It was the
shirtless navigator on the B-17 Flying Fortress, the tanned Lieutenant Clinton
W. Benjamin of Noxan, Pennsylvania, who was too busy with his own duties at the
time, who gave the ostensibly noncombatant passenger permission to fire.
Seated in
the cramped nose of the aircraft where Benjamin worked, war correspondent Richard Tregaskis
had noticed through the transparent plexiglass a Japanese Zero floatplane stalking
the American bomber. Flying just beyond the B-17’s maximum machine-gun range, the
enemy pilot had been shadowing the Fortress, giving its speed and altitude to Japanese
warships cruising on the water far below.
Benjamin
told Tregaskis, “Go ahead,” and he cleared the .50-caliber machine gun and
fired a few rounds at the enemy. “The Zero was far out and I could see my
tracers, like golden balls on a string, curving aft of the enemy plane,”
Tregaskis remembered. He corrected his aim and could see his tracers hit the
Zero. The enemy pilot “heeled over and came straight toward me,” the reporter
said. “I could see his tracers coming toward me like smoky zips or dashes, a
kind of aerial punctuation.”
Tregaskis’s
air battle with the Japanese came after spending seven weeks dodging shells and
bullets with members of the U.S. Marine Corps on an island in the Solomons
called Guadalcanal. Deciding to leave to start work on the book that became the
best-selling Guadalcanal Diary, the International News Service
correspondent had to wrangle his own ride off the island.
Planes out
of Guadalcanal were “few and far between those days,” Tregaskis recalled, so
when a B-17 Flying Fortress flew in from its base at Espiritu Santo in the New
Hebrides on September 25, he asked its pilot, Captain Paul Payne of Des Moines,
Iowa, if he could hitch a ride with him to Espiritu Santo, from where Tregaskis
could start his long journey to Honolulu and begin to write his book.
“Certainly, if you don’t mind going by way of Bougainville,” Payne told the
reporter, as he and his rookie crew had to conduct a reconnaissance mission
there the next day. It was a name that gave Tregaskis some pause, as Bougainville,
the northernmost island of the Solomons, posed dangers to American aircraft.
The
mission called for Payne’s lone B-17 from the 431st Squadron of the Eleventh
Bomb Group to reconnoiter Buin Harbor at the southern tip of Bougainville;
follow the coastline to Buka Island, on which the Japanese had an airfield; and
then wind its way down Bougainville’s eastern coast to Kieta, where the enemy
had built another airfield. All this was to be flown, Tregaskis pointed out, at
an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, “an extremely low altitude considering our
vulnerability.” Later reconnaissance flights by lone B-17s were usually made at
altitudes of 20,000 feet and above. As Payne later told the correspondent: “We
just didn’t know any better. We were fool lucky.”
Although
Tregaskis outlined his exchange with Payne in Guadalcanal Diary, including his decision to fly on the mission as
a passenger, he failed to include an unusual question posed to him by the
pilot: Could the correspondent handle a .50-caliber machine gun? Tregaskis had no experience in handling such a weapon, but he told Payne he could.
The next morning, fueled by a breakfast consisting of a chocolate bar and
wearing a knapsack filled with his notebooks and large, ledger-sized black-leather
diary (he preferred them because they were “hard to lose”), Tregaskis climbed
into the bomber. The plane bounced down the runway, lifted off from Henderson
Field, and headed over Tulagi Bay.
The
adrenaline rush of combat came after hours of tedium on the way to the target.
After leaving Guadalcanal, the bomber had passed up the Slot—the stretches of water between the islands that made up
the Solomons. Tregaskis passed the time by looking down on the “jungly islands
that slipped under our wings. Time dragged.”
The first
Japanese plane appeared as the bomber neared Bougainville. Listening in over
the communication circuit, Tregaskis could hear an unidentified crewman report
contact with an aircraft moving in the opposite direction, about 2,000 feet
overhead and to the right. “He was well out of range,” said Tregaskis. “I got a
glimpse of him; then he was gone to the rear, out of our vision.” Suddenly, the
tail gunner shouted that two Zeroes were coming at them from behind, but, after
a few seconds, he reported that they had turned away. The fighters were
respectful of the “formidable B-17,” Tregaskis noted, but he did begin to think
about “our aloneness over enemy territory and the swarms of enemy planes which
must be around.”
Two other Zeroes came up from below, but did not fire, Tregaskis, now on guard,
spotted one of the enemy aircraft and opened fire. “The empties bounced out and
clanged on the floor, and I remember the sharp smell of the burned powder,” he
recalled. “I also remember the feeling of tremendous exhilaration—and at the
same time fear, of kicking myself for coming on this flight when I didn’t have
to. It seemed we were going to be shot down and not much chance of surviving
this, because we were deep into Japanese territory.”
One of the crew members on
the B-17 was also worried about what might happen if the plane crashed. Payne’s
copilot, Lieutenant James Norman Price, had just arrived in the Pacific.
