Target: Rabaul (22 page)

The return of Donegan and his crew was a tremendous relief to the 38th Bomb Group, but the talk in the camps was about Cheli. Word of his heroism also sped to Australia. On the afternoon of August 18, Whitehead wired a three-page situation report to Kenney in Brisbane. Most of the document focused on the two days of attacks, but the final paragraph was dedicated to the heroics at Dagua: “Cheli, who was leading the 38th Group, and his crew were lost today,” wrote Whitehead. “His airplane was attacked and was in flames before he reached the target. Despite this, he carried out his attack on the Dagua airdrome, leading his unit in a most successful attack before he crashed into the ocean just offshore. I am getting the data together with a view of recommending Cheli for the Medal of Honor. From preliminary data available, his case appears to merit that award.”

Replying the following day, Kenney offered a suggestion: “In writing up Cheli’s case, be sure to get affidavits covering the fact that he continued the attack and led
his unit into action in spite of the fact that his airplane was on fire. Also mention something to the effect that after the airplane got on fire he could have climbed to sufficient altitude to bail out if he had been willing to allow his organization to go leaderless into the attack.”

The last sentence was merely an opinion—and a poorly founded one. Cheli could have turned the lead over. The contingency should have been discussed in detail during the mission briefing. In theory, therefore, the formation would not have gone “leaderless.” More importantly, Kenny had no concept of how savagely the Japanese fighters had attacked. He also failed to comprehend how quickly they would have swarmed over Cheli’s aircraft had he climbed to a safe altitude to jump. In addition, Cheli could not pull straight up to bail out. With two squadrons of B-25s following him, he would have needed to pull off to one side to avoid parachuting into their flight path. This would have further exposed his plane to the full fury of the Japanese fighters. In hindsight, Cheli’s decision to stay with the formation gave him and his crew the best chance of survival.

The truly remarkable aspect of the incident was Cheli’s airmanship and cool-headedness under unimaginably intense circumstances. While under fire from enemy fighters and antiaircraft guns, he dealt with a severe inflight emergency
and
led his squadron on a tricky attack at minimal altitude.

Cheli’s squadron mates had no idea whether he had survived the crash-landing at sea. Because of the aggressive fighters and heavy antiaircraft fire, they could not linger over the spot where he ditched. A few years later, when Kenney penned his autobiography, he concocted a heroic demise for Cheli and his crew.

Having completed the most successful attack of the day, which wiped out every Jap plane on the field, Cheli then instructed his wingman to lead the formation back home and said he would try to make a landing at sea. He turned north toward the water which was only a few miles away and made it, but before he could land, one of the gasoline tanks exploded and the airplane plunged into the sea. For this action beyond all call of duty he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously.

Kenney forgot (or didn’t know) that Dagua airdrome lay only a few yards from the sea, not “a few miles.” His alternate ending is curious because he surely knew, by the time he wrote his memoirs, that Cheli had survived the watery crash-landing.

A fishing boat recovered Cheli and two of his crew and took them ashore. Numerous Japanese observed this, including an officer in the 51st Airfield Battalion who would later state that Cheli, although shirtless, could walk without assistance. A medical officer in the same organization examined Cheli and deemed him unhurt. The two crewmembers, however, were stretcher cases. Staff Sergeant Clinton H. Murphree, the turret gunner, had bullet wounds in his abdomen and
thigh. Technical Sergeant Raymond C. Warren, the radioman/gunner, had two broken ribs and an eye injury.

The captives were moved to the 59th Flying Regiment headquarters and later to the 9th Flying Brigade headquarters, during which time Murphree apparently died of his wounds. If the latter, the Japanese medical personnel at Wewak would have exerted little effort other than to make him comfortable. Warren, as an enlisted man, was almost certainly executed after his rank was determined. No record exists to corroborate a date or location, but other crewmen from B-25s of the same group, captured earlier that month, were known to have been murdered in that area.

