Victory in the Bismarck Sea

Home , Bismarck Sea, Skip bombing, Vitiaz Strait

Landbased airplanes sank every ship in the Japanese convoy. No supplies or reinforcements got through to New Guinea. Victory in the Bismarck Sea

HE March 4, 1943, entry in the From March 1942 to January T diary of Lowell Thomas. the 1943, the Japanese had been able to famous radio newscaster, was typi- send convoys from Rabaul, on New cally succinct: "From the coast of Britain, across the Bismarck Sea to New Britain to the coast of New New Guinea with few losses. No Guinea, the waters are strewn with Allied naval presence existed, and the wreckage of Japanese ships and Allied airpower was too weak to airplanes. The battle of the Bismarck halt Japan's warships. Allied forces Sea was a spectacular victory.** operated from Port Moresby on the The Bismarck Sea? south side of the giant island to Few Americans had ever heard of prevent Japanese forces from mov- it or knew where it was. However, it ing closer to Australia. was to be the scene of a major vie-- In late February 1943, when Japa- tory for landbased aircraft over war- nese ships attempted to reinforce ships—one that would have made and resupply their New Guinea gar- Billy Mitchell, the old champion of risons. they had to be attacked and airpower. very proud. stopped if the Allies were to have a The three-day battle had its origins chance to carry out MacArthur's in the US plan to take the initiative bypass strategy. Buna, across the from Japan and push the network of Owen Stanley Range, about 100 Allied air bases away from Australia miles northeast of Port Moresby, toward Japanese-dominated areas-- was a worrisome enemy base and Gen. Douglas MacArthur's "island- had to be neutralized first. In the hopping" strategy. First. however, the June 1944 issue of Air Force. Lt.

, -.•„,.A.11.ies had to deal with Japanese Gen. George C. Kenney, command-

: forces on New Guinea ing general of Allied Air Forces in the southwest Pacific, explained what happened there.

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A Japanese destroyer falls prey to ••••= skip-bombing B-25 Mitchells. After some experimentation, skip bombing became Fifth Air Force's "standard, sure way of destroying shipping."

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: 3 ney recalled: "It looked as though there might be something in drop- ping a bomb with a five-second- delay fuze from level flight at an altitude of about fifty feet and a few 0. hundred feet away from a vessel, with the idea of having the bomb skip along the water until it bumped into the side of the ship. In the few seconds remaining, the bomb should sink just about far enough so that when it went off it would blow the bottom out of the ship. In the mean- time, the airplane would have hurdled the enemy vessel and would get far enough away so that it would not be vulnerable to the explosion."

