by Bruce Gamble
By the time MacArthur finally reached Mindanao on the morning of March 13, Lieutenant Pease and his B-17 were gone. Brigadier General William F. Sharp, the senior army officer on the island, had considered the bomber too unsafe for the likes of MacArthur and sent Pease back to Australia. The trip was not entirely wasted—Pease departed on March 12 carrying sixteen airmen who had been stranded in the Philippines—but when MacArthur learned that only one rickety B-17 had flown to Del Monte and then left without him, he went ballistic. (Later, stories began to circulate that the youthful-looking Pease was still on the island when MacArthur arrived. Allegedly, the general took one look at the B-17 and refused to board such a “dangerously decrepit” aircraft. Other versions have MacArthur exclaiming, “My God, he’s only a boy,” upon seeing Pease for the first time. Neither story actually happened. Pease, considered one of the best pilots in the 19th Bomb Group, was long gone by the time MacArthur reached Mindanao; nevertheless several biographers and historians have erroneously placed the two men together.)
MacArthur did lose his temper. Outraged over the inept effort to pick him up, he sent blistering messages to Brett in Australia and Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff in Washington, D.C., demanding the “three best planes in the United States or Hawaii.”
One immediate result was that Vice Admiral Leary lost operational control of the B-17s brought over by Major Carmichael. Redesignated the 40th Reconnaissance Squadron, the unit was transferred into the 19th Bomb Group, which was being reformed at Townsville, on March 14. Two days later, four B-17Es from the newly redesignated squadron flew to Batchelor Field and picked up more supplies. From there, two bombers continued north to Mindanao for another rescue attempt. Piloted by Lt. Frank P. Bostrom and Capt. Bill Lewis, the two aircraft collected MacArthur’s party at Del Monte and returned to Batchelor Field by mid-morning on March 17. Richard Carmichael also got involved, flying MacArthur and his family farther south to Alice Springs. Most of the passengers were violently airsick, but somehow MacArthur’s wife Jean was singled out for refusing to fly any farther. As a result, MacArthur decided to complete the trip by rail. He would come to regret it. Only one train was available, pulled by a relic of a steam locomotive, and the journey to Melbourne across the blazing hot outback lasted three miserable days.
MacArthur’s arrival in Australia was accompanied by immediate changes in the command structure. First, the Australian War Cabinet approved a nomination from Prime Minister Curtin naming MacArthur “Supreme Commander of Allied Forces” in the region. Canberra agreed to include all Australian combat forces in the new command, called the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA). Subsequently, per Australia’s endorsement, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington agreed to give MacArthur command of the designated area, simultaneously naming Adm. Chester W. Nimitz “Supreme Commander of the Pacific Ocean Area” (POA). Nimitz’s area of responsibility, much larger in terms of square miles, consisted almost entirely of water except for a few strategic island groups. In contrast, the Southwest Pacific Area included Australia, New Guinea, Borneo, and the Philippines—roughly 90 percent of the Pacific’s aggregate landmass.
MacArthur accepted his new appointment on March 18 while still aboard the train. It was the reprieve of a lifetime. Instead of being sanctioned for the disaster in the Philippines, he had been handed the resources that would allow him to eventually drive the enemy out of his beloved islands. Eager to get started, he made a vainglorious pledge to a gathering of reporters: “I came through and I shall return.”
He had no idea his promise would take three years to fulfill.
A WEEK BEFORE MacArthur’s rescue from Australia, the aviation component of the American army was officially renamed the United States Army Air Forces. At first glance, the strength of the air units in Australia seemed impressive: forty B-17 Flying Fortresses, seven LB-30 Liberators (the export version of the B-24 heavy bomber), twenty-seven A-24 Dauntless dive-bombers, and more than five hundred fighters of various types. But the numbers were deceptive. Of the heavy bombers, perhaps a dozen or so B-17s in the newly reconstituted 19th Bomb Group were operational. The rest were long overdue for major repairs or overhaul. The A-24 light bombers, the army’s version of the highly successful Douglas SBD employed by the U.S. Navy, would prove inadequate as land-based bombers due to limitations in speed, range, and armament.
