Target: Rabaul (61 page)

The early
Reisen’s
greatest trump had been its small turning radius. In large-scale air combat we used all kinds of tactics to lure the enemy into a dogfight. And finally, the enemy stopped fighting on our terms, and with power and speed they carried out with all their strength frontal attacks and disengaged before we could turn after them.

In that situation, we could not compete. Our only tactic then was to spot the enemy first, before they prepared themselves to attack, and vanquish them.

With honest respect for the F6F, Komachi considered the Hellcat the best enemy fighter he faced. “It was faster than our Zero and more powerful,” he explained. “It could dogfight, whereas the F4U could not.”

Nearly killed by an F6F during the Marianas campaign, Komachi added: “There is nothing more frightening than a Hellcat on your tail. They would just shower you with bullets. I used to have nightmares about that!”

Warrant Officer Takeo Tanimizu, who received flight training after the Pacific war began, served on carriers before reporting to Rabaul in late 1943. His first combat coincided with the Fifth Air Force’s big raid on November 2, when
Tanimizu battled Lightnings. “P-38s were not difficult to fight,” he later stated. “In 1942, the Americans lost many dogfights because their pilots did not fully utilize the capabilities of this fighter. They attempted to dogfight us and lost. At low altitudes, they were easy prey because they were not very fast. Later, their pilots got smart and stayed up where we couldn’t reach them. They would swoop down like hawks, make their pass and then climb for altitude. We always had to keep looking up.… The weakest part of the P-38 was the tail: one 20mm shell and the tail would snap off.”

Tanimizu’s opinion of American naval fighters resembled that of his fellow
Reisen
pilots:

The F4U was a tough plane. The only time you could shoot it down was when it was fleeing. You had to shoot at it from a certain angle—from the rear and down into the cockpit—or your bullets would bounce off.

I think the toughest opponent was the Grumman F6F. They could maneuver and roll, whereas planes such as the P-38 and F4U made hit-and-run passes. The F6F could actually dogfight with us, and it was much faster and more powerful than our Zero.

Kusaka even weighed in. As a fleet commander, he compared the Allied fighters through a much wider lens. “The Army planes—P-40s and P-38s—were both very difficult to engage in aerial combat, but once engaged they were shot down very easily,” Kusaka stated in a postwar interrogation. “The Navy plane—the F6F—was not so very fast, but it was very maneuverable and was very much adapted for aerial combat. The F4U was an excellent plane because of its superior speed, heavy armor and armament, and it was very difficult to shoot down in aerial combat. This plane was considered to be the best.”

EQUIPPED WITH IMPROVED
Reisens
, and fighting vigorously to defend their own airdromes, the Japanese held their own for the first few weeks of the renewed aerial campaign. By late January, however, Admiral Kusaka decided to relieve the much-depleted Sixth Air Attack Force, which included Air Group 204. Needing reinforcements, he requested the aircraft of the 2nd Carrier Division at Truk. Underscoring the need for more planes, at least thirteen fighters were reported lost in combat over Rabaul on January 23, and the transfer was ordered by Admiral Koga.

Two days later, the reinforcements arrived. Three carriers (
Junyo, Hiyo
, and
Ryuho
) sent sixty-two Zeros, eighteen Vals, and eighteen Kates to bolster Kusaka’s defenses and his limited attack capability. The exhausted Sixth Air Attack Force withdrew to Truk for recuperation and training, leaving behind twenty Zeros and a few other planes. In addition, approximately twenty pilots from Air Group 204 were transferred laterally to Air Group 253 at Tobera, a move that some did not
embrace. Among them were warrant officers Iwamoto and Komachi. They felt hamstrung at Tobera, which lacked the width to permit the three-plane section scrambles they were accustomed to at Lakunai.

One of the carrier division’s staff officers, Lt. Cmdr. Masatake Okumiya, flew to Rabaul on January 20 ahead of the main transfer. Previously assigned to the staff of the 26th Air Flotilla on Bougainville, he looked forward to a reunion with his old unit. He first paid his respects to Kusaka and was briefed about current operations, wherein he learned that the Eleventh Air Fleet was currently down to just eighty Zeros, with 30 percent of the aviators and ground crews sick. Okumiya was then driven to the building that the 26th Air Flotilla had commandeered for its headquarters, a large, handsome house built on pilings in the tropical style.

