Fortress Rabaul (23 page)

By that time the crew could see enemy fighters taking off. In addition, as navigator John Steinbinder later put it, bursts of antiaircraft fire were “breaking all about,” so DuBose prudently turned toward Port Moresby. The left outboard engine sputtered and quit a few minutes later, making the lone B-17 vulnerable to enemy fighters. The Japanese did not attack, however, and the return flight to Port Moresby was completed on three engines. Upon arrival the crew claimed the destruction of two aircraft parked at Vunakanau, but the Japanese recorded no corresponding losses.

THE FIRST MISSION by B-26s did not fare much better. The crews of the 19th Bombardment Squadron/22nd Bombardment Group, previously based at Langley Field, Virginia, had spent the better part of a year
overcoming several glitches with the new aircraft. Designed for speed, the Marauders boasted two of the most powerful aircraft engines currently available, the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 eighteen-cylinder radial. The bomber’s wings were thin and relatively short, prompting wisecrackers to nickname it the “Flying Prostitute.” (As the saying went, the engines appeared to have no visible means of support.)

But no one joked about the Marauder’s unusually high landing speed. The combination of its low-drag fuselage, small wing, and tricycle landing gear (the B-26 employed a nose wheel instead of a tail wheel) was unforgiving. The B-26 required careful handling, especially when operating on short runways. Takeoff speeds were high when fully loaded with fuel and ammunition, and there was an unnerving tendency for the propellers on early models to suddenly over-speed if the pilot was careless with pitch control settings. Several fatal crashes marred the group’s initial training, the low point coming just two days after the war began when the group’s commanding officer and his entire crew were killed in a takeoff mishap. As the number of fatal accidents increased, the B-26 began to acquire more unattractive names such as the “Widow Maker” and the “Flying Coffin.”

The Marauder men may have felt they had something to prove, but the challenges they faced could hardly have been greater. Like the crews of Major Carmichael’s squadron that flew early missions from New Guinea, the 22nd Bomb Group entered combat with no experience in the Southwest Pacific region and little understanding of its inherent dangers. In support, the RAAF contributed some of its most experienced people to the effort. Among them was Sqn. Ldr. Thomas McBride Price, who had led the first Catalina raid on Rabaul. For the first Marauder mission on April 6, he flew in the copilot’s seat of
Liberty Belle
, piloted by 1st Lt. Albert J. Moye.

Of the nine B-26s that staged up to Port Moresby, eight were considered operational for the mission and began taking off at 0300 into an inky black sky. Heavy rain squalls made it difficult to get the formation joined up; subsequently two Marauders returned to Port Moresby after failing to find a suitable pass through the mountains. The remaining six aircraft crossed the Solomon Sea and followed the southern coast of New Britain to St. George’s Channel, a circuitous route that took longer than expected. By the time they approached Simpson Harbor, nearly an hour had elapsed since DuBose’s solo attack.

The Japanese were ready: seven A5M fighters had scrambled from Lakunai airdrome, and the antiaircraft batteries were fully manned.

Approaching Rabaul from the east, the B-26s dropped nineteen bombs over Simpson Harbor, then reversed course and egressed over the same route. Their wide, sweeping turn exposed them to the ring of antiaircraft guns for much longer than if they had simply continued straight ahead, but, miraculously, the only damage was sustained by
Liberty Belle
. Shrapnel from a nearby burst pierced the fuselage, slightly wounding the radio operator.

Over St. George’s Channel a Marauder belatedly released another four bombs, bringing the total dropped to twenty-three. Only one hit was claimed, but with it, the Marauder crews were credited with sinking a transport. That the Japanese suffered no such loss on April 6 is hardly surprising.

Retreating back down St. George’s Channel, the Marauders had no trouble outdistancing the few A5Ms that gave chase. But not all of the B-26s escaped danger. Well away from Rabaul,
Liberty Belle’s
right engine suddenly quit, whereupon Moye and his crew realized they were quickly running out of fuel. Perhaps a fuel line had been nicked by shrapnel from the antiaircraft shell, or the crew might have mismanaged the fuel system; either way the Marauder was in real trouble.

