Kokoda Air Strikes: Allied Air Forces in New Guinea, 1942

By Anthony Cooper

The author of the bestselling Darwin Spitfires casts a forensic eye over the role that Allied air forces played —or failed to play—in crucial World War II campaigns in New Guinea. This is the story of the early battles of the southwest Pacific theatre—the Coral Sea, Kokoda, Milne Bay, Guadalcanal—presented as a single air campaign that began with the Japanese conquest of Rabaul in January 1942. It is a story of both Australian and American airmen who flew and fought in the face of adversity—with incomplete training, inadequate aircraft, and from poorly set up and exposed airfields. And they persisted despite extreme exhaustion, sickness, poor morale, and the near certainty of being murdered by their Japanese captors if they went down in enemy territory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Sep 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781742241746

Book preview

ANTHONY COOPER is a Brisbane schoolteacher. He is a former glider pilot instructor, has a PhD in German aviation history and is the author of HMAS Bataan, 1952 and Darwin Spitfires: The real battle for Australia, which won the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s NT History Book Award.

Second Lieutenant Ivan A Humphrey on 24 July 1942. The photo is probably taken at Townsville, judging by his cool-weather USAAF leather flight jacket. He wears Australian-sourced RAF flying boots, a prized item among US pilots in Australia, a USAAF headset over his baseball cap, and no life preserver – indicating a non-operational flight. Visible above the parachute pack is the RAF K-Type dinghy pack, resembling a cushion. The Airacobra was unique among operational World War II fighters in its combination of rear-mounted engine and side-opening car-type door. SOURCE AWM 012963A

ALLIED AIR FORCES IN NEW GUINEA, 1942

ANTHONY COOPER

This book is dedicated to the flyers of the US 19th Bomb Group, who were in combat from the beginning, who were a lot better than Kenney said they were, and who carried the can for the mistakes and omissions of their superiors.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Anthony Cooper 2014

First published 2014

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Cooper, Anthony James, 1961 – author.

Title: Kokoda air strikes: Allied air forces in New Guinea, 1942/Anthony Cooper.

ISBN:  9781742233833 (paperback)

9781742241746 (ePub)

9781742246796 (ePDF)

Subjects: Combined operations (Military science)

World War, 1939–1945 – Campaigns – Oceania.

World War, 1939–1945 – Papua New Guinea – Kokoda Trail – Aerial operations.

Bombing, Aerial – Papua New Guinea – Kokoda Trail.

Kokoda Trail (Papua New Guinea) – History – Bombardment, 1942.

Dewey Number: 940.5426

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover images No.75 Squadron pilots at Moresby en route to Milne Bay, July 1942: AWM 150494; A B-25 bomber of the US 3rd Attack Group taking off from 7-Mile, August 1942: AWM 026239.

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Maps

The South West Pacific Area chain of command

1    Australia’s ‘Advanced Striking Force’

2    Losing Rabaul

3    Losing Lae and Salamaua

4    Fighters at last

5    Moresby’s pre-invasion ‘blitz’

6    The Yanks take over

7    Combing the Coral Sea

8    Preparing for the next push

9    Losing Buna

10  Losing Kokoda

11  Defending the eastern flank

12  Turning point at Milne Bay

13  The air supply debacle

14  Air supremacy by default

Afterword

Select bibliography

Index

Glossary and full references can be accessed at the author’s website:

<www.darwinspitfires.com/kokoda>.

INTRODUCTION

Although Britain’s war against Hitler’s Germany encompassed maritime operations as far removed from Europe as the Indian Ocean, the war of 1939–41 had remained essentially a European affair, waged across the European continent itself, the Mediterranean Basin and the Atlantic Ocean. It was only when Japan launched its twin offensives against Malaya and the Philippines on 8 December 1941 that World War II assumed a truly global character, forcing the United States into war alongside its maritime partner, Britain, and presenting the Allied powers with a set of challenges for which they had prepared, but only inadequately. Both the United States and the British Empire had built up respectable forces to defend their respective colonies, but the aggressor had prepared more thoroughly still. Japanese operational superiority soon pitched the combined forces of the United States, Britain, the Netherlands East Indies and Australia into ignominious defeats, delivering up the Western powers’ South-East Asian colonial possessions for Japanese economic exploitation, and allowing Japanese forces to penetrate the island ‘barrier’ protecting Australia’s northern coastline. Since before the turn of the century, Japan’s main objective had been the military-political-economic subjugation of China. However, once she launched her Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Japan was set on a collision course with the United States; and by 1941, Japan’s aggressive China policy could be maintained only if new resources were found to free the nation from dependency upon American oil, to circumvent President Roosevelt’s escalating economic sanctions. The new war that Japan launched upon South-East Asia on 8 December 1941 was therefore primarily an oil war, to seize the Dutch-controlled oilfields of Sumatra and Borneo.

