On the 21st of March 1942, 24 Australian pilots flew north from Townsville. They were going to a place most of them had never seen, a coastal strip in Papua, Port Morsby. The Japanese had taken Rabbal. They had taken Lao. They had taken Salamawa. They had bombed Darwin to rubble on the 19th of February. They had bombed Broom.
They had bombed Windham. Port Moresby was next. If Port Moresby fell, mainland Australia was within bomber range. If Port Moresby fell, the Japanese would have an unsinkable carrier pointed straight at Queensland. Everybody in the room at the Allied headquarters knew it. Everybody in the cabinet in Cber knew it.
The 24 pilots flying north in their Americanbuilt Kittyhawks knew it, too, even if nobody had told them outright. They were the only fighter aircraft Australia had north of the Coral Sea. There was nothing behind them. There was nothing beside them. There was nothing waiting for them in Port Moresby except a halffinish dirt airirstrip, a malarial swamp, and a Japanese air force that outnumbered them by 10 to one.
24 pilots, 24 Kittyhawks, 44 days. By the time it ended, there would be one airworthy aircraft left on the strip. This is the story of the math that killed them. the story of 75 squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force and a ledger that opens at 24 and closes at 1. The squadron had only existed for 17 days when it landed at Port Moresby.
17 days. It had been formed at Townsville on the 4th of March 1942 around a shipload of Curtis P40E Kittyhawks that had been bound for the Netherlands East Indies before the Netherlands East Indies stopped existing. The crates had been diverted to Sydney. The aircraft had been hastily assembled at Bankstown Aerod Drrome.
They had been flown to Townsville. They had been handed to pilots who on average had logged 9 hours on the type and had fired their guns exactly once. Their commanding officer was squadron leader John Francis Jackson. He was 35 years old. He was already considered in some quarters possibly the oldest fighter pilot in the world. He was balding.
He was tubby. He spoke very little. He had no apparent fear of anything. He had flown kitty hawks in the western desert against the Germans and the Italians. He had earned a distinguished flying cross there. He had come home a veteran in a service that had almost no veterans left.
His younger brother Les was in the squadron 2, also a pilot, also experienced. The men called the older brother Old John. He led from the front. He led from in front of the front. The squadron historian would write later that old John was the only thing the unit really had going for it. There had been 25 Kittyhawks at the start. Some had been written off in training accidents at Bankstown.
Some had crashed on the flight north through the storms over the Coral Sea. The unit had lost five aircraft and three pilots on the way to Port Moresby alone before any Japanese had fired a single round at them. Two more were damaged on approach to 7mi strip when the nervous Australian garrison defending the airfield, having seen only Japanese aircraft in the sky for the previous 6 weeks, opened fire on their own incoming fighters.
The Kittyhawks were the first Allied fighters the garrison had ever seen at Port Moresby. Garrison did not recognize them. The garrison shot at them. Two Kittyhawks were rendered unserviceable before they had even rolled to a halt. But 24 pilots stepped down onto that dirt strip on the afternoon of the 21st of March.
The garrison, when they realized what had landed, came out of their slit trenches and cheered. They had been calling these aircraft tomorrow hawks because they had been promised tomorrow for weeks. They had been calling them never hawks because they had stopped believing tomorrow would ever come. And now here they were, 24 of them, real solid American metal sitting on Australian soil in the only place on the planet that mattered to the men huddling in those trenches.
Look at the pilots before the count starts going down. Look at them as men, not numbers. There is squadron leader old John Jackson, mining engineer from Queensland, 35, married, balding, fearless. There is his brother Les, the cooler, younger version. There is flight left tenant John Piper, a tough professional.
There is flying officer Barry Cox. There is flying officer Bruce Anderson. There is flying officer Wilbur Wackett, son of Sir Lawrence Wackett, who built half of Australia’s pre-war aviation industry. There is flight left tenant Wintland. There is flying officer Masters. There is Sergeant David Stewart Brown, 25 years old, a regular sergeant pilot rather than an officer, son of a family back in Australia who had no idea what he was flying into.
There are bank clerks. There are jackaroos. There are stockmen. There is a solicitor’s son from Sydney. There is a pastoralist’s boy from Western New South Wales. They are men with mothers and fathers and brothers and girlfriends and farms and offices to go back to. Aircraft on strength at 7 mi strip. Evening of the 21st of March, 1942.
- Pilots on strength 24. The next morning was the 22nd of March. Old John Jackson did not wait. He had been at Port Moresby for less than a day. He had decided somewhere in the small hours of that first night that he was not going to sit at 7 mi strip and let the Japanese come to him. The Japanese were operating from an airirstrip at Lei on the north coast of Papua about 270 km across the spine of the Owen Stanley Range.
