August 1, 1942
Port Moresby, New Guinea
Five days shy of his fifty-third birthday, Gen. George Kenney lay wet and filthy in a slit trench filled with six inches of brackish water. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed around him as sweat poured off his forehead in the hundred-degree heat. He peered over the lip of the slit trench into what the locals called the Valley of Death. Down there lay the most important piece of real estate in the Southwest Pacific, Seven Mile Drome, and its priceless runway.
A string of Japanese bombs exploded diagonally across the strip like volcanic eruptions. Black smoke and dust billowed skyward as more bombs struck the aircraft dispersal area. Shrapnel ripped into a P-39, setting fire to its fuel tanks. Another one brewed up nearby, and three light bombers, A-24 Dauntlesses, were soon smothered by bombs and flames.
The base’s antiaircraft guns thundered a response. Kenney’s eyes roamed skyward to see their effect. Far above, set against a cerulean sky, he could see a dozen Japanese Betty bombers in a tight formation. These were the pilots and crews of the legendary 4th Kokutai, Japanese naval aviators who sowed terror from China to Manila and beyond. These crews ranked as among the best in the world, and on this day they gave Kenney an object lesson of their skills by tearing hell out of his new command.
As he watched them parade by, antiaircraft shells burst all over the sky. The gunners shot low and wide, hitting nothing. Accomplishing nothing.
Four minutes warning. That’s all they received before the bombs began to fall. Seven Mile Drome, like every other forward base Kenney visited in his new command, lacked everything from vehicles to fuel, mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, and even a goddamned air raid siren. To compensate for that, General Scanlon, the REMF running this place, conceived a novel idea: use color-coded flags to denote the impending arrival of enemy planes.
White meant all clear. Yellow meant incoming aircraft. Red meant the field was under attack. Black meant grab a rifle and a helmet, paratroops were landing on our heads.
Kenney had arrived earlier that morning to sit in on a bomber briefing. As he walked from his aircraft to the operations tent, a white flag fluttered in the breeze above the field’s control tower.
A white goddamned flag.
Yellow seemed infuriatingly fitting, too. When word of the incoming strike reached the field, there was a mad scramble away from it. The engineers working on the strip dropped whatever they were doing and bolted into the jungle, or dove into slit trenches. A few P-39s managed to take off, but they never would be able to catch the bombers in time. Of the forty Airacobras sitting in the dispersal area, less than a dozen took off. The others waited in their protective revetments for bombs to blow them to scrap.
After all the effort, treasure, manpower, and risks to get these birds from Bell’s New York factory across the United States, then across the Pacific to Australia, then up to New Guinea, seeing them senselessly destroyed on the ground seemed absurdly comic. The craziness of war.
Except it wasn’t funny. The Japanese Army’s vanguard just seized a village a couple dozen miles from this airfield. They were coming to take it and capture Port Moresby, the first step in what everyone assumed would be a full-fledged invasion of northern Australia.
Those P-39s needed to be strafing those Japanese troops. They needed to be shooting down bombers. They needed to be sinking barges and shooting up supply dumps. In this crisis, anything would be better than their fate Kenney witnessed that afternoon.
Another string of bombs blasted a fuel depot—just a collection of fifty-five-gallon drums tucked into the nearby jungle without any security on them—and flames shot skyward. Over the roar of the guns and the fall of the bombs, the wounded called for help.
When the bombs stopped falling and the bombers turned for their home base, Kenney and the other generals sharing his slit trench climbed out and tried to clean themselves off as best they could. With water rationed at Port Moresby, they’d have to wait until they returned to Australia to truly get cleaned up. In the meantime, they walked back toward the strip, mud in their shoes, massive mosquitoes still flying in squadrons around them.
“You hear what happened the other night?”
“No,” Kenney said to the young pilot who had fallen in with them.
“One of those mosquitoes landed after dark at the end of the strip, and the ground crews put twenty-five gallons of fuel in it before realizing it wasn’t a P-39.”
