Target: Rabaul (2 page)

The green light flashed and McMurria pushed the four throttles forward, revving the Pratt & Whitney engines to their combined maximum of 4,800
horsepower. Behind him, Sgt. Leslie H. Burnette, the flight engineer, monitored a panel of gauges—a half-dozen for each engine—for signs of trouble. McMurria released the brakes and the Liberator lurched forward, gaining momentum slowly.

Halfway down the runway, still well below takeoff speed, the wing lights picked up a disturbing sight: mud and gravel covered an area on the right side of the steel planking. The heavy rains had caused a washout. Moments later the landing gear plowed into the slurry, slewing the aircraft to the right. McMurria chopped the throttles and stood on the brakes, holding his breath while the heavy aircraft slid along the wet steel. The planking ended and the B-24 skidded into the overrun area, finally coming to a stop uncomfortably close to disaster.

After letting out a few expletives and regaining their composure, McMurria and Martindale carefully turned the Liberator around. Back on the steel mat, they taxied to the washout and stopped, letting the engines idle while they inspected the landing gear for damage. The skid had caused no harm, and only the right side of the runway was covered with sludge. McMurria was confident that he could get airborne on the next attempt, if he hugged the left side of the runway.

Twice previously, on rainy nights like this, the 90th Group had lost bombers and their entire crews to takeoff mishaps. The airfield duty officer arrived and offered to cancel the mission because of the close call; however, McMurria, with visions of Sydney dancing in his head, declined. “Let’s go,” he said.

And that was good enough for his crew.

This time, the B-24 lifted off normally. McMurria gave due respect to the mountains, keeping the craggy range off his right wing until the bomber climbed to twenty thousand feet. Over the northern highlands of New Guinea, the skies cleared. The crew began to relax as the sun warmed the Liberator’s interior.

Their first objective that morning was Wewak, a coastal settlement almost five hundred miles north of Port Moresby. Formerly the administrative headquarters of the Sepik District, the village had been occupied without a fight the previous month. Allied reconnaissance flights periodically monitored enemy activity, but the only noticeable changes thus far were improvements to the grass airstrip, previously used by a Roman Catholic mission.

Unknown to the Allies, Wewak was primed to become a key airbase complex for units of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force (JAAF). In late December 1942, Imperial General Headquarters decided to reinforce Wewak and the village of Madang, two hundred miles to the south, with a full division each—one transferred from Korea, the other from North China. In a cooperative effort dictated by Tokyo, ships and aircraft of the Imperial Navy shepherded the convoys to New Guinea, and a small naval base force arrived to establish a civilian administration, or
minsei-bu
, at Wewak.

Unaware of these changes, McMurria began a gradual descent toward the northern coast of New Guinea. Approaching Wewak, where they anticipated only light antiaircraft fire from one known gun position, the crewmembers
were stunned by the number of ships crowding the harbor. Even more disconcerting, some two dozen Japanese aircraft were parked wingtip to wingtip on the grass airstrip.

The B-24 had arrived just hours after the convoy dropped anchor in the harbor. Transports were already busy offloading troops of the 20th Infantry Division. A far bigger threat was posed by the fighters of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Force (JNAF): twenty-one Type 0 carrier fighters, known universally as Zeros, had deployed to Wewak from the flattop
Junyo
. McMurria and Martindale counted at least six Zekes, the Allied recognition name for the model A6M2, taking off from the grass strip to intercept the Liberator.

McMurria was furious about the flawed intelligence. “We were alone,” he would later write, “looking down at all those goddamn Japanese while supposedly flying a routine reconnaissance mission.”

Outrage quickly gave way to instinct. Up in the bomber’s glass-paneled nose, the bombardier keyed his intercom microphone. “Mac,” shouted Lt. Thomas F. Doyle, “let’s get the hell out of here!”

McMurria’s options were limited. Typically, condensation rising from the warm Bismarck Sea formed thick white cumulus clouds, providing excellent hiding places. But this morning, the skies were clear. Miles to the east, McMurria could see a “little bit of bad weather” and quickly realized that those clouds represented his crew’s best hope for survival. Shoving the throttles forward, he rolled the heavy bomber into a sharp turn. Up forward, Doyle instinctively threw a switch, releasing the entire bomb load in a single salvo. He hoped centrifugal force might propel them toward the enemy airdrome, but the effort was more of a gesture than a calculated attempt to hit anything. Still, his snap decision aided the whole crew. Freed of its heavy bomb load, the Liberator accelerated.

