Fortress Rabaul (17 page)

Carmichael and his flight crews immediately began to prepare the bombers for action. One of the navigators, 2nd Lt. John J. Steinbinder, wrote excitedly in his diary: “
Tomorrow we go on our first mission
. We are to bomb Rabaul.”

The original plan to attack the stronghold in coordination with Task Force 11 was still in effect, or so Carmichael thought, but the enemy raid on Darwin changed the squadron’s priorities. “Mission called off due to great concentration of Japanese naval and aerial forces,” noted Steinbinder. “We are to move on to Cloncurry, 450 miles in the interior of Australia, so that if the Japs bomb Townsville we shall be out of the way.”

There were no Allied fighters or antiaircraft guns at Townsville to protect the B-17s, which were far too valuable to risk. So the 14th Reconnaissance Squadron moved to Cloncurry, deep into the outback, where they found little of interest except wild kangaroos, stifling heat, and hordes of flies. Recreation consisted of an open-air movie theater, and one old hotel had a small pub with enough room at the bar for perhaps ten patrons. Steinbinder described the town as “a hell hole,” and who could blame him? “Flies fly into
your mouth, up your nostrils, into your eyes & ears,” he wrote. “Oh! They sure are hell. It’s terrifically hot here: 40° Centigrade or 105 Fahrenheit.”

In many ways, Steinbinder was typical of the junior officers who had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps prior to the war. Raised in a small town in middle-America, he spent his youth on a dairy farm near Oberlin, Ohio. Unlike the great majority of his peers, however, English was not Steinbinder’s first language. His parents were Hungarian immigrants, and he grew up speaking their native tongue first. Diligence in high school helped him earn a scholarship to Oberlin College, where he received a degree in chemistry. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for the U.S. Army with hopes of training as a pilot but failed to meet the service’s strict vision standards. He was therefore packed off to Miami for navigator training at the Pan American Airlines facility.

A year later and ten thousand miles from home, he sat amid the flies at Cloncurry and tried to make sense of his rapidly changing world.

ON THE MORNING of February 22, the 14th Reconnaissance Squadron was ordered back to Townsville. The B-17s were to hit Rabaul on their own. Carmichael’s squadron lacked ground support personnel, so the overworked flight crews had to perform all necessary maintenance themselves. Three bombers were scrubbed from the mission for mechanical reasons, leaving nine available to fly back to Garbutt Field outside Townsville. There, the enlisted crews spent the day preparing, refueling, and arming the B-17s while the officers attended briefings.

Major Carmichael and his men were introduced to two RAAF Catalina pilots—Wing Cmdr. Julius A. “Dick” Cohen, commanding officer of 11 Squadron at Port Moresby, and Plt. Off. Norman V. Robertson, 20 Squadron—who would ride aboard two of the B-17s to assist with navigation and identification of targets.
*
The American airmen needed the help. Not only did they lack experience in the region, there were no navigation aids or even reliable charts available, and the first leg of the mission would be flown in total darkness over long stretches of shark-infested waters.

The RAAF’s allocation of two valuable pilots demonstrated their faith in the Flying Fortress. Cohen in particular represented years of experience
the Australians could not afford to lose, but he remained modest about his role. “
I was there for comfort
,” he said later. “Carmichael was a very competent pilot, and he had a competent navigator. I didn’t do anything significant. It just gave them comfort to know that they had a pilot with local experience on board.”

The mission profile was essentially unchanged from the original plan, which called for the crews to take off at midnight and attack Rabaul at sunrise. While waiting for the scheduled start-up time, the men endured a few restless hours. Many wrote letters to their loved ones before heading into combat for the first time. John Steinbinder penned one to his mother and another to his college sweetheart, Margaret Gamble, expressing sentiments that he wanted to share “in case anything happens.”

He needn’t have bothered. For his crew, led by 1st Lt. James R. DuBose Jr., the much-anticipated mission ended without the bomber moving an inch. “Our #3 engine refused to run,” lamented Steinbinder in his diary. The mechanical glitch reduced the number of bombers to eight, but the squadron’s troubles were just beginning. While taxiing in the darkness at Townsville, two of the remaining bombers collided and were scratched from the mission, one damaged so severely that it never flew again.

