Target: Rabaul (15 page)

HARGESHEIMER, HAVING CHEATED the Grim Reaper on June 1, flew his next photographic mission four days later—and this time his luck did not hold. Flying an F-5A named
Eager Beaver
, Hargesheimer reconnoitered the north coast of New Britain on the afternoon of June 5 in decaying weather. The JAAF airdrome at Cape Gloucester was all but deserted, so Hargy continued eastward, paralleling the coastline. Near the village of Ubili, about eighty-five miles from Rabaul, he discovered a new airfield under construction and set his camera controls to shoot overlapping pictures. Just after he commenced a wings-level pass over the new strip, Hargesheimer was attacked from behind. Gunfire from the enemy plane, probably a Type 2 two-seat fighter (Kawasaki Ki-45 “Nick”) of the newly arrived 13th Flying Regiment, set the left engine of the Lightning ablaze. Hargy successfully shut it down, but another round of slugs smashed into the cockpit area and disabled the fuel system, stopping the right engine. Bleeding from a scalp wound, Hargy bailed out over New Britain and drifted down into a forest of eucalyptus trees. After the excitement wore off, he began thinking of “fantastic escape schemes,” never dreaming that he had just started an eight-month jungle adventure.

WITH YET ANOTHER empty cot in the squadron encampment, the Eightballers were hard-pressed to add Buka to their target list. Their first attempt, on May
31, had been spoiled by bad weather. The next opportunity, on June 6, was a successful run. Captain DeLasso Loos landed at the new airstrip on Goodenough Island for fuel, crossed the Solomon Sea and photographed Buka, then stopped at Goodenough again on the return leg. He logged six and one-half hours on the mission, a long time in the saddle for a single-seat aircraft. Another effort three days later was similarly productive, but on June 11 the mission was aborted due to compass failure. Flying without an accurate compass would have been suicide, as the whole expanse of the Solomon Sea had “nary a spit of land to show a beckoning finger in case of trouble.”

Despite Whitehead’s concerns about sending heavy bombers over Buka in daylight, the need to map the northern Solomons was critical. The process started with aerial photographs, required by the cartographers and intelligence personnel who created tactical maps—a procedure that took months. The assault on New Georgia would begin in two weeks, after which Admiral Halsey would require accurate Bougainville maps to plan the next campaign. There was no time to waste.

The 8th Photo Recon scheduled its specially equipped B-17, nicknamed
R.F.D. Tojo
, for the next photographic mission. Its crew made two runs over Buka Passage and a mapping pass down the center of Bougainville on June 15, but the film yielded only blank images. “We don’t mind flying for the cause,” wrote the squadron diarist, “but this no-picture deal is for the outhouse.”

Bomber command decided to send a crew from the 43rd Group on the next mapping run. The assignment went to a crew in the 65th Squadron who called themselves The Eager Beavers. Their pilot was an enigmatic twenty-four-year-old, Capt. Jay Zeamer Jr., who had flown B-26 Marauders in the 22nd Bomb Group but never passed the command pilot check ride. In all fairness, numerous fatal crashes marred the reputation of the early Marauders, which had an abnormally high landing speed and were unforgiving of mistakes. According to a fellow pilot, Zeamer repeatedly failed the check rides because he slowed the plane down to practically a full stall on every approach, thinking his technique was perfectly acceptable. In fact, it scared the hell out of the check pilots.

After shipping overseas with the 22nd, Zeamer remained stuck in the copilot’s seat. By late summer 1942, he’d had enough. Bored and frustrated, he convinced the commanding officer to transfer him into the 43rd Bomb Group, newly arrived in Australia. By moving over to B-17s, Zeamer was matched with a plane he greatly admired. But acceptance by the other pilots was another matter. To the rest of the 43rd Group, Zeamer was a castoff. He spent months doing odd jobs that no other pilot wanted, even serving as an intelligence officer, until he began to earn grudging approval. He flew several missions in the coveted left seat as the command pilot, though he allegedly never received a formal check ride.

Zeamer acquired his own crew, cobbled together from replacements and holdovers that didn’t belong to anyone else. The youngest was Tech. Sgt. Johnnie J. Able Jr., a nineteen-year-old flight engineer/top turret gunner from South Carolina.
Master Sgt. Joseph R. Sarnoski was the oldest crewmember at age twenty-eight. He grew up with sixteen siblings in a big Catholic family near Carbondale, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s coal country.

