Fight Coming Up?

Vice Admiral Kaneo Sunagawa, just back from the fronts, advanced fearfully into the outer chamber. It was 10 a.m. The glare in the eyes of the Vice Admiral grew unbearably, for His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Hirohito had generously entered. His Majesty expressed words of excruciating praise for Vice Admiral Sunagawa's victories at sea. The Vice Admiral was then admitted into the inner chamber, where he had a divine audience with Her Imperial Majesty the Empress. Their Majesties bestowed on Vice Admiral Sunagawa a crested cup and an unmentionably sacred sum of money. The Vice Admiral retired in deep reverence with beads of perspiration on his forehead.

This most recent Imperial recognition for a great Japanese "victory" was described in the popular Japanese press and over the radio. Not described was the fall of Buna to Allied troops. Not mentioned was the daily bombing of the Munda airport by U.S. planes. Not even whispered was the possibility that Allied forces might be gathering for new offensive moves. Reason: the Japanese were gathering too.

Blindly, as they believe in their Emperor, the Japanese believe in victory. When the next great clash takes place in the South Pacific, the Japanese expect to win so decisively that all the little setbacks will really prove to have been victories, as announced.

Concentration at the Apex. The magnificent harbor of Rabaul lies at the apex of a triangle, the base of which is held by the Allies. Rabaul is 480 miles from Port Moresby. It is 700 miles from Guadalcanal. It is the logical takeoff point for attack on either.

Last week many sources reported that the Japanese were gathering in Rabaul a force even greater than the armada which in mid-November failed to retake Guadalcanal. The only dissident voice in the Allied chorus warning about the concentration was that of Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who said: "To my knowledge there is no such concentration." An anonymous Navy spokesman next day went out of his way to correct the Secretary by saying that both the Allies and the enemy are throwing great weight into the area and that increased activity may be expected any day. The concentration, it appeared, had been spotted by Army reconnaissance.

Concentration in the Air. Most ominous sign of Japanese preparations was their sudden increase of air power in the whole area. Reconnaissance uncovered the fact that the much-bombed Munda field was stronger than originally thought and consisted of several runways, not just one. The Japs had kept coconut treetops suspended on camouflage nets while grading runways underneath. This field nested a new sting. On one occasion 25 Zeros reared up, spread out like the head of a cobra and struck.

At Buin, on Bougainville, U.S. flyers spotted new concentrations of Jap planes. Seaplane tenders were reported to have helped strengthen the Jap floatplane base at Rekata Bay. Flyers reported encountering two new fighter types, both faster than the Zero. Of the six-week lull in Jap air operations over Guadalcanal, Major General Millard F. Harmon, commander of U.S. Army flyers in the area, said: "It certainly is not going to last. They can reasonably be expected to resume bombing operations with planes improved in armor and armament."

Tojo's Tune? But General Harmon added that there "could be no question about the United States' present air superiority at Guadalcanal." The New Zealand Government's official war correspondent in the Solomons was quoted as saying: "Guadalcanal's striking power as an air base is being widened. . . . Our Solomons air powers are being stepped up." In General MacArthur's zone of operations, U.S. air power was in vigorous control of the situation.

There were hints that other Allied strength besides air power was being increased. New York Times's Foster Hailey was permitted by censors to say: "The day is approaching when the United Nations' commanders can decide where & when the next engagement will be fought. ... It is no longer Tojo who calls the tune." Marine parachutists under Lieut. Colonel Hugh Williams were reported practicing at a South Pacific rear base. Admiral William F. Halsey was reported in New Zealand, which was the springboard for the first invasion of the Solmons. He reiterated his derogatory, perhaps too optimistic, remarks (TIME, Jan. 11 ) about the Japs, perhaps in order to infuriate them into ill-considered moves. This time he added: "When we first started, I held one of our men equal to three Japanese. I now increase this to 20. ... They are just low monkeys."