The fighter situation was hardly any better. Some 337 Curtiss P-40E Warhawks, 90 Bell P-39 Airacobras, and more than 100 Bell P-400s (the export model of the P-39) had reached Australia. However, 125 fighters had already been shot down or destroyed on the ground, another 175 were awaiting assembly or repairs, and 75 of the P-40s had been diverted to the RAAF. Consequently, only 92 P-40s, 33 P-39s, and 52 P-400s were in commission. More importantly, the American fighters were inferior to the Zeros that currently ruled the skies over the Southwest Pacific. All three models were powered by a liquid-cooled Allison inline engine, which performed well at low altitudes but turned anemic above sixteen thousand feet.
The worst reputation belonged to the P-400. Hundreds had been shipped to the Royal Air Force through the Lend-Lease program, but the British accepted only 80 planes. The Soviet Union gladly received most of what remained, but somehow 179 fighters ended up back in American hands. They were sent to the Southwest Pacific, where Army pilots joked that P-400 stood for “a P-40 with a Zero on its tail.”
And there was more bad news. MacArthur was shocked to learn that of the 25,000 American troops in Australia, most were assigned to air units. On February 25, the transports Ancon and Hugh L. Scott had docked at Brisbane with the ground echelons of the 3rd Bombardment Group (Light) and 22nd Bombardment Group (Medium) respectively. Two weeks later, the old liner Maui arrived at Brisbane and offloaded another 2,500 army personnel, all of whom belonged either to an air base company, a communications outfit, ordnance companies, or the 8th Pursuit Group. MacArthur had almost no infantry, no tanks, and no navy. Advised of the stark realities during his train ride to Melbourne, he is said to have exclaimed, “God have mercy on us!”
WHILE MACARTHUR’S FORCES in Australia were significantly weaker than the numbers indicated, the enemy’s control of the region was growing stronger by the day. During the first week of March, Vice Admiral Inoue initiated the simultaneous invasions of Lae and Salamaua, code-named “SR” Operation. POWs from Lark Force were among the dockside laborers who helped load the transport ships gathered in Simpson Harbor. On March 3, elements of Major General Horii’s South Seas Force boarded Yokohama Maru and China Maru while the Maizaru 2nd Special Naval Landing Force went aboard Kongo Maru, Tenyo Maru, and Kokai Maru. The Invasion Force, commanded by Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajioka, included eleven warships protected in turn by another six cruisers of the Distant Screening Unit, which sortied from Truk.
The Invasion Force departed Rabaul on March 5 and was detected two days later by an RAAF Hudson. By that time, however, the convoy was already within fifty-five miles of the New Guinea coast, leaving the Allies powerless to stop it. At dawn on March 8, Kajioka’s warships began shelling both Lae and Salamaua. No one ashore was hurt, and military damage was limited, but the local detachments of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles melted into the jungle without putting up a fight. Unopposed, the Japanese landing forces quickly established antiaircraft and ground defenses and set up a local administration. Engineers repaired the airstrips, which had been badly damaged by Nagumo’s carrier planes in January, and within thirty-six hours Lae was ready to receive fighters of the 4th Air Group from Rabaul.
Allied counterattacks came swiftly. At midday on March 8, five Hudsons from Horn Island randomly attacked the ships in the Huon Gulf. Squadron Leader Deryck Kingwell, newly appointed as the commanding officer of 32 Squadron, enthusiastically claimed a hit on a transport, but his bombs caused only minor damage to Yokohama Maru. A handful of B-17s, also staging out of Horn Island, bombed the airstrip at Salamaua from thirty thousand feet and demolished two hangars, then continued north to Lae and dr
opped the rest of their bombs in the harbor area.
Thus far, the initial occupation of New Guinea had cost the Japanese virtually nothing. That changed in dramatic fashion on the morning of March 10 when American carrier planes caught Kajioka’s fleet by surprise. Credit for the attack goes to Vice Admiral Brown, who sorely wanted another crack at Rabaul. In the days since his first attempt, Task Force 11 had been refueled and replenished off New Caledonia while Brown pressed his superiors for another opportunity. He requested two carrier groups and received Yorktown, supported by Task Force 17, under the command of Rear Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher.
Brown had planned to hit Rabaul on March 10, but when word came that Lae and Salamaua had been invaded, the scheduled strike was scrapped in favor of a surprise attack on the Japanese invasion force. Once again, Brown’s hopes of hitting Rabaul evaporated.
