You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  Efate, code-named Truculence, was approximately twenty-five miles by sixteen miles and even more primitive than Samoa. The Foreign Policy Association, perhaps relying on a bit of hyperbole, informed Americans in a twenty-five-cent pamphlet at the time that the island and its neighbors in the New Hebrides group were “not far removed from the days when white traders came in for ebony and sandalwood and were glad to get away without being cooked and eaten by the ferocious natives.”

  What Efate did have was two excellent harbors. The previous year, vast compounds of military supplies, tank farms for fuel storage, and vital repair facilities were built almost overnight to support the Americans’ unfolding strategy in the South and Southwest Pacific. Here the squadron would wait—how long Major Overend didn’t quite know—for another Corsair unit to complete its combat tour so the Hell’s Angels could inherit its planes. The days went by, and they made the most of it, holding a three-day softball series between the officers and the enlisted men that ended in favor of the enlisted men, three games to two, on Thanksgiving Day, November 25. The holiday spirit proved to be too much for some in the unit, though: two corporals in the ground crew were confined to the brig for five days for being AWOL all Thanksgiving Day.

  During the downtime, Ryan, puffing on a tobacco pipe, went for long strolls down to the beach, passing some tents of the younger pilots, where he often stopped to give them a few words of encouragement. Some would complain to their senior officer about their living conditions, to which the perennially optimistic Captain McCown would lecture: “Do you know what it would cost to go to a beach resort like this?”

  Some of the pilots got word of an Englishman who ran a trading post on the island and had a warehouse filled with cheap brandy and gin from the Australian distillers Tolley, Scott & Tolley—at two dollars a bottle. Several of them commandeered a car and stocked up. They were building up quite a stash. They also still had the Teacher’s Highland Cream scotch whiskey they had purchased before their sea voyage back in San Diego.

  Ships docking in Efate also brought Australian beer. The Hell’s Angels soon devised a handy way of getting it cold without the benefit of an icebox: cans wrapped in towels were stuffed into one of the gun bays in one of the few available Corsair’s wings, flown up to twenty thousand feet, and delivered nice and frosty for the evening. One night they got an even rarer treat when a Navy vessel filled with nurses passed through and they got to dance to Glenn Miller records at a hastily scheduled dance at the makeshift Officers’ Club.

  After nearly a week of mostly sitting on their hands, the members of the squadron finally inherited what their official war diary described as “battle scarred, old, and worn out” Corsairs. The pilots were split into two wings. Each wing was to rotate days flying, ensuring pilots had one day off for every day they flew missions. Ryan didn’t have to wait long. On November 27 he had to sprint to his assigned fighter plane when the air raid sirens on Efate started blaring and the squadron scrambled into the air to avoid a feared Japanese air attack that never came. Two days later the squadron’s mechanical problems returned to haunt them. On the morning of November 29, Lieutenant Norman, who was almost killed when his Corsair flipped over coming into Atlanta at the beginning of September, crash-landed in the water after the engine started belching thick black smoke and the propeller stopped turning. Half a century later, the few tourist shops on the island, later known as Vanuatu, sold a postcard showing Norman’s Corsair, with coral growing around the wing, still sitting in the lagoon. If that wasn’t enough to rattle them, later that day two other pilots had a midair collision that resulted in a second plane being declared a total loss. They considered themselves exceedingly lucky that no one was seriously hurt.

  Over the next week, Ryan logged more hours in the cockpit with gunnery practice and a series of training exercises to further hone his fighter tactics. On other days, he flew cover missions over Efate or provided air protection for Navy battle groups operating in the area.

  Efate was in striking distance of the battle zone, which lay three hundred miles to the north in the Solomon Islands. A double chain of craggy, disease-ridden islands about nine hundred miles long and covered in coconut plantations, sweltering jungles, and mist-hung peaks, the Solomons lay to the east of New Guinea and spread south and eastward into the shipping lanes between the United States and Australia. The Japanese had moved into the area in early 1942 when their top naval officers concluded that a broad area would have to be occupied to secure the air and naval forces at Rabaul and on the main island of New Guinea. Encountering little resistance, Japanese forces developed a series of outlying bases in the Solomons to cover the approaches to the fortress at Rabaul.

