Wild_Bill_Kelso
Senior Master Sergeant
- 3,231
- Mar 18, 2022
So I just got this in the mail a couple of weeks ago, been waiting for it for several months. I have a few others in the series already, these are day by day accounts of the air combat in the South Pacific, for this volume mainly around New Guinea. This is one of those series which looks at records from both sides, so you get a much more complete and balanced picture of what was actually happening, as distinct from the older generation of WW2 aviation books we read in the 70s-90s, which were facts mixed with a lot of "patriotic optimism" and all kinds of more or less random legends.
I'd been looking forward to Volume 5 because this is where the 49th FG gets into the mix, the very first P-38s arrive, and the Allies start pushing back a bit in this area. This post / review is kind of a high level overview with some broad, sweeping observations. I think these operational histories always change the way we look at things a bit which is what makes them exciting and interesting. I wanted to point out some of these and I'll get into more detail in followup posts.
This one is 225 pages not counting references etc. It gets into the mix pretty quickly. These books are illustrated partly with some color CG images that are slightly artificial looking, but by and large pretty good and they kind of make the book come alive and give you some idea of what things looked like in color where and when this was actually going on. I particularly like the A-20 on the cover of this one. This is just a vague impression but overall I'd rate this book higher than some of the other volumes in terms of overall quality and overall merit. There are just enough charts, not too much of a wordy introduction or summary, it's mostly just hard data.
This book covers September, October, November and December 1942. It starts out pretty slowly, as the air combat died down a bit. The Japanese are no longer sending a lot of daylight raids against Port Morseby, and the Battle for Guadalcanal isn't as hot and heavy, the fighting is mostly concentrating on the Kokoda trail campaign in the East coast of Papua New Guinea. Both the US and IJN are rotating some units out, and bringing some new ones in. For the Japanese this includes some IJA units with their Oscars (and a bit later, Ki-48s) though they aren't operational until toward the end. For the first two thirds of this book, covering fighting from September through mid-November, the book is actually a little bit boring. It's not written in a particularly dramatic way, and page after page of reading how some unit strafed the jungle, dropped 14 x 300 lb bombs and expended 1,400 rounds of 20 mm and 8,000 rounds of .303 is only so gripping, even though if you read between the lines a bit, interesting and dramatic things are still happening there almost every day.
There just isn't that much air to air combat in the first 150 pages or so, mostly bombing sorties and mostly against jungle targets with results that are are hard to verify. Partly this is due to the weather (see below) and partly due to changing out some exhausted units, and realignment of command structures and so on.
But by the end, in the second half of November and getting into December, the fighting really picks up a lot and it gets much more interesting. Taken in aggregate, it does change my perception on several things and now I'm looking forward to Volume 6 quite a bit. Here are a few of my general / broad strokes observations, and I'll post some specific examples later on.
The mountains, the sea - the weather!
There are three sides fighting here - The Allies, the Japanese, and the weather! I think the weather was the most lethal force. An average mission is at the squadron level goes like this: A dozen aircraft take off, one has engine trouble and goes back right away. Then they hit weather and half get lost in storms and clouds and turn back. The remainder bomb the target in wildly varying conditions, often to no measurable effect. Then one more plane has another mishap, either they get lost in total overcast and crash into a mountain, they struggle to find the base and finally crash land on the strip, or end up way out to sea, run out of fuel and crash land on a beach or ditch. Some later to be rescued and / or recovered in some amazing feats of engineering. The weather is incredibly capricious and dangerous, and the risks of flying around this area were IMMENSE. I would assume still are at least to some extent. The weather was the major limiting factor which kept the combat from being much more bloody, at some points you have something like 60-80 fighters or more active on both sides, but they never run into each other in those kinds of numbers
Every kinda plane you could possibly want
The aircraft types in action are extremely varied. On the Japanese side - A6M2, A6M3, A6M2-N, D3A, G4M, Ki-43, Ki-48, G3M, E-13, Ki-15 / C5M, Ki-46, H6K, F1M, and probably some others I forgot. On the Allied side, P-39D through K, P-40E and K, P-38F, B-17D, E and F, B-24, B-25C, B-26, A-20A, Hudson, Wirraway, Beaufort, Beaufighter, C-47, and PBY are all heavily engaged in fighting, albeit mostly on a small scale. They all have their moments too. Most of these types were being encountered by one another in various combinations which are often not what you would expect, sometimes with very interesting results!
Bomber vs. bomber
One example of what I mean by the above is that there are several cases where bombers were fighting bombers. In one incident three B-25s encountered a G4M and they got into a running fight, resulting in fairly severe damage on both sides but no shoot down. On another case D3A bombers joined A6M fighters attacking a B-17, on another case a G4M joined with some A6Ms attacking a B-24, and got shot down by the B-24 gunners. I think there are a few more of these.