The crew lacked a B-17 of their own, but fate brought them a war-weary Fortress. Dropped off at Jackson Field, it was parked to one side to be cannibalized for parts. Its olive drab paint was faded to a color Zeamer described as “shit-brindle,” but he and his crew rehabilitated the B-17E (serial number 41-2666), and made a few improvements. They stripped out two thousand pounds of nonessential weight, then mounted twin .50-caliber machine guns in place of the single mounts in the waist positions, and replaced the two flexible .30-caliber guns in the nose with .50-caliber machine guns. Yet another .50-caliber was mounted in a fixed position in the “cheek” of the nose section, rigged so that Zeamer could fire it from the pilot’s seat. He claimed on numerous occasions that with sixteen guns,
Old 666
, as the crew called her, was the most heavily armed B-17 in the Pacific.

After test-flying the refurbished bomber on May 18, Zeamer and his crew did not fly it again until the 28th, when they completed a mapping mission over southeastern New Ireland. They next flew
Old 666
on June 2 to map the Admiralties and reconnoiter the Buka Passage—a mission lasting more than twelve hours. Their fourth flight in the bomber would be the risky mission to map Bougainville, scheduled for a predawn takeoff on the morning of June 16.

CREWS WERE NORMALLY awakened about two hours before takeoff for reconnaissance flights, which required less time to brief than bombing missions. Zeamer’s crew was scheduled to depart at 0400, but at midnight the phone in his tent jangled. Group operations told him that a photo reconnaissance of Buka was needed in addition to the mapping requirement. “Hell no,” Zeamer growled. “I’m going up there to do a mapping, and that’s it. Nothing is going to interfere with that.”

He hung up before learning the caller’s name. A few hours later, as
Old 666
was taxiing for the mission, a courier pulled up in a jeep and delivered official orders to photograph Buka. Informed during the briefing that earlier photo runs showed no great number of enemy planes on the airdrome, Zeamer instructed his navigator, Lt. Ruby E. Johnston, to plot a course for the distant field.

It was a nearly cloudless day, ideal for mapping. Johnston’s precise navigation brought the B-17 directly over Buka at 0830. In the belly of
Old 666
, Sgt. George E. Kendrick began taking photographs. Contrary to the briefing information, the airstrip was packed with planes. Crewmembers noted “a string of 15 or 20 fighters” parked alongside the single runway and approximately ten more either taxiing or getting airborne.

Unknown to the Allies, the Japanese were about to launch a strike against shipping at Guadalcanal. Reconnaissance aircraft had discovered Admiral Halsey’s invasion fleet, assembled at Lunga Point for the forthcoming assault on New Georgia. The aircraft at Buka were part of a preemptive strike that would commence
that very afternoon—and the count by Zeamer’s crew was accurate. Air Group 251 had arrived from Rabaul the previous day with thirty Zeros (A6M3 “Hamps”), and one
chutai
(typically a nine-plane division) was on alert. The combat log of Air Group 251 reveals that a total of eight Zeros scrambled to intercept the B-17, which threatened the secrecy and success of the pending attack.

Although the enemy fighters would reach the bomber’s altitude within minutes, Zeamer told his crew to commence the mapping run over Bougainville. The weather was unusually good, and it might not be as favorable for many days. Upon reaching Buka Passage, Zeamer turned southeast and started the mapping—a long, straight run of approximately eighty miles that would terminate at Empress Augusta Bay, two-thirds of the way down the west coast of Bougainville.

At the navigator’s station, Johnston quickly spun his circular slide rule and calculated that the run would take twenty-two minutes at their current ground speed. Due to the nature of photographic mapping, Zeamer would have to hold the aircraft absolutely steady for the entire distance. With enemy fighters closing, the minutes would seem like hours.

WARRANT OFFICER YOSHIO Oki, a twenty-seven-year-old veteran of the China campaign and an original member of the vaunted Tainan Air Group, led the eight Hamps aloft from Buka. With at least sixteen victories to his credit, Oki was one of less than a dozen pilots of the Tainan Group who survived the months of attrition over New Guinea and the Solomons in 1942. The other pilots in his
chutai
, none below the rank of flight petty officer second class, had ample experience. One of his
shotai
(three-plane section) leaders was also an ace. Flight Petty Officer 1st Class Ichirobei Yamazaki had downed more than a dozen Allied planes after joining the Tainan Group the previous year.

Wearing dark green paint schemes with black engine cowlings, the Model 32 fighters climbed hard into the sun after the lone bomber. Oki and his fellow pilots were obsessed with B-17s, long regarded as the ultimate foe in the Allied arsenal. Like Captain Ahab chasing down a great white whale, there was no greater accomplishment for a Japanese fighter pilot than to shoot down a “Boeing.”