  By the fall of 1943, just as Ryan and the Hell’s Angels arrived in the Pacific, the Allies’ noose was tightening. Relentless attacks from B-25s and other heavy bombers of the Army Air Forces were pummeling the Japanese airfields from bases on the south and east coast of New Guinea, while dive-bombers and attack planes operating off the decks of Navy aircraft carriers were steadily whittling away at Japan’s naval strength. By November, however, there were still nearly 100,000 Japanese troops at Rabaul. They blocked any Allied advance along the north coast of New Guinea toward the Philippines, a cornerstone of General MacArthur’s strategy. Thus, every move the Allies were making in the region was geared toward subduing the Japanese garrison at Rabaul. But before they could do that, they had to clear the way, which meant wresting from the Japanese control of the Solomons—beginning with the bloody fighting on the island of Guadalcanal, on the southern end of the Solomons.

  Another step, approved by the high command back in July 1943, was to capture territory farther up the Solomon chain suitable for air bases that would permit fighters and light bombers to reach Rabaul and return. Having fighters within range of Rabaul was considered especially critical because they could protect the large, lumbering bomber planes that were carrying tons of firepower but were highly vulnerable to Japanese fighters and the anti-aircraft artillery guns that ringed the heavily defended Japanese stronghold. Allied planners trained their attention on the island of Bougainville, which lay only a few hundred miles from Rabaul.

  Bougainville, code-named Frigidaire, was the largest of the Solomon Islands at 125 miles long and 48 miles wide. Two active volcanoes, ten-thousand-foot Mount Balbi and eight-thousand-foot Mount Bagana, blanketed the island in steam and smoke. On the northern and southern ends the Japanese were dug in at a series of air and naval bases; according to Allied intelligence estimates, there were nearly sixty thousand forces in all. An Allied foothold on Bougainville, it was agreed, would not only put more air forces in range to strike at Rabaul but also allow aircraft to avoid some of the Japanese strongholds elsewhere in the Solomon chain and the empire’s naval forces operating in surrounding waters. The need to seize territory on Bougainville suitable for airstrips was only reinforced when in August the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended bypassing Rabaul rather than attempting to seize it with a costly invasion. In fact, the necessity of subduing Rabaul was now greater than ever. As the famed war correspondent Robert Sherrod put it, “By-passing an island obviates the necessity of landing on it, but also imposes the responsibility for keeping it knocked out.” The Allies had to make sure that Rabaul was kept out of commission for the rest of the strategy to defeat Japan to succeed. Flying from air bases in Bougainville was how the Allies hoped to land the knockout punch.

  As the Hell’s Angels were heading for Samoa in late September, the plan was put in motion. The submarine USS Guardfish landed a small detachment of Marines about ten miles northwest of the fishhook-shaped Cape Torokina—code-named Azalea—on Bougainville’s southwestern coast. They waded through the heavy surf of Empress Augusta Bay to reconnoiter a coastal plain about seven square miles framed by forbidding swamps and isolated from the rest of the jungle island by a spine of volcanic mountains. After they took soil samples and found relatively few Japanese defenders, it was decided that Torokina would
be assaulted by Marines on November 1 and an airstrip hastily built to strike Rabaul.

  By December, Ryan found himself eating at the “training table,” enjoying rare chow like steak and hollandaise sauce. “To be fattened up,” he told Grace.

  He and his fellow pilots also began memorizing the geography of the Solomon Islands—especially “the Slot.”

  A strip of open water about 350 miles long and 70 miles wide, the Slot stretched from the island of Guadalcanal in the south to Bougainville in the north. In between lay the Russell Islands and the New Georgia group. The pilots knew their lives might depend on being able to recognize the thickly forested islands and atolls on either side of the Slot. Heavy concentrations of Japanese forces and air forces were spread throughout, and if a pilot had to make a forced landing on land or in the water, he wanted to make sure to avoid them.

