For the Honor of God

(See Cover)

Last week was the most successful week of the war in the Southwest Pacific. With the Japs all but cleaned out of the Papuan sector of New Guinea, with the crushing of a Japanese attempt to land new reinforcements, General Douglas MacArthur left the screened veranda of his New Guinea cottage, where he had been since November, and returned to his headquarters in Australia.

His first act was to heap honors on his high command: Distinguished Service Crosses to twelve of his ranking officers (six Americans, six Australians). One of them, Lieut. General Robert L. Eichelberger, was revealed as the U.S. field commander in the Papuan campaign. In an outpouring of long-kept secrets, General MacArthur also revealed the identity of his ground forces in the campaign: parts of the 6th and 7th Australian divisions, and of the American 41st (Oregon, Washington, Montana National Guard) and 32nd (from Wisconsin and Michigan).

Said General MacArthur: "The magnificent conduct of the troops and elements of this command, operating under difficulties rarely if ever surpassed in a campaign, has earned my highest praise and commendation. . . . To the American Fifth Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force no commendation could be too great. . . . They have set new horizons for the air conduct of the war.

"To Almighty God," concluded General MacArthur, "I give thanks for that guidance which has brought us to this success in our great crusade. His is the honor, the power and the glory, forever, Amen."

Hammer the Hammer. But last week belonged to the airmen. The center of the week's action focused first on a drab sedan which lurched over the pocked and pitted track that winds from Jackson airdrome to Port Moresby. The thick red dust of New Guinea blurred its windows, but not the three white stars on its license plate. Spying the stars, half-naked troops, Australian and American, grinned and threw casual salutes. One of their favorite brass hats was home again: Lieut. General George Churchill Kenney, Commanding General of Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, and commander, Fifth U.S. Air Force.

The grins would have become cheers had the troops known what scrub-headed General Kenney was saying at that moment: "Good, Whitey! Let's smear 'em tomorrow."

"Whitey" was his deputy commander, Brigadier General Ennis C. Whitehead. "Em" was the Japanese concentration at Rabaul. Rabaul Peninsula lies at the northern tip of New Britain, 480 air miles from Moresby. It looks not unlike the cocked hammer of a pistol, and like a pistol the Japanese have pointed it at the Allies in the Southwest Pacific. Kenney's planes had hit it before, but not in the strength he wanted. Now Whitehead had met him at the airdrome with the news that his strength was mustered: two squadrons of Flying Fortresses, one of B-24 Liberators. At last Kenney was ready to hammer the hammer.

For exactly 25 years George Kenney has carried in his fob pocket a small pair of wooden dice. They are the oracle he invariably consults before embarking on momentous projects. In the rocking, dusty sedan he plucked them out at random. They showed six-one, a natural. He faced them toward his aide, able, beady-eyed Captain Clarence "Kip" Chase.

"See?" he crowed. The drab sedan lurched on toward Moresby.

Next morning, before the sun began to smother Moresby in equatorial heat, three Fortresses droned north. Reconnaissance photographs had revealed a larger concentration of Jap ships in Rabaul Harbor than usual, and some 40 planes on adjacent airdromes. The vanguard of Fortresses ignored the ships, dropped their 500-lb. bombs on the planes. How many they smashed the darkness concealed, but fewer than 20 rose to meet the 30-odd U.S. bombers which struck the harbor's clustered ships at noon. Five of these went down before the squadrons' .50-caliber guns. Nine, possibly ten, warships were left afire or sinking. The price: one heavy bomber.*

What a Week! That was only the beginning of a week when George Kenney's dice tumbled out sevens like a slot machine gone haywire, and U.S. airpower in the Southwest Pacific came of age.

Despite the U.S. heavy bombers' heavy toll, the Jap dipped next day into his deep reservoir of shipping and brought out four transports, determinedly convoyed by two cruisers and four destroyers. The destination: Lae (rhymes with gay) 150 miles up the New Guinea coast from Buna, where the Jap has his nearest foothold.

The convoy was only 30 miles off New Britain, near Gasmata, when a B-24 Liberator on reconnaissance picked it up. A Flying Fortress escorted by eight long-range P-38 (Lightning) fighters flew in to intercept. They found that the convoy carried an umbrella of 14 Zeros. They shot down nine, probably got three more and damaged the other two.

Fortresses haunted the convoy until after dark, when an Australian-manned Navy Catalina picked up the convoy's phosphorescent wake. Three bombs from the Catalina blew up a big (14,000-ton) transport which probably carried 4,000 men.