Two weeks before the big strikes on Wewak, twenty-four strafers of the 38th Bomb Group had conducted a barge sweep along the New Guinea coast from Lae to Madang. Numerous small vessels were strafed and destroyed, but a B-25D of the 71st Bomb Squadron, flown by Capt. William H. Uhler, was attacked by a pair of fighters that either caused control damage or wounded the flight crew. Flying erratically, the aircraft climbed and temporarily joined another element of B-25s, but it collided with one of the planes and “plunged into the sea at a sharp angle,” as described by Middlebrook. Witnesses thought that no one surfaced after the crash; however, copilot 2nd Lt. Owen H. Salvage survived and was taken prisoner. While in the water, he sustained a nasty bite, ostensibly from a shark, on one calf.

Three days later, accurate antiaircraft fire caused a B-25 of the 405th Bomb Squadron to ditch near Madang. The squadron’s commanding officer, Maj. Williston M. Cox Jr., had been leading the overall mission and was captured along with most of the crew. Taken to Madang, Cox would later remember seeing Lt. Salvage there, his leg badly infected. The captives were subsequently moved to a Kempeitai compound in the village of Amron, about nine miles above Madang in the foothills. There, the survivors from the two B-25s (except Cox) were executed on August 31. Second Lieutenant Robert J. Koscelnak (copilot), 1st Lt. Louis L. Ritacco (navigator), and Tech. Sgt. Hugh W. Anderson (radio gunner) were blindfolded, bayoneted, and then beheaded by soldiers of the Kempeitai. Lieutenant Salvage was stabbed by “many soldiers” who took turns—essentially using him for bayonet practice. Lastly, Capt. Robert L. Herry (pilot) asked to be shot rather than stabbed to death, but he was tied between two uprights and bayoneted.

Cox, a senior officer, was important enough to retain for interrogation. So was Cheli, who had taken command of the 405th after Cox went missing. Whether the Kempeitai interrogators learned of this coincidence is not known, nor is what the two men endured in their prisons: Cox at Amron, Cheli at Wewak. In early October 1943, both men were transported from New Guinea to the Kempeitai compound at Rabaul. They were initially held in cell number one, reserved for new arrivals undergoing initial interrogation, but after a few days they were transferred into cells housing other POWs. Cheli subsequently spent about three weeks in cell
number five with Jose Holguin, who learned the circumstances of Cheli’s crash-landing. “He did not know how he got out of the cockpit,” Holguin later wrote, “but remembered having to swim to the surface as the airplane was sinking to the bottom. He tried to help his copilot but could not. One or two of his other crewmembers were, supposedly, also captured, but once interrogations at Wewak were finished, around the end of September, he lost track of his men, and as far as anyone knows, they never arrived at Rabaul.”

Cheli was skinny, pale, and depressed. As Holguin, his new cellmate, noted sympathetically: “He had not yet reconciled himself to his new existence and that new existence became more precarious with each passing day.”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE August 18 raid against Wewak, three F-4/F-5 Lightnings went out to photograph the airdromes. Due to bad weather, all three returned with unused film. Thus the claims submitted by the returning fliers could not be verified by intelligence experts. When the photographic evidence was unavailable, overlooked, or ignored, war correspondents got a dose of exaggeration. In fact, newspaper headlines announced that the results of the
first
raid had been revised upward, and now stood at 120 planes destroyed, with another 78 destroyed on the second raid. The aggregate of 198 represented roughly 90 percent of the 225 planes that Kenney claimed were on the airdromes prior to the strikes, suggesting that the attacks had all but wiped out Teramoto’s Fourth Air Army. Enthusiasm for good news overruled common sense, and the stories went out to the wire services.

After the war, the U.S. Army’s official history stated that actual losses to the Japanese were “about half what the Allies initially claimed.” The assessment matches other sources. In his account of the New Guinea campaign, Lt. Gen. Yoshihara Kane, Eighteenth Army chief of staff, wrote: “About August 1943 the air units in New Guinea reached their peak, and … were able to relax to the extent of thinking they could sleep peacefully. But about mid-August, the airfields at Wewak and But were bombed heavily and almost 100 crack planes were lost. Not only were the air troops despondent, but so also were the troops of 18th Army.”