Innovators, Improvisers When Kenney arrived in Austra- It was dangerous work, but modified B-25s were ideal for the task of cutting the lia, he found that his flying assets enemy's supply lines. After skip bombing and strafing the deck, the bombers were about 200 fighters—mostly P- would hurdle the beset vessel, clearing the area before the bombs detonated. 39s and P-40s—along with an as- sortment of A-20s, B-25s, B-26s, "Too Expensive" the most active airfield on the north- B-17s, and C-47s; a high percent- "Our fighters began to patrol over ern side of New Guinea. age were out of commission for Buna. If [a Japanese pilot] came up, • Salamaua, with an important maintenance and parts. His air force we shot him down. If he did not harbor and airfield. units grew during the next few come up, we strafed him on the • Finschhafen, a shipping center months as he reorganized them and ground. In between times, heavies, and anchorage for seaplanes and ten- put men in charge who knew how to mediums, and light bombers dug ders. innovate, improvise, and make do holes in his runways, battered down Japan's bases and shipping through- with the supplies available. his revetments, burned up his stores, out the nearby Bismarck Archipelago In the air, they began to show what and strafed his personnel. The [Japa- were also attacked in order to isolate could be achieved with a mix of nese] kept filling up the bomb cra- that area. bombardment and fighter aircraft. ters, and we kept making new ones. On February 25, Allied radio in- With the number of Japanese ships He replaced his airplanes, and we tercepts revealed that a large enemy of all types plying their resupply promptly shot them out of the air or convoy, traveling to Lae, was sched- routes, there would be plenty of op- burned them on the ground. Before uled to arrive in the Bismarck Sea portunities to experiment with low- long, he tired of the game and didn't early in March. The exact size and altitude bombing tactics against them. bother to fill in the holes on the composition of the convoy were un- Major Benn is credited by General runway. It had cost him around known, but the Allies were confi- Kenney with developing skip bomb- seventy-five planes, and he decided dent that they would be carrying both ing into a fine art. He experiment- that it was too expensive." troops and supplies to support an ed with different bomb sizes, timed However, the Japanese wanted the expected push to retake the areas of fuses, and approaches to targets. He base back in operation and staged New Guinea that had been lost. led one skip-bombing raid with a their main forces from Rabaul on the What was to be called the Battle of half-dozen B-17s at low altitude and Bismarck Sea coast off New Britain, the Bismarck Sea began with the sent six enemy ships to the bottom. 500 air miles from Port Moresby. sighting of the expected Japanese According to Kenney, "Skip bomb- Enemy convoys from there had tried convoy off the north coast of New ing became the standard, sure way of to relieve Buna, but it finally fell to Britain on March 1. destroying shipping, not only in Bill's Allied ground forces in January 1943. General Kenney knew the battle bombardment squadron but through- It cost the enemy about 300,000 tons would show what landbased airpower out the Fifth Air Force." of shipping sunk or damaged and could do against naval forces. He Meanwhile, General Kenney called scores of planes destroyed by Fifth had arrived in the southwest Pacific on Maj. Paul I. "Pappy" Gunn, a Air Force bombers and fighters. in July 1942 as commanding general pilot whose unorthodox solutions to While ground forces continued of Allied Air Forces under General maintenance problems became leg- to clean up enemy stragglers, Gen- MacArthur. endary. Gunn developed a package eral Kenney 's air units began to While he was en route to the of four .50-caliber machine guns for carry out almost daily attacks on Pacific to his assignment as Mac- the nose of A-20 light bombers. This enemy concentrations farther up the Arthur's chief air officer, he and his impressed Kenney. He directed Gunn New Guinea coast. There were three aide, Maj. William Benn, commander to "pull the bombardier and every- chief targets: of the 63d Bomb Squadron, discussed thing else out of the nose of a B-25 • Lae, a major Japanese base and low-altitude bombing of ships. Ken- medium bomber and fill it full of

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.50-caliber guns, with 500 rounds of ammunition per gun." Kenney said, "I told him I wanted him then to strap some more on the sides of the fuselage to give all the forward firepower possible. I sug- gested four guns in the nose, two on each side of the fuselage, and three underneath. If, when he had made the installation, the airplane still flew and the guns would shoot, I figured I'd have a skip bomber that could overwhelm the deck defenses of a [Japanese] vessel as the plane came in for the kill with its bombs. With a commerce destroyer as effective as I believed this would be, I'd be able to maintain an air blockade . . . any- where within the radius of action of the airplane." Lt. Gen. George Kenney (left), Fifth Air Force commander, and Maj. Gen. Ennis "Pretty Shooting" Whitehead, his deputy, were the architects of the victory in the Bismarck Sea, The combination of forward-firing which General MacArthur said, "cannot fall to go down in history." .50s and skipping bombs was effective. As fast as planes could be modi- General Kenney added that he had convoy, a large merchant vessel was fied, pilots were trained. One of the "a hunch" that the enemy's forces sunk, two others damaged, and a B-25 squadron commanders who "were going to get the surprise of destroyer was set on fire. The Flying became especially adept at attacking their lives." Fortresses were attacked by thirty shipping at low altitudes was Maj. The battle began on the afternoon Japanese fighters, three of which Ed Lamer. He and his "commerce of March 1, 1943, when a convoy of were shot down. Ten Allied bomb- destroying" squadron had become seven merchant vessels, six destroyers were riddled with holes, but all expert at skipping bombs into ground ers, and two cruisers was first sighted returned to their base at Port Moresby. targets at low altitudes and strafing north of New Britain. Seven addi- Later that day, the convoy con- with the nose- and side-gun-firing tional merchant vessels reportedly sisted of six warships and ten mer- .50 calibers. Kenney recalled,"! saw joined the convoy en route as the chant vessels. They were attacked a couple of them practicing on the weather closed in. by nine B-17s that eliminated two old wreck on the reef outside Port On March 2, the vessels were again merchantmen and damaged another. Moresby. They didn't miss. It was sighted heading from the Bismarck One intercepting fighter was shot pretty shooting and pretty skip bomb- Sea toward the Vitiaz Strait. When a down; again, all bombers returned ing." force of twenty-nine B-17s hit the safely. Just before daybreak on March 3, reconnaissance airplanes spotted

