Target: Rabaul (18 page)

The deception worked. According to a postwar summary, the Japanese considered launching an infantry raid to capture the new base.

We knew that the enemy was constructing a big air base in the vicinity of Bena Bena in New Guinea from the beginning of May [sic]. For fear that
the above base would have a devastating effect on our bases in eastern New Guinea, the Eighth Army group consulted the central headquarters to draw up plans for the destruction of this enemy base. In June the 7th Air Division, which had been in the Dutch East Indies area, and one raider unit which was sent from Japan, were put under the command of the Eighth Army group. The army group drew up plans to have the Bena Bena base captured by the raider unit under the protection of the reinforced air force and simultaneously have the 18th Army secure the same district.

Intent on eliminating the decoy base, the Japanese missed the fields under construction west of Lae. By July 10, the runway at Tsili-Tsili could receive C-47 transports. Thereafter, supported by hundreds of planeloads of personnel, materials, trucks, and even small bulldozers and graders, the 871st Airborne Engineers worked on the airdrome at a blistering pace.
^*
“The new field was coming along fast,” Kenney would later write, “and the Japs still had not discovered it.”

Wurtsmith was directed to advance the 35th Fighter Group to Tsili-Tsili as soon as the strip could handle fighters. This couldn’t happen fast enough for Kenney, who fretted about the Japanese buildup at Wewak. He wanted “to really liquidate the place,” but knew there were too many fighters at the four airdromes to risk a daylight attack without ample escort. To his delight, the engineers did their job in just over two weeks. Fifteen hundred drums of aviation gas were flown in, and the first fighters touched down on July 26 to stand daytime alerts. As far as the Japanese knew, Wewak remained out of reach of Allied aircraft except for unescorted heavy bombers. But as Kenney later put it, he had built a new airfield “right in their back yard.”

In early August, the 40th Fighter Squadron of the 35th Fighter Group moved up to Tsili-Tsili. Facilities were sparse, inasmuch as the engineers had focused on completing the airstrip. When the squadron’s ground personnel arrived on August 11, they discovered a primitive setting. “Hardships became the byword of squadron personnel,” wrote the unit’s historian. “The general area was mountainous, with no accessible overland approach routes. Everything had to be flown in by transport. There was an inadequate warning system because the mountains reduced the effectiveness of radar. On many occasions, the sound of exploding bombs and the burst of ack-ack fire were the first indications that an air raid was in progress.”

The garrison and squadron personnel would soon learn just how inadequate the warning system was.

IF THERE WAS one segment of his air force that Kenney could finally feel good about, it was Fighter Command. In the spring of 1943, aircraft shortages were so
severe that he scrounged around Australia to find three war-weary fighters at repair depots. Kenney was pleased with the performance of the P-38 outfits, but among the 8th, 35th, and 49th fighter groups, only one squadron in each was equipped with Lightnings; the other squadrons still flew outdated P-39 Airacobras or P-40 Warhawks. Kenney pleaded frantically to Arnold to send the aircraft he had been promised, as they were still not coming in the numbers pledged. During April, for example, the army shorted Kenney by forty-five fighters, twelve heavy bombers, sixty-one medium bombers, sixty-six light bombers, and forty twin-engine transports. He wired Arnold again on May 1 and complained about the shortfall, pointing out that an additional 276 aircraft were promised for the month of May. He added that unless he got the 224 aircraft owed for April,
plus
the promised inventory for May, he would be forced to revise his operational plans.

Kenney’s persistence finally got results. Arnold arranged to send enough new P-38s during June to form a whole new fighter group, designated the 475th, but there was a catch: Kenney would have to organize it with personnel already overseas. He began by gathering unattached talent as best as he could from the 11th Central Replacement Depot in Australia, but still had to pilfer pilots and ground crews from existing groups, regardless of the aircraft they flew. This caused resentment among the leaders of the affected squadrons, because Kenney demanded top performers. No one dared protest too loudly, however; Kenney was the boss. Moreover, many of the pilots who had been flying P-39s or P-40s jumped at the offer to transfer into the hotrod Lightning. With enough aircraft and personnel to field three squadrons, the 475th Fighter Group was activated on May 14. Lieutenant Colonel George W. Prentiss, the erstwhile skipper of the 39th Fighter Squadron/35th Fighter Group, assumed command a week later. Three months of training in Australia would ensue before the first all-P-38 group in the Southwest Pacific was deemed ready for combat.