Remembering his friends in good spirits, Okumiya received a shock when he saw their demeanor:

I rushed out of the car as soon as it stopped, and ran up the staircase. I expected to see my dear old friends after four months of separation.

The people I saw at headquarters were the same people in the same outfit. But their words and attitude were totally different from those I had seen several months before. They had been energetic and bright then; but now they were short-tempered, and their language was rough. Their fighting spirit, which everyone in the military had praised, had disappeared without a trace. The former harmony in the headquarters … was also gone. What had happened to them?

Okumiya could not discern whether the staff members were simply war-weary or had given up. Knowing about their pending withdrawal to Truk, he realized they were anxious to leave Rabaul. He also detected a clear sense of remorse among the senior staff. “The commander and his staff members could not board the planes and take the lead because they had their own duty,” he wrote. “Yet, combat took their subordinates and friends with no mercy, day in and day out.”

It gradually dawned on Okumiya that his outlook during the past few months had been naive. The mounting death toll among the air units had become a source of anguish for the staff at Rabaul. Physically and mentally, they were fast approaching burnout.

HOPELESSNESS SOON BECAME common at Rabaul. The sixty-two Zeros that arrived with the 2nd Carrier Division provided only temporary improvement before their numbers eroded, and only ten additional Zeros were received in February. Approximately 150 planes had been delivered to Truk by carriers, many in crates, but there weren’t enough airframe personnel to assemble them or qualified pilots to test fly and ferry them to Rabaul.

General Mitchell, meanwhile, continually escalated the size and frequency of Allied raids. On the morning of February 10, just two weeks after the infusion of planes at Rabaul, fifty-nine SBDs and two dozen TBFs attacked Vunakanau with an escort of ninety-nine fighters. Two dozen B-25s escorted by twenty fighters hit the same target shortly thereafter. Later still, twenty-one Liberators escorted by twenty-eight Corsairs and Lightnings attacked Tobera airdrome. The three waves totaled 275 Allied planes—more than Kusaka had in his whole inventory.

During the light bomber attack on Vunakanau, only fifteen to twenty Zeros were seen in the air, of which just five intercepted. Practically unopposed, the TBFs scored at least eleven direct hits with two-thousand-pounders on the concrete strip, rendering it temporarily unserviceable. While the Avengers pounded the runway, the SBDs targeted antiaircraft emplacements.

A marine dive-bomber squadron, VMSB-241, was on its first mission over Rabaul. Captain Alphonse B. Sutton led a six-plane division of variegated blue SBDs on their first combat dives. Their targets were antiaircraft gun emplacements, mostly the big, high-angle “heavies” scattered around the airdrome complex, although some crews were assigned to dive on “autos” (multiple-barrel automatic cannons), while others attacked machine-gun emplacements. Scores of the light weapons ringed the big guns. “During our dive on the target,” recalled Sutton, “the enemy tracer bullets were coming at us so heavy that it was similar to flying through hail.” Sutton and his fellow pilots fired back, strafing their targets with two .50-caliber machine guns in the cowling while they plummeted almost straight down.

Other than seeing ribbons of tracer fire in his dive, Sutton was hardly aware of his surroundings until after he released his thousand-pounder and pulled out. This was where his Dauntless was most vulnerable, but he also had an opportunity to look around:

I looked up in the sky and saw hundreds of black puffs caused by the explosions of the Japanese large antiaircraft guns. I also witnessed several planes burning and spinning down toward the earth. At that moment I could not make out whether they were American or Japanese.…

My first thought was that this was just what we had seen in the movies. But it quickly registered on me that this was no movie—all this hell was for real.…

Vunakanau simply hadn’t enough guns to effectively defend against almost sixty howling dive-bombers. The marine SBDs dropped their bombs with great accuracy, scoring direct hits or “effective hits” on several heavy guns, numerous automatic weapons, and machine-gun pits. But the bombers were not immune. Lieutenant Paul C. Wells never pulled out of his dive, an indication that he was unconscious or dead when his Dauntless plunged straight into the target. Four
other SBDs were damaged, two with large holes in their tail sections. An Avenger of VMTB-143 was also shot down, crashing into a hill near Toma plantation, and five other TBFs were damaged by machine-gun fire.