Next morning the convoy reached the vicinity of Lae, where more Zeros undertook to protect it. Then George Kenney's airmen really started to work. Besides Fortresses, Liberators and Lightnings, George Kenney has samples of almost every type of combat plane the U.S. can produce: twin-engined Boston (A-20), Marauder (B26) and Mitchell (B25) bombers, Kittyhawk (P-40) fighters, plus some Australian Beaufighters and Beaufort bombers. The turbo-supercharged Lightnings can hit the Zeros high, and the heavily-armed Kittyhawks catch them when they come down low./-

The Lightnings opened the fighting against 20 Zeros by knocking down four. A flight of Marauders dumped its bombs, fought off twelve fresh Zeros, probably got two. Three Flying Fortresses poured .50-caliber bullets at the Zeros for nearly an hour, destroyed four. The bombers sank a second large transport and hit a third with a 500-lb. bomb.

All night and next day George Kenney's airmen hammered at the convoy and its protecting planes. Mitchell bombers sank a transport which rolled over in the shallow water near the Lae jetty, knocked down five Zeros which attempted to interfere. Beaufighters swept into the Lae airdrome, burnt up one Zero, shot up others on the runway. In the late afternoon the oft-derided Kittyhawks were attacked by 18 Zeros. Score: 13 Zeros shot down, one Kittyhawk (pilot safe). When 20 more Zeros jumped some Lightnings they lost all but five. Total Jap planes lost in three days: 85 certain, 48 more maybe. Said MacArthur's communique dryly: "The enemy's air losses over the last three days may be regarded as serious." Allied losses: "Comparatively negligible."

Flyers' General. In five months in the Southwest Pacific, the man chiefly responsible for these successes has yet to have a day off, or even to want one. General Kenney's office is wherever he and Captain Chase are at the moment. Places are always laid for George Kenney at two luncheon tables, one at Port Moresby, the other nearly 2,000 miles south in Australia. Most weeks he manages to have several meals at each of them. Last week he had three lunches at his mainland headquarters, two with MacArthur in New Guinea.

George Kenney was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, 53 years ago. His parents were Americans whose vacation he spoiled by arriving a week early. His expatriate birth was in the tradition of his mother's family: she had been born on shipboard on the Atlantic and one of her sisters had been born in Sweden.

George Kenney was raised (to a height of 5 ft. 6 in.) in Brookline, Mass. He studied civil engineering at M.I.T., but left after three years to become an instrument man for Quebec & Saguenay Railroad. Then he became a civil engineer and a contractor. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Signal Corps as a private. He learned to fly under Bert Acosta, who was later to achieve fame as a transatlantic pilot. His first three landings were all dead stick, but he was notably successful once he got to France. Twice he was shot down. He was credited with two German planes, came out of the war with a captaincy, the D.S.C. and Silver Star.

Between wars Kenney married twice, fathered a son Bill (now 20) and a daughter Julia (16). He went through the routine which is designed to round out an air general: War College, Supply, Air Corps Engineering School, instructor in observation. In France in 1940 he riled other military observers by recommending that the U.S. throw its Air Force into the ashcan--"It's so out of date for the kind of war the Germans are going to have here."

Between times he experimented. George Kenney was the first man to fix machine guns in the wing of a plane: back in 1922 he installed two .30-caliber Brownings in the wing of an old De Havilland. Kenney is the inventor of the parachute bomb, which enables bombing planes to fly lower, bomb more accurately. He invented this bomb in 1928, but it was never used until last September, when he dropped 240 of them on the Japanese at Buna. Twenty-two Jap planes were standing on the strip; 17 of them were destroyed and all the ack-ack in the area was silenced.

"You've got to devise stuff like that," Kenney says. "I'd studied all the books on these different goddam campaigns, and Buna was not in any of them."

A new kind of war. The textbooks did not tell George Kenney what he would find in the Southwest Pacific. It was a war for a cocky, enthusiastic little man who can inspire his flyers with his own skill for improvisation.

Though it apparently marks the beginning of an Allied offensive in the Southwest Pacific, the Battle for Buna, in perspective, was only a local action 3,500 miles south of Tokyo. But it probably will go down in history as the first campaign ever supplied entirely by air.