The very success of the resultant Japanese offensives in the new Pacific Theatre brought them into collision with Australian military outposts defending the Australian colonies of Papua and New Guinea. This book provides a narrative of the air operations in support of the ensuing campaign, culminating in the battles along the Kokoda Track – which connected Port Moresby on the southern coast with the northern coast opposite. Although this story has usually been told from the perspective of the army, the New Guinea ground campaign was fought for airfields: it was the presence of airfields that gave places their significance and it was the possession or loss of airfields that determined each side’s tactical options. In the context of New Guinea’s challenging geography, these airfield localities were effectively islands reachable only by sea or air. Both sides’ armies fought to seize or hold these isolated enclaves in order to extend the reach of their own air power and to prevent the enemy from doing so. To that extent, the battle for New Guinea in 1942 was primarily an air war, with the ground fighting subordinated to that end.

Many books have appeared on various aspects of the air fighting over New Guinea in 1942, but there has been no single volume that represents it as a connected campaign as this book sets out to do. Authors have written about particular units, particular people, particular nationalities, particular services, particular places, or particular battles. The literature has largely existed in silos – army, air force, navy; Australian, American, Japanese; Rabaul, Coral Sea, Milne Bay, Guadalcanal, Kokoda. This book seeks to interconnect these hitherto largely discrete strands and perspectives by locating Allied air operations within the context of the wider campaign.

Although the Kokoda campaign itself only commenced in late July 1942, it was the product of a long process of escalation by which the Japanese approached ever more closely to Moresby via a series of tactical bounds: in January seizing Rabaul on New Britain; in March seizing Lae and Salamaua on the northern coast of New Guinea; in May attempting a direct seaborne assault through the Coral Sea; in July landing at Buna to commence the overland advance to Moresby; and in August landing in Milne Bay to provide flanking support for that same operation. All these bounds were aimed at gaining control of key airfield sites and all required air superiority to succeed. The Kokoda ground campaign was nothing more or less than an attempt to seize Moresby’s airfields and thus win the air war on the Japanese south-eastern flank.

This narrative terminates with the enemy’s strategic withdrawal in September 1942, once the diversion of Japanese resources from New Guinea to Guadalcanal neutralised the Japanese overland assault on Moresby. From that point on, no realistic prospect remained of the Japanese seizing Port Moresby. Of course, the reconquest of Papua would exact bitter fighting and heavy losses, but Moresby itself was safe from the moment that Japanese resources were withdrawn from the campaign.

Offering a synopsis of existing research, this book does not pretend to cover any topic in exhaustive or definitive detail. As any historian would expect, my conclusions are open to challenge, and indeed I would be delighted to have had some role in stimulating primary source research, in all three countries. Certainly the existing literature has huge gaps awaiting investigation and publication.

In this regard, I am particularly indebted to those authors who have already broken new ground. It is perhaps invidious to name some but not others, but particular mention needs to be made of Lex McAulay, for both his pioneering use of Allied intelligence material derived from wartime Japanese sources, and for his conscious linking of the Kokoda ground and air campaigns; of Steven Bullard, for finally providing us with access to the Japanese official history translated into English; of John Moremon, for demonstrating the absolute primacy of logistics to the Kokoda campaign; of Peter Williams, for producing such a fresh and iconoclastic analysis of that campaign; and of Luca Ruffato and Michael Claringbould for providing a detailed account of the Japanese side of the air campaign from Japanese sources.

Particular readers may object to my inclusion of some things at the expense of others, but it is likely that I share their sense of grievance. In mitigation of my fault, I would observe that the effort of fitting a campaign of this size into one not-overlarge book required the type of dispassionate ruthlessness that would have befitted a successful general.

My thanks go to Lex McAulay for so helpfully providing both some rare books and some useful collated notes, to John Moremon for generously providing me with both his thesis and some primary source documents, to Arthur Jackson for graciously lending a precious original photo, and to Phillipa McGuinness for giving me another run. Thanks also go to Peter Ingman, Gary Conwell, Lex McAulay and Jane Murphy for reading the drafts, and to Jane, Charlotte and Elizabeth for loving me enough to let me write.

Notes on nomenclature

The United States Army Air Forces’ order of battle in Australia was sufficiently large and elaborate to cause the reader some confusion; for example, there was an 8th Bomb Squadron and an 8th Fighter Group, a 35th Fighter Squadron and a 35th Fighter Group – all separate organisations. Therefore, for simplicity’s sake, where possible the parent group is referenced rather than that group’s constituent squadrons; for example, the 3rd Attack Group rather than that group’s 13th or 90th Bomb Squadrons. Only in cases where US squadrons were deployed independently of their parent groups are they identified by squadron; for example, the 8th and 89th Bomb Squadrons. Readers are invited to consult the unit table following, in order to clarify unit identities and affiliations.

In order for the non-specialist reader to differentiate Australian from American units in a narrative where they are often freely intermixed, I have followed respective national usages: Australian units can be identified by plain numbers (for example, ‘75 Squadron’), whereas US units are identified by ordinal numbers (for example, ‘8th Bomb Squadron’).

To identify aircraft types, I have avoided using two designations for the same type, preferring the American term ‘P-40’ rather than the British ‘Kittyhawk’; and ‘Airacobra’ to avoid confusing the reader with separate ‘P-39’ and ‘P-400’ variants of the same type. Similarly, in reference to transport aircraft, I have used the generic term ‘DC-3’ to cover C-49, C-50 and C-53 aircraft – reflecting period usage.