Despite what had just happened, Kenney smiled at that.
He was all business a few minutes later, peppering everyone with questions. He listened without comment, gathering information, forming a picture in his head as to what he’d inherited and how he would have to fix it.
This was a beaten, desperate force he now owned. MacArthur shunned his aviators—they’d let him down so often, he’d given up hope that the flyboys would ever be anything but boastful skirt-chasers. When he first met with MacArthur, Kenney listened to his litany of complaints about the 5th. Can’t bomb. Can’t shoot planes down. Can’t fight. No organization. Morale in the tank. Leadership vacuums everywhere.
Now he was seeing firsthand how MacArthur had formed his opinion.
With P-39s all over the field, why had only ten taken off to intercept?
Only ten? Came the response. That was a Herculean effort, something to take pride in here in New Guinea.
The answer left Kenney dumbstruck.
“What? Why?”
Those were the only ones the mechanics could patch together. The others were down with battle damage, missing parts, or some kind of mechanical issue.
Seventy-five percent of the fighters defending the best and biggest air base in New Guinea, it turned out, were out of commission?
It got worse. The planes only flew when it was absolutely crucial that they do so. Every time they went aloft, they consumed fuel, oil, ammunition. Parts wore out and damage was suffered. In summer 1942 New Guinea, they had few spare parts, no real maintenance facilities, and never enough fuel or lubricants. Everything had to come up from Australia to be off-loaded at Port Moresby’s single, small dock. The Japanese bombed the town and the ships constantly.
So the planes sat, either broken or waiting for a mission to justify the cost.
The pilots at Moresby looked like castaways, clad in ragged uniforms rotting in the tropical environment. Some wore Aussie shorts and combat boots, shoulder holsters, and little else. The men simply didn’t have any other options. It wasn’t like there was a place in town at Moresby to go buy uniforms when old ones rotted out. There had been a department store not far from the docks, but an Australian militia unit came through on their way to the front and looted everything. They promptly marched into the steep mountain range beyond Seven Mile Drome known as the Owen Stanley Range, encountered the Japanese, and collapsed. The militia broke and ran, their officers screaming at them to get back in the fight. The Japanese overran some of their units, torturing captives and eating the wounded alive. The reports were clear about that. At times, the Imperial soldiers were seen to grab an Australian and drag him, dead or alive, back to their dugouts to feed.
Other horrors emerged from the mountains as well. Tales of Aussies finding their buddies with their limbs and arms hacked off, bayoneted to trees, their genitals stuffed in their mouths. The men perpetrating such crimes could break through the shaky Aussie defenses and wipe out the airmen at Seven Mile Drome. When Kenney asked for better protection, the Australians answered that they could spare no troops for the airfield’s defense.
These men—Kenney’s men now—were hanging on a limb. Most looked little better than skeletons—especially the maintenance crews. They’d been living in the jungle for months, eating canned Australian rations, dropping weight as they labored in the scorching heat and humidity. They suffered from stomach parasites, dysentery, malaria, and a dozen other jungle ailments that would confound the VA docs back home for years to come. Yet these men had mettle. They worked day and night to patch together their birds. Without spare parts, they got creative. They stripped wrecks for anything useful. They sent salvage crews into swamps and Japanese-held jungles to find downed planes and carry out whatever they could. One team vanished behind Japanese lines for days, returning to the rendezvous point late because they struck gold out in the bush—crashed bombers and fighters. They enlisted the help of a hundred local natives to carry out everything they could unbolt from the wrecks.
Ten planes getting off the dusty runway at Seven Mile Drome? Kenney understood now what a minor miracle that required. Darkness gave the men no respite. Night after night, the Japanese sent a few aircraft to loiter overhead and drop bombs with surprising accuracy—accuracy aided by Japanese operatives in the jungle around them who fired flares throughout the night to help guide the bombers. These were nuisance attacks designed to keep the men from getting enough sleep. They worked brilliantly. The men dozed fitfully in slit trenches, clouds of mosquitoes feasting on them through these raids. In the morning, the Japanese would hit them again just before lunch from above twenty thousand feet.