Having arrived two weeks after the Japs landed at Buna (July 20), Kenney spent two months organizing his air force, pepping up laggard flyers, briefing new ones, getting his fresh supply of planes ready for action. By Sept. 28 the Jap was at Ioribaiwa, only 32 miles from Port Moresby. MacArthur, his chief of staff Major General Richard K. Sutherland (a pilot himself), Australian General Blamey and Kenney fixed on a plan: to wrest control of the air, despite hell and high mountains, by blasting the Japs out of Buna and far-off Lae and Salamaua, the bases from which Buna was supplied.

While the retreating Aussies made a stand at Ioribaiwa, Kenney's planes swarmed north. They struck the supply line crawling from Buna. They struck airdromes again & again. Presently the stunned Jap no longer bothered to repair the craters in his strips. During the height of the Guadalcanal action came a six-week period in which no Jap plane dared to take the air. Since Nov. 1 no Jap reinforcements for New Guinea have landed intact. Most of them never landed at all.

The Hard Way. Meanwhile, more of Kenney's planes were dropping troops on an emergency strip at Wanigepi, on the coast of southeast Buna. As the troops moved toward Buna, Kenney had to find new strips for his supply planes. He found them by sending light planes to drag the coast for level ground. Sometimes it was pocked with palms, sometimes wing-deep in grass. The first pilot to land would squirm to a semi-crash landing. When the ear-ringed natives gathered round, he spread his wares--cowrie shells and tobacco sticks--and bargained to have trees and grass sliced down. The natives, men & women, usually set to work with a will.

On these makeshift strips George Kenney soon was landing 2,000,000 lb. of supplies a week. In a single day he delivered 519,000 lb.--100 planeloads. He flew in a 250-bed hospital with enough equipment to maintain it for ten days. He delivered a four-gun battery of 105-mm. howitzers, with tractors to haul them and crews to operate them. A Flying Fortress is designed to carry no more than 6,000 lb.; a 105-mm. howitzer unit weighs 7,000. Kenney flew the guns 1,500 miles from Australia and delivered them over weather-treacherous, 12,000-ft. mountains to makeshift airfields. Among other items he also delivered over 4,000 infantrymen, using 16 different types of planes to haul them in. He delivered bulldozers and horses and mules (which frightened the aborigines, though they were long used to airplanes).

Kenney's lessons, in half a year of fighting the Jap are four:

> "The Jap is a hell of a tough boy. He's best when he's attacking; that's why our cue is to attack him. The attacker always has the advantage of surprise, and the Jap has not got any crystal ball."

> "Shipping and planes are our two chief targets and our own planes should be designed with that in mind. If the same weapon can be used against both, you're sitting pretty. The weapon is a question of skip bombing and lots of .50 caliber gunfire forward."

> "There is nothing wrong with our planes except that I haven't got enough of them. When we get in a fight, if we don't make 'em pay ten Zeros for every heavy bomber we lose, I consider we got gypped."*

> "War against the Jap is a war of attrition. Its last battle will be fought in the streets of Tokyo."

Nobody knows better than George Kenney that the ladder his bombers must climb to Tokyo is a long ladder. New names by the hundreds find their way into the communiques. No sooner was Kododa disposed of then there was Buna and Gona--then Cape Endaiadare, Buna Mission, Sanananda--and Lae, Salamaua, Wewak, Kavieng, Rabaul and Gasmata still to come. That is only the beginning, and there are Japs in each of those places who must be dug out at the point of a bayonet after Kenney has flown the bayonets and the men to wield them.

In the long, hard task which does not faze him George Kenney is surrounded by able assistants. General Whitehead is his New Guinea air commander. Kenney's chief of pursuit is a 36-year-old, battlewise tactical genius named Paul Wurtsmith. Kenney has surrounded himself with capable Australian flying officers, such as Group Captain William Garing, who knows every nook of the thousands of trackless Pacific square miles.

Above all, George Kenney has the support of Douglas MacArthur who, when he gave out the totals of the damage done by Allied airplanes* in his area, dated them, not from the time of his own arrival in the Southwest Pacific, but from the Buna landing in July, i.e., about the time George Kenney took over. Said MacArthur of Kenney last week: "He is unquestionably one of the best qualified air officers in the world today."

* Lost with that plane was Brigadier General Kenneth Walker, 44, bombardment expert.

/- A favorite gag of Lightning pilots is radioing to the low-flying Kittyhawks: "Just stay there; I'll chase him down to where you can hit him."

* Quite properly. A Flying Fortress crew consists of ten skilled Americans; A Jap Zero contains one Jap.

* The score of Jap losses since Kennedy's arrival is: 418 planes, 24 warships, 86 transports, 150 landing barges.

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