Target: Rabaul by Bruce Gamble

but his personality and achievements—particularly his squadron’s superb results in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea—made great headlines for the Fifth Air Force. As Kenney later wrote, “The lad was a bit cocky, bragged some, and swaggered, too, but it was all right with me. He had a right to.”
    Unfortunately, everyone was forgetting a cautionary rhyme repeated since the dawn of flight training: There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.
    Too many aviators ignored the ditty’s message, or believed it did not apply to them. On April 30, when the 90th Squadron moved over the mountains from Port Moresby to Dobodura, Larner took off from Schwimmer airdrome in his B-25, Spook II . The bomber was crammed with passengers, baggage, and supplies, yet Larner decided to show off with a low-level, high-speed pass at Dobodura. As he pulled up sharply into a tight chandelle, the overloaded B-25 stalled, fell off on one wing, and plunged into the ground. The real tragedy was that Larner’s mistake cost not only his own life, but seven others.
    The New Guinea graveyards held far too many men like Larner, as did the slopes of the Owen Stanley Mountains and the unexplored depths of the surrounding seas. Many victims had only themselves to blame. That didn’t sit well with Kenney.
    The general and his subordinate commanders needed planes and pilots. Without both, the road to Rabaul wasn’t getting any shorter.

CHAPTER 4

The Heart of Darkness
    A NY GLANCE AT a map will show that aviators shot down or forced to abandon their aircraft in the Southwest Pacific had a high probability of ending up in the water. Neither the Allies nor the Japanese had a formal air-sea rescue organization in place during the first years of World War II, so aircrews on both sides expected a difficult ordeal if they ditched or bailed out. If a pilot or crew were not rescued within twenty-four hours, the probability of survival diminished rapidly. Getting back alive required not only resourcefulness but a hefty measure of luck.
    When Jim McMurria’s B-24 was forced down at sea on the morning of January 20, 1943, the crew’s outlook was almost hopeless. Two men died. The eight survivors clustered around a single raft designed to hold five men and floated with the currents seventy miles off the New Guinea coast. Deep in enemy territory, more than five hundred miles from the nearest friendly base, they knew there was little possibility of rescue. Their only hope would be a random encounter with a submarine or a flying boat.
    By the end of the first day, the survivors’ skin was blistering from exposure to seawater and sun. All of them had bumps and bruises, but Tom Doyle, the bombardier, lay in the center of the raft with bloody wounds. Most of the survivors hung onto a rope attached to the outside of the raft. To help their buoyancy, they removed their shoes and threw them away, a decision they would later regret. Their next concern was fresh water. A rain squall brought relief that evening, but then developed into a terrific storm that tossed and drenched the men throughout the night.
    By sunrise the sea had calmed. Later that day, spirits soared as a Liberator from their bomb group came within a few miles. McMurria fired two flares, but the B-24 droned by. Shortly before sunset, the sighting of a distant island raised hopes again. Other small islands came into view on the third day, January 22, and the survivors realized that the currents were pushing them toward New Guinea. As darkness fell, they passed through the outer reef of Wokeo Island into a lagoon, where heavywaves tossed them onto a rocky shore. Bruised and bleeding from coral cuts, the crewmen crawled a few feet before collapsing from exhaustion.
    The next morning, sympathetic natives found the Americans and took them to a local village. The eight men caused a stir across the island, and the top two native leaders became involved in the castaways’