by John Darnton
Mom had similar concerns. One was whether Barney had suffered before dying. Another was whether he had been disfigured. Almost all accounts of the attack went out of their way to reassure her on both points. General Harding, the officer who had given him permission to go, wrote to her ten days afterward: “I think you may take some comfort from the knowledge that there was no suffering and disfiguring mutilation. He died instantly, after being wounded in the back of the head.”
I found reason to question his assertion. Through the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort McNair, I obtained an after-action report of the attack, filed by the fleet commander, Lt. Col. Laurence McKenny. It presented an account seen from the vantage point of the ships. He described the unidentified bomber flying overhead and “not requesting identification of motor launches flying flags of the United States.” The first bomb was dropped and the ships’ machine gunners opened fire—whether before, simultaneously, or after is unclear—and the plane left and then returned to drop more. Among the list of those killed and injured, Byron Darnton was first. The notation said he “died in rowboat of head wounds.” So his death had not been instantaneous. When I first read this sentence, it felt like a blow to my gut. My reconstruction of his last moments was turned upside down. I wondered, Was he at all conscious? Did he understand what was happening? Did he have time to think of anything—of us?
I became obsessed with compiling a minute-by-minute account. I obtained a list of survivors from the 128th Infantry, mostly those who had attended 32nd Division reunions, and I tracked them down. I managed to find half a dozen soldiers still alive who had been on one of the two ships. Not surprisingly, their recollections had eroded over the decades. Their stories often didn’t tally as to the time of the attack or even the day—another lesson in how easily history slips away. But the bombing itself was seared into their memories—partly because it was their first time under fire and partly because many realized they were being targeted by an American plane. “You don’t forget something like that,” said Joseph Meicher of Madison, Wisconsin, who was eighteen when he joined the service in 1940. Seated in his wood-lined study, amid war memorabilia, he continued: “We knew it was our plane. We could see the star on it. We zigzagged, tried to get away. The bombs kept coming down. We had a bunch of barrels on board and every time a bomb went off, I ducked between the barrels. Later I found out they were filled with gasoline.” He laughed dismissively. “Imagine if one of those had gone off.”
“It was about eight o’clock in the morning,” recalled Earl R. Beecher, then ninety-one and, like Meicher, now deceased. “We were going to make a beachhead. We watched some planes go over—there were two or three of them—and then this sucker comes along and … I don’t know what got into him. He opened the bomb doors and the lieutenant on board got onto the machine gun—a fifty-caliber—and started firing. Then the plane dropped bombs. They were daisy cutters. They went off just above the water and cut down everything around them. The other boat got a chance to get out in open water. The lieutenant, who knew a lot about boats, wanted us to get out in open water so we could maneuver away from the bombs, but the major on board, who outranked him, thought we should try to make it to shore. He was wrong. That’s the army for you.”
Beecher was wounded in the head—he lost part of his nose and was blinded in one eye—and was hospitalized for five months. He had had debilitating headaches into old age. “The shrapnel showered the boat. It went everywhere. We could see that the plane was American. I don’t know why they couldn’t see our American flag. It was flying high. They were eager to get a Jap boat. From what we heard, if they hit a Jap boat, they’d get some rest and a case of scotch. If I could have caught that pilot, I would have killed him.” That was his feeling back then. And now? He paused, then grunted. “It’s water over the dam, so you just have to forget it.”
Ernest Gerber, eighty-five years old, and a retired career officer living in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, was on the Timoshenko and recalls the attack vividly. “We got to Pongani and anchored offshore in preparation to go in. We heard this plane. It went overhead; then it returned. Of course, everyone looked to see what it was. And we spotted a bomber. It was quite high. As it came closer, we could see the bomb-bay doors open. And a bomb dropped out—actually, two of them. We had officers with field glasses and they recognized the plane as American. They saw that star. When it started dropping bombs on us, our people manned fifty-caliber machine guns and opened fire. They dropped two more bombs. They never directly hit either boat that was there. But the shrapnel was what caused the damage. It injured a couple of people on our ship. We were told that people on the other ship were killed. After the plane took off, the natives came out in their outriggers and we paddled to shore, and we made the first beach landing of World War II.
“We were disgusted with the air force. I did hear from somebody in our regiment—he ended up in a hospital, either in Port Moresby or Australia, and happened to be in the same ward as a crew member of that plane that bombed us. The story that the crew member told our infantrymen was that they were told when they started out on their mission there were no American ships in the area and anything they saw they should bomb.”
I began a search for a “mission report” from the U.S. Army Air Forces. I figured I had accounts of the attack as seen from the ships and now I wanted an account from the air. A report from the aircraft commander might settle the question of who had fired first and clear up other discrepancies. Mostly, I wanted to learn the pilot’s identity. It seemed a significant piece of the puzzle. I remembered a vague story that the pilot had gone to see my mother to beg forgiveness—a story that clearly never happened, given that she said in her letter that she had never learned his name. But in the same letter she said that a Darnton family friend from Adrian, an infantry major named George C. Bond, who had lost a leg in battle, reported that during his hospital stay a man in the neighboring bed turned out to be the pilot and had suffered a collapse. Perhaps I had somehow conflated the two stories. Or in my childhood fantasies I persuaded myself that any man who had committed such a heinous act deserved to suffer a nervous breakdown, like the stricken aviator in the movie Twelve O’Clock High. Once again, history had erased its solid lines and left behind only tantalizing traces.
