Fortress Rabaul (20 page)

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 bomber 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.

The accommodations at Seven Mile airdrome were terrible—even worse than at Cloncurry—and the stranded Americans went four days without shaving or changing their clothes. Steinbinder felt like “a bum,” but thanks to the unexpected delay, he and the other crewmen were rewarded with a unique opportunity. In the company of hundreds of Aussies, they were among the few Yanks to witness a minor miracle.

CHAPTER 12

The Last Outpost

A
S THE WAR IN THE
Southwest Pacific entered its fourth month, Vice Admiral Inoue continued to focus his attention on New Guinea. It was obvious to both sides that whoever controlled the world’s second largest island would dominate the region. By the middle of March 1942, the Japanese held Lae, Salamaua, and Finschhafen, giving them control of the northeast coast. As soon as improvements to the airdrome at Lae were completed, Imperial Navy aircraft merely had to zoom over the Owen Stanley Mountains to attack Port Moresby. The outlook for the Australian garrison was bleak.

The conquest of New Guinea received enthusiastic coverage in the Japanese press. One newspaper boasted: “Port Moresby is already on the verge of collapse as a result of repeated bombing by the Nippon Navy air corps. The present [efforts] of Nippon Army and Navy detachments completely sealed the fate of New Guinea.”

Such propaganda had been published virtually every day since the beginning of the Pacific war, and by the spring of 1942, military personnel and civilians alike were brimming with overconfidence. The effect, later called
senshobyo
(literally, “
victory disease
”), was most apparent in the actions of military planners. Often displaying complete disregard for the capabilities of Allied forces, they tended to spread their forces thinly over large areas, sometimes extending them far beyond their lines of supply. (A prime example of
senshobyo
would occur in early April, when Vice Admiral
Inoue and Major General Horii received orders to commence the second stage of the Southern Offensive. Instead of concentrating their resources on one objective, they planned simultaneous operations against Port Moresby and Tulagi, hundreds of miles from Rabaul in opposite directions. Even as that operation got underway, Admiral Yamamoto and the Combined Fleet staff began war-gaming the next offensive, the invasion of Midway.)

At Rabaul and Lae, meanwhile, the 24th Air Flotilla was stretched to the limit as Rear Admiral Goto’s airmen softened up Port Moresby. The land-attackers of the 4th Air Group flew a grueling schedule of long patrol flights every day, weather permitting, in addition to a steady diet of bombing missions. Port Moresby was raided twice on March 10 by a total of eighteen
rikko;
then five Zeros conducted a strafing attack on March 13, and the following day nine
rikko
hit Port Moresby again while eight other medium bombers, escorted by a dozen fighters, attacked the Allied airdrome on Horn Island.

The pace did not let up. On March 15 nine
rikko
bombed Madang on the northeast coast of New Guinea, after which the 4th Air Group shifted its attention to Tulagi, hitting the anchorage and seaplane base for two consecutive days. Next, the land-attackers returned to Port Moresby for raids on March 19 and 20 before finally taking a much-needed rest. By then, the airmen and ground personnel had been conducting nonstop operations for almost four weeks.

However, despite the 4th Air Group’s effort to destroy Allied air power at Port Moresby, American B-17s continued to reciprocate by periodically hitting Rabaul. Rather than collapsing, the last outpost on New Guinea frustrated the Japanese with its resiliency.

FOR THE GARRISON at Port Moresby, the respite taken by the 24th Air Flotilla came as a huge relief. The young militiamen of the 30th Infantry Brigade, whose average age was just eighteen, had deployed to New Guinea with only minimal training. Since then they had endured conditions that would practically drive a man insane. Osmar White, a newspaperman who arrived in mid-February with four other accredited war correspondents, despised New Guinea’s climate.

Every afternoon and every night it rained
. Every night hordes of black, voracious mosquitoes came singing hungrily out of the grass. Every dawn hordes of black, voracious flies came in buzzing thirstily. They slept in clots and festoons on the rafters of the mess. Assaults on them with insecticide at night would bring down a squirming carpet that covered the packed earth floor, but it never appreciably diminished their numbers.

Conditions were slightly better down at the waterfront. The Catalina squadrons enjoyed decent accommodations and food in the RAAF mess, but the frequency of their long, hazardous missions led to extreme fatigue. Sometimes the airmen flew on consecutive nights, yet they went about their business with quiet determination. George Johnston, another of the war correspondents who covered the fighting in New Guinea, was in awe of the aircrews’ stamina. “Repeatedly I saw men come in after 13-hour patrols, snatch a bite of food and a few hours’ sleep, then roar off again over the reef on another job that would keep them in the air for 14 hours,” he wrote. “I saw them, almost staggering from want of sleep, falling into bunks while the squadron’s incomparable ground staff ‘bombed up’ for another trip scheduled for take-off a few hours later.”

North of town at Seven Mile airdrome, the living conditions were much worse. Japanese air attacks had demolished all of the permanent buildings, which meant the only shelter from the savage sun consisted of tents and other temporary structures. Aircrews and ground personnel lived in primitive camps scattered among the ugly, scrub-covered hills surrounding the runway. Clouds of mosquitoes brought the inevitable malaria and dengue fever. Sanitation was virtually nonexistent. Latrines, as the saying went, consisted of nothing more than “a shovel and a walk.” The direct result of this casual approach to hygiene was repeated outbreaks of dysentery, gastroenteritis, and other intestinal ailments.

As bad as the living conditions were, the monotonous diet of army rations did nothing to improve the men’s health or their morale. John Steinbinder, who endured several layovers at Seven Mile, wrote sarcastically: “We have a great variety of food here. For breakfast we have hash, potatoes, hardtack, and coffee; for lunch, hash, potatoes, bread, and tea; for dinner, hash, potatoes, rice, peaches, and coffee, with choice of hardtack or bread.”

During daylight hours, maintenance personnel and construction crews toiled under the blazing sun, keeping one eye skyward for the next enemy raid. At any moment a flight of Zeros might swoop down undetected, for there were too few warning posts in the mountains between Lae
and Port Moresby. The early detection network, such as it was, depended entirely on radio reports based on visual sightings, some of which came from the Japanese side of the mountain range. Probably the most daring coastwatcher on New Guinea was thirty-three-year-old Flt. Lt. Leigh G. Vial, known by his call sign: “Golden Voice.” Assisted by local villagers who periodically delivered supplies to his primitive camps, he observed the Japanese from the hills overlooking Lae, frequently providing the only advance warning of an incoming raid.

Even when timely warnings were received, most of the Aussies remained at their posts after the sirens began to wail. Major General Basil M. Morris, the senior Australian officer at Port Moresby, issued a directive stating that the men were to keep working until the bombs began to land within two hundred yards, at which time “
officers would be permitted
to order their men to take shelter.” As if on a dare, the men habitually waited until the last possible second before sprinting to the nearest underground bunker or slit trench. The latter type of shelters were more exposed than a solid bunker, but they offered some protection from the most-feared Japanese bombs, the 60-kilogram fragmentation devices called “daisy cutters,” which exploded into hundreds of jagged shards.