Table of Allied flying units in the New Guinea campaign, arranged numerically

The Pacific Theatre

The Theatre of Air Operations

The New Guinea Theatre

Port Moresby and the Kokoda Track

The South West Pacific Area chain of command

1

AUSTRALIA’S ‘ADVANCED STRIKING FORCE’

It was 9.12 pm on the evening of 8 December 1941, the first day of Australia’s Pacific War, when a Catalina flying boat of the Royal Australian Air Force’s No. 11 Squadron alighted in Fairfax Harbour, Port Moresby, after a long day searching the Torres Strait for Japanese pearling luggers. Having been debriefed and fed, the pilot, Flying Officer Lyn Sloan, declared himself fit to fly again and so was ordered to resume the search immediately: in effect, having flown all day, Sloan had now volunteered to fly all night as well.

Before the outbreak of the Pacific War, ex-Qantas Empire flying boat A18-13 of 11 Squadron moored off Moresby’s flying boat base at Fairfax Harbour. The photo is taken from the Napa Napa flying boat anchorage on the opposite side of the harbour. This tiny undeveloped port became the major base for the Allied defensive campaign in 1942. SOURCE AWM P02684.004

The crew boarded their aircraft at 10.45 pm, started up and taxied out for a night take-off to the south straight towards the open sea. It was a calm night with clear visibility out to 6 kilometres. Sloan seemed in a hurry to get away, opening his throttles prematurely and taking off diagonally across the line of the flare path. Despite this irregular departure, he got airborne on a safe heading, with a clear run through the harbour entrance. However, as soon as the aircraft rose to 100 feet it crabbed to the right in an undiagnosed flat turn caused by the pilots’ failure to check the rudder trim before take-off – the rudder was set with 3 degrees of left bias, whereas it should have been centralised for take-off. Neither Sloan nor the second pilot, Flight Lieutenant Nelson Reid, noticed the swinging compass and so the aircraft maintained its uncommanded turn, almost reversing course to re-enter the harbour.

With both pilots believing they were safely headed out to sea, the Catalina ran straight into Hanudamava Island at 11.11 pm, its port wingtip striking the unseen high ground and slewing the aircraft’s nose violently into the hillside. The sudden flare of exploding fuel tanks lit up the night, to which unnatural illumination was then added at intervals the angry red flashes of bomb detonations. The fire burned until early morning, the wreck remaining so hot that the bodies could not be removed until well after daylight. All eight men died as early victims of wartime flying fatigue.

Inexperience and understaffing had both played a part: Sloan was a new graduate Catalina captain with only 45 hours in command, having only rejoined the unit the day before from the Seaplane Training Flight at Rathmines on Lake Macquarie in New South Wales. Neither 11 Squadron’s commanding officer (CO), Squadron Leader Julius ‘Dick’ Cohen DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross), nor his opposite number at 20 Squadron, Squadron Leader William ‘Hoot’ Gibson DFC, had seen Sloan before the fatal flight, as both were away flying on operations: the Catalina squadrons’ pilot shortage forced the COs to stay on the flight roster, preventing them from supervising their crews and monitoring flying standards. Cohen had met Sloan only briefly back in August before the latter went on captain’s course at Rathmines and thus had only ‘very sketchy’ knowledge of him either as a man or pilot. This was the first fatal flying accident on wartime operations out of New Guinea. The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) would have to shrug off many more such losses over the next four years.

Cursed by the eye-watering endurance of their aircraft, Catalina crews would be required to simply fly and fly again in defence of Australia’s northern island barrier. After a few months of war operations, war correspondent Osmar White witnessed Catalina crews at the wharf upon their return from a mission, ‘so exhausted they could hardly stand, eyes like raw beef from glare, and bodies palsied by snapping nerves’. Even allowing for journalistic hyperbole, these were clearly very tired men who were obliged to fly for too long too often. By January 1942, most 11/20 Squadron pilots would be flying more than 200 hours per month despite expressed concerns by RAAF medical officers about the resultant extreme flying fatigue.

RAAF preparations for war in the Pacific

The service had spent the previous two years preparing for the war against Japan by laying out a network of forward bases and patrol lines across the path of any Japanese advance towards New Guinea or the Solomon Islands. Within three weeks of the commencement of hostilities in Europe, No. 11 Squadron had been built from scratch and deployed to Port Moresby – but with a strength of only two aircraft. Even this modest feat was only accomplished thanks to the civilian resources provided by Australia’s national airline: Qantas Empire Airways provided the Short S.23 ‘Empire’ flying boats; the facilities of its flying boat base in Port Moresby; the maintenance base at Rose Bay in Sydney Harbour; and a cadre of flying boat captains around which the new squadron was built.