Other important developments were also afoot. Throughout the first half of 1943, Kenney and Whitehead had predominantly sent heavy bomb groups to attack distant targets, such as Rabaul, while the medium bomb groups concentrated on targets within their reach. In addition to attacking the aforementioned strongholds on New Guinea, the A-20s and B-25s of the 3rd and 38th Bomb Groups periodically hit Gasmata and Cape Gloucester on New Britain. The RAAF, particularly the Beaufighters of 30 Squadron, attacked coastal locations and enemy barge traffic.

Few of these strikes were large in scale; instead, small numbers of aircraft conducted harassment raids. Mission requirements also included patrols and antishipping strikes, which diminished the effort that any single group could muster for an event. The missions were important, disrupting the enemy’s attempts to resupply or reinforce their strongholds, but the Allied crews were growing bored. As the 38th Bomb Group’s official history explained: “Missions of the past few months, with the exception of March when the 38th put on a spectacular show in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, were strikes at enemy installations, and there was
something dull and uninteresting about it, except when the enemy would put up a few fighters to intercept our formations or else try to break up our attacks with an intense anti-aircraft barrage—and that was rare.”

Such sentiments were about to change. As of early 1943, only one outfit, the 90th Bomb Squadron of the 3rd Bomb Group, operated modified B-25 strafers—the ones Kenney called “commerce destroyers.” In May, the group’s 8th and 13th squadrons converted to the up-gunned version, as did the 71st and 405th squadrons of the 38th Bomb Group. Describing themselves as “specialists in daring low-level work,” the latter commenced strafing missions on May 12.

The following month, Kenney welcomed an influx of aircraft and personnel, including the 348th Fighter Group, equipped with Republic P-47D Thunderbolts, and the 345th Bomb Group, with four squadrons of B-25Ds. After a few warm-up missions, the 345th flew down to Townsville to have their aircraft converted to strafers.

The conversion—an outgrowth of Kenney’s innovative genius, the self-taught engineering talent of Maj. “Pappy” Gunn, and the encyclopedic knowledge of Jack Fox, a civilian technical representative from North American Aviation—was highly effective. With the bombardier’s position and equipment removed from the glazed nose section, there was ample room for four .50-caliber machine guns in a reinforced panel, fed by ammunition canisters providing four hundred rounds per gun. Two additional .50-caliber guns were installed on each side of the fuselage in streamlined blisters, yielding a total of eight fixed, forward-firing heavy machine guns wired to a trigger controlled by the pilot. Another practical enhancement was the removal of the ventral turret, which had proved worthless during the B-25’s first year of combat. In its place went an auxiliary three-hundred-gallon fuel tank that not only extended the B-25’s range, but helped counter the weight of the nose guns and ammunition. The early conversions, which included the aircraft of the 3rd and 38th Bomb Groups, provided an attachment for dropping the tank after emptying it. No one dared carry an empty tank into a combat situation: the fumes inside were explosive. Furthermore, the tank interfered with the movement of the upper turret, which remained inoperative until the tank was dropped.

KENNEY HAD GOOD reason to be concerned about Wewak. Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, commander of the Eighth Area Army headquartered at Rabaul, and Lt. Gen. Hatazo Adachi, commander of the Eighteenth Army headquartered at Madang, were not only committed to holding Lae and Salamaua, but had considered an advance southward to Bena Bena, very near the deceptive emergency strip that Kenney was building at Garoka.

Imamura, like Kenney, had pleaded with his superiors for more aircraft. Few planes were on hand at Wewak during March and April, resulting in limited offensive operations—no support for ground units, no attacks on Allied airdromes or harbor facilities. Improvements were pending, but the development was slow.
Five months had passed since the occupation of Wewak, yet the 5th and 10th Airfield Construction Units, assisted by more than three thousand soldiers, had completed only one airdrome. Lacking heavy equipment and basic tools, the Japanese depended primarily on manual labor. By late spring 1943, their engineering efforts had yielded approximately 160 revetments among the four airfields, most of them at the original airdrome, where construction was deemed completed except minor repair work. Thirty bomber revetments had been constructed at But airdrome, and at Dagua (known as But East to the Japanese), sixteen out of the planned forty fighter revetments were finished. Boram (Wewak East) boasted only eight bomber revetments, with another fifty to be completed by the end of June. In a striking comparison, U.S. Army engineers had used practical know-how and airlift ingenuity to build a complete airdrome at Tsili-Tsili within weeks.

