the desire to allow his eyes to remain closed.