“It was there that General Kenney was the first in American history to achieve the now widely accepted principle that the first goal of any military conflict is air superiority.”

By John E. Happ

MY FATHER never spoke much about his time in World War Two.

The man I knew growing up was a mild mannered, devout, church-going guy — a hobby pilot and a gardener. When asked about his service, I remember he’d simply say he was a “pilot in New Guinea.” I always thought he flew transport planes, hauling goods and men around in relative safety.

Only after cleaning out the family home following his death did I come to realize how drastically he had understated his wartime experiences. One of the artifacts I recovered was his pilot’s case. Stamped with the words “Navigation: Dead Reckoning” and “NATIONAL BREIFCASE MFG CO INC.,” it contained an assortment of old wartime documents, newspaper clippings and private letters that together revealed details of his 64 combat missions with the USAAF in the Pacific.

It was through this surprising discovery that I came to learn of my father’s time in the 312^th Bomber Group as it struck enemy airfields, destroyed bridges, strafed Japanese infantry and artillery and bombed shipping across New Guinea starting in 1943. These experiences became the inspiration for my book The Navigation Case: Training, Flying, and Fighting the 1941 to 1945 New Guinea War. Here’s some of the story. 

The Southwest Pacific Area, 1942

As America ramped up for war across two oceans, the Allied heads of state agreed to a policy of defeating Germany first; and when accomplished turn their combined force against Japan in the Pacific. In practice, Germany first meant that 85 per cent of American war materiel was to be committed to Europe and the fight against the Nazis. Directing Allied forces from his new base in Melbourne, but lacking men and materials, General Douglas MacArthur was obligated to fight defensive battles to protect Australia and his supply lines.

Japan’s war plan was to wear down the Americans and negotiate a settlement to keep a number of these various conquests they had made as colonies. The fighting devolved into faltering and tangled battles of attrition in the dense jungles of Guadalcanal, New Guinea, where pestilence and malnutrition on both sides caused more deaths than combat.

General George Kenney was appointed to MacArthur’s staff in August of 1942. Named commander of Allied air forces in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA), the 53-year-old Great War combat pilot initially had only 260 planes at his command, “many of them unserviceable,” to cover a theatre that included the Philippines, Borneo, the western Solomon Islands, the Dutch East Indies and Australia, as well as Papua and New Guinea. Over the next year, Kenny would bring his growing forces to bear.

By the summer of 1943, the Allied campaign to drive the Japanese from New Guinea was continuing. During those 18 bloody months, an estimated 24,000 Allied soldiers died advancing from Port Moresby to coastal town of Lae – a distance of just 200 miles. It wasn’t until August that the Americans were finally able to carve out an air base at a grassy plain called Gusap, about 100 miles northwest of Lae and about 40 miles in from the coast.

By the fall, Kenney’s Fifth Air Force was strengthened; receiving 35 new bomb groups, a total of some 3,300 aircraft.

MacArthur’s “Triple Play”

Japan had been marshalling forces throughout the Bismarck Sea and along the northwest coast of New Guinea in preparation for an Allied offensive in late 1943. They concentrated their defences at several hundred miles away at Madang, Wewak and Aitape. American intelligence discovered that these bases were being supplied from a massive port further north called Hollandia (present-day Jayapura, Indonesia) – thought to be out of range of Allied bombers.

Throughout the early months of 1944, Allied pilots were tasked with slowing the enemy build-up by bombing and strafing strategic enclaves throughout this vast area. At the time, an expanding Japanese air base at Wewak “awed General Kenney and his men.”

They were unsettled by the fact that the Japanese had been receiving new men and hardware seemingly daily. It was estimated that tens of thousands of enemy troops and hundreds of combat warplanes were stationed there. Madang, a little to the south, served as a depot and logistics centre, partway between Lae and Wewak. The most distant target was Aitape, the third of this group of bases. It was positioned some 400 miles to the northwest of Lae, yet still 150 miles south of Hollandia.

Allied commanders detailed plans for 312th Bomb Group to harass the base and airstrips at Aitape. These assaults were also intended to test the range of their Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers and evaluate the men’s endurance over the four-hours long missions. As these bombing raids began to show results, the Japanese in turn cautiously moved men and equipment back to Hollandia about 550 miles away, expecting to place them out of range of American bombers. And that presented MacArthur with a new dilemma: He was inadvertently causing the Japanese to reinforce Hollandia, strengthening a link further up their supply chain.

A diversion intended to hold those Japanese troops in place in Madang was launched. On March 12 a stream of Australian troops laboriously reached to within 30 miles of Madang via jungled inland routes, simulating a traditional ground offensive. From the sea, a platoon of U.S. troops landed on a nearby coast representing another prong of attack. The Japanese took the bait and interpreted these moves to be part of an Allied plan to take Madang – portending another long, drawn out battle of attrition – just what the Japanese wanted.

Strong opposition from the Japanese was expected and intelligence reports confirmed that enemy troops were indeed being transferred down from Hollandia to Wewak and concentrating to confront the Allies there. MacArthur’s fake campaign on Madang was working.

Those harassing raids on Aitape told General Kenney he could get more out of the A-20s and reach Hollandia. MacArthur anxiously ordered a massive knock-out punch to overwhelm it.

“It was a very important mission because it was the final blow in the campaign known as MacArthur’s Triple Play,” Pilot Len Happ of the 312th Bomb Group wrote. “The Triple Play was by-passing Wewak, Madang and Aitape [to take out Hollandia] which the Japanese never expected.”