The Tip-Off. Shadow-boxing went on with new vigor last week. Ten Japanese destroyers dashed for Guadalcanal to put floating drums of supplies ashore. So many might not only replenish the supplies of the dwindled force already there but land advance stocks for future attackers. Three destroyers were put out of action by dive-bombers and PT boats. The U.S. Navy sneaked in for an early morning shelling of Munda. The Japs sent an emergency (or perhaps diversional) expedition to Lae. U.S. forces on Guadalcanal took the one hill from which the Japs could shell Henderson Field.

But the clearest shadow moving across the face of the South Pacific had the shape of an airplane--not a combat type, but a reconnaissance shape. The Japs noticeably stepped up reconnaissance over the whole area, including Northern Australia. Such seeking out has always been the tip-off for a big Jap effort.

For the Honor of God

(See Cover)

Last week was the most successful week of the war in the Southwest Pacific. With the Japs all but cleaned out of the Papuan sector of New Guinea, with the crushing of a Japanese attempt to land new reinforcements, General Douglas MacArthur left the screened veranda of his New Guinea cottage, where he had been since November, and returned to his headquarters in Australia.

His first act was to heap honors on his high command: Distinguished Service Crosses to twelve of his ranking officers (six Americans, six Australians). One of them, Lieut. General Robert L. Eichelberger, was revealed as the U.S. field commander in the Papuan campaign. In an outpouring of long-kept secrets, General MacArthur also revealed the identity of his ground forces in the campaign: parts of the 6th and 7th Australian divisions, and of the American 41st (Oregon, Washington, Montana National Guard) and 32nd (from Wisconsin and Michigan).

Said General MacArthur: "The magnificent conduct of the troops and elements of this command, operating under difficulties rarely if ever surpassed in a campaign, has earned my highest praise and commendation. . . . To the American Fifth Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force no commendation could be too great. . . . They have set new horizons for the air conduct of the war.

"To Almighty God," concluded General MacArthur, "I give thanks for that guidance which has brought us to this success in our great crusade. His is the honor, the power and the glory, forever, Amen."

Hammer the Hammer. But last week belonged to the airmen. The center of the week's action focused first on a drab sedan which lurched over the pocked and pitted track that winds from Jackson airdrome to Port Moresby. The thick red dust of New Guinea blurred its windows, but not the three white stars on its license plate. Spying the stars, half-naked troops, Australian and American, grinned and threw casual salutes. One of their favorite brass hats was home again: Lieut. Generjal George Churchill Kenney, Commanding General of Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, and commander, Fifth U.S. Air Force.

The grins would have become cheers had the troops known what scrub-headed General Kenney was saying at that moment: "Good, Whitey! Let's smear 'em tomorrow."

"Whitey" was his deputy commander, Brigadier General Ennis C. Whitehead. '"Em" was the Japanese concentration at Rabaul. Rabaul Peninsula lies at the northern tip of New Britain, 480 air miles from Moresby. It looks not unlike the cocked hammer of a pistol, and like a pistol the Japanese have pointed it at the Allies in the Southwest Pacific. Kenney's planes had hit it before, but not in the strength he wanted. Now Whitehead had met him at the airdrome with the news that his strength was mustered: two squadrons of Flying Fortresses, one of B-24 Liberators. At last Kenney was ready to hammer the hammer.

For exactly 25 years George Kenney has carried in his fob pocket a small pair of wooden dice. They are the oracle he invariably consults before embarking on momentous projects. In the rocking, dusty sedan he plucked them out at random. They showed six-one, a natural. He faced them toward his aide, able, beady-eyed Captain Clarence "Kip" Chase.

"See?" he crowed. The drab sedan lurched on toward Moresby.

Next morning, before the sun began to smother Moresby in equatorial heat, three Fortresses droned north. Reconnaissance photographs had revealed a larger concentration of Jap ships in Rabaul Harbor than usual, and some 40 planes on adjacent airdromes. The vanguard of Fortresses ignored the ships, dropped their 500-lb. bombs on the planes. How many they smashed the darkness concealed, but fewer than 20 rose to meet the 30-odd U.S. bombers which struck the harbor's clustered ships at noon. Five of these went down before the squadrons' .50-caliber guns. Nine, possibly ten, warships were left afire or sinking. The price: one heavy bomber.*

What a Week! That was only the beginning of a week when George Kenney's dice tumbled out sevens like a slot machine gone haywire, and U.S. airpower in the Southwest Pacific came of age.