When the Imperial Japanese Army started to cross the Owen Stanley Mountains on what was known as the Kokoda Trail, bound for a final assault on Port Moresby, the enemy’s vanguard had overrun Moresby’s air warning stations. The Allies used to get forty-five minutes warning before an attack. Now, ten minutes was the norm. Sometimes the only warning they received was seeing the red flag hoisted above the control tower as bombs fell around it. Twenty men that summer went “bomb happy” and broke down under the strain. They were evacuated as psychiatric casualties with “more or less permanent dementia.”
The Japanese bombed in daylight with near impunity. The P-39 was no high-altitude brawler. Without a supercharger to boost engine power, its speed fell off above fifteen thousand feet so dramatically the plane was easy meat for Japanese Zero fighters. In New Guinea, with worn-out engines and a full combat load of fuel and ammunition, the Airacobra pilots needed at least forty-five minutes to set up a successful intercept.
Kenney listened as the pilots explained they didn’t have the time. They went up as the bombers arrived over the field and tried to intercept. They limped toward the enemy formations, their P-39s barely managing one sixty in their climbs at max power.
That’s when the Zeroes hit them. They dropped like anvils into their formations, shooting them to pieces while they were slow and sluggish. Sitting ducks. The kill-to-loss ratio said everything about who was winning the air war in New Guinea. One Japanese outfit had more kills over New Guinea than all of the 5th Air Force fighter squadrons combined.
The Fifth included a few aces—pilots who’d shot down five or more planes—but almost all of them had run their scores up in the Philippines, Java, and defending Darwin in northern Australia. Within the six P-39 squadrons—on paper a hundred and fifty fighters—only about fifty Japanese planes had been claimed.
The ’Cobra pilots learned their fighters could not turn with the Zeroes. They could not outclimb them. They could out-dive them and maybe outrun them on the deck. When the executive officer of Port Moresby, Captain Marburg, went to go talk to the P-39 guys earlier in the summer, they seemed to him to be obsessed with the Zero. The Zeroes were always on their tails, or above them, ready to pounce. They never had the tactical advantage, and they hated the planes the Army gave them to fly.
Every day, they climbed into their cockpits, sleep deprived and sickly, knowing that they faced diminishing odds of survival against the Zeroes sure to be waiting for them. They knew if they bailed out, their chances of survival diminished even more. Clambering out of the Airacobra’s car door was tough enough, but they soon found that doing so usually resulted in catastrophic injuries as the tail hit them when they free-fell from the cockpit. Those who survived to open their chutes often came down with broken limbs or severe head trauma.
That was assuming they came down over friendly territory. Over the Japanese-held stretches of New Guinea, a bailout meant almost surely ending up dangling helplessly from a tree. Japanese patrols found many Allied aviators in such a state. Their fate? Torture. Execution. Some were eaten by their captors.
In New Guinea, mercy did not exist. The war there was a conflict that brought out the most barbarous elements of the human heart.
Some pilots managed to escape and evade, living in the jungle with the help of friendly natives. They returned weeks after being shot down, usually so sick and starving that they were no longer fit for combat. One reporter who went down with a bomber crew emerged from the jungle after an epic, desperate overland hike. By the time he reached safety, he was delirious, weak, and barely functional. It took him months of hospital rest to finally recover his health and senses and get back on his feet.
Then there were those who tried to escape and evade, only to end up a victim of the jungle. After getting shot down, one pilot began working his way through the Owen Stanleys back to Seven Mile Drome. He came to a creek so deep that he could not wade across it. He started to swim. Halfway across, a crocodile reared out of the creek’s depths and sank its teeth into the pilot’s midsection. Trapped and flung back and forth by the croc, the pilot somehow managed to draw his survival knife and slam it between the vicious animal’s eyes. He staggered to the far bank where some natives found him and carried him to Port Moresby. He lay on a litter, barely conscious, his wounds infected and suppurating, until a transport arrived to fly him to Australia.
