Summer of 1943
New Guinea
Kenney flung the 5th Air Force against Wewak repeatedly through the end of August, using his P-38 force to cover both heavy bombers and the Pappy Gunn modified strafer B-25s. The attacks destroyed hundreds of Japanese planes on the ground, while the few that got airborne to challenge the Americans were knocked out of the sky by the eager Lightning jocks. It was one of the most lopsided aerial victories of the war, and it changed the entire complexion of the New Guinea campaign. The strafers tore the heart out of the Japanese Army Air Force, blowing apart on the ground the planes that took so much effort to get to Wewak from the Home Islands. Hundreds of Japanese aircrew were killed, and the new fighter units were almost completely destroyed. In early September, some of them could count only a half dozen available Oscars and Hiens. The rest lay in jungle craters, or broken and burned on the sides of the Wewak runways.
There would be no further Japanese Army Air Force counteroffensives in New Guinea. The 5th ruled supreme.
Beyond the strategic implications of the raids, the Wewak air battles created a host of new American aces and gave the current leaders a chance to extend their scores. Tom Lynch shot down three more fighters, bringing his total to fourteen at the end of the month. George Welch, the Pearl Harbor hero who spent the better part of the last year flying the hated Airacobras, finally talked his way into the 80th Fighter Squadron, which reequipped with P-38s earlier that summer. Over Wewak, he made a huge statement, flaming three fighters on August 20. He and Lynch were neck and neck, battling for second place and striking position to catch Bong.
Dick missed the Wewak raids. Johnson, who took formal command of the Knights on the twenty-seventh, assigned him to cover other strikes around New Guinea and the western tip of New Britain. While he flew what turned out to be milk runs, his competition racked their scores up, and Vern Haughland breathlessly documented their kills. At the end of the month, Vern wrote a story about George Welch’s return from Airacobra obscurity, highlighting his three-in-a-day battle over Wewak. Being one of the first American air heroes of World War II made him a favorite back home, though in the 5th he was less revered by the senior leadership. He could be an acerbic person, one who didn’t hold back with the press. When asked what the best aspect of the P-39 was, he quipped, “Eleven hundred pounds of Allison armor.” It was a reference to the engine being behind the pilot. Not a stellar thing to say to the people back home building them. Whether the senior brass kept reporters away from Welch or he simply wasn’t covered much while he was not scoring in his Airacobra unit after late 1942 is unknown. Either way, he wasn’t a Kenney favorite.
Tommy McGuire destroyed two more planes at the end of August to become one of the 475th Fighter Group’s first aces. Back home, nobody noticed. Vern and the other reporters covering the ace race ignored him, though in Australia the papers did carry an account of his first fight over Wewak. He was lost in the crowd of new aces rising with the P-38’s ascendancy, and the fact that he still was not well regarded by his peers—despite his astonishing success that August—had done him no favors.
With the Japanese units at Wewak in shambles, Kenney turned the 5th Air Force against Cape Gloucester, New Britain. The massive Japanese base at Rabaul lay on one end of that island, a secondary airfield on the other. To support the impending amphibious invasion around Lae, Kenney wanted to make sure Cape Gloucester couldn’t be used as a staging base by the Japanese.
The strikes triggered a strong Japanese reaction. The Knights tangled for the first time with the new Japanese Army Air Force twin-engine fighter, the Ki-45 Toryu. They made easy work of the slower, if more agile, aircraft. Johnson shot down one Toryu on the second of September, achieving ace status with his two kills from the Aleutians. On the same day, George Welch returned home with two more victory claims, both of which V Fighter Command confirmed. That tied him with Dick Bong, and for a month they shared top ace honors.
But George Welch’s tenure with the 5th Air Force ended right after the September 2 air battle. He developed a severe case of malaria and was medically evacuated to Australia, never to fly in combat again.1 Upon recovery, he returned home and was sent on the war bond tour circuit, giving speeches all over the country. It was a job he loathed so completely that in 1944, he asked Gen. Hap Arnold personally for permission to leave the Army Air Force so he could go be a test pilot for North American Aviation. Arnold let him go, and the first American air hero slipped into civilian clothes a year before Hiroshima.
He left behind a unit that soon challenged the Knights for primacy in the Southwest Pacific. The Headhunters of the 80th Fighter Squadron had languished at Moresby for over a year flying Airacobras. Now, with their new P-38s, the unit cut a swath through the Japanese in every aerial encounter. Jay Robbins was their star ace, having scored seven kills in two fights in July and September to vault him ahead of Johnson on the ace ladder.
As the P-38 pilots competed against each other and crushed the Japanese in nearly every battle, Kenney’s latest special project arrived on the scene and totally changed the dynamics of the ace race at a time when the 5th was gearing up for its greatest challenge: destroying Japanese airpower at Rabaul.
Back in the spring of 1943, Kenney returned to the States briefly following the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. He returned a national hero, a general in a backwater theater whose men scored the AAF’s biggest victory of the war. Kenney’s face now graced the cover of Life magazine. Reporters clamored to interview him. He was on everyone’s A-list for dinner in the Washington elite set when he arrived in the capital to personally brief Hap Arnold. During that meeting, Kenney asked his commanding general for reinforcements. He needed more fighter groups, more P-38s, and more bombers if MacArthur’s drive to the Philippines was to get under way. The P-39s in the 5th needed to be discarded.
Arnold told Kenney he didn’t have the planes to give him. As for any new fighter or bomber groups? The ones working up Stateside were all earmarked for Europe. The conversation proceeded stiltedly from there.
Eventually, Arnold slammed the door to further discussion, leaving Kenney to process the fact that his theater would continue to get everyone else’s scraps.
He’d made good use of scraps, though, thanks to ingenuity and a whole lot of outside-the-box thinking. Kenney decided to do the same thing in Washington.
Thanks to the Bismarck Sea victory and his status as America’s latest hero general, President Roosevelt asked him to the White House to discuss the situation in the Pacific. During the meeting, FDR asked him if he needed anything. Kenney seized on the moment and told the commander in chief he needed more fighter and bomber groups. Roosevelt listened, then promised to send him the reinforcements.
Kenney learned a valuable lesson that day. Publicity, accolades, and victory could be used as political currency to get what he wanted for his theater. He’d executed a masterful end run around Hap Arnold, who could not have been pleased with his insubordination. But the commander in chief ordered Arnold to send Kenney reinforcements, and dutifully he picked several about to head to England and directed them to Australia instead.
That’s how Lt. Col. Neel Kearby, commander of the 348th Fighter Group, found himself getting off a transport in Australia instead of the UK. A father of three young boys, he was a bantam of a man with charisma to burn and flecks of gray in his dark hair. At thirty-three, he’d spent his entire life dreaming of only one thing: becoming America’s ace of aces. When he met General Kenney for the first time, he looked at his new commanding general and asked, “Sir, who are the high scorers here? I need to know who to beat.”
Kenney smiled broadly. As he wrote later, “Kearby looked like money in the bank.”