John R Bruning - Race of Aces: WWIIs Elite Airmen and the Epic Battle to Become the Master of the Sky

August 1, 1942

Port Moresby, New Guinea

F ive 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 bases antiaircraft guns thundered a response. Kenneys 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. Thats 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 fields 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 Bells 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 wasnt funny. The Japanese Armys 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 depotjust a collection of fifty-five-gallon drums tucked into the nearby jungle without any security on themand 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, theyd 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 wasnt 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 hed inherited and how he would have to fix it.