The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (66 page)

In Rabaul, fires were visible and smoke rose into the air; planes were diving and zooming in all directions amid the black bursts of the antiaircraft flak and against the backdrop of tropical greenery, coconut palms, and the red, orange, and white explosions from the bombs. Somewhere among all this were tens of thousands of people, Japanese soldiers and sailors and civilians, yet nary a one could be seen.

Above it all Lindbergh’s Corsairs continued to circle. Another bogey was reported, which also turned out to be friendly. A plane came out of the melee burning badly, Lindbergh said, leaving behind it a long trail of white smoke, “like sky writing.” The radio continued to direct the rescue of the downed pilot in the raft. As suddenly as it began, the strike was over and the planes began reforming over the water, out of range, before going their various ways. Now it was Lindbergh’s turn.

His objective was a low oblong building near the beach from which gunfire had been reported on an earlier raid. He set the controls to dive and followed the flight leader in at about 2,000 feet, lining the building in his sights. But the flight leader’s plane was in the way, too close to shoot. Lindbergh waited, still diving as the ground rushed up at him, then it was clear and he pressed the trigger as the streams of tracers tore up the roof and wall.

He leveled out twenty feet above the treetops, hoping the building did not contain women and children. At 400 miles per hour he was going too fast to shoot at much this close to the ground. He turned out over the water and rendezvoused with the other planes above nearby Duke of York Island, where there was an enemy-held airstrip and huts said to be occupied by Japanese. Orders were to “strafe everything in sight.”

Lindbergh was blasting away at these huts when a much larger building came into his sights. He was about to press the trigger when a tall structure atop the building revealed itself to be a steeple. It was a church. He zoomed past. He’d been told to shoot at churches anyway because the enemy used them for their troops. “However, I will leave churches for someone else to shoot at,” Lindbergh said.

He joined up with the other planes and they returned to their airstrip at Green Island, keeping a sharp lookout for a yellow life raft from a plane reported missing in the St. George’s Channel. Lindbergh saw no antiaircraft fire himself, but one of the other pilots reported that Japanese flak had burst behind his plane.

On the path back to his hut he ran into the commanding officer of the marine air group who was upset that Lindbergh had gone on the patrol. “You are on civilian status,” the C.O. told him. “If you’d had to land and the Japs caught you, they would have shot you.”

Lindbergh replied that, according to reports he’d read, they shot you anyway, no matter what your status.

The C.O. wanted to know if Lindbergh had fired his guns. When the answer was affirmative, he became even more upset, saying, “You have a right to observe combat as a technician, but not to fire guns.”

One of the other pilots allowed that it would certainly be all right for Lindbergh to “engage in target practice” to see if the guns worked properly.

Others chimed in as well, agreeing that target practice was very much allowable. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“The tenseness began to ease up,” Lindbergh said. “Let’s wait a day or so and see if anybody kicks up a fuss,” someone suggested. That was how they left it. “The more I see of the Marines the more I like them,” said former army colonel Charles Lindbergh.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
L
INDBERGH
visited a native village. The condition of the natives was sad, he found. Traditionally, the inhabitants of these islands had been cannibals but they had not practiced for many years, since the arrival of Christian missionaries. “Their wild, barbaric freedom has been taken away from them and replaced with a form of civilized slavery which leaves neither them nor us better off,” Lindbergh observed. “The white man has brought them a religion they do not understand, diseases they are unable to combat, standards of life which leave them poverty stricken, a war which has devastated their homes and taken their families away.”

Later that day he went on a strafing and reconnaissance run. It was a two-plane afternoon harassing flight over the coast of Japanese-held New Ireland to locate antiaircraft guns and attack targets of opportunity. Everything and everyone on the island was “enemy” and subject to being shot at, they were told.

At one point Lindbergh, flying low along the beach, got a man in his gun sights. He was standing in the water, and for a moment Lindbergh considered pulling the trigger, but he resisted the impulse and was glad he did. The man (“probably an enemy”) apparently saw him coming but did not run. Instead he merely strode out of the water and across the beach. “I should never quite have forgiven myself if I had shot him,” Lindbergh told his journal. “Naked, courageous, defenseless, and yet so unmistakably man.” Charles returned before sundown and spent the evening ruminating in his journal on war and life and death.

Next day, May 25, after a conference with commanders about operating problems with the Corsairs, Lindbergh moved on up the island chain to Emirau, a tiny speck on the ocean north of New Ireland and about five hundred miles north of Bougainville. The Corsair squadron leader there was Major Joe Foss, the Marine Corps’ leading ace with twenty-six enemy “kills,” who had recently been awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Guadalcanal.

When he arrived at headquarters, Lindbergh found that Foss was elsewhere on the island attending the funeral of one of his pilots, who had been killed the day before. However, he was just in time for the arrival of Admiral Halsey, who was making a farewell tour of his South Pacific outposts before moving his command northward to the central Pacific. In moving north from Guadalcanal at the beginning of 1943, Halsey had cleared all critical areas of the enemy and established American bases with air and sea superiority while isolating hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers in places such as Rabaul, Kavieng, and other strongholds.

The following day Lindbergh took part in a Corsair raid on Kavieng, which lay on the northernmost tip of New Ireland. Two months earlier the Japanese admiral in charge ordered the execution of all European prisoners on the island, resulting in the deaths of twenty-three men, women, and children in what came to be known as the Kavieng Wharf Massacre. Save for the war, these places had been the very embodiment of tropical paradise, with crystal clear water, endless white sand beaches, swaying palms, friendly natives, lavish European-style plantations. Then the Japanese came.