0 200 Mlles eight enemy warships escorting seven 11111100w I • 41%st merchant vessels headed south through the Vitiaz Strait. General Kenney explained what happened Bismarck Sea Rabaul•- A next: "At ten o'clock, the big brawl began about fifty miles southeast of 411 Finschhafen, right where we had planned it. Eighteen heavy bombers NEW BRITAIN Finschhafen and twenty medium bombers attacked • r;.. from 7,000-foot altitude. As the last PAPUA Lae • bombs were dropped, thirteen Aus- • tralian Beaufighters swept in at deck Salamaua height, strafing the whole length of the convoy, as Ed Lamer with twelve Buna • of my new B-25 commerce destroy- Owen • Alb ers skip-bombed, followed by twelve • Stanley 411k A-20 light bombers, also down 'on Port Moresby Range N. the deck.' Sixteen P-38s provided top cover. 411111 Vim "Ed Larner's squadron dropped NORTHERN AUSTRALIA thirty-seven 500-pound bombs, scor-

AIR FORCE Magazine August 1996 91 teen men killed and twelve wounded. Four aircraft were shot down and two crash-landed close to base. The number of ships sunk varied in official reports; poor weather pre- vented reliable reconnaissance. How- ever, when all the reports were in, the final count, according to the official Summary of Results, was "thirteen to fourteen M/V [merchant vessels] and seven DD [destroyers] sunk and one DD as a possible only. In addition to shipping losses, our fighters shot down twenty-seven fighters, and our bombers destroyed thirty- two planes." "Jock" Henebry, who in time became a major general and then, after retirement, the National President of the Air Force Association from The Japanese did a masterful job of camouflage—to no avail—on these troop 1956 to 1957, summarized the three- transports in Bargen Bay, New Britain. Fifth Air Force B-26s found them day battle this way: "All ships of the anyway and sent them to the bottom. convoy were sunk. All landbased Army Air Forces and a few Austra- ing seventeen direct hits, and the A- fire and sinking fast. One destroyer lian planes did the job. There were 20s, which also skip-bombed, scored was set on fire and another was left no Allied navy surface vessels in- eleven direct hits out of the twenty sinking. volved—a 'first' in history involv- 500-pounders they let go. When reconnaissance airplanes ing such a large enemy force. No "Twenty minutes from the time came over the next morning, only troops or equipment reached their the attack started, the battle was just one burned-out Japanese destroyer destination." about over. Every. . . merchant ves- was visible and it was barely afloat. In his after-action report, Maj. Gen. sel was sunk, sinking, or so badly One of Major Larner's B-25s skipped Ennis C. Whitehead, then deputy damaged that it was certain they a bomb into it and sent it to the commander of Fifth Air Force, re- would never reach land. One of the bottom. viewed the battle strategy and re- destroyers had been sunk and three The Battle of the Bismarck Sea sults: others were in bad shape from direct was over. The entire force of Japa- "Our plan of attack was to begin skip-bombing hits." nese troops, supplies, and equipment hitting the convoy as far out as During the battle, one B-17 was set had been destroyed; the encounter weather and radius of our bombers on fire, but it continued on its bomb had cost the enemy an estimated permitted. In each attack, we used run. Just as the bombs were released, 15,000 lives. US losses came to thir- all air force units [that] had suffi- the airplane lost its wing and spiraled seaward out of control. Seven men bailed out successfully, and all were strafed by Japanese fighters as they swung in their parachutes. Three P- 38 pilots, seeing what happened, dove on the enemy planes and blasted five of them out of the sky; however, all three P-38s were shot down. Of the thirty Japanese fighters in the engagement, twenty-two were definitely destroyed, two were probables, and four were damaged.

Lamer and Henebry That afternoon, what was left of the Japanese convoy came under attack by a force of sixteen B-17 bombers, five Australian Beaufighters, and ten B-25 "strafers" led by Major Lamer, with Maj. John P. "Jock"

Henebry on his wing. Eleven P-38s To make it a lethal commerce destroyer, the 8-25 lost its bombardier but flew top cover. When the attack was added four .50-caliber guns. Eventually, the Mitchell would bristle with up to over, three enemy vessels were on eighteen guns, in addition to rockets and 3,000 pounds of bombs.