Finding the pilot’s name was no easy task. I enlisted the aid of a young researcher named Edward Rogers, who was compiling a history of the Fifth Air Force’s 3rd Bomb Group and contacted me after reading my notice in the Orphans Network newsletter. After several months, he had narrowed the search to the group’s 13th Squadron, but the squadron’s records for March through December 1942 had been lost in a plane crash the following January. Incidents of friendly fire were rarely if ever recorded—unless the plane was on the receiving end.
Finally, out of the blue, Rogers sent me a message: “Found It!” He had located the pilot’s name by checking the personal diary of another pilot, Harry Mangan. An entry for October 19 read: “… New Guinea goes well tho Dave Conley bombed our own landing party below Buna the other day—the simple dogs at Moresby didn’t warn him and on his reco he bombed a boat not knowing it was ours. I understand that there were casualties.” At last! The pilot was David M. Conley. The plane itself was named Baby Blitz, and I was able, with Edward’s help, to obtain a photo of it resting on a landing strip, the flight and ground crew posing in front of it.
I was also able to track down Conley’s last known address, a residence in Leisure World, a retirement community in Mesa, Arizona, and got a phone number. Before I even had a chance to think of what to say, I dialed, holding my breath while I waited for the connection. But the number was no longer in service. Later, to my dismay—but also, strangely, to my relief—I learned that Conley had died in May 2001.
I found out that he had a son named Wilder Conley. I called the management of Leisure World, in hopes of securing a forwarding address, but there was none. Internet search programs failed to turn up a contact. So I hired a private
detective. The detective came up with a cell-phone number for Wilder in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. I practiced my pitch—the delicate question of whether his father had ever expressed remorse for killing my father would require some tact. I reached him at work—he was a phone solicitor—and we made a date to talk the following day. We chatted for well over an hour. Wilder Conley was accommodating. He filled me in on his father’s thirty-year career with the air force and said he would send on numerous photos and clippings.
On the critical issue—the incident of friendly fire—he said his father had never mentioned it. In fact, he hadn’t talked much about his war experiences at all, at least not at home. He might have with other pilots.
In a week’s time, a carton arrived containing a scrapbook, photos of shirtless crew members posing before B-25s, and yellowed news clippings from Topeka, Kansas, Conley’s hometown. He was the son of a veteran of the Spanish-American War. One clipping dated back to the day he became a cadet; it showed him with ten other young men, standing in the front row and looking serious, his right hand raised to take the oath. I examined all the photos. Conley was a handsome devil, curly-haired, with strong cheekbones and classic midwestern looks. There were articles about his numerous awards (the Air Medal for twenty-five operational missions, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star, the Purple Heart, and oak-leaf clusters). There was his certificate of training from flight school, pay stubs, lists of equipment, V-mail letters home, and even flight records, including one for October 18, listing it as a reconnaissance mission.
Some items gave a sense of the man. An article in a U.S. Air Force museum magazine written six years ago by a fellow pilot, Hal Maull, described what Conley was like as a copilot. It said he “made one insufferable pun after another.” When the two spotted land returning from a mission, Maull would put the plane on autopilot and they’d play cribbage: “It may seem insane but it was one of the things that removed us from the insanity of war.” One time they were forced to make a crash landing on a reef and were stranded in the jungle for a month; short of food, they came upon a wild steer and drove it onto a beach, where Conley was supposed to shoot it. He couldn’t bring himself to do it—“it was a case of buck fever”—and Maull had to grab the rifle to dispatch the beast.
Conley was wounded in the Japanese attack on the Philippines on the first day of the war. He was rescued from a hidden American base during Gen. Ralph Royce’s daring long-distance raid in April—the very mission that my father wrote about when he and Carleton Kent hitched a ride to Charters Towers and interviewed the pilots, getting a scoop that was then delayed by MacArthur’s censors. I wondered if Barney had seen Conley there or even talked to him.
All in all, the items in the box presented a glamorous record of an aviator’s exploits. After the war, his life appeared much less exciting and even anticlimactic and a little sad. He was employed at an air force desk job, then for NORAD as an operations officer, and finally as an installation repairs manager for Sears Roebuck. In old age he had a series of transient strokes and was taken to his son’s house in Jacksonville Beach to die.
In all the clippings, documents, and snatches of conversations with his son, there was not one hint that anything untoward had happened on October 18, 1942. It seemed unlikely that Conley had suffered a nervous breakdown, and if the deaths he’d caused that morning upset him, he kept it bottled up. As I looked over the small box of official documents and personal remnants of his life, it was almost as if the attack over Pongani had never happened.