US and Allied Bombers were fending off Japanese fighters by themselves
I've been told quite confidently in the past that even the big four engine US bombers could not fly missions without fighter escort in the Pacific. This is demonstrably not the case, as many US and some Australian bombers got into lengthy fights with sometimes large numbers of Japanese fighters, A6M and later Ki-43, sometimes for as long as a half hour to an hour or more, and rarely got shot down. By the second half of the book this seems to have happened every 3 or 4 days. Usually these were B-17s, especially during their routine raids against Rabaul, then later B-24s as those went into action. But it also happened with B-25s, B-26s, A-20s, and on at least one occasion, Beauforts. Usually neither side lost any aircraft, in a few cases bombers were shot down, in a few cases fighters were shot down (especially if the bombers were in formation and not by themselves). Most often each side sustained some damage but made it back to base. On the flipside, the same was sometimes the case with Japanese bombers too, and neither Zeros nor Betty's seemed to burst into flames every time they were hit, but the Japanese bombers did seem to be more vulnerable to fighters. One one occasion 49th FG P-40s seem to have rather easily fought past some A6M fighter escort and shot down 3 or 4 G3Ms in a matter of seconds.
Fighter vs Fighter was about even
The fighter vs. fighter combat i was looking for was actually pretty rare and most of it happened in December. The Japanese lost 19 Zeros and 4 Oscars. The US lost 20 Kittyhawks and 6 Airacobras. The airacobras actually did quite well, better than the Kittyhawks in two incidents, though they were mostly flying the less aggressive missions so didn't get into as many fights. By this time they also have newer model P-39s in action with more experienced pilots, and have probably developed tactics. P-38s come into the picture only a little bit at the very end of the book, claiming I think one Oscar and one Val. They were still having severe maintenance issues with these which Claringould gets into some detail on that. It was a P-39 unit which had converted to the P-38s, and Bong was sent over to them. 9th FS / 49th FG is still flying P-40s at this point, and they have the most worn out ones. Just a few P-40Ks have arrived and are in use with only one squadron (I think it was 8th FS). The Allies lost a lot more bombers in action because they were still flying daylight missions almost every day, but I think most of the losses were actually to weather and accidents... the Owen Stanley range was probably the single biggest Ace in the Theater by a wide margin, followed by the Pacific Ocean.
Skip Bombing
One of the neat things about this book is that we get to see the actual results of skip bombing and some other low-level bombing attempts. The beginning of the book, and the previous books, are filled with dangerous, hair raising B-17 raids against Rabaul, against enemy ships, and other targets which ultimately seem to have very little effect. That must have been so frustrating for the crews. But by the second half of the book they are starting to try skip-bombing attacks and a lot of very low-level bombing runs (usually getting shot up by flak in the process). I'm happy to say (sorry IJN) that this did actually seem to work on at least 3 or 4 occasions. I need to go through again and count them all carefully. Most of the skip-bombing runs were done by B-17s. I think the first few times they thought they got hits but didn't, but toward the end they thought they got hits and actually did hit and seriously damage several Japanese warships and transports. Low level attacks by the twin engine bombers also seemed to be pretty effective more generally.
The Theater was D A N G E R O U S
New units coming into the Theater were walking a tightrope of death and all kinds of ghastly accidents were very routine. When they first brought the A-20s in, they were using British made parafrags (actually WWI vintage bombs designed to be thrown out of airplanes by hand) with twitchy contact fuses. Several A-20s just blew up for no apparent reason while flying around, killing all crew aboard. It turned out to be these parafrag bombs and they switched them out for more modern ones. New units rotating in had very high accident rates, far more maintenance problems, much higher rates of disease, got lost more often on missions, ran into the Owen Stanley mountains more often, did much more poorly in combat, and ended up ditching in the sea more often than the veteran units. Once they survived a couple of weeks of action they did a lot better. Sometimes sanity prevailed, for example canceling one particularly hare brained mission planed for the P-38 squadron.
Pilot rescue and Attrition
Reading between the lines again, there are a lot of really dramatic survival stories in here. Pilots walking for days in the jungle, or stranded on tiny islands, getting their planes flying again and making it back to base, etc. This is where the Japanese seem to be indeed really be losing out. It's not so much that Zeros and Bettys are blowing up like the Hindenburg every time a bullet hits them, because they don't. The Zeros in particular actually seem like pretty tough planes and routinely take battle damage and make it back to base. But when they do go down, the pilot more often ends up dead, (maybe 2/3 of the time as a completely unscientific guess), while on the Allied side it's the opposite, about 2/3 of the time it seems like the pilot eventually gets back to base and back into action.
The Kokoda Trail
It's hard to determine how much effect the Allies had on the land battle in terms of air support / interdiction. Clarngbould himself thinks they didn't have much effect, at least until the Allied troops actually got over the mountains and managed to build an airfield on the north side. Certainly a lot of bombs and bullets were wasted strafing empty jungle, empty huts, and one little rope bridge that kept being rebuilt. And there were the usual ugly accidents with friendly fire incidents and so on. On the other hand some Japanese supplies were getting stopped, and in particular their shipping was suffering. You did not want to be in a boat or barge on the eastern or northern coast of New Guinea in late 1942. I came away with the impression that they did have an effect, certainly the Japanese ground forces supply situation was desperate. This is where the Wirraway came into it's own, in the later stages of the fighting around Buna / Gona. The Aussies used them as spotters and to coordinate air strikes by the other aircraft, and it really helped a lot.
The Allies also did other clever things non-aviation related like manage to get three Stuart tanks delivered to the vicinity of Buna (using barges with only 4" of freeboard clearance while carring them!) which did make a big difference in the fighting. But this was largely possible because of Allied air cover.
Anyway, that's a little summary, I'll post some specific examples of the above wildly insane claims later.
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