Despite the U.S. heavy bombers' heavy toll, the Jap dipped next day into his deep reservoir of shipping and brought out four transports, determinedly convoyed by two cruisers and four destroyers. The destination: Lae (rhymes with gay) 150 miles up the New Guinea coast from Buna, where the Jap has his nearest foothold.

The convoy was only 30 miles off New Britain, near Gasmata, when a B-24 Liberator on reconnaissance picked it up. A Flying Fortress escorted by eight long-range P-38 (Lightning) fighters flew in to intercept. They found that the convoy carried an umbrella of 14 Zeros. They shot down nine, probably got three more and damaged the other two.

Fortresses haunted the convoy until after dark, when an Australian-manned Navy Catalina picked up the convoy's phosphorescent wake. Three bombs from the Catalina blew up a big (14,000-ton) transport which probably carried 4,000 men.

Next morning the convoy reached the vicinity of Lae, where more Zeros undertook to protect it. Then George Kenney's airmen really started to work. Besides Fortresses, Liberators and Lightnings, George Kenney has samples of almost every type of combat plane the U.S. can produce: twin-engined Boston (A-20), Marauder (B26) and Mitchell (B25) bombers, Kittyhawk (P-40) fighters, plus some Australian Beaufighters and Beaufort bombers. The turbo-supercharged Lightnings can hit the Zeros high, and the heavily-armed Kittyhawks catch them when they come down low./-

The Lightnings opened the fighting against 20 Zeros by knocking down four. A flight of Marauders dumped its bombs, fought off twelve fresh Zeros, probably got two. Three Flying Fortresses poured .50-caliber bullets at the Zeros for nearly an hour, destroyed four. The bombers sank a second large transport and hit a third with a 500-lb. bomb.

All night and next day George Kenney's airmen hammered at the convoy and its protecting planes. Mitchell bombers sank a transport which rolled over in the shallow water near the Lae jetty, knocked down five Zeros which attempted to interfere. Beaufighters swept into the Lae airdrome, burnt up one Zero, shot up others on the runway. In the late afternoon the oft-derided Kittyhawks were attacked by 18 Zeros. Score: 13 Zeros shot down, one Kittyhawk (pilot safe). When 20 more Zeros jumped some Lightnings they lost all but five. Total Jap planes lost in three days: 85 certain, 48 more maybe. Said MacArthur's communique dryly: "The enemy's air losses over the last three days may be regarded as serious." Allied losses: "Comparatively negligible."

Flyers' General. In five months in the Southwest Pacific, the man chiefly responsible for these successes has yet to have a day off, or even to want one. General Kenney's office is wherever he and Captain Chase are at the moment. Places are always laid for George Kenney at two luncheon tables, one at Port Moresby, the other nearly 2,000 miles south in Australia. Most weeks he manages to have several meals at each of them. Last week he had three lunches at his mainland headquarters, two with MacArthur in New Guinea.

George Kenney was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, 53 years ago. His parents were Americans whose vacation he spoiled by arriving a week early. His expatriate birth was in the tradition of his mother's family: she had been born on shipboard on the Atlantic and one of her sisters had been born in Sweden.

George Kenney was raised (to a height of 5 ft. 6 in.) in Brookline, Mass. He studied civil engineering at M.I.T.. but left after three years to become an instrument man for Quebec & Saguenay Railroad. Then he became a civil engineer and a contractor. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Signal Corps as a private. He learned to fly under Bert Acosta, who was later to achieve fame as a transatlantic pilot. His first three landings were all dead stick, but he was notably successful once he got to France. Twice he was shot down. He was credited with two German planes, came out of the war with a captaincy, the D.S.C. and Silver Star.