But at least one of his few surviving buddies recalled it. “The friendly fire incident—I remember it well,” said Vernon J. Main, a crew chief in the 13th Squadron, who also served as flight engineer on combat missions and had earlier evacuated Conley from the Philippines during Royce’s raid. Main flew off in a different direction from Conley that morning. “There were two missions that day and we split the force and went to different places. I think we went to Finschhafen and they went to Buna. That’s where it happened. We were staging out of Moresby and we found out when we came back. We felt terrible.” He pointed out there had been no procedure for identifying a friendly vessel. “We had no protocol for that.” Couldn’t Conley, spotting two unidentified vessels, have radioed his base to see if they were ours? I asked. “You wouldn’t have been able to transmit from Buna to Moresby because the mountains were in the way.”
The same point—the difficulty in knowing who was who—was made in the article written by Hal Maull. “At this early stage of the war there were no such things as aircraft and warship identification courses,” he wrote. “I doubt that we could have told the difference between a US or Japanese vessel unless we could have seen the flag on the stern.” The King John, however, had been flying a U.S. flag, and so had the Timoshenko. And there was a recognition procedure for a friendly plane coming in to Moresby—circling the shipwreck in the harbor counterclockwise at five hundred feet. Apparently, things were different above contested waters, where pilots were loath to take unnecessary risks. “There was no protocol or anything to check on the identity of a ship,” noted Harry Mangan, the pilot in the 13th Squadron who had kept the diary. In a phone interview he said, “It’d be too dangerous. You wouldn’t risk flying low or dipping a wing or anything like that. We didn’t go sticking our noses in someplace that was hot. We got in and got out as quickly as we could.” Though he had referred to the incident in his diary, Mangan said he no longer remembered it.
Recently, Vernon Main was a docent at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. He made a point of telling visitors how primitive flying was in those days. “We had some pretty crude instruments. We were using National Geographic maps of New Guinea and the Pacific Ocean dated 1930. They didn’t have any charts for that part of the world.” He said pilots often didn’t know who was below them, on ground or on sea. “The thing I remember coming out of the war,” he added, “was don’t ever, ever fly over a vessel in the water, because they’re going to shoot your ass down if they’re friendly or not. You always have to fly parallel to a ship.”
In the end, I was not able to locate the U.S. Army Air Forces report. A search of records at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base turned up nothing. Nor did a trip to the chaotic National Archives in College Park, Maryland. After a frustrating day acquiring entry credentials, fighting through crowds of researchers, applying for records that were distributed only at certain times—a bewildering process called “pulls”—I came away empty-handed. The volume covering the 3rd Bomb Group for that specific period was missing, the only blank space in a long stately row of thick bound books. So I never did succeed in finding an account of the bombing from the air. But I was able to find something even more valuable—a description from an eyewitness on land.
I was led to it by a retired Australian soldier living in Mooloolaba, Queensland, named Alan Hooper. As a young man, Hooper went to Papua with the Queensland militia shortly before the war. He transferred to the Papuan Infantry Battalion, which was made up of natives called “Fuzzy Wuzzies” because of their distinctive hair. When the Japanese invaded, he stayed on north of the Owen Stanley Mountains, leading patrols. He also wrote many letters home to his wife, and these, together with his diary and his reminiscences, made for an arresting book, Love, War and Letters. After reading it, I contacted Hooper. In the course of our correspondence he sent along a manuscript written by another Australian, Tom Grahamslaw, a leader of a military outfit called the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU). Grahamslaw was a legend. Operating in enemy-controlled territory, he gathered intelligence, provided native carriers (the “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels”) to transport wounded soldiers to safety, and was part of the network of heroic “spotters” who peered through binoculars and reported enemy movements by ham radio. The reminiscences of Grahamslaw, now dead, were partially published in a magazine, Pacific Islands Monthly, in 1971. The part that was not published included a thorough, presumably neutral descri
ption of what actually occurred.
On 18 October, shortly after I had returned from a patrol, some of my native police sighted two ships approaching from the direction of Tufi. They dropped anchor off Pongani, where they were in clear view of us.
The ships were crowded with troops wearing jungle green uniforms. When I left Port Moresby our troops were still wearing khaki, and as far as I knew, the Japs were the only ones garbed in jungle green. Furthermore, the headgear of the new arrivals looked much the same as that worn by Jap troops.
While we were somewhat uneasily speculating as to the identity of the new arrivals we sighted an American medium bomber, with its markings clearly visible, flying over the ships and obviously trying to identify them. The ships immediately opened fire on the aircraft, which responded by dropping several bombs, after which it made one strafing run and then departed.
All this made me believe the ships were Japanese, and I thereupon informed New Guinea Force by signal, after which I transferred the communication set to a more secluded place several miles inland. On resuming contact with H.Q. I learned that the ships were American.
Accompanied by Wilkinson and several police I made a beeline through the bush to Pongani, where we were accosted by an American patrol. These troops believed they were in enemy occupied territory and they regarded us with suspicion. However, I was able to establish our bona fides when I met their commanding officer, Colonel McKinney. He had been informed that an ANGAU reconnaissance party was somewhere in the area.