  The especially inhospitable climate—and inhospitable natives—were two reasons the islands remained largely unoccupied by Europeans at the outbreak of World War II. In a theater of war that had no shortage of challenging climates and terrain, the Solomons stood out as hardship duty. The writer Jack London, who traveled there earlier in the century, remarked, “If I were king, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons.”

  On the fifth of the month Ryan got his first taste of the Solomons when he was ordered, along with a fellow captain and five lieutenants, to ferry the first of what would be several batches of Corsairs up to Guadalcanal.

  Code-named Cactus, Guadalcanal had been the scene of one of the bloodiest struggles of the war against the Japanese. Ryan knew from the newsreels and newspaper dispatches about the living hell the island had been for so many of his fellow Marines. Marines first waded ashore in August 1942 on both the main island and the smaller, adjacent Tulagi. The Japanese poured in thousands of crack troops from Rabaul and other bases in the northern Solomons to beat back the Allied advance. A series of sea battles for control of the surrounding waters ensued, and a stretch of open water about twenty miles wide between Guadalcanal and the small island of Florida earned the grim name Iron Bottom Sound. At the same time, Navy, Army, Marine, and New Zealand combat planes fought the Japanese to a standstill in the skies. But by the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1942, the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters had ordered its forces to evacuate the island.

  Now, with Guadalcanal firmly in Allied control and the Japanese forced farther back up the Solomons, Ryan was awestruck by the landscape he saw out of his cockpit, scenes of paradise reminiscent of the adventure tales and motion pictures that he so loved.

  “We saw an awful lot of water—and an awful lot of cloud formations,” he wrote to Grace. “The cloud formations in the southwest Pacific are many, very large, and very striking—if not beautiful.”

  He was particularly taken by the sunrises and sunsets on Guadalcanal, where he spent a few days before returning to the Hell’s Angels on Efate. But he couldn’t fully appreciate them. They were also a reminder of what else was waiting just beyond the horizon to the north and west.

  “The sunrise we saw on Guadalcanal always looked so much like the Japanese emblem that I didn’t like to look at it.”

  The ferry hops turned out to be almost the only time in the cockpit he and his fellow pilots got for most of December. Their hand-me-down Corsairs were soon grounded due to a continued lack of spare parts. First it was due to inadequate fuel supplies, then night flying was suspended because “the crash boat is not equipped with search lights,” and finally all flight operations were suspended on December 9 as they awaited a new shipment of fuel diaphragms. Early December also saw three more accidents. That was after one of their planes flipped over upon landing at Quoin Hill on Efate, another cartwheeled during a night landing, while a third was forced to ditch in the water. Thankfully, there were no major injuries.

  Ryan, still ebullient about the simple pleasures in life, was crowing about a care package that included a subscription to Newsweek magazine.

  “Back in the States, I never let a Friday afternoon go by that I didn’t buy a Time, Newsweek, Collier’s, Life, and Saturday Evening Post—to read them on Sunday,” he wrote to Grace in December. “Needless to say, all the stuff you sent comes in awful handy.”

  He also received a V-mail from his sister Claudia alerting him that the whole gang was planning to be home in Charleston for Christmas and expressing how she wished her big brother could be there. Ryan, too, longed to be with them—just like last Christmas—but he had more important things to do.

  “Great stuff,” he told Grace. “You ought to have a swell time. We ought to have a swell time here too. I’m afraid there won’t be too much ‘Peace on earth’ or ‘good will toward men,’ but there will definitely be no dearth of fireworks.”

  He closed the letter by thanking his mother for the ID bracelet she shipped to him: “I’m glad you sent it. I needed some sort of a ‘good luck charm’ with me, and this is just the thing. Thanks a lot.”

  On Christmas Eve, the Hell’s Angels’ gear, half of the pilots, and all the support personnel—and some of the booze—were loaded onto three DC-3s for the short trip to the combat zone and an island named Vella Lavella. The rest of the pilots, including Ryan, ferried their battered planes, along with more booze wrapped in towels and blankets and stuffed into the Corsairs’ middle gun bays. Their next island home, code-named Dogeared, lay less than a hundred miles from Bougainville. Hilly, thickly forested, and about twenty-six miles long, Vella Lavella had been evacuated by the small Japanese garrison when the Allies came ashore in the middle of August on the south side of the Barakoma River on the island’s southeast end.

