by Bryan Bender
The day after Christmas, Ryan flew a cover mission for a Navy task force steaming past Vella Lavella, another “chore” hop that consisted of flying from dawn to dusk, “getting the rear part of your anatomy well acquainted with a hard parachute during the four hour stretches.” It was an uneventful foray, as Ryan dutifully recorded in his flight log, with no sign of enemy planes.
Ryan awoke in his tent in the predawn darkness of January 3 and crawled out of his mosquito net. There was no time for a shower or a shave. Sitting on the edge of his cot, he groggily pulled on his flight suit and shook his boots out on the sand floor, in case any poisonous centipedes had crawled in overnight. He grabbed his gear and slogged through the towering banyan trees to a larger tent that served as the chow hall, where he joined dozens of other newly arrived fighter pilots at the hastily built base at Torokina on Bougainville Island. After a typical breakfast of a few cups of coffee, a slice of bread, and a can of beans, they climbed into the back of olive-colored trucks, called carryalls, for the bumpy ride along freshly bulldozed jungle paths to the nearby airstrip.
When Ryan and the Hell’s Angels were moved to Torokina, on New Year’s Day aboard a DC-3 transport plane, they learned firsthand the precarious nature of the Allies’ strategy in the South Pacific. Cape Torokina, situated on the southwestern tip of Bougainville, was seized after the Third Marine Division waded ashore on November 1 under unrelenting fire from Japan’s Twenty-Third Infantry Regiment and Sixth Artillery, which had been in position for more than a year and had constructed an intricate network of bunkers and pillboxes. Bougainville, covered in swamps, thick jungles, and volcanoes and swarming with as many as sixty thousand Japanese troops, held little attraction for the Allies. The Americans had come for only one reason: to take control of a seven-mile-wide, pie-shaped slice of jungle poking into Empress Augusta Bay, where they could quickly construct a fighter and bomber strip to launch attacks against Rabaul. The invasion plan for Cape Torokina called for leaving the rest of the disease-ridden island to the Japanese and relying on air attacks to keep the enemy forces brooding just on the other side of Mount Bagana occupied.
When Ryan arrived, Japanese bombs were still striking Torokina almost daily, and artillery barrages were a constant threat. The Hell’s Angels had spent their first night curled up in foxholes between their tents after an approaching “Washing Machine Charlie”—a Japanese floatplane with clanking engines—set off the air raid siren before tossing para-frags—bomblets with a small parachute—out over the beachhead. At least one member of the squadron had already been injured by shrapnel from a Japanese artillery round that screamed toward their positions from the nearby jungle. The pipeline the Americans constructed to supply fuel to the airfield was severed no fewer than eighteen times.
The living conditions were also among the most meager yet. The Marines, sailors, and soldiers, living four to a tent or in foxholes drenched in tropical rain, had to contend with cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, and malaria. The makeshift hospital ward was “rather like an excavated basement before the foundation is built,” and the operating room was a “rectangular hole in the ground covered by a tent.” The chow, too, was a constant source of complaint. There were virtually no fresh vegetables, meat, eggs, or milk, and bread was scarce. Rations usually consisted of oatmeal and powdered eggs for breakfast, and the menu for other meals wasn’t any more appealing: sausage loaf, better known as “sliced horse cock,” and creamed dried beef on toast, or “shit on a shingle.” The New Zealand mutton that was flown in was universally hated, so Spam and Vienna sausages became staples.
They tried to make the most of the primitive setting. While fatigues were the most common uniform, they were permitted to wear whatever they wanted to contend with the sweltering heat. Some got into the habit of walking stark naked along the busy paths of the base to bathe in a stream, sometimes catching a lift on the running board of a truck. There was virtually no chance of running into a woman. In fact, the only white woman they knew on Torokina was a nude woman tattooed to the chest of Private Albert Harron of Toledo, Ohio, who had been a taxicab driver before the war. A few special touches helped to make the place look and feel a little civilized. Wooden signs were posted on the muddy tracks that served as roads—“15 mph for Trucks,” “20 mph for Jeeps,” and “No Parking.” Tacked to the buildings that housed the Thirty-Seventh Army Division were gag signs like “Bougainville Grill,” “Empress Augusta Tea Room,” and the “Torokina Trocadero.”