As a result of all the difficulties on the ground, only six B-17s took off from Garbutt Field that night. More trouble occurred about an hour later when the formation ran into the inter-tropic front over the Coral Sea. First Lieutenant Harry W. Spieth became temporarily lost and returned to Townsville, where he explained he could not get around the wall of cumulous clouds that towered to forty thousand feet. Nobody questioned his decision. Formation flying was challenging enough in broad daylight, but at night and in bad weather the conditions could be terrifying. Visual acuity and depth perception were diminished, and the slightest motions seemed greatly amplified.

Now down to five, the B-17s punched through the storm system in two groups. Three of the Fortresses, led by Major Carmichael, gradually fell behind the other two as they continued toward the target, costing Carmichael the distinction of being the first American to bomb Rabaul. The honors went instead to Capt. William Lewis Jr., who arrived over Simpson Harbor at 0647 with 1st Lt. Frederick C. Eaton Jr. on his wing.

Clouds and volcanic steam obscured the anchorage, so the two B-17s orbited overhead for almost half an hour before the bombardiers were
able to identify targets. Lewis made a standard bomb run, dropped his four six-hundred-pounders, and turned toward Port Moresby as planned. Eaton’s bombs failed to release, so he doubled back over the target for another attempt. By this time, enemy antiaircraft shells began to burst in the vicinity, and as Eaton made his second run a large-caliber shell punched clean through his B-17’s right wing without exploding.

The bombers’ loitering, not to mention Eaton’s second run over the target, gave the Japanese ample time to scramble several fighters. Six Zeros and two Type 96s rose up from Lakunai, and while Lewis got away cleanly, Eaton was chased almost to New Guinea in a prolonged gunfight. His crew claimed two enemy fighters shot down and another “crippled,” but no corresponding losses were recorded by the 4th Air Group that day. Conversely, Eaton’s bomber was struck by a single cannon shell, but the crew escaped injury and the aircraft sustained only minor damage.

The bigger problem for Eaton was high fuel consumption. Calculations provided by the mission planners had been based on peacetime experience; but in actual combat the B-17s were using far more fuel than estimated. This was compounded when both Lewis and Eaton spent more than thirty minutes over the target. The second bomb run cost Eaton a lot more fuel, and after evading the fighters he discovered there wasn’t enough in the tanks to make it over the Owen Stanley Mountains.

Looking for a suitable landing place northeast of the great range, Eaton spied what appeared to be a grassy plain just inland from the New Guinea coast. He made a textbook wheels-up landing, as uneventful as a crash landing could be, but the bomber decelerated quickly and then sank several feet into muck. The solid-looking field turned out to be the Agaiambo Swamp, a vast wetlands. Although Eaton and his crew climbed from the bomber unhurt, their adventure was just beginning. Five weeks later, after battling malaria and 220 miles of wretched terrain, they finally returned to Port Moresby.
*

BY THE TIME Carmichael’s element of three B-17s arrived over Rabaul, several minutes behind Lewis’s flight, interceptors were waiting. “I don’t
think the Japanese were yet ready to fight,” recalled Carmichael, “so it wasn’t a real severe attack.”

The enemy fighters became more aggressive after the B-17s dropped their bombs. Dick Cohen, accustomed to the barebones Catalinas of the RAAF, was glad to sit on an armor-plated seat in the cockpit of Carmichael’s B-17. “Some Japanese fighters came by,” he remembered. “I could see the Zeros struggling to get enough height to make a pass at us. Their bullets were small, but there were quite a few holes in the B-17, and a couple of the crew were wounded.”

He was right: Zeros peppered Carmichael’s aircraft, causing superficial wounds to the radio operator and tail gunner, but the Flying Fortress lived up to its reputation for ruggedness. “We were a formidable platform for the Japanese to approach,” Cohen added. “Our gunners were very good, the aircraft maintained good defensive formation, and I think the Japanese had a pretty rough time.”