Turning due south toward the Trobriand Islands, Moye set the trim for single-engine operation. This required additional power on the good engine, consuming what little remained of the fuel. Just north of Kiriwina Island the left engine quit. Unfortunately the Marauder’s operating manual contained scant information to procedurally guide the pilot through a dual engine failure, and Moye nearly lost control of the cross-trimmed bomber. Instinctively, he put the plane into a dive, maintaining enough airspeed to keep the wings level.

Too low for the crew to bail out, the Marauder ended its descent in a violent splashdown that broke the fuselage in two. Both sections sank in less than two minutes. The flight engineer, Staff Sgt. Samuel K. Bourne, never surfaced, but the rest of the crew swam clear of the sinking wreckage. Banged up from the ditching, they struggled to stay afloat with only one life raft between them.

At that moment, a Catalina of 11 Squadron was nearing the outbound limit of a long patrol from Tulagi. Pilot Officer Terence L. Duigan and his
crew happened to be near Woodlark Island when the radio operator picked up a Morse code signal regarding the downed B-26. Alerted to be on the lookout, the Aussies almost missed Moye and the other survivors, who had reached dry land with the aid of local natives. Luckily one of the Marauder crewmen had a Very pistol and fired three flares in quick succession. Noting their position, Duigan touched down in a nearby lagoon, taxied deftly between some coral reefs, and brought the Catalina in close. He was astonished to see one of his own commanders, Squadron Leader Price, being hauled aboard with the others. Little did any of them realize that Duigan had just pulled off the first air-sea rescue by an RAAF flying boat.

AFTER COMPLETING the raids against Rabaul and Gasmata on April 6, most of the American bombers refueled at Port Moresby before returning to their respective bases in Australia. One exception was Lieutenant DuBose and his B-17 crew, who experienced a delay as described by Steinbinder, the navigator. “After refueling we had to wait for the B-26s to clear the field,” he wrote in his diary. “While we were waiting, the Japs bombed Moresby.”

Sitting in the Plexiglas nose of his B-17, Steinbinder had a front-row seat as the first bomb from the retaliatory strike exploded five hundred feet away. He later noted that “
the other 69 bombs
hit the hills as we tried to get off the field,” but the B-17 didn’t quite make it out of harm’s way. While trying to taxi in the midst of all that excitement, DuBose dropped one of the main wheels into a bomb crater, and two whirling propellers were damaged when they struck the ground.

Fighters from 75 Squadron intercepted the raiders, but the Aussies had little success against the high-level bombers. Flying Officer Edmund J. Johnson, one of the replacement pilots, made a dead-stick landing in a swamp after his engine was disabled by just two bullets. Les Jackson attacked a pair of Zeros head-on, and his engine was likewise put out of commission, forcing him to crash-land on a coral reef. His Kittyhawk came to rest in just six feet of water, at which point Jackson climbed from the cockpit onto one of the wings. When some of his squadron mates appeared and circled overhead, he danced a little jig to signal that he was okay. Seeing this, John Jackson radioed to base that a “kite” was down, not recognizing his own brother on the Kittyhawk’s wing. “The pilot’s okay—jumping about,” he added. “Seems a happy sort of chap.”

Johnson and Jackson both escaped injury, but the interception cost 75 Squadron two more Kittyhawks. The good news that day came from the relative successes achieved by the bombers over Rabaul and Gasmata. Almost imperceptibly, there had been a shift in the balance of power. The Allies were still pathetically weak, but their ability to send more than a dozen bombers against the Japanese was perceived as a major improvement. And the momentum continued to build as two more B-26 squadrons became operational. Compared to the paucity of missions completed by the B-17s, the Marauders fairly burst into action, hitting Rabaul no less than nine times over the next seventeen days. Usually the results echoed the first effort—lofty claims for damage compared with little actual harm done to the enemy—but there were exceptions.