The pilots at Moresby watched him go, knowing that they could share such a fate.
Morale was near collapse. Mail hardly ever came. One local Aussie flying boat pilot became a local folk hero for refusing to make the run to Moresby from Townsville without somebody throwing at least a few sacks of mail into his aircraft. But most of the time, the planes and ships arrived with nothing. The mail piled up in Australia, weeks and weeks behind. For men already thinking they were in for a repeat of the Singapore campaign—trapped between the sea and a pitiless Japanese army—the lack of mail pushed some to the breaking point. At least two suicide attempts took place that summer, both traced directly back to the lack of contact with home.
Kenney found his pilots believed they were the forgotten ones of the Army Air Force, thrown into a noose without care, without supplies, parts, proper aircraft, or hope. They were not wrong. When Kenney first arrived in Australia, four days before this inspection trip to Seven Mile Drome, he asked the man he was replacing, General Brett, how many planes the 5th Air Force possessed. Brett had no idea. When he asked questions about everything from command structure to supply chains and aircraft maintenance, the answers were always the same. No clue. I’ll get back to you on that, General.
Kenney quickly found out where all the supplies were: Melbourne. The air service command built a massive, $3.5 million facility and was busily filling it with everything from Allison engines to intercoolers for P-40 Warhawks. They took pride in what lay in their warehouses and jealously guarded those parts.
Those parts were needed thousands of miles north, in New Guinea. The supply guys were loath to part with their stash. Before Kenney even went up to Moresby, he knew that to fix this mess he’d have to destroy a lot of careers and send these idiots home. But who would take their place?
Anyone willing to fight, or support the fight, he decided.
General Kenney had inherited the most disorganized and defeated command in Air Force history. To turn it around, he knew he needed two things: an aggressive spirit that pervaded every corner of the 5th Air Force and a plane that could beat the Japanese.
He hoped the Lockheed P-38 Lightning would be that plane. In the meantime, Kenney looked for some way to rally his men, to build their spirit and restore morale. But in New Guinea, there was virtually nothing that could do that. In the weeks that followed, the grind continued, and morale remained a hair’s breadth from being broken.
But then, later that fall a plane arrived, carrying America’s greatest World War I hero, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker. Wearer of the Medal of Honor—the highest award for bravery the U.S. government bestows on its warriors—“Captain Eddie” was a legend to every Depression-era kid whose eyes turned skyward and dreamed of flight. He was our best fighter pilot from the Great War—a man who survived the buzz saw over France’s Western Front when countless other Americans did not. He not only survived, he became an extraordinary aerial hunter, shooting down twenty-six German planes to become the Army Air Service’s ace of aces.
He was the example Kenney’s men needed. Tough, resourceful, and built with a bulletproof never-quit attitude that even being lost at sea for weeks could not diminish, he set out to meet Kenney’s fighter pilots. This new generation of pilots greeted the old warrior with awe and not a little hero worship. Rickenbacker was touched. He felt for the kids suffering and dying in this primal hellhole.
Kenney seized the moment and challenged his men to beat Eddie’s score. The pilots saw what that could mean: hero status, their name in papers across the country, and their faces in the newsreels. Captain Eddie leveraged his fame into running one of the most successful airlines in the country. He’d gone from a simple mechanic to a millionaire, thanks to his prowess in battle over the Great War’s trenches.
This was the brass ring dangling in front of Kenney’s young pilots that helped spark the renewal of spirit the 5th Air Force’s fighter units so desperately needed. The race to twenty-six became the rally point, one led and inspired by a handful of daring fliers who risked everything to unseat Captain Eddie as America’s ace of aces. But besting Captain Eddie’s score proved to be just the start of what became one of the wildest and most unusual events of World War II: the Race of Aces.