The slow progress at Wewak was due partly to tropical diseases. Coastal New Guinea was notorious for its endemic rates of malaria, dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, and other debilitating and deadly infections. According to one Japanese author, 60 percent of the army personnel at Wewak were sick in mid-1943, most of them infected with malaria or amoebic dysentery. No one could do much about the insidious mosquitos, which the Japanese came to fear almost as much as “Boeings,” but the incidence of dysentery was largely their own fault. Crude living conditions, poor diet, and disregard for sanitation created the perfect breeding ground for bacterial infections.

Despite the lack of construction equipment and the battle with diseases, the airdromes were eventually operational. One of several units that commenced the long journey to the Southeast Area from Japan was the 68th
Sentai
(Flying Regiment, roughly equivalent to an Imperial Navy air group), the first to be equipped with the army’s sleek, liquid-cooled Type 3 fighter. Built by Kawasaki, the Ki-61
Hein
(Swallow) was routinely mistaken for the Messerschmitt Bf-109, but more closely resembled an early model P-51B Mustang. The streamlined fighter possessed good flight characteristics and armament (two 12.7mm and two 7.7mm machine guns), and had a top speed of almost 370 miles per hour; however, the Ha-40 twelve-cylinder inline engine was unreliable in the tropical heat and humidity.

In early April 1943, the 68th’s planes and pilots departed from Yokosuka, Japan, aboard the auxiliary aircraft carrier
Kasuga Maru
, which delivered them as far as Truk. The regiment would have to proceed independently to Rabaul, a challenging overwater flight of approximately seven hundred miles. Twenty-seven fighters started out on April 27, but the transit ended in misfortune for a formation of thirteen. Due to “lack of necessary facilities, poor navigation, [and] poor equipment,” eight fighters crash-landed on or near a small atoll, two others turned back, and two disappeared. It was fortunate that one plane of the thirteen arrived safely at Rabaul, resulting in the eventual rescue of the eight stranded pilots on May 10.

While the 68th Flying Regiment made its troubled way southward, additional units proceeded to Wewak by various routes in April and May. Meanwhile, radar
equipment arrived to provide advance warning of inbound Allied raids. However, the installation did not become operational for several months—a delay that would have important ramifications.

In June, partly in response to Imamura’s request for more planes, but also to interdict the Allied decoy airfield at Bena Bena, Imperial General Headquarters ordered the Fourth Air Army to relocate from the Netherlands East Indies to the Southeast Area. Commanded by Lt. Gen. Kumaichi Teramoto, the force of approximately ten thousand troops including aircrew, ground staff, and support personnel reached Rabaul on August 6. Soon thereafter, Teramoto was instructed to move his headquarters to Wewak. The force departed with ambitious orders from General Imamura: destroy Allied shipping around New Guinea, attack Allied ground forces in the Lae-Salamaua area, and destroy “the enemy air force advancing to Eastern New Guinea.” The latter was undoubtedly a reference to Kenney’s new airdromes at Marilinan and Tsili-Tsili, which had finally been discovered. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the fields were already operational.

BY THE SECOND week of August, Wewak’s four airdromes were crowded with aircraft, including light bombers, heavy bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, and four regiments of fighters.

A high-speed pass by the 8th Photo Squadron on August 11 produced pictures labeled “unidentified airdrome,” but two days later a pair of F-4/F-5 Lightnings obtained excellent photographs. Intelligence analysts at Port Moresby counted 199 aircraft among the four airdromes (though Kenney, in his autobiography, put the number at 225). Whatever the figure, General Teramoto’s Fourth Air Army was a serious threat to the Allies.

The development was exactly what Kenney had hoped for. Now that Tsili-Tsili airdrome was operational, P-38s could top off their tanks and reach Wewak in the fighter escort role. From his headquarters in Brisbane, Kenney instructed Whitehead to plan an attack against all four airdromes simultaneously using every strike aircraft capable of making the round trip.