According to Price, Payne had let his previous copilot take his crew out
several days before and they never returned. “When we got in there [Espiritu
Santo] he latched onto my crew and I flew co-pilot for him for a while,” Price
noted.
On their first mission, because the navigator was busy counting the
ships in the harbor, the civilian correspondent, Tregaskis, had to man one of
the plane’s machine guns. Price worried that if the bomber had been shot down
and they survived, the Japanese might learn that Tregaskis had operated one of
the guns, would declare him a spy, and execute all the crew. The copilot
remembered eight Zeros in all making attacks on his B-17. “They always come in
nose to nose and they made several passes at us,” Price recalled. “They made a
lot of passes at us and why they didn’t shoot us down I don’t know.”
Although
untrained, Tregaskis proved to be relentless when it came to keeping his gun
chattering away at the Zero. He saw the enemy plane, in a three-quarter frontal
pass, curve along the bomber’s flank. As the Japanese pilot roared by, the
other B-17 gunners brought their guns to bear, and “we all gave him plenty,”
noted Tregaskis. “One of us hit him in the engine and he went down. Naturally,
I think it was my shooting that did it.” The rear gunner reported that the
floatplane had to make a forced landing on the water.
Other
Zeroes made additional passes at the the bomber, but Tregaskis noted that they
seemed to do so in a “half-hearted” manner. The crew also had to endure
antiaircraft fire from the ships below, with shell fragments thwacking against
the bottom of the aircraft’s fuselage and striking its right aileron. While all
this was going on, Benjamin calmly counted the ships off the southern tip of
Bougainville, reporting he saw twenty-seven of them. “We conducted the rest of
our reconnaissance peacefully and ran into no more enemy aircraft or ships,”
Tregaskis recalled.
At one
point, the B-17 went as low as 350 feet, trying to catch a glimpse of the
airfield and harbor at Kieta, but it was no use, as the cloud cover was too
thick. Tregaskis felt fortunate the bad weather intervened, because at such a
low altitude “we would have been an easy shot for any Zero who happened to be
wandering about in the vicinity.” Hours later, the bomber landed safely at Espiritu
Santo. Tregaskis remembered that he had “kicked himself,” at first, for risking
his life on such a dangerous mission. He later changed his mind, recognizing that
leaving Guadalcanal on a B-17, via Bougainville, seemed to be “highly
appropriate when, as the marines would say, you considered how rugged our life had been on that f------
island.”
Tregaskis
remained at the base at Espiritu Santo, codenamed Button, for only a short
time. “Living there was primitive,” he noted. “But compared to the
night-and-day misery called Guadalcanal, it was a pleasant rest camp.” There he
began to shape the entries in his diary into a book.
Eventually,
Tregaskis flew on to Nouméa, New Caledonia, a French colony that had grown to become
a major facility for supporting the fighting on Guadalcanal and served as
headquarters for Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, commander of the South
Pacific Forces. Streams of military vehicles filled the streets “with their
noise and motion,” Tregaskis remembered. The Grand Hotel du Pacifique, formerly
one of the top hotels on the island, had been taken over by army officers and
some of its rooms had been emptied of their comfortable iron beds and plumbing to
serve as offices.
An
enterprising French woman, Tregaskis noted, had opened a sidewalk soda
bar—labeled as “le sandwich du soldat”—and offered “limonade” for four francs
(ten cents), sickly milkshakes for six francs (fifteen cents), and sardine
sandwiches for eight francs (twenty cents). Dubbed the “juice” by soldiers, the
soda stand offered none of the usual properties of an American soda fountain—no
shiny syrup knobs, no marble counter, no racks of garish-colored magazines or
cellophane-packaged crackers.
Still, the proprietor had “caught the general
idea at least,” said Tregaskis, and had cannily hired a bevy of local beauties
to tend the bar. “At all times of day, soldiers and a less number of sailors
stood in line at the cashier’s window, buying tickets, and lined the bar
testing madame’s delights and trying to make time with the sandwich jerkers,” he
recalled.
Tregaskis
had not expected to be on New Caledonia for long, as he wanted to return to
Pearl Harbor to begin writing his Guadalcanal book. He had a rude awakening,
however, when he came upon two associates eager to tell him about the
“sluggishness and unpleasantness of life in this American base.” One of the
reporters went as far as to term the base the “world’s a-- hole,” with
correspondents the “farthest people up the a--. The big shots around here treat
us like poison.”
One of the
biggest problems involved a rash of unnecessary paperwork insisted upon by
Ghormley, including orders permitting Tregaskis to continue his journey. “He
signs them himself,” one of the reporters told Tregaskis about the admiral. “He
has to read them over first, too. Considering he has to read and sign
practically every document, you’re lucky it only takes a week or so to get your
orders.”