Now, one by one, Ryan and his fellow pilots filed into their command post, a large, rectangular bunker bracketed by coconut logs that had been gouged into the beach on the southeast side of the airstrip. In the distance, through the early morning mist, they could just make out the rows of makeshift white crosses marking the final resting places of scores of Marines and soldiers who had died seizing the beachhead from the Japanese weeks earlier. Some were the freshly dug graves of those killed in one of the almost daily ambushes by Japanese troops along the American perimeter just three miles inland.
Nearly ninety officers huddled in the gloom for the preflight briefing. The day’s mission would be a “fighter sweep” over the Japanese-held redoubt at Rabaul, a little over two hundred miles away. The objective was to “destroy enemy aircraft by aggressive offensive action.” It was Ryan’s first combat mission, and he was assigned as the flight leader.
Ryan had few illusions about the dangers awaiting him across the Solomon Sea. He was raw with grief and disbelief that Zombie Blount had failed to return from a mission the day before. Zombie was the feisty former boxing champ from the University of Mississippi whom he had become fast friends with back in the States when they both joined the new squadron. Zombie now marked the squadron’s first combat loss. He was last seen spiraling downward from about twelve thousand feet over Simpson Harbor after twelve Hell’s Angels were attacked by at least thirty Japanese Zeros that emerged out of the north from the nearby island of New Ireland. Zombie’s cot had been swiftly removed from his tent upon orders from the skipper, Major Overend, that same afternoon. He thought it better for morale not to have an empty rack staring at his pilots through the night when they were headed to the same place in hours themselves.
Today would be Ryan’s turn. He would be going up against the fortress that terrified a million Allied fighting men. Thousands of enemy troops were concealed in a maze of tunnels that had been dynamited into the rocky cliffs. Some of Japan’s most experienced fighter pilots, including members of the 204th Fighter Group, awaited them on five nearby airfields. The entire area bristled with anti-aircraft guns, the so-called ack-acks, high-caliber explosives that lit up the sky with their tracers, flying up in sheets so heavy, some pilots reported, you could step out of your cockpit and walk on them.
Ryan and his fellow pilots would also have to cross more than two hundred miles of the Solomon Sea and complete the nerve-racking journey back to base—all in the single-engine Corsair, with its now almost legendary mechanical problems. Even a minor malfunction and they could find themselves clinging to their life vests—their trusty Mae Wests—and floating in their inflatable rubber raft. Landing back on their airstrip, meanwhile, was dicier than usual. On one side of Pima One, as the new fighter strip was called, was a swamp and on the other a tangled web of thick palm trees. On the approach for landing, the trees had been cut down, but the stumps were sticking up. At least one Corsair had already struck them and burst into flames.
In the dim light of the command post, a few colonels stepped in front of a series of maps to brief the pilots on their mission. The “fighter sweep” was a tactic first employed by the Americans a few months earlier. Instead of escorting large bomber planes to protect them from being shot down by Japanese fighters during their raids—one of the primary missions of fighter planes—the pilots would force their Japanese counterparts into the air and “mix it up.” It was little more than picking a fight in the skies, designed to inflict as many losses of Japanese aircraft as possible. Today, w
ith Ryan in the lead, the mission called for forty-eight Marine Corps Corsairs from several squadrons.
