Target: Rabaul (7 page)

Kenney thrived on such legends. And he was equally familiar with the rest of the hero’s story. Promoted to major in mid-January, McCullar was pulled from his beloved 63rd Squadron, a tight-knit outfit he had flown with for months, to assume command of the 64th. The squadron had a mediocre combat record and low morale, but by the end of March, McCullar had turned it around. The highest praise came from his former squadron mates, who claimed that the 64th could “accomplish any task assigned them.” Although McCullar had a different crew and no longer flew
Black Jack
, he led by example, taking his share of the difficult missions.

When Kenney began his temporary stint as head of V Bomber Command, McCullar and the rest of the 43rd Bomb Group had been in combat for more than six months. Crews periodically received a week of R&R in Australia, but the cumulative effects of combat took their toll on both men and machines. Commissioned fliers could occasionally let off steam at the officers’ club, but taut nerves and alcohol could be a volatile mix. McCullar learned this the hard way on the night of April 9, when he and an inebriated army doctor had an unfortunate encounter.

Arriving at Port Moresby the following day, Kenney learned about the disturbance and wrote a full description in his diary:

Ken McCullar is a hard-hitting lad in many ways. Last night he was down at the officers club at Port Moresby with a few others of the 43rd Bombardment Group, enjoying himself, when he heard a medical colonel … discussing, in an over-loud manner, the shortcomings of the air force. Some of the phrases used had a lot of four-letter words in them, and finally a lot of names, including mine, were used. Ken disapproved and invited the colonel to eat his words. The colonel refused, quite belligerently, perhaps relying too heavily on his superior height and reach. Ken became a bit impatient, and with one or two (accounts differ) punches, knocked the colonel through a window and down to the muddy ground several feet below.

Reasoning that “you can’t try a person twice for the same offense,” Kenney took swift action. He told his chief of staff at bomber command, Col. Roger M. Ramey (no relation to Howard Ramey), to “punish Ken with a reprimand” without delay if he was indeed guilty. This would prevent the obnoxious colonel from pressing more serious charges or seeking a court-martial.

After the reprimand, Kenney called in McCullar for a face-to-face. The general said that he appreciated what McCullar had done, not only for him but for the Fifth Air Force; then he sternly told the young hero to “lay off colonels from now on.”

On April 11, Kenney’s first full day at the helm of bomber command, the Japanese launched an aerial offensive against New Guinea. Approximately three weeks earlier, Imperial General Headquarters had introduced a new plan, the Joint Army-Navy Central Agreement on Southeast Area Operations, to establish “a superior and impregnable strategic position.” The great Southern Offensive, begun with such promise at the end of 1941, was dead. The Allied counteroffensive was now underway, resulting in crucial defeats for the Japanese at Guadalcanal and Buna. Tokyo had little recourse but to go on the defensive. With a coordinated effort by the army and navy to bolster the existing strongholds, the Allies would pay dearly for every advance.

One offensive plan, buried deep in the Central Agreement, directed the navy to initiate an air campaign against Allied positions in the Solomon Islands—a counterattack against Guadalcanal. The task fell to the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, whose staff knew the Allies were entrenched in the southern Solomons. In February, American forces had bloodlessly occupied the Russell Islands, seventy miles northwest of Guadalcanal. Seabees immediately began constructing a pair of airstrips to support the invasion of New Georgia.

The main aviation component at Rabaul, the Eleventh Air Fleet, had been debilitated by the battle for Guadalcanal and could not undertake the new offensive alone. Yamamoto therefore ordered the Third Fleet to contribute its carrier planes. He and the Third Fleet commander, Adm. Jisaburo Ozawa, shifted their headquarters temporarily to Rabaul, arriving in early April. With Vice Adm. Jinichi Kusaka, who commanded both the Eleventh Air Fleet and the Southeast Area Fleet, they worked out the details of Attack X, scheduled for April 5. With Ozawa’s carrier planes, Yamamoto had approximately 350 attack aircraft at his disposal, so he decided to hit key Allied positions in New Guinea as well the Solomons. This decision led to plans for a series of raids on Port Moresby, Milne Bay, and other locations. Known as Attack Y, it was added to the overall plan, officially named A-Operation (
I-Go Sakusen
).