Roaring across the harbor, McMurria hauled back on the control column to get above the guns of the anchored warships. Shells began exploding nearby, one so close that it peppered the right inboard engine with shrapnel. Excited chatter on the intercom announced the arrival of fast-climbing Zekes. In the tail turret, Sgt. Frank O. Wynne called out three fighters approaching from astern. Three more were reported overhead by Burnette, who now manned the upper turret.

The Liberator had ten .50-caliber machine guns for defense, but even that relative arsenal was not enough to deter six of the Imperial Navy’s best fighters. Within moments the Zekes initiated a well-coordinated attack, charging in from several directions simultaneously. McMurria tried every trick he knew, rolling the big aircraft and then skidding it from side to side, but the carrier-based pilots were savvy. “They came at us from above, below, from head-on, from the rear and from port and starboard,” McMurria would later recall, “… and in spite of any evasive action I could take, we were getting shot up badly.”

The antiaircraft shell that exploded near the number three engine sealed their fate: the damaged engine began losing power. Though the B-24 had no realistic
chance of escape, McMurria continued out to sea. The crew desperately hoped the Zekes would turn back, but the rain clouds were still fifteen miles distant. It would take almost six minutes to reach them at the bomber’s reduced speed—an eternity if the fighters kept up their disciplined attacks. During those few minutes, the Zekes could pump thousands of machine-gun bullets and dozens of explosive 20mm shells into the Liberator at point-blank range. Dreams of Sydney evaporated.

But the gunfire suddenly stopped. Scanning the skies, McMurria and his crew wondered why. Martindale glanced out his side window and saw a Zeke to his right, maintaining a loose formation with the Liberator but otherwise making no aggressive moves. In the upper turret, Burnette reported that another enemy fighter, directly above them and slightly to the front, “was doing the same thing.”

The pilots looked up just in time to see a black object tumble from the Zeke overhead. Martindale mistook it for an external fuel tank until the device exploded, sending out brilliant streamers of burning phosphorus that hung in the air like long, white tentacles. Luckily the weapon, a Type 3 aerial burst bomb, had detonated to the side of the Liberator’s flight path. The astonished crew barely had time to react before another Zeke joined the one overhead and boxed in the bomber. One by one, three more bombs tumbled down. Martindale called out their release, giving McMurria ample time to veer away. The busy pilots had no idea they were among the first Allied airmen to witness the use of the spectacular but ineffective weapon.

Having failed to stop the Liberator, the Japanese pilots resumed conventional gunnery attacks. Soon thereafter, McMurria had to feather the prop on the number three engine, further reducing the bomber’s speed. They finally reached the rain clouds, which proved pathetically small, hiding the aircraft for only a few seconds.

Unable to outrun the enemy, McMurria and his crew fought back. The left waist gunner, Pfc. Patsy F. Grandolpho, hollered on the intercom that he’d shot down a Zeke. No one else saw the action, nor could anyone confirm a second fighter claimed by Doyle, the bombardier, a few minutes later. The lack of witnesses supports the
kodochosho
(combat log) of the fighter detachment from
Junyo
, which lost no planes that day.

The Zekes continued swarming, nimble carnivores nipping at a crippled beast. Despite its great size, the B-24 shuddered from the impact of bullets and 20mm projectiles. One shell exploded in the nose compartment, puncturing a hydraulic reservoir. Buzzing shrapnel flayed Doyle’s back while he stooped to fire his machine gun. He staggered up to the flight deck, shocking the pilots with his gory appearance. A large chunk of flesh hung from his left shoulder, and his flight suit was soaked red. But the wound wasn’t life-threatening. Most of what stained Doyle’s flight suit turned out to be hydraulic fluid. Martindale ordered the navigator, Lt. Alston F. Sugden, to man Doyle’s machine gun. The running gunfight continued.

Another 20mm shell exploded at the rear of the fuselage, cutting control cables to the rudders and horizontal stabilizers. Out on the main wing, bullets shredded the fabric-covered ailerons. Unable to hold the wings steady, McMurria noted
grimly that “the ship was getting harder to fly.” The Zekes made two more firing runs, knocking out another engine, after which the Liberator was nearly impossible to control. Smoking badly and losing altitude, the B-24 descended below a thousand feet—too low for anyone to bail out safely.

