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| ISBN-13: | 9781742241746 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 25 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Kokoda Air Strikes
Allied Air Forces In New Guinea, 1942
By Anthony Cooper
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Anthony CooperAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-679-6
CHAPTER 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.
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.
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).
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kokoda Air Strikes by Anthony Cooper. Copyright © 2014 Anthony Cooper. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Introduction vi
Maps xii
The South West Pacific Area chain of command xx
1 Australia's 'Advanced Striking Force' 1
2 Losing Rabaul 30
3 Losing Lae and Salamaua 52
4 Fighters at last 90
5 Moresby's pre-invasion 'blitz' 130
6 The Yanks take over 174
7 Combing the Coral Sea 208
8 Preparing for the next push 238
9 Losing Buna 263
10 Losing Kokoda 303
11 Defending the eastern flank 332
12 Turning point at Milne Bay 377
13 The air supply debacle 421
14 Air supremacy by default 452
Afterword 476
Select bibliography 487
Index 493