The back-to-back raids had severely depleted the fighter units. Afterward, according to Japanese authors Ikuhiko Hata and Yasuho Izawa, the 13th Flying Regiment had only two operational aircraft remaining; the 68th was down to two, and the 78th had none. Kane went so far as to call the raids “a fatal blow to the air force.” He undoubtedly meant Teramoto’s Fourth Air Army, rather than the entire JAAF, but the point was that the Allies had at last achieved aerial superiority over New Guinea. Within a few weeks, further Allied advances would essentially trap the Japanese. Thereafter, replacement of aircraft and pilots became increasingly difficult, and aerial support of ground operations all but ceased. Similarly, efforts to resupply the garrisons, even those in the north, were curtailed due to the fact that no aerial protection could be provided for the convoys.

Although the two raids had battered Wewak, it was far from finished. Attacks would continue regularly into 1944, with many more casualties among Allied airmen. The JAAF succeeded in bringing in periodic reinforcements to replace losses from the raids, but never regained its former strength in the region. The skies over New Guinea now belonged to Kenney, making it only a matter of time before the Allies also prevailed in its jungles.

*
Many Allied airmen referred to the Oscars—and other radial engine single-seat JAAF fighters—as “Zeros.” The ubiquitous usage is understandable: the types were nearly identical in appearance, especially in the blur of high-speed combat.

CHAPTER 10

Primary Colors

D
ESPITE THE DAMAGE
caused by the bombing and strafing attacks in mid-August 1943, Wewak continued to be a thorny target for months. Throughout August and September, Wewak and its satellite airdromes demanded V Bomber Command’s attention. On August 25, Kenney was compelled to wire Arnold that he had already used up 10 percent of his parafrag stockpile. Tossing in a not-so-subtle reminder, Kenny added that because he had designed the parafrag, he should be entitled to a bigger share of the production. Boldly, he asked Arnold to intervene on his behalf.

By the end of August, Kenney’s intelligence gurus estimated the Japanese had 118 operational aircraft in New Guinea, primarily at Wewak. More alarming was the count on New Britain (at Rabaul, Gasmata, and Cape Gloucester) totaling more than 280 aircraft, plus 54 at Kavieng and 113 in the Solomons. Even stronger was the enemy’s presence in the Netherlands East Indies, with an estimated 345 aircraft. Kenney was no doubt concerned: after months of effort, the Japanese still had 910 planes in the theater.

Kenney had another dilemma, too. Many of his units were fatigued, yet he was committed to supporting an ambitious list of operations already scheduled for the near future. The seaborne invasion of Lae was set for September 4, to be followed the next day by a massive airdrop over Nadzab, a promising airfield site in the Markham Valley. The amphibious invasion at Finschhafen would commence on September 22.

To maintain aerial superiority over New Guinea, Kenney instructed Whitehead to continue pounding all the coastal strongholds, particularly Wewak. Whitehead also sent raiders to attack the airdromes at Cape Gloucester and Gasmata. He used everything at his disposal, including the RAAF Bostons and Beaufighters of No. 9 Operational Group, hitting five or six different locations almost daily.

But the policy had a downside. In order to maintain the focus on strongholds in New Guinea and western New Britain, Kenney and Whitehead had to keep
Rabaul off the target list. Kenney informed MacArthur that he “didn’t have enough strength to handle the Jap air forces at both Rabaul and Wewak.” He would continue hitting the latter until the forthcoming operations were well underway.

MacArthur tacitly approved the proposal, which is odd. By early August, when the conversation occurred, Rabaul had already been ignored for three weeks. Only five nocturnal raids had been conducted during the first twelve days of July. Furthermore, excepting routine solo reconnaissance missions, Rabaul was not targeted at all in August and only once in September. That raid, by nine Catalina flying boats on the night of September 3, proved harmless. It was the only attack during a span of nearly three months; otherwise, the garrison enjoyed a reprieve. Tens of thousands of people could sleep without the disruption of air raid sirens, antiaircraft barrages, and the
crumph
of exploding bombs.