The new strike plan was hastily crafted while the combined carrier groups steamed across the Coral Sea. Because the Japanese heavily patrolled the sea lanes between New Britain and New Guinea, the probability of pulling off a surprise attack from that direction seemed unlikely. By steaming around New Guinea to Port Moresby, however, Brown’s carriers could deliver their planes to within 125 miles of the enemy fleet with little chance of detection.
The biggest challenge would be getting the heavily loaded planes over the Owen Stanley Mountains. Captain Ted Sherman, Lexington’s commanding officer, later wrote: “We had little information as to the height of the mountains, and it was doubtful that our sea-level torpedo planes could clear them. Our intelligence data was extremely meager. Our charts showed the coastline but no details of the interior. Furthermore, our chart of the Gulf of Papua was marked ‘Surveyed in 1894’ and ‘Area contains many coral heads which grow from year to year and whose position is unknown.’ It was not a very pleasant prospect for a navigator.”
The day prior to the attack, Sherman sent Lexington’s air group commander to Port Moresby and another pilot to Townsville to get “the dope” on the region. Their most important finding was the location of a pass through the Owen Stanleys at 7,500 feet, roughly in line with the attack route. For a few hours each morning the weather atop the pass was usually clear, but the rest of the day it was cloaked in clouds.
Early on the morning of March 10, Lexington and Yorktown began launching their planes for the first-ever joint attack by U.S. Navy carrier groups. The combined strike force, consisting of sixty-one SBD Dauntlesses, twenty-five TBD Devastators, and eighteen F4F Wildcats, crossed the beach in scattered formations and started the long climb over the mountains. By early afternoon, the American flyers were back aboard the carriers, jubilantly describing how they had caught the Japanese napping. They attacked the enemy ships with a vengeance, claiming two heavy cruisers, five transports, a light cruiser, and a destroyer sunk; a minelayer “probably sunk”; two destroyers and a gunboat “seriously damaged and possibly sunk”; and two additional vessels damaged. The successful raid was later hailed by President Roosevelt as “the best day’s work we’ve had.” Medals were doled out like candy, with no less than fifteen Navy Crosses and nine Distinguished Flying Crosses issued to various participants.
As might be expected, the damage actually incurred by the Japanese was significantly less than claimed. The transports got the worst of it, with three out of five sunk and another beached. No warships were lost, but the light cruiser Yubari limped back to Rabaul with nine dead and fifty wounded aboard, and later underwent a complete refit. A seaplane tender and two destroyers received direct hits, and a minelayer suffered hull damage from near misses. The cost in personnel, on the other hand, had been steep. Among the transports alone the death toll was almost 350 men, with many additional casualties aboard the damaged warships.
The Japanese did not suspend SR Operation—another contingent of the South Seas Force strengthened Japan’s foothold on New Guinea by capturing Finschhafen the next day—but the surprise attack by Lexington and Yorktown sent shock waves through the Imperial Navy. Inoue, stunned to discover that American carriers were in the area, henceforth insisted on carrier support whenever amphibious landings were made.
And in Japan, Admiral Yamamoto renewed his vow to lure the Pacific Fleet carriers into a decisive battle and crush them.
AT CLONCURRY, Major Carmichael scheduled the 40th Reconnaissance Squadron to hit Rabaul again. Their most recent attempt, on March 13, had been a dismal failure: only one bomber out of five participants had reached the target area. Carmichael decided to lead the next mission personally. To improve his chances for success, he brought in Master Sgt. Durwood Fesmire, widely considered the best bombardier in the 19th Bomb Group.
Following the usual profile, four B-17s flew up to Port Moresby on the afternoon of March 17 to prepare for the mission. They took off at dawn the next day to attack shipping in Simpson Harbor, but once again there were nagging problems. En route to the target at thirty thousand feet, Lt. “Dubby” DuBose and his crew struggled with a recalcitrant bomber. Both starboard engines ran poorly, and when the gunners tested their weapons they found only the twin-fifties in the tail were operational. All of the others had gummed up, their firing mechanisms frozen in the rarified air. Rather than turn back, DuBose elected to continue to the target, convinced that Japanese fighters could not climb high enough to bother them.