In that same correspondence, as a captain and an operations officer, Happ described the scene further.

“It was known we were going to operate [the A-20s] in the upper limits as far as gas and mileage were concerned,” he recalled. “The weather forecasts were marginal.”

On Sunday, April 16, the men were briefed on the mission and assigned their roles. The overall attack included squadrons from multiple Allied bases, totalling an estimated 300 combat aircraft. Happ wrote, “In fact the whole damned Fifth Air Force and Third Attack [Group]” was deployed.

From the start of the mission crews could see bad weather building. Winds jostled their wings and rattled the men in their cockpits. Happ recorded, “…but we all took off because of the importance of the mission.”

Of the over two-hour flight to their target he added, “I was leading a flight of three aircraft. We were to drop 500 pounders with a B-25 and then hit the deck to strafe.”

The attack on Hollandia completely surprised the Japanese. Three hundred new planes on various runways were destroyed before they even got off the ground. Not one Allied plane was lost to enemy fighters or anti-aircraft fire during the raid. However, while they were engaged in their attack, a full-scale tropical storm had built up blocking their way home. Many pilots lost their way consumed in the grasp of the weather, never to be found again.

“[Experienced] pilots reported that some planes just disappeared. Others crashed into the mountains or into the sea,” Happ would later recall.

In the journals of mission survivors are phrases like “a solid wall of weather” and “the sea was whipped into white caps by the wind.”

At MacArthur’s headquarters, the mission was considered a great success and just a week later American troops landed at Hollandia almost without opposition. In this grand leap-frogging maneuver, MacArthur had split the enemy’s defenses on New Guinea in half. Dependent on re-supply from the sea, a large portion of the Japanese army in the east (caught in the Madang fake) was now isolated and helpless.

In the end, the storm’s toll on the Allies was devastating: the loss and destruction of 37 U.S. aircraft with their gunners and pilots. Recorded by the men of the 312th as “Black Sunday,” it remains the biggest Allied operational loss (as opposed to combat loss) in American history.

Hollandia to the Vogelkop

The Japanese had conquered and evicted the Dutch from western New Guinea and Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies) within the first weeks of 1942 following Pearl Harbor. Oil, vital to the Japanese economy and war machine, was found in abundance on New Guinea’s Vogelkop Peninsula. According to one historian, “[Commanders in] Washington had looked at the region and projected production of as much as 16,000 barrels a day.” In July, 75 A-20s struck the Japanese at an oil field and depot called Boela, west of the Vogelkop.

Later that month, the 312th flew a dangerous, low-level assignment to bomb a Japanese seaplane base with supply transport barges in port at a town called Kokas on the south coast of the Vogelkop Peninsula. An amazing sequence of photos from that mission captured what the pilots of the 312th faced in New Guinea as clearly as anything.

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Relieved and anxious at finishing his bombing run, the aero plane piloted by First Lieutenant James Knarr with Staff Sargent Charles Reichley as gunner, was hit by anti-aircraft flak, caught fire, and rolled to the right.

Out of control, the A-20 plunged into the bay. The descriptive images give an idea of how low the squadron was flying, and at what speed by how quickly Knarr impacts the water and how quickly his ship crashes. It warrants emphasizing that his A-20 weighed 15,000 lbs. empty, was over 17 feet in height and 47 feet in length. The wingspan measured just over 61 feet. Before our eyes we see this enormous machine shatter upon impact with the sea, disintegrating.

Greatest Air Force victory

In August of 1944, after weeks of intense aerial bombing, the U.S. landed fresh fighting troops at a beach called Amsterdam and on an island called Middleburg, all on the west coast of the Vogelkop.

In this scattered burst of aggression, specifically on Aug. 6, Australians reported that Japanese were fleeing various strongholds in Geelvink Bay. The ANZACs discovered Japanese resistance on the peninsula regrouped at a port called Manokwari and Allied forces attacked them there via undefended beaches near Sansapor. By the end of August that port was taken and some 25,000 Japanese troops were isolated on the peninsula. Trapped and cut-off these men amounted to the final significant enemy opposition in all of New Guinea.

The Japanese threat once reached Port Moresby across the Torres straights from Australia. During the first 18 months of the war, an estimated 24,000 Allied soldiers died moving the battle lines in the Allies’ favor just 200 miles from Port Moresby to Gusap Air Base and the port town of Lae. When the Fifth Air Force was strengthened, while still only receiving the raw minimum of America’s military output, the results and the statistics became amazingly clear: The progress made from Lae to Hollandia, while costing upwards of 9,000 Allied air and ground losses, moved the battle line over 500 miles in those first four months of 1944 alone.

Another four months later from Hollandia, with the liberation of the oil-rich Vogelkop peninsula in August of 1944, the Fifth Air Force commanded air superiority over the 1,500 mile length of New Guinea from the Coral Sea in the southeast to the Halmahera Sea in the northwest.

It was there, in New Guinea, that General Kenney was the first in American history to achieve the now widely accepted principle that the first goal of any military conflict is air superiority.

The Battle of New Guinea is unrivalled as the greatest victory in the history of the U.S. Air Force.

John E. Happ is the author of The Navigation Case: Training, Flying, and Fighting the 1941 to 1945 New Guinea War. A contributing author to the Journal of the American Revolution, he has written for the World War One website The 75th Artillery C.A.C. and the adventure magazine Atlantic Coastal Kayaker. You can visit his website at www.johnhappusa.com.