“The men of 75 Squadron fought desperately against the Japanese for the next 42 days while living and working in conditions best characterized as squalor.”
By Jay Stout
THE Australian machine gunners squinted at the four strange aircraft arcing down toward 7-Mile Drome, Port Moresby’s main airfield. These seemed different than the other Japanese fighters—Mitsubishi A6M Zeros—that had so regularly shot up the airfield during the previous several weeks.
Regardless of their appearance, the Australians were anxious to fight. The Japanese had been bombing them at their leisure, and from altitudes that made them almost impossible to hit. It was only when the Zeros descended to make strafing runs that the defenders had a chance at retribution. So then, this was a rare opportunity. The gunners eagerly fingered the triggers of their weapons as the enemy fliers descended directly toward them.
Peter Jeffrey let the nose of his P-40 ease down toward the airfield. He and the other three pilots in his flight were the vanguard of the Royal Australian Air Force’s, or RAAF’s, 75 Squadron. The squadron was being sent to defend Port Moresby—on the southeast coast of New Guinea—against Japanese bomber raids which had been growing in size and frequency. The port, the town and the surrounding airfields were the Allied center-of-gravity in New Guinea in early 1942. If it remained undefended, the Japanese would bomb it into uselessness before taking it for themselves.
Nearing the runway, Jeffrey noted the winking flash of gunfire from several points at the airfield’s perimeter. He was confused as Japanese ground troops had not been reported anywhere near the area. An instant later he instinctively ducked at the clanging cacophony of bullets crashing into his aircraft. He cursed as a round thumped into the headrest, less than an inch from his head.
Jeffrey lowered the P-40’s landing gear and flaps. After touching down, he rolled toward the far end of the runway while gunfire continued to tattoo his nearly-new aircraft. Behind him, the other three fighters in his flight were likewise being holed.
Orders were bellowed across the airfield. Radios crackled. Men stood and waved frantically. The gunners, confused, looked up from their positions. Why were the enemy aircraft landing? Here and there, individual soldiers still fired their rifles at the strange new fighters.
No one was hurt in the embarrassing episode, but two of the four P-40s needed repairs before they could fly again. Tempers were hot and it was several minutes before the shouting and blame-gaming between the fliers and the soldiers subsided. The gunners insisted, probably correctly, that they had not been made aware that friendly fighters were inbound. For their part, the pilots argued that their aircraft—in RAAF markings—hardly resembled anything the Japanese were flying.
There wasn’t time for bickering. A single Japanese bomber, probably on a reconnaissance mission, was reported inbound. Crews hurriedly refueled the two flyable aircraft which roared airborne only a short time later.
The two pilots, Wilbur Wackett and Barry Cox, played cat-and-mouse through layers of clouds with the enemy aircraft, a Mitsubishi G4M twin-engine bomber. Finally closing the distance, they both poured bullets from their .50 caliber machine guns into the hapless bomber. The rat-a-tat-tat of the gunfire was audible on the ground and the Australian troops shouted and cheered as the Japanese aircraft caught fire, exploded and spiraled into the sea. An antiaircraft unit noted the jubilation: “And what a cheer when the Jap was seen to crash in flames and a large column of black smoke reached up to, and flattened itself against, the low cloud bank!”
Thankfully, the 13 additional P-40s which arrived later that day were not fired upon by Port Moresby’s defenders.
The date was March 21, 1942, and it was remarkable that 75 Squadron even existed. To that point in the war, during the months following the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Allies had been handily beaten in almost every engagement and were falling back—or fighting lost causes—nearly everywhere in the Pacific. Australia is to where many of the Allied forces retreated or were diverted. Their equipment and material, as well as that sent from the States, likewise ended up in Australia.
That equipment included American P-40 aircraft. Built by Curtiss, the P-40 was a frontline fighter that had already been to war with Great Britain’s Royal Air Force, the Soviet Union’s Red Air Force and, famously, the American Volunteer Group, or Flying Tigers. The P-40 was fast, rugged, well-armed and reasonably maneuverable. And, happily for the Australians—who had no modern fighters—several dozen were given them by the United States.
And with the situation growing more desperate by the day, the RAAF couldn’t get them to Port Moresby soon enough. Accordingly, 75 Squadron was formed on paper on March 4, 1942. It received its first P-40s on March 8, and started training on March 11. Except for a scant handful of pilots who had flown alongside the RAF in the Middle East, few of the pilots had ever seen a P-40. Rather, most of their flying experience was at the controls of the Wirraway, an Australian-built derivative of an American training aircraft.
The P-40 was much more complex. And bigger.
“To get into a Kittyhawk you had to climb up onto the wing and then clamber up in the cockpit,” Arthur Tucker recalled. “And there, sticking in front of you, was this great 12-cylinder V-engine with an air scoop on the top. And it sort of went up almost at forty-five degrees, and you couldn’t see anything ahead of you.”
John Pettet’s observation was unique.
“I remember more than anything else the smell, and I can still smell it,” he remembered. “Sometimes you get the smell in a ship [aircraft] and I don’t know what it is, whether it is cables or what, or metal, or whatever they treat the metal with, but there is a certain smell about it—particularly American airplanes.”
Despite the P-40’s size and complexity—and its particular odor—the newly assigned pilots began training immediately. There were accidents of course, but after about a week most of the men had logged approximately eight-to-10 hours on the type. And then, only ten days after being introduced to the aircraft, 75 Squadron was sent to Port Moresby. Were the situation not so desperate, it would have been absurd.
Absurd or not, the squadron immediately went into combat under the command of John F. Jackson, an aggressive leader who was variously described as a “magnificent fellow,” and possessed of “extraordinary courage.”