For the Japanese gun crews, the sight of dozens of dive-bombers roaring down, firing as they came, plus the knowledge that tons of explosives would soon be whistling down on them, was terrifying. And the attacks came daily. Eventually, something had to give.

Recently promoted to captain, Saiji Matsuda of the Kempeitai investigated an incident involving an antiaircraft battery commander. During one attack, the lieutenant colonel “hit, beat upon, and kicked his subordinates” while screaming at them to cease fire. A few subordinate officers considered killing him, but instead notified the military police. After the investigation, the colonel was sentenced to execution by firing squad. He requested permission to “commit an honorable suicide,” which was granted. Instead of performing a traditional hara-kiri, a ritual self-disembowelment, he drank a beer, then blew his brains out with a pistol. “The laws of the battlefield are merciless,” wrote Matsuda. “That his family did not have to experience the ostracism that would otherwise have resulted was the only bright spot.”

THE MOMENTUM THAT Ralph Mitchell had built was now unstoppable. Squadron upon squadron continued pounding Lakunai, Tobera, and Vunakanau airdromes on February 12 and 13. More than two hundred Allied planes participated each day, bombing and strafing with increasing impunity. Opposition on both days amounted to less than fifty interceptors, approximately half as many as Kusaka had sent aloft just a few weeks earlier. Coming to grips with the inevitable, Lt. Cmdr. Okumiya would later write, “We repeated ambush after ambush, day in and day out. However, the achievement was small and we became unable to attack the enemy’s bases. Obviously the result was our own damage increasing. It seemed that no matter how many enemy planes were shot down, they reinforced their units even more. I felt strongly that the continuation of a defensive battle would be difficult in this situation.”

Still the Japanese refused to quit. Almost every night, Kusaka defiantly sent his few remaining
rikko
crews against Allied positions in the Solomons and coastal New Guinea. But the reversal of fortune was now complete. Two years earlier, almost to the month, the first American efforts to bomb Rabaul had consisted of a few unescorted B-17s, which accomplished nothing more than annoyance for the Japanese. Now the Japanese could muster only three or four Betty bombers, and their attacks were too insignificant to make an impact on the Allied juggernaut.

The aerial assault by Mitchell’s forces, conversely, made such dramatic progress that his staff may have become overconfident. On the night of February 14, a mission was sent out to sow mines in Simpson Harbor. The navy had modified its Mark 12 cylindrical mine for dropping by parachute, and TBF Avengers were capable of carrying a single 1,600-pound weapon. Marine squadrons had conducted night
mine-laying missions in the southern Bougainville area a year previously, but casualties were considered “too heavy to warrant the continuation” due to the fact that the Avengers were easily spotlighted by searchlights and knocked down by antiaircraft fire. Later that year the marines laid almost a hundred mines in the northern Solomons, but again the crews considered the cost to be “outrageously high.”

No one had learned from previous experience. The ComAirSols staff decided it would be worthwhile to plan a “special mining mission” over Simpson Harbor, the most heavily defended anchorage in the entire theater. Orders were written, and Mitchell, a marine flier himself, undoubtedly knew of the event as the Avenger crews headed off. Starting at 0030 hours on February 14, twenty-five TBFs from VMTB-233 took off from Bougainville. One later turned back, but the rest proceeded to New Britain and set up their drop profiles. Descending to an altitude of less than six hundred feet, the TBFs cut across the upper half of Simpson Harbor from west to east, their speed reduced to less than 180 knots to enable proper parachute deployment.

As the mines deployed, multiple searchlights coned the slow-moving Avengers. Intense antiaircraft fire followed, bringing down one Avenger in the first wave, two in the second wave, and three from the third. Two of the Avengers were reported as “flamers.” Three made controlled crashes in the harbor area, and all three pilots—lieutenants Hugh L. Cornelius, John L. Bartholf, and Robert W. Sherman—were taken prisoner along with some of their crewmen. Cornelius’s gunner died the following day. One Avenger crashed on the eastern side of Lakunai airdrome, while the fate of the other two Avengers is uncertain. They simply did not return. Each of the six downed aircraft carried a crew of three, for a total cost of eighteen casualties. The mines, due to the great depth of the harbor, caused no harm to the Japanese.