Delayed two days by bad weather, Attack X was launched on April 7. More than two hundred aircraft, the largest Japanese strike force since Pearl Harbor, attacked the Tulagi anchorage and ships near Guadalcanal. The dive-bombers had limited success, sinking a destroyer, a corvette, and a tanker, but when the surviving crews returned to their units, they reported twelve major ships sunk. The fantastic claims, plus more bad weather, convinced Yamamoto that Attack X had succeeded. Subsequently, he shifted his attention to New Guinea.

At half past noon on Sunday, April 11, a strike force of approximately a hundred planes from Ozawa’s carrier groups attacked Oro Bay, fifteen miles south of previously contested Buna. One small cargo ship was sunk, a second beached, and a minesweeper damaged. The effort was relatively feeble compared to the blow that Yamamoto could have delivered. Kenney thought as much, later stating that
he was “puzzled” by the enemy’s choice of targets. The nearby airstrip complex at Dobodura, undergoing rapid expansion, housed dozens of aircraft. A concentrated attack there might have set the Allies back several months.

Realizing he was fortunate, Kenney found himself in a grim chess match. The most pressing challenge would be to correctly anticipate the enemy’s next target and intercept the attack. Aware that Milne Bay was “full of shipping,” he moved the majority of his fighter strength to Dobodura and Milne Bay, on the other side of the Owen Stanley Mountains, leaving only twenty fighters at Port Moresby.

His defenses established, Kenney knew he was not compelled to wait for the enemy to make the next move. Inclined to think offensively, he decided to hit Rabaul.

THAT AFTERNOON, IN the 43rd Bomb Group’s tent city at Port Moresby, orders were posted for another night attack on Rabaul. Lieutentant Colonel John A. Roberts, who had assumed command of the group less than two weeks earlier, would lead the effort. Two of his squadrons, the 64th and 65th, were to commit every available B-17 to the mission.

An hour after midnight on April 12, startup procedures commenced at Jackson Field, often referred to by its former name, Seven Mile airdrome. Roberts occupied the copilot’s seat of
Lulu Belle
, which had been fitted with extra fuel tanks in lieu of bombs to conduct weather reconnaissance and general observation. At 0130, the B-17 roared down the runway and climbed alone into the darkness.

Fifteen minutes later, the main strike began. A B-17 named
Blues in the Nite
taxied to the downwind end of the runway. This was McCullar, heading up the main formation as commanding officer of the 64th Squadron. His aircraft had two extra sergeants aboard who had volunteered as spare gunners. Anyone who got to fly with McCullar owned a lot of bragging rights.

Throttling up to full power, McCullar released the brakes at 0147. In the control tower, Maj. David W. Hassemer watched the heavy bomber accelerate normally. But something went wrong. The B-17 was about halfway down the runway, nearing takeoff speed, when Hassemer distinctly heard “a loud metallic crack” over the sound of the four radial engines. He later reported: “At a point opposite of the tower a long streak of bluish-white sparking flame appeared below the number-three engine nacelle and in the right wheel assembly. This flame lasted for five or six seconds and then went out momentarily.”

Multiple failures may have occurred independently. The metallic bang was possibly the bursting of an expander tube in a brake line on the right landing gear. A stream of pressurized, highly flammable hydraulic fluid contacted hot metal, either the brake bands on the wheel or the engine exhaust outlet, igniting the fire seen from the control tower. Other witnesses saw the flames spread quickly from the engine nacelle across the upper and lower wing surfaces, until a stream of fire reached back the length of the aircraft. At roughly the same moment, just
as the heavy bomber got airborne, the tire on the
left
wheel separated from the landing gear.

Engines howling, its right wing burning brightly,
Blues in the Nite
pitched up sharply. After rising only a few hundred feet, it stalled. Rolling drunkenly to the left, it staggered along for several seconds at a sixty-degree angle of bank, an indication that McCullar and his copilot were trying to fight the stall. Gravity prevailed, however. A few hundred yards beyond the southeast end of the runway,
Blues in the Nite
pitched over and nosed into the ground, killing everyone on board. Flames mushroomed into the sky, accompanied by two small explosions. A few seconds later, the bomb load exploded with a tremendous blast.