An 11 Squadron Catalina offshore from Moresby in August 1941, the photo taken from an Empire flying boat, with the Empire’s starboard wing float visible. The Catalina’s gun blisters are prominent, providing excellent platforms for seaward observation, also each mounting twin .303-inch Lewis guns. SOURCE AWM 009103

Through 1940, 11 Squadron pioneered the RAAF’s Advanced Operational Bases (AOBs): built upon prewar civilian facilities, these extended the patrol arc of its flying boats by operating from advanced outposts such as Lorengau in the Admiralty Islands, Kavieng on New Ireland, Rabaul on New Britain, Tulagi in the Solomon Islands, Samarai on the eastern tip of the Papuan mainland, Vila on Vanuatu, and Noumea on New Caledonia. This would be the essential structure upon which the RAAF would build its initial defensive operations in the Pacific War. By the end of 1940, 11 Squadron’s aircraft inventory had been expanded to four Empire flying boats, the tiny size of this force being typical of the limitations both of RAAF resourcing and of RAAF thinking at the time: 1940 plans laid down a force of only eight aircraft for the defence of New Guinea! Clearly, the envisaged scale of Japanese operations was neatly downgraded to match available resources, rather than attempting to meet Japanese resources with an expanded RAAF capability. This polite fiction was politically convenient for Australia’s defence posture of supporting the British Empire in the war against Hitler’s Germany; convenient also for those senior officers who were meanwhile turning the RAAF into a training adjunct to Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) under the terms of the 1939 Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS).

After the outbreak of the Pacific War, such complacent force estimates would almost overnight be inflated to a requirement for ten whole squadrons for the defence of Rabaul and Moresby, but by then there would be no extra aircraft available: at that time there were available in Australia only two flights of Hudson bombers to cover the entire east coast – 13 aircraft in total. Moreover, even had the RAAF possessed large numbers of aircraft, both Port Moresby itself and the AOBs were too undeveloped to support them. Up to December 1941, both the RAAF and the Australian Army neglected military engineering, particularly mechanised plant for road and airfield construction, using civil contractors instead to improve the facilities at the AOBs. Without dedicated resourcing, there was little prospect of building up the forward bases rapidly enough.

At the start of August 1941, a second flying boat unit was formed, No. 20 Squadron, joining 11 Squadron at Moresby, both squadrons now equipped with the purpose-designed Catalina. The AOBs in the islands were also placed on a war footing: officers and men were posted in to bring the units up to establishment and the bases were provided with wireless stations, bomb dumps, fuel dumps, stocks of spare parts and stores, detachments of up to a couple of dozen men, and motor launches and barges from the RAAF’s Marine Section. War-like equipment was issued for the first time – steel helmets, gas masks, personal weapons, bomb-sights, reconnaissance cameras, signal pistols, signalling lamps, parachute flares and binoculars.

RAAF Headquarters (HQ) had also set in place a command and control apparatus to handle the demands of the coming war operations: Northern Area HQ at Townsville in Queensland was declared operational in June 1941 under Group Captain Frank Lukis OBE. Although a World War I pilot, he had had only a limited prewar curriculum vitae as a squadron CO in Australia, with no command experience in this new war. However, Wing Commander WH ‘Bill’ Garing DFC, a war-experienced officer from the European theatre, was made Senior Air Staff Officer (SASO) to plan all flying operations out of Townsville, Moresby and the AOBs. From July the new Townsville HQ maintained 24-hour radio watches and manned the Operations Room around the clock, connected to all subordinate units by wireless telegraphy (W/T) or telephone and to RAAF HQ in Melbourne, Victoria, by high-speed teleprinter.

Despite the inadequate size of the RAAF’s fleet of Catalinas and Hudsons, the service had displayed fine technical judgment in selecting these two American types, as they gave some substance at least to the reconfiguration of Australia’s Pacific defence strategy to forward defence of the island barrier. The Catalina’s 6600 litres of fuel provided a patrol endurance of 23 hours, giving a 1600-kilometre reconnaissance radius or an 1100-kilometre bombing radius. The Lockheed Hudson was less impressive, but it was nonetheless the RAAF’s first modern combat aircraft, with deliveries starting in the first half of 1940, to become the backbone of the home-based squadrons.

Nonetheless, numbers of both aircraft and crews remained grossly inadequate: at the outbreak of the Pacific War, the RAAF had only 40 trained Hudson crews and 15 trained Catalina crews in Australia. Under the Empire Air Training Scheme, trained RAAF personnel were made unavailable to RAAF operational squadrons deployed on home defence, posted instead either to staff the myriad EATS training units that were springing up throughout Australia, or overseas for service with the RAF in Britain, the Middle East and Malaya. High-value combat aircraft too were withheld from Australia, diverted to higher-priority theatres such as Europe, North Africa and Malaya (in that order).

Three Hudson Mark 1s from 23 Squadron at Archerfield in July 1941. No. 23 provided aircraft and crews to 24 Squadron at Rabaul, including A16-38 in the centre, and Flying Officer Oscar Diethelm, the pilot of the third aircraft here. Hudson A16-3, in the foreground, has not yet received its Boulton Paul hydraulicpowered gun turret. SOURCE AWM AC0068

Thus the two front-line Catalina squadrons entered the month of December 1941 with only ten aircraft and crews between them, bringing obvious limitations in operational capacity. On any given day, each squadron would have its aircraft dispersed away from Port Moresby at AOBs throughout the operational area, in addition to aircraft undergoing major inspections or repairs at Rathmines in New South Wales. As a result, an average of only two or three flying boat sorties per squadron per day was achievable. Even before hostilities officially commenced, these sorties were already committed to searching for Japanese activity, particularly on the northern approaches to New Britain and the Solomon Islands. In laborious day-long patrols, crews rotated from one AOB to another, traversing the strung-out island perimeter of the RAAF’s area of operations. For example, on the evening of 7 December, after one such rotation, the two squadrons combined had three aircraft at Rabaul, two at Vila, one at Tulagi and one at Moresby.