Between wars Kenney married twice, fathered a son Bill (now 20) and a daughter Julia (16). He went through the routine which is designed to round out an air general: War College, Supply, Air Corps Engineering School, instructor in observation. In France in 1940 he riled other military observers by recommending that the U.S. throw its Air Force into the ashcan--"It's so out of date for the kind of war the Germans are going to have here."

Between times he experimented. George Kenney was the first man to fix machine guns in the wing of a plane: back in 1922 he installed two .30-caliber Brownings in the wing of an old De Havilland. Kenney is the inventor of the parachute bomb, which enables bombing planes to fly lower, bomb more accurately. He invented this bomb in 1928, but it was never used until last September, when he dropped 240 of them on the Japanese at Buna. Twenty-two Jap planes were standing on the strip; 17 of them were destroyed and all the ack-ack in the area was silenced.

"You've got to devise stuff like that," Kenney says. "I'd studied all the books on these different goddam campaigns, and Buna was not in any of them."

A new kind of war. The textbooks did not tell George Kenney what he would find in the Southwest Pacific. It was a war for a cocky, enthusiastic little man who can inspire his flyers with his own skill for improvisation.

Though it apparently marks the beginning of an Allied offensive in the Southwest Pacific, the Battle for Buna, in perspective, was only a local action 3,500 miles south of Tokyo. But it probably will go down in history as the first campaign ever supplied entirely by air.

Having arrived two weeks after the Japs landed at Buna (July 20), Kenney spent two months organizing his air force, pepping up laggard flyers, briefing new ones, getting his fresh supply of planes ready for action. By Sept. 28 the Jap was at loribaiwa, only 32 miles from Port Moresby. MacArthur, his chief of staff Major General Richard K. Sutherland (a pilot himself), Australian General Blarney and Kenney fixed on a plan: to wrest control of the air, despite hell and high mountains, by blasting the Japs out of Buna and far-off Lae and Salamaua, the bases from which Buna was supplied.

While the retreating Aussies made a stand at loribaiwa, Kenney's planes swarmed north. They struck the supply line crawling from Buna. They struck airdromes again & again. Presently the stunned Jap no longer bothered to repair the craters in his strips. During the height of the Guadalcanal action came a six-week period in which no Jap plane dared to take the air. Since Nov. 1 no Jap reinforcements for New Guinea have landed intact. Most of them never landed at all.

The Hard Way. Meanwhile, more of Kenney's planes were dropping troops on an emergency strip at Wanigepi, on the coast of southeast Buna. As the troops moved toward Buna, Kenney had to find new strips for his supply planes. He found them by sending light planes to drag the coast for level ground. Sometimes it was pocked with palms, sometimes wing-deep in grass. The first pilot to land would squirm to a semi-crash landing. When the ear-ringed natives gathered round, he spread his wares--cowrie shells and tobacco sticks--and bargained to have trees and grass sliced down. The natives, men & women, usually set to work with a will.

On these makeshift strips George Kenney soon was landing 2,000,000 Ib. of supplies a week. In a single day he delivered 519,000 Ib.--100 planeloads. He flew in a 250-bed hospital with enough equipment to maintain it for ten days. He delivered a four-gun battery of 105-mm. howitzers, with tractors to haul them and crews to operate them. A Flying Fortress is designed to carry no more than 6,000 Ib.; a 105-mm. howitzer unit weighs 7,000. Kenney flew the guns 1,500 miles from Australia and delivered them over weather-treacherous, 12,000-ft. mountains to makeshift airfields. Among other items he also delivered over 4,000 infantrymen, using 16 different types of planes to haul them in. He delivered bulldozers and horses and mules (which frightened the aborigines, though they were long used to airplanes).

Kenney's lessons, in half a year of fighting the Jap are four:

> "The Jap is a hell of a tough boy. He's best when he's attacking; that's why our cue is to attack him. The attacker always has the advantage of surprise, and the Jap has not got any crystal ball."