Many of the pilots, standing shoulder to shoulder in the bunker, had a hard time hearing. Others strained to get a good look at the maps at the front of the room. They were told that two Catalina flying boats were on alert off Torokina to fish out any pilots downed at sea, and they were instructed to radio “Dane Base” if they got into trouble. One of the so-called Dumbos, so named for the seaplane’s floppy-looking wings, would come looking for them and, if they were lucky enough, pull them in through the gun ports. If they went down or bailed out close enough to Torokina, they might also have a chance of being picked up by one of the Navy patrol boats that were tied up on small Piruata Island in Empress Augusta Bay just off the airstrip. They were to avoid, at all costs, coming down on Japanese-held New Britain, where their chances of being rescued were exceedingly slim. They would be on their own, their only hope of survival to find some friendly natives and hide out in the jungle, or locate a river or stream and follow it to the coast. They would have a better chance if they could reach New Ireland across the channel. If they could evade the Japanese there, they were told to find a village near the Weilan River where a friendly native named Boski would help them. But they should be extra careful to look out for cannibals. New Ireland was still notorious for them. A water landing was by far their best option, because they could deploy their lifeboat, shoot their signal flares, and possibly be spotted by the rescue plane, which would have at least several fighter escorts. A successful rescue, however, would depend on how accurate their fellow pilots were in reporting their last position. Time would also be of the essence, as the currents and unpredictable weather could quickly carry them off. If the Dumbos couldn’t find them, the Japanese might. By now all the pilots had memorized the little ditty penned by a fellow Corsair pilot, titled “In a Rowboat at Rabaul”:
If the engine conks out now,
We’ll come down from forty thou’
And we’ll end up in a rowboat at Rabaul,
In a rowboat at Rabaul.
We’ll be throwing in the towel,
’Cause they’ll never send a Dumbo ’way out here.
We’ll be prisoners of war
And we’ll stay through forty-four
Getting drunk on sake and New Britain Beer.
But they all knew better. Being captured at Rabaul almost certainly meant torture and death. Japanese soldiers were known to take target practice with their bayonets on captured pilots’ chests before beheading them. If the Americans were taken to a prisoner-of-war camp, they would likely die in captivity. Some pilots, relying on humor and tall tales to help cope with the jitters, joked that if you got hit or were experiencing engine trouble over Rabaul, you might as well land on one of the Japanese airfields and sprint right to the commander’s tent—just to get it all over with.
Just as the mission briefing was about to wrap up, another officer stepped in front of the group of pilots. He was “chubby” and “yellow-skinned,” apparently suffering from the tropical skin disease that had become known as the crud. The image did not instill confidence. But the dour mood quickly brightened after a few whispers and murmurs passed through the packed bunker. The man standing before them was Pappy Boyington, perhaps the most famous Marine fighter pilot of the war.
Boyington now had twenty-five Japanese planes to his credit, four of them over Rabaul in the previous week alone. He was just four days away from being shipped back to the States. He and his famed Black Sheep deserved the rest: they had lost six pilots in the last ten days. Pappy had recently been asked by one of the greener pilots what strategy he recommended for going toe-to-toe with Japanese fighter pilots over Rabaul. He replied that “there is no such thing as strategy in fighting up there. Gambler’s guts would be better to describe what a fighter pilot needs. It’s like street fighting. If you hit the other guy first, and hit him hard, you’ll probably strike the last blow. That he’ll hit you back harder than you hit him is the chance you have to take.”
Boyington had pioneered the fighter sweep, and his willingness to egg on the Japanese to come up and fight was already legendary. One such tale was well known among the ranks of Marine fliers at Torokina. It turned out that one of the radio operators at Rabaul, Chikaki Honda, had grown up in Hawaii, where he was known as Edward and played baseball at McKinley High School before attending college in his parents’ homeland of Japan. After Pearl Harbor, Honda forfeited his American citizenship, joined the Imperial Japanese Navy, and by the summer of 1943 was stationed in Rabaul. On a fighter sweep three weeks earlier, Boyington eyed between thirty and forty Japanese fighters lined up on the reddish-brown dirt airstrip at the Lakunai Airdrome, on the north shore of Simpson Harbor.
“Come on up and fight,” Pappy shouted over the radio.
“Come on down, sucker,” Honda responded.
So Boyington did, dropping to ten thousand feet and spraying the airfield with nine hundred rounds.
Now Ryan and the other pilots crowded into the bunker were told that Boyington would also be going on the mission with them. His presence stiffened their spines. After Boyington delivered a pep talk, the pilots were given their altitude assignments and mission folders containing smaller maps for their journey. The group then broke up, and the pilots scampered out into the dawn to their planes, which had been pulled out of their revetments and lined up, nose to tail, on the perforated steel plates known as Marsden Matting that served as the runway, which was now streaked with mud and still wet from the previous night’s rain.