By this time, diplomatic intelligence and Allied intercepts of Japanese signals traffic permitted Australia’s Central War Room in Melbourne to divine impending hostile action by Japan. In response to the deteriorating intelligence picture, on 1 December 1941 RAAF HQ placed the Hudson flights of both 24 Squadron at Townsville and 23 Squadron at Archerfield airfield in Brisbane on war readiness. Each of these squadrons was composed of two flights of Wirraways and one of Hudsons, the Wirraways tasked with providing coastal defence of the major ports while the Hudsons were designated as a mobile strike force.

The deployment of 24 Squadron to Rabaul

Although Australian-occupied New Britain was secondary to Japan’s main objectives in Malaya and the Indonesian archipelago, its capture was an integral part of the Japanese war plan, and both the Imperial Army and Navy assigned forces for its capture simultaneously with their main offensive operations further west. The Japanese realised that Allied occupation of Rabaul would permit air raids on their forward fleet anchorage at Truk Lagoon in the Caroline Islands, while Rabaul’s ‘excellent’ naval base offered much from an offensive point of view as well: as early as September 1940, a naval research paper identified Rabaul as a stepping stone for the conquest of Port Moresby and as a pathway into the Coral Sea; all Allied targets in both eastern New Guinea and the Solomon Islands would lie within a 1000-kilometre bomber radius. Accordingly, plans made on 5 November 1941 called for the Imperial Army’s South Seas Force to seize the Australian airfields in the Bismarck archipelago as soon as the American outpost at Guam was conquered.

At Townsville on the evening of 2 December, Air Commodore Lukis asked the CO of 24 Squadron, Wing Commander John Lerew, to get his Hudson flight to Rabaul quickly. The squadron was given minimal notice to scrape together a small stock of spares, tools, stores and equipment, while Lerew and his executive officers had to select which men and which items could be crammed into the three Hudsons and the two supporting Empire flying boats for the rushed move north. The commander of the Hudson flight, Flight Lieutenant John Murphy, took off from Townsville on 5 December, leading his flight into Vunakanau airfield at Rabaul on the 7th. His tiny force of four bombers was grandly termed a ‘mobile strike force’ to cover the 2000-kilometre-wide defensive arc forward of New Ireland and New Britain.

One reason for such paltry RAAF numbers was that Rabaul lacked properly laid-out airfields. The prewar non-development of this base was related to Australia’s observance of the terms of its League of Nations mandate over former German New Guinea. However, given the desultory pace of base development even in Australian territories where ‘fortification’ was permissible, and given the weak air defence resources available throughout the theatre, it is highly unlikely that Rabaul could have been turned into a credible base in the time available. Indeed, even Moresby was thoroughly inadequate for the basing of substantial numbers of aircraft: its 7-Mile airfield was a bare gravel runway, with no dispersed aircraft parking areas, no phone lines, no radio communications and no water supply. At Rabaul, Murphy’s detachment found that the airfield at Vunakanau also left much to be desired as a front-line operational base. Airfields had been neglected because the Rabaul AOB was a flying boat base, pure and simple, in accordance with the RAAF’s prewar reliance upon flying boats for operations forward of Port Moresby. Vunakanau lay on the opposite (southern) side of the harbour to Rabaul, nothing but a boggy strip cut through the kunai (the man-high grass endemic to the region). It had no facilities, no phone, no wireless, no airfield equipment, no storage and no buildings beyond a rude tin shed.

Lakunai, the civil airfield at Rabaul, lay just to the east of Rabaul township on the northern shore of the harbour, so close underneath Rabaul’s active volcano that operations were frequently held up by volcanic ash falling on top of parked aircraft and covering up the runway. This airstrip too had no dispersals and no airfield ground equipment, although it was at least connected by telephone to the civilian exchange in town. Neither airfield had a fuel tanker, so refuelling was done by hand, pumping fuel from 50 US gallon drums (44 Imperial gallons or 189 litres). This labour was most exhausting for the men and most inhibiting for the squadron’s operations, as it took six hours to refuel just one Hudson by hand pump. No. 24 Squadron’s three airfield fuel tankers had of course been left behind at Townsville in the airlift, as had its other 18 vehicles.

Controlling so few operational aircraft, lacking fit-for-purpose ground facilities, and yet with such extensive operational responsibilities, the RAAF was in effect forced to unblinkingly require the impossible of the small band of airmen it now placed in the path of the Japanese offensive. Prewar doctrine entertained the fanciful notion that a half-dozen Catalinas or Hudsons constituted a credible strike force, and that these would simply hit their targets, sink their ships and remain effective in the face of enemy opposition.