During the investigation of the grisly scene, a dead wallaby was found in the vicinity of the runway, leading to immediate and persistent speculation that a collision with a
kangaroo
had caused the mishap. Although related to kangaroos, the agile wallaby found in New Guinea are quite small, making it an unlikely culprit. Furthermore, the war diary of McCullar’s former unit, the 63rd Bomb Squadron, contained a detailed entry regarding the crash, but made no mention of any animal.

How did the rumor become so entrenched? One contributor was Kenney, who wrote in his popular postwar autobiography: “The story was that just as Ken’s B-17 was ready to leave the ground, it collided with a kangaroo or a wallaby, which hit the turbo-supercharger exhaust, setting fire to the main gasoline tanks in the wing.”

An equally important factor was the collective shock of losing such a popular, talented man. No one wanted to consider that mechanical failures and human error caused the crash. By blaming an act of God in the form of a furry brown animal, McCullar’s stunned friends and squadron mates could put the disaster in perspective.

It is just as likely that the laws of probability caught up with McCullar. Bravado and determination will carry a man and his crew only so far. Lucky streaks end. There were numerous contributors to that tragic crash, attributable to the frenetic pace of the war. Issues such as combat stress and fatigue on the part of the flight crew, questionable maintenance on the aircraft, oversights during the preflight inspection—all could be factors in the accident.

Those dynamics were frequently overlooked in an effort to put more planes in the air and more bombs on the target. The result was an astonishingly high mishap rate. For every loss of a high-profile individual such as McCullar or Benn or Ramey, dozens of crews had come to grief in the mountains or the surrounding waters. Some accidents could be investigated, such as McCullar’s, but far more losses involved unexplained disappearances. The culprit was usually some combination of crew error (poor navigation or lack of awareness of the surrounding terrain) and low visibility (either at night or in bad weather). Crews got hopelessly lost and flew out to sea, or crashed into the slopes of the towering mountains. The aviators made grim jokes about a new type of cloud called “cumulogranite,” and shared cautionary phrases such as “every cloud has a rock and a tree in it.”

The statistics confirm their fears: during the first four months of 1943, three B-17s, five B-24s, a B-25, and three C-47 transports went missing in New Guinea.

THE NEWS OF McCullar’s death shocked the men at Port Moresby, from Kenney on down. Kenney was particularly upset, for his last words to McCullar had been a scolding.
^*
But there was no time to grieve. That same morning, 500 miles to the northeast, Admiral Yamamoto sent off another strike against New Guinea. Wearing starched dress whites, he waved to the crews as forty-three Type 1 land attack aircraft (Mitsubishi G4M1s, code named “Bettys”) took off from Vunakanau airdrome. Also participating in the attack were 130 of the Imperial Navy’s most celebrated fighter, the
Rei Shiki Sento Ki
, or Type 0 carrier-borne fighter, commonly abbreviated as
Reisen
. An escort of sixty-five Zero fighters from the Eleventh Air Fleet and some carrier-based units took off from Lakunai airdrome to escort the bombers, while another sixty-five Zeros from
Zuikaku
,
Hiyo
, and
Junyo
formed an independent striking unit.

Heading toward Milne Bay, the attackers were detected by a radar station on the New Guinea coast at 0945. The task of intercepting them fell to V Fighter Command, headed by Brig. Gen. Paul B. Wurtsmith, who had led the fighter defense of Darwin in 1942. Normally he would have called his own shots at Port Moresby, but with Kenney on site, Wurtsmith had a three-star general to back his plays. How much input Kenney provided is unknown; but as an attack specialist, he probably left the interception decisions in Wurtsmith’s capable hands. Virtually every Allied fighter in northeast New Guinea was scrambled, with vectors to intercept the Japanese near Goodenough Island. It was the right call, given the circumstances, but shortly thereafter the radar signal was lost. At 0955 a different station issued an update: the enemy formation was now crossing the mountains near Kokoda, on a direct heading for Port Moresby.

The feint gave the Japanese an opportunity to cause serious damage at Jackson Field. Only eight P-38 Lightnings and a dozen outclassed P-39 Airacobras were available there—twenty fighters against well over a hundred attackers. Wurtsmith had no time to vector the main body of interceptors toward Port Moresby. Instead, they were instructed to head toward Lae, where the Japanese would probably land to refuel after the attack.