A Citizen Soldier in the Air - a B-24 Liberator pilot's story.

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A Citizen Soldier in the Air.

New Guinea daze

At some point, perhaps January 1943, the 321st was transferred to an air base at Port Moresby, on the southeast tip of Papua, New Guinea. New Guinea is divided by the Owen Stanley Mountain Range, and the Japanese held the northern side of the island, while the Allies held the south side. It was just a few minutes flying time between Port Moresby and the Japanese bases (Wewak, Madang, and others), but the mountains provided some protection (they were around 15,000 feet tall with some passes as low as 6,000 feet). The mountains also presented a challenge to navigation, especially in the late afternoon when powerful thunderstorms would sit astride the mountains.

Charlie recalls one particularly frightening mission when they were attempting to fly through a 6,000 foot pass between much higher mountains, on the way to a "nuisance raid" on Rabaul (they often flew all-night nuisance raids, with a string of single B-24’s dropping bombs every thirty minutes). Cloud cover was complete, so they were flying totally on instruments.

They flew for the pass at 15,000 feet, figuring this would give them plenty of margin, and maybe allow them to break through on top, but this was "the worst goddamn thunderstorm I ever saw", recalls Charlie.

"“The violence of that storm was awful, and the turbulence was so bad, I thought the airplane would come apart. There were also ice pellets, as noisy as hell, and St. Elmo’s fire (static electricity discharges) dancing all over the ship. The navigator was yelling at me, and I tried to hold course as best I could, but I could barely keep it in the air - it was the worst battering we ever had". This sounds like a nightmare already - but it gets worse!

Cookie in New Guinea courtesy of b24bestweb.com

The engineer was already helping with the instruments, which were jumping all over the place, when something knocked out their gyro instruments (sounds like a vacuum system failure, though the gyros may have just tumbled from all the bouncing around). So now they are Back to needle-ball-airspeed, the most basic instruments, without even an artificial horizon or gyro compass.

The pitot tube was also fouled with ice for a while, so even the airspeed was suspect. "We had fun there for a while," Charlie says. "We lost a lot of altitude and I was scared to death we would run into a mountain, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it - I wasn’t going to change course, but the compass was jumping all over the place, so I just had to try to bracket it - same with the airspeed.

We lost 7000-8000 feet in maybe half an hour, flying around 7000 feet in what we hoped was that 6000 foot pass - finally we broke through on the other side of the mountains."

They bombed Rabaul, and by the time they flew back, the evening storms had subsided, and they returned home safely.

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