The town of Kavieng had been badly damaged by Allied raids and there were no signs of life from the air; the patrol stayed offshore for much of the time, however, to avoid known antiaircraft positions. They did sight and destroy a Japanese supply barge, with Lindbergh firing hundreds of rounds in three passes, at close range, through “spurts of water and flying splinters.” May 27 was Charles and Anne’s fifteenth wedding anniversary. He spent it in the air checking out reports of a submarine (nothing found) in the channel between Kavieng and New Hanover.

It was decided to rig the Corsairs in Lindbergh’s patrol with five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs to drop on Kavieng. Lindbergh’s bomb overshot its mark but landed near buildings where enemy fire had been reported. “I do not like this bombing and machine gunning of unknown targets,” he reported.

That afternoon Lindbergh took a Corsair up for an aileron test instead of joining the Kavieng patrol mission, and it may have been a good thing. Three dive-bombers were shot down over the city and at least two men were killed and a third was missing. Three were saved. It was a difficult dinner that night at the pilots’ mess.

For the next week Lindbergh continued his daily bombing run on Kavieng, with negligible results. Too often he overshot his target, but by the end he felt he was getting the hang of it. On June 6, however, his final day on Emirau, he managed to place a five-hundred-pound bomb squarely in the middle of the main Japanese runway, blowing a sizable crater in the coral and rendering the strip inoperable. That afternoon he flew to Green Island and resumed making trouble for the Japanese on Rabaul, and when he returned from that mission the radio was full of news about the Allied invasion of France—D-day!

Next morning the Rabaul patrol found a column of Japanese trucks and enjoyed a turkey shoot, reducing several to flames. Later they learned that a pilot had been killed in the patrol that relieved theirs when he went after a similar column of Japanese trucks. It was a trap and the trucks were decoys: damaged equipment surrounded by concealed machine guns meant to lure American pilots to their doom. Somehow word of this ruse had not reached Lindbergh’s patrol. “Death lies hidden all around us,” he remarked, “so subtly that we cannot realize it is there.”

On his last day in the Solomons Lindbergh was witness to a spectacular air assault on Rabaul: twin-engine Lockheed PV Harpoon bombers came in first dropping thousand-pound bombs, followed by the dive bombers and torpedo bombers, then the P-38s and P-39s, and finally a flight of B-25s bombing from altitude. It was a devastating show of pyrotechnics that raised a great deal of dust but started no fires or secondary explosions, a fact that indicated there might have been nothing left in Rabaul to bomb.

Lindbergh had learned a great deal about the navy’s Corsairs and how they behaved in combat, all of which he would put into a report, once he had flown the twin-engine P-38, the army’s predominant fighter.

O
N
J
UNE 14
HE CAUGHT
a four-motor transport to New Guinea where the army’s Lockheed P-38 Lightning twin-engine, twin-boom fighter planes were flying in General MacArthur’s air force. With help from his old friend Major General Ennis Whitehead, who had been merely Major Ennis Whitehead at the beginning of the war, Lindbergh checked himself out in the P-38s for several days, nearly cracking up on his first flight from a locked wheel brake, but eventually logging enough flying time to feel comfortable in the craft.

New Guinea was a dangerous and haunting place during World War II. It is the world’s second largest island (after Greenland), shaped like a peacock, and containing some of the remotest jungle terrain on Earth. It is mostly hot, steamy rain forest, punctuated by a spine of mountains, known as the Owen Stanley Range, which rise to heights of 16,000 feet or more; some are actually capped in snow much of the year. Beginning in the nineteenth century Europeans, largely Dutch, established coconut plantations along the coast, but the interior remained a dark, inhospitable place where civilization had made few appreciable inroads, and whose inhabitants were thought still to be headhunters and cannibals.

Two years earlier, in the spring of 1942, the Japanese had sent an army by sea from Rabaul to capture Port Moresby—New Guinea’s capital and largest city, only a couple of hundred miles from the northern tip of Australia—but that force was turned back by American carriers at the Battle of the Coral Sea. The Japanese then proceeded to land their army on the northern coast of New Guinea, on the peacock’s “back” (Port Moresby would be at the bottom, or southern, side, its “tail”), and began a march across the precipitous Owen Stanley Range until they were in view of Port Moresby. They were defeated by a ferocious Australian defense and neared starvation. However, they continued to occupy the northwestern part of New Guinea where, from scores of jungle landing strips, their air force harassed Allied shipping.

Both sides continued to throw more men into the fight throughout 1943 and early 1944, but by the spring of that year General MacArthur had accumulated the strength to attack with some eighty thousand fresh men in a two-pronged pincers movement from one end of the peacock’s back to the other. That operation began two months before Lindbergh arrived, and the fighting remained intense and deadly on the ground.

Two months earlier, General Kenney, MacArthur’s air chief and Eddie Rickenbacker’s old friend from World War I flying days, had learned through Magic (the U.S. code-breaking project in the Pacific) radio intercepts that the Japanese had approximately three hundred and fifty warplanes at the far northern end of the peacock’s back and sent two dozen B-24 heavy bombers to destroy them. He was largely successful, having caught the Japanese off guard, but there remained determined pockets of Japanese air resistance, as well as formidable antiaircraft defenses. It was against this backdrop that Lindbergh now inserted himself to learn the combat qualities of the P-38.

The story goes (as told by Colonel Charles H. MacDonald, third leading ace in World War II with twenty-seven enemy planes to his credit)
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that Lindbergh entered the operations “shack” of the renowned 475th Fighter Group (Satan’s Angels) of the Fifth Air Force, where Colonel MacDonald, who was the group commander, was absorbed in a game of checkers and did not immediately catch the name of the tall civilian standing behind him. Lindbergh stated his business, which was to test out P-38s, but MacDonald’s interest continued to linger on the checkerboard while Lindbergh shuffled around awkwardly and the colonel and his opponent contemplated their moves.