  It was a choppy flight, and when Ryan and the others backed their aircraft into revetments, some of them were leaking. But it wasn’t hydraulic fluid, as the mechanics first suspected. It was broken bottles of brandy and gin—the Tolley, Scott & Tolley scooped up at the trading post on Efate. One of the senior officers went up and down the line and collected what was left, and it was mixed together in a concoction that was soon designated Jolly Tolley.

  Word quickly spread across the base that a new squadron had arrived with Christmas spirits. As the Hell’s Angels were settling into their tents, a commotion ensued as rowdy members of another squadron barreled into their camp, knocking over some of the tents. It was the legendary Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington and his rabble-rousing Black Sheep Squadron. The boisterous Boyington had apparently already tracked down his old friend Major Overend and broken into the Hell’s Angels’ stash of scotch whiskey that had arrived with their footlockers aboard the DC-3s. Soon both the Teacher’s Highland Cream they had saved from San Diego and the Jolly Tolley flowed liberally at the impromptu Christmas party on Vella Lavella. There were feats of arm wrestling, poker games, singing, and even a few drunken injuries that required some patching up by Doc Wolfe.

  The next day, Christmas, they enjoyed turkey dinner with all the fixings and even real butter. But the respite didn’t last long. While they were receiving an intelligence briefing beneath a thatch of palm trees, the air raid sirens started blaring, sending them scrambling into the nearest bunker. They also knew that on the twenty-seventh, after a few “familiarization hops” around the island, eight of Ryan’s fellow pilots in the squadron were scheduled to fly their first combat mission to Rabaul. One of them buckled under the pressure of it all, shaking like a leaf on Doc Wolfe’s cot, muttering that he couldn’t hack it. Major Overend soon agreed and instructed him to turn in his wings. The skipper put him in charge of packing the parachutes. There was no time to court-martial him. Perhaps Overend couldn’t blame him.

  A few hundred miles away, an Army Air Corps F-5 Lightning from the Seventeenth Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron was flying at thirty-five thousand feet over the northernmost tip of New Britain Island. Fitted with K-17 aerial cameras in the nose, the aircraft made several passes over the Japanese airdromes surrounding Rabaul. The specialized
cameras, manufactured by the Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, relied on a series of exchangeable Bausch & Lomb Metrogon lenses with focal lengths up to two feet long. The cameras’ shutters clicked automatically, capturing images of the airfields and surrounding ground installations that the Japanese had carved out of the jungle. They also snapped photographs of Simpson Harbor, dotted with Japanese warships and supply barges, and the surrounding waters leading into St. George’s Channel.

  Within a few hours, the film was developed, and photo interpreters determined that at the Vunakanau Airdrome, built on a plateau about a thousand feet above sea level and surrounded by coconut plantations about eleven miles south of Rabaul, the Japanese had cleared a series of trails snaking deep into the jungle where dozens of aircraft were parked in revetments to shield them from Allied bombing raids. The trained eye could make out numerous Japanese fighters and bombers nestled beneath the jungle canopy, some with the “meatballs” painted on the tips of their wings. Images of other Japanese airfields ringing Rabaul, with names like Tobera and Lakunai, showed runways pockmarked with craters from recent U.S. bombings but still in operation. Despite the relentless pounding by Allied aircraft for nearly two years, the Japanese installations ringing Rabaul still posed a powerful threat.

  The film was soon turned into charts, maps, and pilot navigation strips by a team of enlisted technicians working in a makeshift photo lab. They considered their work a sacred trust, as their commander had recently reminded them:

  Your maps will guide men, planes, and ships along their way forward.… The foot soldier will carry your maps along his march. He will unfold his map at night somewhere, maybe in a muddy ditch, and hold up a match to it. He will fold it up again and go forward along a jungle trail, which you located on photographs many months ago.… You topographers, whose fingers grow stiff and tired from drawing in precise and fine detail, must keep on. Look at the little strip maps you are making for pilots to carry with them on each mission. They need these to find their way to the enemy and back home.