The B-17 hit hardest was flown by 1st Lt. Harry N. Brandon, who needed every bit of skill to control the bomber after his right inboard engine burst into flames and the outer engine was shut down by mistake. The forgiving B-17 stayed aloft on the two left engines while the fire was extinguished, and eventually the right outboard engine was restarted. A pilot from the 4th Air Group at Rabaul, FPO 2nd Class Motosuna Yoshida, claimed a B-17 and was credited with a victory; however, no Flying Fortresses except Eaton’s were lost.

After a long return flight, four B-17s crossed the Owen Stanley Mountains and landed at Port Moresby. Cohen and Robertson returned to their RAAF squadrons, and the bombers were refueled before taking off again for Australia. Reaching Townsville on the afternoon of February 23, Carmichael’s small clutch of bombers completed a mission of more than fourteen hours’ duration.

For all the effort, the first American raid on Rabaul was a big disappointment. The results were officially recorded as “not observed,” and Carmichael’s personal assessment of the mission was equally modest. “We attacked Rabaul with whatever number of planes we had available,” he said years later, “but we didn’t hit anything.”

Other sources support Carmichael’s statement, if only by omission. Australian prisoners in the Malaguna Camp stockade were completely unaware that Simpson Harbor had been attacked by B-17s that morning,
likely because of the cloud cover and the bombers’ high altitude. Similarly, there was no mention of the B-17s in the diary kept by Private Hisaeda of the 55th Field Hospital, though he recorded virtually every other raid during that period. Less than twenty-four hours later, for example, he wrote of an attack by three enemy aircraft, noting that one was shot down. As usual, Hisaeda’s information was accurate. Flight Lieutenant Ernest V. Beaumont and his eight-man crew, flying one of three Catalinas that raided Rabaul on February 24, failed to return from the mission.

ON FEBRUARY 26, Dick Cohen led several Catalinas back to Rabaul for another night attack. By that time he had been flying combat missions without letup for the better part of two years, including a stint with the Royal Air Force in England, and was exhausted. The tempo of operations placed enormous demands on all of the crews and their dwindling number of airworthy Catalinas, but 11 and 20 Squadrons kept pecking away at the Japanese stronghold. Unfortunately, the enemy’s defenses were rapidly improving. “
The Japanese were very alert
,” Cohen remembered. “They’d flick searchlights on us at once, and we realized that they were either very efficient or had radar.”

On this night, as the flying boats approached Rabaul at seven thousand feet, the ships down in the darkened harbor looked like toys. But the bursts of antiaircraft fire shaking the Catalinas were real enough, giving the bombardiers a difficult time as they tried to align their sights. Tired and frustrated, Cohen decided that something had to give. Spotting a large Japanese ship alongside one of the wharves, he spontaneously decided to make an unorthodox attack. “We were fed up with being shot at from down below, and fed up with being attacked by fighters,” he said later. “I got it into my head to attack the Toboi Wharf, which was visible on that particular night, a clear night. So I just rolled over and dived on it.”

Catalinas were never intended for dive-bombing, but Cohen pushed his aircraft into a steep power dive that terrified his crew. Flight Lieutenant Robert M. Seymour, his copilot, later told Cohen it was the most frightening experience of the entire war for him. Up in the bow, the bombardier had a dizzying view as the seaplane plunged earthward. At 1,300 feet, Cohen shouted “release bombs!” over the intercom and hauled back on the control column. Twelve 250-pounders detached from their external wing
racks and exploded a few seconds later, rocking the Catalina as Cohen pulled out at mast height over Simpson Harbor.

MAJOR CARMICHAEL was eager to hit Rabaul again. The 14th Reconnaissance Squadron was scheduled for its second attempt on February 28, but the mission had to be canceled when more than half the flight crews fell ill with dengue fever. The conditions at Cloncurry were ideal for the viral outbreak, which takes about a week to incubate. It waylaid dozens of men with high fevers, skin rashes, painful joints, and severe headaches. The dusty heat and swarming flies only added to the sick men’s misery, which lasted several days before the infection ran its course. By the end of the first week of March, the squadron had completed only a few reconnaissance missions.

Thus far the oddball B-17 squadron, still attached to the U.S. Navy, had been completely ineffective. And for the Allies, there was more troubling news: improvements would be few and far between, and very slow in coming.

CHAPTER 11