McMurria alerted the crew to prepare for ditching.

The men in the nose compartment were to move to the relative safety of the flight deck, but one did not comply. Private First Class Walter R. Erskine, manning a machine gun to fend off frontal attacks, “was frozen to his .50-caliber and wouldn’t leave it,” reported a crewmember. A nearly identical situation occurred in the rear compartment. While the tail gunner, ball turret gunner, and one of the side gunners moved to the forward bulkhead to brace for impact, Grandolpho held tightly to his waist gun. Described as “looking extremely frightened,” he refused to budge.

Up in the flight compartment, McMurria and Martindale struggled to control their faltering leviathan. For a few heart-stopping moments the B-24 staggered through the air, barely above stall speed. McMurria may have been the first to attempt a two-engine ditching in a B-24, and there was no way to finesse a water landing. With the bomber on the verge of a stall, McMurria lowered the nose and added power to gain speed, which gave him some control; then, at the last instant, he pulled the throttles to idle and hauled back on the control column, hoping to settle tail-first in a reasonably soft landing.

But a B-24 was almost impossible to ditch without major structural damage. The problem was the Liberator’s design, which combined a high main wing and a cavernous belly with flimsy bomb bay doors that slid open and closed on vertical tracks. During a water landing the doors invariably collapsed, often leading to the failure of the aft bulkhead in the bomb bay. It was not uncommon for B-24s to break in two on impact with the water.

McMurria’s Liberator struck the surface of Huon Gulf with a thunderous splash and promptly broke in half behind the main wing. The forward section, weighted by the main wing and four engines, sank immediately. The men on the flight deck, dazed by the impact, found themselves underwater and going down fast. McMurria crawled through his side window and ascended what felt like “thirty or forty feet” before surfacing. Only the tail section of the bomber remained afloat. Neither of the two automatic life rafts had deployed properly from compartments in the main wing. One didn’t surface at all, and the other was tangled in its own lanyard, about to be pulled under by the sinking nose section.

Just then, Staff Sgt. Fred S. Engle, the radio operator, popped up. Realizing that the raft’s lanyard had to be cut immediately, he discovered that his survival knife was missing, evidently torn away in the crash. Doyle, the bombardier, surfaced twenty feet away, and Engle shouted to him for help. Unfortunately, Doyle had also lost his survival knife. A moment later, however, he remembered that he had a backup—a dime store keychain with a pocketknife attached. Pulling it from
his clothing, he threw it to Engle without a moment’s thought about the possible consequences. Mesmerized, the other crewmen watched the little knife flip end-over-end through the air. Doyle had a nasty shoulder wound, was treading water,
and
wore a bulky Mae West, yet his twenty-foot toss was perfect. So was Engle’s one-handed catch. Diving underwater, Engle cut the lanyard. The raft popped to the surface.

The last man to come up was Martindale. Just before impact he had turned off the master switches to prevent a fire, but he was briefly knocked unconscious. Revived by seawater rising in the cockpit, he found himself pinned in his seat. Wriggling free only after the cockpit was fully flooded, Martindale escaped through the side window and discovered that he wasn’t wearing a Mae West. He had taken it off when they stopped on the runway at Port Moresby and subsequently forgot to put it back on. The oversight nearly killed him. Burdened by wet clothing and the .45 automatic he wore in a shoulder harness, he barely reached the surface. After a quick gasp, he sank. Kicking back to the surface one last time, he came up behind Sugden, the navigator, and in desperation seized Sugden’s harness. This gave Sugden a terrible fright: he thought a shark had grabbed him.

In all, eight men got out of the Liberator. Erskine and Grandolpho, evidently trapped in the broken bomber, never appeared. The survivors—McMurria, Martindale, Doyle, Sugden, Burnette, Engle, Wynn, and Sgt. Raymond J. Farnell, Jr.—gathered around the single raft, assessing their injuries. Most were minor, but Tom Doyle was bad shape. In addition to the wound in his back, he had a deep gash in his right thigh. A piece of jagged metal had sliced all the way to the bone when he escaped from the sinking plane. While McMurria tried to administer first aid from a small emergency kit, Doyle lay bleeding on the floor of the raft. The rest of the crew, glancing around nervously for sharks, clung to the raft’s sides.