In
addition to checking in with American military officials for orders, Tregaskis
had to complete forms with both the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy “pledging
allegiance and agreeing to submit my copy for censorship.” When he complained
that he had already signed many of those same forms in Pearl Harbor, one of his
informants replied that it did not matter—he would have to sign them all over
again.
The army also prohibited reporters from visiting airfields or hospitals,
a regulation that tripped up Tregaskis when he tried to visit Colonel Sam
Griffith, a friend of his who had been shot in the arm on Guadalcanal and was
recuperating in a Nouméa hospital. An army colonel refused permission for him
to see his friend, “even though I promised I wanted to see him for personal
reasons only,” Tregaskis recalled.
Getting to
see Ghormley proved to be a problem. The admiral worked out of a converted
merchant ship, the USS Argonne, anchored
in Nouméa’s harbor. On the ship, Ghormley, eventually replaced by the more
aggressive Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, had to contend with mountains
of paperwork. “He worried about everything,” the admiral’s chief of staff said,
“and I can’t say that I blame him.”
To get out
to the flagship, Tregaskis needed to hitch a ride on a boat that did not have a
set schedule for such trips. “It might take all day to get out to the ship and
back,” he noted. If he made it to the Argonne,
he had to check in with the flag secretary, a person often quite busy with
paperwork and someone who possessed an uncertain temper and had to be handled
with diplomacy. “Eventually one’s petition for order would be taken to the
admiral, and orders might result,” Tregaskis said. Meanwhile, one of his fellow
reporters warned him, “you have to wait in this a—hole.”
The
rigmarole with orders and permissions seemed like a “slap in the face” to
Tregaskis, especially considering his hazardous stay on Guadalcanal. On the
island he had become used to something new in his life—men acting “without
their masks, without posing; men being themselves and trying to accomplish
things directly without delay, as they must in such situations of dire peril.”
Life at this advanced base, where the rulebook reigned supreme, came as a shock
to him. A friend of his later described the situation at New Caledonia and
other bases safe behind the lines as “not war, not peace,” a description that Tregaskis
found to be accurate the more he saw of such locales. Under the circumstances,
since he badly wanted to get out of Nouméa and back to Pearl Harbor as soon as possible,
Tregaskis realized there was little he could do “except go through the
necessary forms and immerse myself in the prescribed reams of red tape.”
While waiting
for his orders, Tregaskis secured living space in a one-room flat for a dollar
per day from a French woman, Madam Rougon, and tried to settle down to do some
writing. For days, however, he found himself out of sorts, with his vitality
sapped by “a great desire to sit still, to just be quiet, to vegetate.” Being
yanked away from the unending danger of bombing and shelling was “a sudden and
tremendous change,” he reflected, as well as being a great letdown. “I wanted
to stay where I did not have to move and where no one would speak or make any
sound,” he remembered. Talking to others who had similar experiences in the
field, Tregaskis discovered that his reaction was “quite normal.”
After some
time on Nouméa, the effects of his adventures in Guadalcanal began to fade, and
Tregaskis returned to writing what became Guadalcanal
Diary, getting a “good bit of work” accomplished. He recalled that the
writing went “fairly fast,” but the memory of his time under fire on
Guadalcanal, and the way it shaped his behavior, continued. “Even in Noumea, I
found that my nervous system put me automatically in a state of alertness
whenever lightning flashed in the sky or distant thunder rumbled,” Tregaskis
remembered. “These phenomena had become associated with gunfire, in my
consciousness, and my instant impulse was to look for cover.”
Tregaskis
believed there was nothing “abnormal” about his reaction, as “one develops
certain habits which fit any type of existence to which he is exposed, if he is
exposed long enough, and it is just as natural for a man who has been living in
a fighting zone to view thunder and lightning cautiously, as it is for a city
dweller to look up and down before he crosses the street.”
Finally,
Tregaskis’s orders arrived and he made prepartions for his journey to Pearl
Harbor. He was anxious to get back as quickly as possible because he had heard
a rumor (unfounded, as it turned out) that the U.S. Marine Corps was preparing
to make a raid on Wake Island, the former American base captured by the
Japanese early in the war. “I wanted to go along on the Wake jaunt, if there
was actually to be one,” he noted.
When he
left Noumea for the airbase where he was to catch a U.S. Army B-24 Liberator long-range
bomber that was to fly him to Honolulu, Tregaskis had only four dollars in his
wallet. He had cabled the International News Service’s New York office asking
for additional funds, but, as he later discovered, the “cable had moved with
the speed of a turtle, as most cables from the South Pacific did in those days,
and the money had not been sent until just about the time I was leaving
Noumea.” (The needed funds finally arrived a month later.) He was able to
borrow a money order for ten dollars, but found that nobody would cash it for
him without, he joked, signed authorization from Secretary of War Henry Stimson
or Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. He saw himself being reduced to “becoming
a beachcomber and being devoured by cannibals.” Tregaskis landed in Honolulu
with just fifty cents to his name.