At the front of the snaking line of Corsairs were Ryan and eight other pilots from the Hell’s Angels, followed by aircraft from three other squadrons, including Boyington’s Black Sheep. As gas trucks topped off their tanks, in the distance they heard the faint volleys of gunfire being exchanged between the Army’s Thirty-Seventh Division and the Japanese troops just outside the Torokina base perimeter. At 6:50 a.m. sharp, Ryan was given the signal and pushed the throttle forward. One by one the line of planes roared down the runway, from east to west, and into the air. The expanding swarm climbed in a wide arc over Empress Augusta Bay, bearing a heading that took them up the coast of Bougainville to the northwest. Below them, shielded by the thick jungle, Japanese coast watchers were likely already radioing to Rabaul that they were coming.
At five thousand feet, the Hell’s Angels rendezvoused with Boyington’s squadron and the rest of the fighter sweep. By 7:10 a.m., all forty-eight planes were on course for the 214-mile journey to Rabaul. When they reached about ten thousand feet, they engaged the “Low Blower,” the supercharger that pushed more oxygen into the engine, and then continued to climb through several layers of thick clouds. At about eighteen thousand feet they turned on the “High Blower,” the supercharger that fed the maximum amount of air into the engine’s eighteen cylinders. To their right they passed the island of Buka, located across a narrow strait directly northwest of Bougainville where the Japanese had several airstrips. They soon left the Solomon chain behind them and were plotting their course due west across the Solomon Sea. Below them was a mixture of shallow water dotted with large coral reefs, and some of the deepest waters on earth, including the yawning New Britain Trench, which reached depths of more than thirty thousand feet. A number of the pilots pulled out of the formation temporarily to fire their six .50-caliber Browning machine guns, a precaution that some found reassuring, the chug-chug-chug of the quick bursts and the curving tracers giving them a little extra confidence. Soon the entire formation cruised between twenty thousand feet and thirty thousand feet under a bright sun and blue skies with nearly unlimited visibility. Ryan and his squadron mates flew in a tight group at about twenty-four thousand feet, the hum of engines and the whir of the propellers carrying them south of Cape St. George, on the lower tip of New Ireland, up St. George’s Channel, over New Britain’s Cape Gazelle, a headland smothered by jungle, toward Rabaul.
At 8:15 a.m., they arrived over S
impson Harbor, and almost immediately the sky lit up with ack-acks, the deafening chuk chuk of the aerial cannons reverberating across the sky and bursting a few thousand feet below them in an orderly pattern. Down below, at the Lakunai Airdrome, they saw the dust being kicked up from enemy aircraft taking off from the airfield. The American formation circled Simpson Harbor, waiting for the Japanese planes to come up to meet them. As they were coming around for a second loop over the harbor, eight Kawasaki Ki-61 fighter jets, designated by the Allies as “Tonys,” headed straight for them with their brown markings and orange “meatballs” emblazoned on their fuselages.
The American and Japanese fighters scattered across the sky in swirling dogfights, their hurtling planes diving and climbing in mortal combat. At about twelve thousand feet, Lieutenant Richard “Cosmo” Marsh, who had joined the Hell’s Angels as a replacement pilot in San Diego, hit one of the Tonys in the right wing with his .50-caliber guns. Trailing smoke, the plane careened down to the right and out of sight. Lieutenant J. M. Lambdin was flying at seventeen thousand feet when he attacked a lone Zero that had come up to challenge them, striking it in the forward section and causing it to nose over and plunge toward the earth in a trail of thick smoke.
The fracas quickly subsided as the Japanese planes scampered away and the Hell’s Angels began heading back to base. Then, about twenty miles down St. George’s Channel, Lieutenant Marsh was again jumped by a Tony on his tail. He turned, got into position, and fired a short burst directly into the fuselage behind the cockpit, sending the Japanese plane spiraling down toward the water.