Although No. 24’s Hudson flight commander, John Murphy, was an experienced reconnaissance bomber pilot, having graduated from flying training in 1938, having been operating Hudsons since April 1940, and as a Hudson instructor having converted his own CO, John Lerew, onto the new machines in May 1941, and although all his Hudson captains were also relatively experienced senior pilots, the first encounters with the enemy showed that pilot proficiency would not compensate for inadequate aircraft performance and deficient ground systems. On 8 December, an unidentified aircraft made an overflight of Rabaul. The next day it returned, this time identified as a twin-engined navy bomber (a Truk-based Mitsubishi G3M), making three photographic runs before returning northward. Murphy chased it, but the Japanese machine was faster as it had more height. Back in 1940 when the shiny new Hudsons first arrived in Australia, the speedy-looking machines with their two forward-firing machine guns were seen as substitute fighter aircraft for the defence of the capital cities, but this was now revealed as a forlorn hope.

The unmolested Japanese intrusion on 8 December had an immediate result: that evening, Lerew and his two Wirraway flight commanders were summoned to HQ at Townsville and ordered to get the squadron’s other two flights to Rabaul as well. However, although Wirraways were now assigned to take over interception duties, they were even slower than Hudsons. This was hardly surprising as the Wirraway was merely an armed trainer; this fact must have been very clear to Wing Commander Garing at Northern Area HQ, who had seen real fighters in England during 1939–40, and who moreover in May 1941 had testflown a Dutch Do.24 trimotor flying boat to find the big machine both faster and more manoeuvrable than the RAAF’s so-called ‘fighter’.

The Wirraway – the RAAF’s emergency fighter of 1941–42. This 21 Squadron Wirraway is seen diving dramatically over Laverton in 1940, but the photo was taken at the very top of the type’s usable height band. The type simply had too much airframe and too little engine to provide anything like viable fighter-like performance. In practice, Wirraways would very rarely enjoy a height advantage over their opponents. SOURCE AWM 000714

Ever since British Air Marshal Sir John Salmond’s review of the RAAF in 1928, fighter aviation had been deleted from the RAAF’s order of battle, reduced to the status of a demonstration fighter flight attached to the training base at Point Cook in Victoria. In the prewar period there had been no plan, project or prospect of obtaining a fighter force for service in Australia’s defence. No. 24 Squadron at Rabaul therefore had the dubious honour of standing in the breach using glorified Wirraway trainers as ‘emergency fighters’.

Supported by an Empire flying boat from 11 Squadron to convey a further limited contingent of ground staff and a minimum stock of tools and spares, the first Wirraways set out on 10 December, flying to Port Moresby in two flights and thence onwards to Rabaul. This was the first time these crews had flown any distance over water, RAAF policy having formerly insisted that single-engined machines could only be operated within gliding distance of the shore. Flight Lieutenant Bruce Anderson, one of the Wirraway flight commanders and a fighter veteran from North Africa, brought the first flight into Vunakanau on 10 December, while Lerew himself led the second flight in on 15 December, deploying a combined total of ten Wirraways. Anderson’s flight was co-located with the Hudsons at Vunakanau, while the other flight under Flight Lieutenant Bill Brookes was positioned at the old civil airfield at Lakunai.

A disappointing debut

Lerew’s ferry flight into Rabaul was concurrent with 24 Squadron’s first offensive operation – a Hudson strike on Kapingamarangi (also known as Greenwich Island) in the Caroline Islands. As a small, poorly defended island outpost, ‘Kap’ was the only target within striking range of the Hudson. Responding to signals intelligence of a Japanese ship movement between Truk and the Solomon Islands, Flight Lieutenant Ken Erwin was dispatched on a photo-reconnaissance mission to Kap early on 15 December. He arrived over the target in mid-morning and duly photographed the island base, finding it a modest affair with only one large building and three slipways. Peering through binoculars from a height of 15 000 feet, his crew saw no aircraft but counted 19 barges and one transport ship steaming away from the anchorage on a northerly course. Erwin descended to inspect the ship more closely, estimating its displacement as 5000 tons, in the process coming close enough to attract some gunfire from its anti-aircraft (AA) guns. Forbidden to break radio silence according to prevailing reconnaissance doctrine derived from the RAF, he had a three-hour return flight to Rabaul to alert HQ and deliver the film.

However, Erwin’s observer had failed to wind the film onto the camera correctly, with the result that the images were incorrectly exposed. Afterwards, Wing Commander Garing condemned the crewmen for their ‘carelessness’ and rebuked them for their ‘utter failure’ to take the photos. Garing’s righteous indignation obscures systemic causes for this miscued camera operation: the F.24 reconnaissance cameras had only arrived on the squadron in August, the mission was flown in the rarefied air of 15 000 feet, the Hudsons lacked an oxygen system, and the crews had had no operational training under realistic conditions. Rather than dereliction of duty, more likely it was a combination of hypoxia and inexperience that caused the fumbled camera operation on this, the RAAF’s first high-altitude photo-reconnaissance mission from Rabaul.