Just before noon on April 9, eight Marauders attacked Simpson Harbor and Vunakanau airdrome. Half, loaded with 500-pound general purpose bombs, attacked shipping from 4,500 feet, scoring a near miss on a docked merchantman and a possible hit on a copra warehouse. The other four Marauders conducted a low-level attack on Vunakanau, scattering dozens of 100-pound demolition bombs across the airdrome from a mere five hundred feet. In fact, the bombers were too low: all four received shrapnel damage from their own bombs. But their ordnance hit several parked bombers and started a large fire in a munitions warehouse. The returning aircrews were credited with destroying nine aircraft on the ground, a whopping exaggeration, but there’s no denying that the mission was a success. Rear Admiral Masao Kanazawa, commander of the 8th Base Force, described the raid as “severe.” He also noted details of the destruction in his diary: “At Vunakanau, 30 casualties from the 7th and 10th Establishment Squads, with one dead at the airfield under a torrent of exploding torpedoes. Conspicuous signs of defeat in the air war.”

Kanazawa’s profound words about defeat indicate that the Japanese were humiliated by the attack, as though they had not anticipated the Allies’ ability to land such a solid punch in broad daylight. In the Malaguna Road stockade, Lark Force POWs heard about the destruction at the airdrome, including rumors that corpses were stacked high in a hangar. “[T]wo
truckloads
of bodies were seen entering the town en route to the crematorium,” noted Capt. David Hutchinson-Smith of the 17th Antitank Battery. “I personally saw the trucks returning to Vunakanau with blood
smeared over side boards and wheels, and with shrapnel holes in canopy and body.”

The next Marauder raid, on April 11, was less successful. Eight bombers took off from Port Moresby at 0900, but one turned back because of mechanical trouble. The remaining aircraft were divided among three different targets. Four B-26s, all from the 33rd Bombardment Squadron, split into pairs to attack Vunakanau and Lakunai airdromes. The two that bombed Vunakanau released forty 100-pounders from the relatively safe altitude of 2,500 feet and observed no direct hits. The other two bombers dropped their ordnance on the runway and revetment area at Lakunai, reportedly starting a major fire, but the actual damage was minimal.

During the attack run over Lakunai, the Marauder piloted by 1st Lt. Louis W. Ford was rocked by three antiaircraft bursts. Shrapnel hit the right engine, punctured the fuel tank in the left wing, severed hydraulic lines, and ignited vapors in the auxiliary fuel tank mounted in the bomb bay. The latter quickly became a blowtorch, and Ford tugged on the tank’s release handle in the cockpit to drop the flaming container. It wouldn’t budge. The B-26 seemed destined to explode, but two crewmen climbed into the bomb bay and physically kicked the gas tank free. Although the immediate threat was gone, the bomb bay doors were stuck in the open position because the hydraulic lines had been cut. Faced with multiple in-flight emergencies, Ford safely reached the coast of New Guinea and belly-landed in a field of kunai grass near Tufi. The crew survived, but it took them forty-seven days to reach Port Moresby.

Meanwhile, the four Marauders from the 19th Bomb Squadron targeted shipping in Simpson Harbor. They dropped a dozen 500-pounders and hit nothing but seawater; nevertheless the crews were electrified by the sight of an “aircraft carrier” that had gone unnoticed until they started their bomb runs.
Kasuga Maru
, a converted liner, was moored near Lakunai airdrome while offloading a cargo of Zeros. The Marauders were jumped, in turn, by three Zeros that had been delivered by a different ship. Each side claimed one victory, but neither actually scored any hits.

Returning to Port Moresby, the Marauder crews reported the presence of the
Kasuga Maru
in Simpson Harbor, and an effort to sink it was organized immediately. Three Marauders, loaded with the few remaining 500-pounders at Port Moresby, took off at daybreak on April 12. Four others flew in from Australia during the early morning hours, refueled,
and then took off from Seven Mile at 0930 to find the carrier. The first group got through and attacked the carrier (mistakenly identified as
Kaga)
, dropping nine bombs. One hit was claimed along with four near misses, but the ship suffered no damage.

The second element of Marauders, minus one aircraft that had returned to base because of mechanical trouble, failed to find the carrier in Simpson Harbor. Risking heavy antiaircraft fire, the crews bombed random targets instead. Only later, while departing toward the east, did they stumble upon
Kasuga Maru
out in St. George’s Channel. By that time, however, all of their bombs had been dropped.

And so the record of underwhelming achievements continued. It seemed that no matter what the Allies tried, they could not attack Rabaul without something going haywire.

CHAPTER 14