The Japanese did not know 75 squadron had arrived. The Japanese on the morning of the 22nd of March were sitting at lay the way a man sits in his own kitchen. Old John gambled. He took nine Kittyhawks off Seven Mile Strip before dawn. Nine. He left the rest on the ground to defend Port Moresby in case anything came overhead while he was away.
The nine aircraft climbed into the cold air above the Owen Stanley’s. They crossed the spine of Papua in the dark. They came down on the other side of the mountains. As the first gray light was coming up, they came in over the sea, low, fast, and pointed at the Japanese strip at lay. The Japanese had zero fighters parked in neat rows on the ground.
The Japanese had bombers parked in neat rows on the ground. The Japanese had men walking around in the cool of the morning. The Japanese were not at any state of alarm whatsoever. Old Jon’s nine Kittyhawks came in across the airfield at low level with all guns firing. The lay raid lasted minutes. When it was over, 12 Japanese aircraft were burning on the ground.
Three of them were bombers. Nine were zero fighters. The dive bombers fuel dump had been set a light by the dive bombing element of the action and would burn for 24 hours with secondary explosions audible from many kilometers away. Two more zeros lifted off in confusion as the Australians were leaving and were promptly destroyed in the air.
14 Japanese aircraft killed on a single morning, the squadron’s first day of war. But the ledger ticked. Flying officer Bruce Anderson was hit during the strafing run. His Kittyhawk went into the sea off lei. Anderson was killed. He was the first of the 24 pilots to die. Another Kittyhawk flown by flying officer Wilbur Wackett was so badly shot up by anti-aircraft fire that Wackett had to put it down in the jungle on the north coast.
Wackett survived the crash. He then began a 320 km walk back to Port Moresby through some of the most hostile terrain on the planet. Mountain, jungle, river, swamp, malaria, leeches, no food. The walk would take him weeks. He would make it back. The Kittyhawk would not. Three more aircraft were lost to landing accidents and operational mishaps in the chaos around the raid.
Old John Jackson squadron had given the Japanese the worst aerial bloody nose they had received in the Pacific theater to that date. The Japanese had not known 75 squadron existed at 6:00 in the morning of the 22nd of March. By breakfast time they did. The Australian garrison at Port Moresby when the surviving Kittyhawks came back over the strip with their cowlings blackened by gunfire stood up out of their trenches a second time and cheered a second time.
Aircraft on strength. Evening of the 22nd of March, 1942. 23. Pilots on strength 23. The Japanese reaction came the following day. The Japanese reaction would in fact never really stop coming again. The 23rd of March brought Japanese bombers over Port Moresby in retaliation for Lei. The 24th brought more.
The Japanese understood now that Port Moresby had teeth. The Japanese understood now that those teeth were going to have to be broken. The Japanese had three air fleets within reach. The 25th airfloter based at Rabbal, the forces operating out of Lei, the forces operating out of Salamawa. They could rotate. They could rest. They could replace.
They could draw on a pool of bombers and fighters that ran into the hundreds. 75 squadron could not rotate. 75 squadron could not rest. 75 squadron could not replace. The pilots learned in the first week how the air defense of Port Moresby was actually going to work. The Japanese came almost every day. They came in twin engine Betty bombers in formations of 91827 escorted by zero fighters that flew higher than the Kittyhawks could climb.
The Australians had no radar worth the name. They had a thin line of coast watchers out in the islands and the jungle. Men with binoculars and radios sitting on hilltops calling in when they spotted aircraft heading south. The coast watchers were the warning system. Sometimes the warning came 20 minutes ahead.
Sometimes it came 5 minutes ahead. Sometimes the bombers arrived before the warning did. The Kittyhawks would scramble. They would claw for altitude. They would try to be above the bombers when the bombers came over. They very often were not. They very often were below the bombers looking up at the bomb bays as the bombs came out.
The strip itself was bombed almost every day, too. Slit trenches were dug along the edge of the dispersal area. Ground crews would be working on an aircraft would hear the warning bell, would drop their tools, would sprint for the trenches. Aircraft were lost on the ground without ever getting airborne. Two were destroyed on the dispersal pad on the 28th of March.
One was destroyed there on the 31st. A bomb landed close enough to a Kittyhawk being refueled to blow it onto its back. The mechanics began parking aircraft as far apart as the dispersal area allowed. Then they began moving them into the bush at the edge of the strip overnight. Then they began digging revetments, sandbagged horseshoe walls of earth and timber that an aircraft could be pushed into for protection.