Erwin landed at 1.30 pm to deliver his oral report. Once the details were signalled to Townsville, HQ ordered a strike on this, the first target located within Hudson range. All available aircraft – three Hudsons – took off one and a half hours after Erwin’s landing. The crews located the ship 60 kilometres off Kap and delivered bombing attacks from medium level, as briefed by Murphy. Two attacks were made separated by 50 minutes, bombing from heights between 7000 and 10 000 feet. This separation shows that the three aircraft had spread out in order to search the area of sea predicted to contain the northward-bound ship. As a result, all three aircraft bombed separately, greatly simplifying the Japanese captain’s task of dodging each stick of bombs. Each time the ship evaded the line of four towering white bomb detonations, showing the difficulty inherent in hitting a moving ship with conventional level bombing.

Although this piecemeal attack had violated the military principle of concentration of force, 24 Squadron’s tiny strength at Rabaul meant that there was very little force to concentrate. Moreover, the limitations of radio communications had militated against a pre-strike airborne rendezvous. It was only from later in 1942 that the RAF pioneered the use of airborne homing transmissions over mid-ocean ship targets, to enable a strike force to concentrate over a spot in the ocean for a coordinated strike. Also, the Mark 1 Hudson’s marginal range with a full bomb load meant that there was no time to waste orbiting near the target while waiting for a rendezvous that might or might not be accomplished in a vast cloud-strewn sky.

This had been the first time any of the officers at HQ had planned a real-war ship strike, and so they had simply expected the three Hudsons to hit the ship and sink it. Garing was most unimpressed when apprised of the actual results by wireless, signalling his rebuke of the squadron for its ‘lamentable’ bombing, and stating that more was expected of them given the ‘tremendous amount of training given’.

However, Garing’s spluttering indignation rested on only dubious justification, as 24 Squadron Hudsons had so far expended their flying hours primarily on shipping and anti-submarine patrols over convoys off the Australian ports – rather than on practice bombing against moving ship targets. For example, through November the Hudson Flight had been preoccupied with friendly ship movements out of Townsville – searching for them, patrolling over them, identifying them, signalling to them and photographing them from low level. Only on 11 November did the three Hudsons get bombing practice on a towed target. A practice ship strike conducted by the squadron on 23 June 1941 points moreover to the unrealistic nature and unrepresentative results of the staged exercises that were only infrequently conducted before the war: when six Wirraways dive-bombed HMAS Goulburn and Burnie off Townsville, the umpires lamely concluded that both ships were definitely ‘sunk’. Furthermore, since the move to Rabaul 24 Squadron’s flying hours had been consumed in operational patrols rather than training, and of course no training facilities were provided there for bombing practice against moving targets. In fact Garing had grossly underestimated the training requirement that was necessary in order to deliver hits on moving ship targets in real combat.

Shipping attack tactics in 1941–42

Indeed, war experience so far showed that the task of hitting moving ships with bombs was a desperately difficult and costly business. RAAF senior officers did not have far to look for examples: on 8 December 1941, 24 RAAF Hudsons made bomb runs from minimum altitude against three anchored invasion transports at Kota Bharu in Malaya, but they sank only one ship. As 1942 operations would show, this 1:24 ratio would coincidently provide an approximate yardstick for bombers’ demonstrated hit ratios on ships in real attacks; and on this statistical basis Murphy’s attack off Kap had never had more than the most minimal chance of securing a hit.

Only the dive-bomber offered a reliable means of getting bombs onto a ship target, as the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka had proven in the European theatre during 1940–41. However, the only exponent of this delivery method on the Allied side was the US Navy. By contrast, the RAAF was doctrinally dependent upon Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) and was thus wedded to the idea of using conventional bombers to deliver their bombs while in level flight. Unfortunately, the RAF’s wartime experience so far had demonstrated the abject failure of such conventional attacks upon ships.

In response the British had resorted to the only delivery method realistically able to get bomb hits on the target – ultra-low-level approaches at mast height, bombing at minimum range by aiming at the ship’s waterline. However, even these low-level attacks delivered only dubious results; for example, out of 121 ships attacked during March–April 1941 by No. 2 Group RAF in Britain, only six ships were claimed sunk by the aircrew. The real results were even worse than this, for postwar research showed that in the whole of 1941 No. 2 Group sank only seven ships. To make matters worse, the attacking bombers were terribly vulnerable to the ships’ AA gunnery, as shown by an average loss rate through 1941 of 23 per cent per attack.

Yet according to Garing, it was these very failed tactics that Murphy should have used on 15 December; he alleged that by choosing to attack from medium height the Hudson pilots had failed to press home their attacks ‘in a determined and calculated manner’. Garing even made an adverse comparison between the performance of Murphy’s three Hudsons and that of the Japanese navy strike group which only five days earlier had sunk the British capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, off Malaya. This was a most invidious comparison given that the Japanese had attacked with 58 aircraft, and even then had obtained only one bomb hit from level bombing (both ships were sunk by torpedoes). As 1942 strike experience in the theatre would confirm, a three-aircraft attack had minimal chance of achieving even a single hit on a moving ship.