One of 75 Squadron’s few combat-experienced pilots, he had been credited with shooting down six enemy aircraft in the Middle East. Early on March 22, the day after the squadron arrived at Port Moresby, Jackson led his poorly prepared flyers on a strike against the Japanese airfield at Lae, on New Guinea’s northern coast.
The plan included ten P-40s. One of them was destroyed on takeoff when its pilot swerved to avoid another aircraft. Jackson led the remaining fighters over the Owen Stanley Range and down to Lae where they caught the Japanese by surprise. With four of his pilots providing high cover, Jackson and four other pilots made their attacks.
The Japanese fighters were lined up on one side of the airfield, while the bombers were parked on the other. Regardless, they caught fire and exploded the same. The attacking Australians raced low and fast over Lae, their gunfire marked by streams of tracers. What once were Japanese aircraft exploded into bright orange fireballs that punctuated the grey morning gloom. Black smoke rose in thick clots before dissipating into indistinct smudges.
Exuberant at having created such a spectacle, the 75 Squadron pilots wrenched their P-40s around for another attack from the opposite direction. John Piper, flying only just above the ground, smashed into the propeller of a parked enemy bomber. A wing spar was severed and one of his machine guns dropped away and clanked onto the ground.
But the P-40 was tough and Piper’s machine held together even as he was jumped by a patrol of Zero fighters. He hunched low in the cockpit as 20-millimeter cannon shells zipped by his wounded aircraft. Still, he kept his speed up and the enemy pilots gave up the chase.
Meanwhile, the top-cover pilots were caught in a twisting fight as they dived onto the Japanese Zeros. An enemy fighter essentially flew itself in front of John Pettett. “All I instinctively did,” he said, “was pull back on the stick and pull the trigger and allowing what I thought was enough deflection and that aircraft went down.” Another Zero was claimed by Peter Turnbull.
A pair of RAAF Lockheed Hudson light bombers motored above it all, dropping bombs and taking photographs. A Zero made a firing pass and wounded two crewmen, but was shot down by the gunners aboard the Hudsons.
Once safely back on the ground, Jackson and his pilots tallied the score. Photographs confirmed the destruction of nine Zeros and three bombers at Lae, plus the three Zeros destroyed in the air. But the successes came at a price as, in addition to the aircraft destroyed on takeoff, two P-40s were missing and presumed shot down. That same afternoon, another aircraft was wrecked in an accident while on a patrol mission. So then, of the 17 aircraft that 75 Squadron had flown to Port Moresby the day prior, four were already destroyed and a number of others were damaged. Such a loss rate could not be sustained.
The men of 75 Squadron fought desperately against the Japanese for the next 42 days while living and working in conditions best characterized as squalor. Their primary mission was the defense of Port Moresby. Once a raid was reported inbound, the squadron typically scrambled whatever aircraft and pilots were available. And then, in no particular formation and exercising only the most rudimentary tactics, they threw themselves against the enemy flyers.
The results were mixed. The Australians claimed some small successes, but also lost planes and pilots, one, two, or three at a time. Aircraft and pilots were replaced only sporadically and never in suitable numbers. It was an unspectacular, but critical grind. If nothing else was achieved, the fact was that the Japanese no longer raided Port Moresby unmolested.
A chief problem for 75 Squadron’s pilots was that the Japanese aircraft flew at high altitudes to which the P-40 could only barely stagger. Moreover, the P-40 was not nearly so maneuverable as the Zero. Traditional dogfighting was impossible—all other factors being equal the P-40 could not win. Consequently, Jackson admonished his men to make only one firing pass and then use the P-40’s superior speed to dive away.
Jackson’s superiors—ignorant of the relevant realities—bristled at the fact that 75 Squadron’s pilots failed to engage the Japanese in old-style air combat. They called Jackson on the carpet and implied that he and his men lacked aggressiveness, or worse, were cowards.
Chafing at the accusations, Jackson called his men together and declared that from that point they would dogfight the Japanese. They were stunned that he had reversed his position. It was a sure way to die. He knew and they knew it.
Jackson, grasping at straws, promised his pilots that there was a way to successfully dogfight the Zeros. He would show them. But there was not. On April 28, 1942, he scrambled with the squadron to meet an incoming raid. He tangled with the Japanese fighters and was shot down in flames. His body was later recovered.
Without their leader and fresh pilots, and lacking replacement aircraft and the means to maintain the ones still on hand, 75 Squadron languished. On May 3, the squadron could sortie only a single aircraft. On May 7, with newly-arrived American squadrons ready to carry the torch, 75 Squadron’s men boarded a ship and returned to Australia for rest and refit. Badly worn but not beaten, the squadron rightly took pride at having been one of the few units anywhere to successfully resist the Japanese advance across the Pacific.
Jay Stout is the author of Savage Skies, Emerald Hell: The U.S., Australia, Japan, and the Ferocious Air Battle for New Guinea in World War II from Stackpole Books. A retired U.S. Marine Corps fighter pilot, over a 20-year career he logged a remarkable 4,500 flight hours, including 37 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. He has appeared as an aviation and military expert on various television and radio programs, and his writings have been published in newspapers and professional journals around the country. He is the author of nearly a dozen books, including Air Apaches: The True Story of the 345th Bomb Group and Its Low, Fast, and Deadly Missions in World War II; Hell’s Angels: The True Story of the 303rd Bomb Group in World War II; Fighter Group: The 352nd “Blue-Nosed Bastards in World War II; and The Men Who Killed the Luftwaffe: The U.S. Army Air Forces against Germany in World War II. He lives near Richmond, Virginia.