> "Shipping and planes are our two chief targets and our own planes should be designed with that in mind. If the same weapon can be used against both, you're sitting pretty. The weapon is a question of skip bombing and lots of .50 caliber gunfire forward."

> "There is nothing wrong with our planes except that I haven't got enough of them. When we get in a fight, if we don't make 'em pay ten Zeros for every heavy bomber we lose, I consider we got gypped."*

> "War against the Jap is a war of attrition. Its last battle will be fought in the streets of Tokyo."

Nobody knows better than George Kenney that the ladder his bombers must climb to Tokyo is a long ladder. New names by the hundreds find their way into the communiques. No sooner was Kododa disposed of then there was Buna and Gona--then Cape Endaiadare, Buna Mission, Sanananda--and Lae, Salamaua, Wewak, Kavieng, Rabaul and Gasmata still to come. That is only the beginning, and there are Japs in each of those places who must be dug out at the point of a bayonet after Kenney has flown the bayonets and the men to wield them.

In the long, hard task which does not faze him George Kenney is surrounded by able assistants. General Whitehead is his New Guinea air commander. Kenney's chief of pursuit is a 36-year-old, battlewise tactical genius named Paul Wurtsmith. Kenney has surrounded himself with capable Australian flying officers, such as Group Captain William Garing, who knows every nook of the thousands of trackless Pacific square miles.

Above all, George Kenney has the support of Douglas MacArthur who, when he gave out the totals of the damage done by Allied airplanes* in his area, dated them, not from the time of his own arrival in the Southwest Pacific, but from the Buna landing in July, i.e., about the time George Kenney took over. Said MacArthur of Kenney last week: "He is unquestionably one of the best qualified air officers in the world today."

Losses but not Defeats

The Navy named last week one carrier, three cruisers and six destroyers which it had previously admitted lost between Oct. 26 and Dec. 1 but had not named. The carrier was the Hornet. The cruisers were the Atlanta, Jnneau, Northampton. The destroyers were the Gushing, Preston, Benham, Walke, Monssen, Laffey, Barton. Most interesting news was the inclusion of the Atlanta and Jnneau--fast, light anti-aircraft vessels bristling with 16-five-inch guns. Their loss was presumably due to their meeting surface vessels, against which they had not been primarily designed to fight.

Jap losses in the same battles: two carriers badly damaged (believed sunk by flyers who attacked them); one battleship, three heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, eleven destroyers sunk; two battleships, one cruiser, six destroyers damaged; several transports and cargo ships sunk and damaged.

Still Clinging

A B-25 bomber, droning through the Arctic sky one day last week, spotted a Japanese freighter where no Jap freighter ought to be. Said the Navy's laconic communique: "The ship was left burning and was later seen to sink." The Navy offered no conjecture as to what the ship was doing 110 miles north and east of Kiska, in the Bering Sea.

Logical supply route to Kiska from Japan is to the south and west (where a Consolidated Liberator bomber sighted and bombed another cargo ship on the same day). Possible explanation for the B-2s's victim being where she was: she was trying to slip into Kiska from the north, in the fog-shrouded Bering Sea where U.S. planes would be less likely to see her. But other Jap cargo ships were luckier. At least two in the past fortnight have landed supplies for the Jap force which still clings to the tail of the Aleutians. On their next raid U.S. pilots, who had been having their own way over Kiska Harbor and who had begun to hope that they would dislodge the Japs, were met by a swarm of newly arrived Zeros.

* Far below the actual up-to-date figures because sinkings are seldom officially announced until many weeks later.

* Lost with that plane was Brigadier General Kenneth Walker, 44, bombardment expert.

/- A favorite gag of Lightning pilots is radioing to the low-flying Kittyhawks: "Just stay there; I'll chase him down to where you can hit him."

* Quite properly. A Flying Fortress crew consists of ten skilled Americans; A Jap Zero contains one Jap.

* The score of Jap losses since Kennedy's arrival is: 418 planes, 24 warships, 86 transports, 150 landing barges.

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