92 AIR FORCE Magazine August 1996 cient radius in one coordinated attack. Once the convoy was within the operating radius of our attack bombers, we used medium-level bombing to divert AA [antiaircraft artil- lery] and fighters and the attack bombers to make the 'kills.' "The medium-level bombing was surprisingly effective. Strafing by our attack bombers and the RAAF Beaufighter squadron proved adequate in the neutralization of destroyer and light cruiser AA. The fighter cover over each coordinated attack effectively neutralized the enemy fighter force, permitting our bombers to make their runs without enemy fighter interference." General Whitehead noted that the .50-caliber "gun is adequate for strafing such targets. The eight-gun B- "Jock" Henebry's 3d Bomb Group became proficient skip bombers and were 25C-1 has, however, only half enough instrumental in the lopsided victory in the Bismarck Sea. He went on to firepower. From fifteen to twenty become a major general and later AFA President and Chairman of the Board. [.50-caliber] guns firing forward would give a suitable covering fire ing techniques. "Jock" Henebry's 3d drome. US losses were six B-25s, for attack bomber operations against Bomb Group became especially adept. with three missing, and nine P-38s, warships." Further proof came in an attack at with eight of them missing. Rabaul on November 2, 1943, a date Kenney reported: They Mean Business that ranks with the Bismarck Sea "In the space of twelve minutes, we As many as fourteen forward- battle in the history of the war in the had destroyed or damaged 114,000 firing .50-caliber guns were added South Pacific. tons of Japanese shipping, shot down to some later model B-25s, as well as While six P-38 squadrons flew top or destroyed on the ground eighty- eight five-inch rockets and a 75-mm cover, Maj. Ben Fridge, with four five . . . airplanes, and burned out cannon, which "Poppy" Gunn had squadrons of B-25s, machine-gunned half the town of Rabaul, with a loss perfected. In addition, the B-25H, and dropped phosphorous bombs on of supplies to the enemy estimated the most lethal of all B-25s, also was antiaircraft positions. Henebry led at 300,000 tons." able to carry a hefty 3,000 pounds of his five squadrons into Rabaul Har- "Jock" Henebry did not escape the bombs. As General Kenney com- bor through the smoke of the phos- enemy's wrath unscathed. He had to mented in the Air Force article, "The phorous bombs at masthead height. ditch his B-25 after it was riddled greatest commerce destroyer of the "Of the thirty-eight vessels . . . and with bullet and shell holes and one war had been born. We hurriedly twenty merchant ships . . . in the engine was shot out. He and his crew remodeled every B-25 we could get harbor that day," Kenney reported, were rescued later that day. our hands on and made the phrase "thirty received direct hits in the In writing about the Bismarck and 'air blockade' mean something." toughest, hardest-fought engagement Rabaul battles in his personal his- General MacArthur sent his "grati- of the war. The list included one tory of the war, General Kenney, tude and felicitations on the mag- heavy cruiser, one destroyer tender, declared, "Never in the long history nificent victory," which "cannot fail one submarine tender, three destroy- of warfare had so much destruction to go down in history as one of the ers, two naval auxiliary craft, three been wrought upon the forces of a most complete and annihilating com- minesweepers, sixteen merchant ves- belligerent nation so swiftly and at bats of all time." General Kenney sels, two tankers, and a tug." such little cost to the victor." sent a congratulatory message to Although from fifty to sixty en- General Kenney, a contemporary General Whitehead and added, "Air- emy fighters were expected, 125 to of Billy Mitchell's who agreed with power has written some important 150 showed up and dove through the the great crusader's airpower postu- history in the past three days. Tell P-38s to get at the B-25s. Sixty- lates, must have taken special pride the whole gang that I am so proud of eight Japanese fighters were de- in writing that statement. After the them I am about to blow a fuze." stroyed by the P-38s and B-25s, with 1921 bombing tests off the Atlantic Since the Bismarck Sea action had twenty-three probables. In addition, coast, Mitchell had declared, "No proved the concept was sound, all Fridge's B-25s destroyed ten float- surface vessels can exist wherever light- and medium-bomber pilots planes sitting at anchor, as well as air forces acting from land bases are were trained in low-altitude bomb- other aircraft on the Lakunai Air- able to attack them." General Ken- ney's low-flying B-25 mediums, appropriately named for Mitchell, C. V. Glines is a writer living in Dallas, Tex. His most recent article for Air proved beyond all doubt that he was Force Magazine, "The Son Tay Raid," appeared in the November 1995 issue. right. •

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