Already four miles high, the B-17’s ground speed exceeded two hundred miles per hour, and the Zeros burned a lot of fuel during the long climb at full throttle. The strain, in fact, was too much for the Hamp piloted by Flight Petty Officer 2nd Class Shunichi Yahiro: its engine suffered a complete failure, forcing him to ditch. The remaining Zeros pressed ahead, gradually reeling in the B-17. After reaching its altitude, they closed the distance quickly. However, Oki and his fellow pilots were puzzled that the pilot of the Boeing did not attempt to evade them. Instead, the huge bomber maintained a rock-steady flight path. The intercept would be easy.

Indeed, it was illogical to hold the wings absolutely level while enemy fighters closed in. But from four miles up, a tilt of the camera’s lens by just one degree
would induce an error of one mile on the ground, ruining the mapping effort. The goal was to generate accurate maps for the troops who would invade Bougainville in a few months. To buy some extra time, Sgt. Herbert W. “Pudgy” Pugh fired a burst with the twin fifties in the tail position; likewise, Sgt. Forrest E. Dillman cut loose with the guns in the ball turret.

Rather than attack from the rear, Oki led his fighters around the unwavering B-17 to attack it from the front. The tactic was based on experience. Despite all the guns in a B-17, the forward quadrant was the weakest: aside from the upper turret, a typical B-17E/F had only two flexible .30-caliber machine guns in the nose, one for the bombardier, one for the navigator. Oki led his fighters well ahead of the B-17, providing ample separation before he initiated a frontal attack.

By the time the Zeros were in position, only two minutes remained on the mapping run. But two minutes was a long time to endure coordinated attacks by multiple fighters, especially while flying straight and level. Knowing that it was “the dumbest thing you could do with a B-17,” Zeamer held the bomber on course while the Zeros attacked.

As the
chutai
leader, Oki commenced the first head-on pass. “One whipped by my side window,” recalled Zeamer. This was probably Oki, who approached the B-17 from its eleven o’clock, flying straight at the bomber with a closing speed in excess of five hundred miles per hour. A collective report from the crew provided details: “A single-seat fighter made a distant pass from below at 11 o’clock and followed through in a right diving turn. Our tracers were seen entering the fuselage.”

Oki’s first pass was his last. Vaporizing gasoline streamed from holes in a fuel tank—he was fortunate the Zero didn’t explode in a fireball—and he could not reenter the fight. Most accounts credit Zeamer for damaging the Zero, but this was almost impossible. Committed to the mapping run, Zeamer never altered course. The single gun he controlled was bolted in place to fire straight ahead, whereas Oki approached from a position thirty degrees to the left of Zeamer’s aiming point. The damage to the Hamp was likely the work of Joe Sarnoski, reputedly an excellent gunner; or perhaps Sergeant Able in the top turret put slugs into the lead Hamp.

Oki’s fighter was disabled, leaving him no choice but to head home. Flight Petty Officer 2nd Class Hiroshi Iwano, seeing his
chutai
leader in distress eighty miles from Buka, accompanied Oki to the airdrome. This further reduced the number of interceptors, but Oki or one of his pilots evidently radioed for help. By the time the next frontal attack began, a twin-engine fighter had joined the fray.

Oki’s initial pass caused little damage to the B-17. Zeamer maintained his course in hopes of completing the mapping run, but about thirty seconds after Oki’s pass, a second frontal attack commenced. Numerous variations of what happened next have been published in books, magazine articles, and documentaries. Some details were invented by their writers in hyperbolic stories; others, as aviation historian and artist Jack Fellows puts it, “have evolved into a yarn laced with fuzzy recollection and wishful thinking over the passage of considerable time.”

A little-known compilation of crew statements given on the day of the mission contains the most reliable details. An extract, published for the intelligence community approximately a month after the event, reveals that the second frontal attack overwhelmed the limited number of forward-firing guns.

A half a minute [after the first pass], three enemy aircraft coordinated in a simultaneous attack from the front. A single-engine fighter attacked from slightly below our aircraft from 10 o’clock. His accurate fire wounded the bombardier, the pilots, the engineer, and extensively damaged our aircraft. The hydraulic system was destroyed, all flight instruments except the airspeed indicator were made inoperative, the control cables were damaged, the pilot’s rudder pedals were smashed and the oxygen bottles in the cockpit were holed and set on fire. In spite of his wounds, the bombardier effectively fired at this enemy aircraft until it burst into flames and disintegrated. Simultaneously, the navigator was firing at a single-engine fighter approaching from 2:30 o’clock and the pilot was firing a fixed, forward firing .50 caliber at a twin-engine fighter coming in from 11:30 o’clock.