The Hudson crews at Rabaul had earlier received lectures on ship strike tactics from Squadron Leader Cohen, CO of 11 Squadron, and Murphy had listened well enough to gain a good understanding of the tactical realities of ship strikes. Accordingly, he had briefed the crews to make their bombing runs from medium altitude in order to preserve from needless losses the squadron’s small force of Hudsons, and also because the RAAF had not provided delayed-action bomb fuses. The instantaneous fuses in use precluded low-level bombing because the bomb explosions would have struck the aircraft while still overhead; although the required 11-second delay fuses were available to the RAAF Hudson squadrons operating with the RAF in Malaya, they had not yet been provided to Rabaul. Murphy’s tactical decision was subsequently validated by Squadron Leader Arch Tindal from Northern Area HQ during his inspection tour of Rabaul in January; in effect he sided with the squadron by concluding that Hudsons were unsuited to low-level attacks on shipping because they had poor forward firepower and poor forward visibility for bombing, while their portly shape and low speed made them ‘an excellent target’ for AA guns.

Despite his personal operational experience, Garing’s criticisms betray either an uncertain grasp upon the tactical realities of ship strike operations in the war so far, or a ruthless streak in knowingly demanding his men do the impossible. Although he had won a DFC in the European theatre, he had flown Sunderland flying boats on convoy patrols and had therefore not been involved in the RAF’s low-level shipping strikes. Now he asserted that this type of attack was consistent with low losses: 24 Squadron was somehow to ensure that by attacking in a ‘determined’ (namely, low-level) manner it was nonetheless to ensure ‘maximum safety of the aircrew’ – although without suggesting how these two contradictory outcomes could be achieved simultaneously. In reality it was an either/or proposition: the aircrews either had to maximise their survival chances by bombing from height, or maximise their bombing results by attacking low.

Hudson raids on Kapingamarangi

Lerew understood the subtext of Garing’s rebuke exactly: the next strike his squadron made would have to be low-level or else. Townsville HQ had also condemned the squadron for its ‘bad recce reports’ on 15 December, so Garing now issued very prescriptive orders for the next Kap strike on 19 December: he specified both a pre-strike and post-strike photo run in addition to the strike itself, thus requiring three runs over the target in succession.

As he read this ops order at Rabaul’s RAAF W/T station, Lerew could see at once that the preliminary photo run must alert the enemy defences, thus forgoing the element of surprise. As he had been briefed to expect a Japanese aircraft carrier in the vicinity and therefore expected the appearance of enemy fighter aircraft, and as the operations order required only one Hudson to go, Lerew put himself on the mission: he had yet to fly an operation himself and was unwilling to ask the other Hudson captains to go on what looked like being a one-way trip. The criticisms so far from HQ had both insulted his squadron and cast aspersions on the competence and courage of its officers, so now he personally took on the burden of redeeming both himself and his unit. Lerew drove the 20 kilometres out of town to Vunakanau and got ready to fly. The thoughts of the three crewmen who had to go with him are not recorded.

After a three-hour transit flight, Lerew arrived over Kap to make the photo run along the beach at 10 000 feet. This lower height permitted the second pilot, Flying Officer Stuart Hermes, to operate the cameras more efficiently, but the crew could still not spot the Japanese AA positions or the targeted buildings despite scanning the area below through binoculars. However, a couple of floatplanes were evident, and by the time the photo run was completed white wakes on the lagoon showed that these were taxiing for take-off: the seaplane tender Kiyokawa Maru had deployed its floatplane detachment to Kap to provide token air defence.

Lerew turned to commence his bomb run, diving so rapidly that he caught one floatplane still skimming across the water on its take-off run. Opening fire as he descended through 800 feet, he pulled out only two seconds later at 250 feet, having lashed the water around the floatplane with bullet spray from his twin .303-inch (7.7 mm) Brownings. Lerew thought he had got hits, but was not sure – the RAAF had only provided ball ammunition, so there were no tracers to spot the fall of shot and no incendiary strikes to show hits. The Hudson flashed overhead and shot across the beach at 200 feet and 230 knots. After dropping two 250-pound (113 kg) bombs across the slipway and then another two on the village adjoining the reported ‘store’ building, Lerew headed out to sea, avoiding the floatplane by climbing into a convenient cloud at 4000 feet. Using this cover he regained height and came back for a post-strike photo run in punctilious fulfilment of the operations order, and then took his relieved crew back to Vunakanau unscathed.

After a repeat raid on Kap on 25 December, Murphy’s Hudson flight was reinforced at the turn of the year with three extra Hudsons and crews, officially designated the RAAF’s ‘Advanced Striking Force’. Having by now obtained 11-second delay bomb fuses to permit low-level bombing, the next Hudson strike on Kap was the largest and most successful yet. Lerew led a four-aircraft attack back to the floatplane base on 1 January, sweeping across the waterfront at such low level that the bombing was accurate: they got bomb hits on the barracks, warehouse, bomb dump and pier; 450 barrels of aviation fuel went up in flames; one moored floatplane was burnt out; and one taxiing floatplane was severely damaged. As the Hudsons retired the crews were cheered by the sight of a thick column of black smoke rising to 10 000 feet.

This was good bombing, but it was lucky for 24 Squadron that the newly developed base yet lacked AA defence or fighters, for the vulnerable Hudsons could not expect to operate with impunity indefinitely. As a warning of things to come, when Murphy led two aircraft back there on 17 January they were engaged by six floatplanes and chased away into cloud. Under duress, he