The B-17s reached Simpson Harbor and released their bombs, but soon thereafter DuBose and his crew encountered more trouble than they’d anticipated. The navigator, Lieutenant Steinbinder, later described their adventurous return flight.
Just as we closed the bomb bay doors the ship began to shake like a leaf in a cyclone & the #4 engine broke into flames, showering the fuselage with molten aluminum. We shut off the engine and tried to feather the prop but couldn’t. Finally we gave up. The three other ships left us. We flew on three engines for five minutes, losing altitude slowly but surely. Suddenly out of the clear blue sky 4 Zero fighters attacked us, two of them from below and 2 from the sides. They made their initial passes without getting any fire from us, as we had only 2 guns working. Suddenly one came under us strafing our belly and came up in full view of the rear gunner. He put in a burst & saw the ship smoking & falling away. The others each made a few more passes but at a respectful distance, all their shells falling short. Can’t understand why they didn’t use their nose cannon [sic]. This fighting took up thirty-five minutes and they left us. We were down to 22,000 ft. and losing altitude faster than before. We tried feathering the #4 engine again. Without any rhyme or reason the darn thing started up again and shook the plane so badly that we all expected the wing to be torn off. We all donned parachutes and life vests as we were out to sea and prepared to jump. However, by cutting the throttle the engine merely kept the prop turning, which suited us very well. Pistons and pieces of aluminum, however, kept flying about. One large piece flew into the upper turret blister. Had our crew chief been in the upper turret it would surely have brained him. He, however, was lying down with a raging fever.
DuBose turned eastward to give Gasmata a wide berth and then pointed the B-17 south until they reached the tip of New Guinea. By the time he finally headed west toward Port Moresby, the detour had sapped precious fuel. Steinbinder calculated they would run out of gas thirty minutes short of home base. Updating their position, ground speed, and fuel status every ten minutes, he discovered that their fuel economy had begun to improve slightly.
Somewhere off the coast of New Guinea, the propeller on the tortured outboard engine fell off and twirled downward into the sea. A few minutes later the crew radioed Port Moresby to report that they were inbound, only to receive a warning not to land: an enemy air raid was in progress. Lacking the fuel to loiter, DuBose ignored the warning. “We couldn’t wait,” Steinbinder wrote, “so we flew in anyway.”
Fortunately, the Japanese attackers departed only moments before the damaged B-17 arrived at Seven Mile airdrome. DuBose landed safely, cleared the runway, and was starting to taxi on two engines when the bom
ber ran out of gas. Grounded until repairs could be made, DuBose and his crew remained at Port Moresby while Carmichael led the other three B-17s back to Townsville.
Upon reaching Australia, Carmichael and Sergeant Fesmire disagreed on the results of the attack. The other bombardiers had been briefed to toggle their bomb loads on the leader’s cue, but Fesmire thought they had dropped prematurely. He waited until he had a cruiser in his sights yet was humble enough to admit that his bombs merely exploded close to the warship, causing no damage. Carmichael, however, claimed the cruiser had been sunk, and confronted Fesmire about not dropping with the others. The sergeant replied that those bombs had only killed “a few fish,” but Carmichael continued to insist that they had sunk the cruiser. A squabble ensued. Out of pride Fesmire held his ground for a while, but he was too heavily outranked to sustain the argument. Finally he blurted, “All right! They sunk the damn cruiser!”
Credit for the warship was officially awarded to Carmichael’s crew, but Fesmire was correct: the Japanese suffered no such loss on March 18. In fact, no Japanese vessels were even damaged, for the essential reason that high-altitude bombing almost never succeeded against shipping. Over Rabaul, many a bombardier was fooled by the Davapia Rocks, known to locals as the “Beehives,” which jutted from the middle of Simpson Harbor. From five miles up they looked just like a vessel, especially when the wind and tides created the illusion of a wake.
BACK AT PORT MORESBY, Lieutenant DuBose decided he was unwilling to leave his valuable B-17 at the mercy of the next Japanese air raid. The crew removed everything they could unbolt to lighten the bomber, after which DuBose climbed aboard and risked taking off using the three good engines. He and a minimal flight crew got airborne and took the B-17 to Townsville, leaving Lieutenant Steinbinder in charge of six crewmen and three thousand pounds of U.S. Army equipment. They would have to stay at Port Moresby and wait for a ride back to Australia.