The Japanese kept finding them anyway. On the 24th of March, two Kittyhawks were shot down over Port Moresby itself. One pilot bailed out and came down in the harbor. He was picked up. He was back at the strip in his flying boots by lunchtime. The other pilot did not bail out. He went into the hills behind the town with his aircraft.
They never found him. On the 28th of March, another Kittyhawk was lost in a dog fight with Zeros over the strip. On the 31st, two more. The mechanics began cannibalizing aircraft. A Kittyhawk that came back with one shot out wing would have a wing taken off a different wreck and bolted on in its place.
The wings were sometimes from different production batches. The wings sometimes did not match. The aircraft sometimes flew slightly crooked. The pilots flew them anyway. Sergeant David Stewart Brown went up on the 28th of March. 25 years old. Quiet man, steady hands. He came back. He went up again on the 2nd of April. He came back again.
He went up again on the 11th of April, escorting American A24 dive bombers in a raid on Lei. He was flying close cover. The Australian formation was hit by Zeros. Brown’s Kittyhawk was hit by anti-aircraft fire and possibly by a Zero. The Kittyhawk went down towards the sea. Brown got out. Brown got down on land. Japanese soldiers found him.
Brown was sent to the Japanese naval base at Grabau. Brown was held in a room with two captured American airmen for 4 weeks. The Americans were eventually moved to a prisoner of warship and sent to Japan. They survived the war. Brown was separated from them at the Warford Rabal on the 26th of May.
Brown was never seen again by the other prisoners. Brown’s name never appeared on any Japanese prisoner of war list. After the war, search teams uncovered execution grounds near the Matupi volcano at Rabbal, where 30 bodies were found. Victims of Japanese naval war crimes. Brown was believed to be one of them. He has no known grave.
The ledger ticked aircraft on strength. End of the first week of April. 19. Pilots on strength. 21. By the second week of April, the pattern of the campaign had settled into something the pilots could feel in their bones. Wake up before dawn. Walk out to the strip in the dark. Listen for the coast watcher reports coming in over the radio in the operations tent.
Drink coffee that tasted of kerosene. Wait. The Japanese like to come at midm morning. The pilots would sit in their cockpits with the canopies open, sweating in the equatorial sun, listening. When the bell rang, they would start engines, taxi, take off in pairs. They would climb west across the harbor into a sky that was almost always full, full of cloud, full of haze, full of Japanese aircraft.
They could not see until they were close enough to fire. The Kittyhawk was a heavy aircraft. It was an honest aircraft. It was not a zero. It could not turn with a zero. It could not climb with a zero. The Kittyhawk could dive. The Kittyhawk had six 50 caliber machine guns. The Kittyhawk had armor plate behind the pilot.
If a Kittyhawk got hit, it could often take the hit and come home. If a Zero got hit by a 50 caliber round, the Zero generally exploded. The Australian pilots learned in the first two weeks what the Americans were also learning at the same time in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies and would learn a few months later at Midway.
Do not turn with the zero. Do not climb with the zero. Come down on the zero from above. Fire once and keep going down. Use the dive. Use the weight. Use the guns. Do not stop. Do not pull up into the turn the zero pilot is begging you to make. If you pull up into the turn, you will die. If you keep diving, you will live.
The pilots who would not learn this rule died. The pilots who learned it lived a little longer. By the middle of April, the men were ill. The mosquitoes at 7 mi strip carried malaria of the falciperum type, which is the kind that kills you. They also carried deni. The pilots had no proper antimmalarial regime.
Quinine was scarce. The pilots flew with fevers of 39°. They flew with the shakes. They flew with their fingernails turning the color of slate. Dysentery went through the ground crews and through the cockpits. The water supply at Port Moresby was contaminated. The food was tinned bully beef and dog biscuits and very little else.
Letters from home took weeks to arrive. Some did not arrive at all. Cigarettes were the currency of the strip. A man with cigarettes could buy almost anything. A man without cigarettes was poor. Old John Jackson did not get ill. Old John Jackson did not appear to need sleep. Old John Jackson appeared, in fact, to be made of a different material to the men around him. He flew almost every mission.
He led almost every mission. He took the most dangerous slot, which was the lead slot, which was the slot that any zero looking for a kill would aim for first. He did not give it up. His men noticed. His men, several of them, said later that they would have followed him anywhere because of it. Around him, the squadron was being whittleled.
Three aircraft lost in the week of the 4th to the 11th of April. Two more in the week after. The mechanics were now working 20 hours a day in rotating shifts. A Kittyhawk that came in with damage at 6:00 in the evening would be torn apart, the parts inspected, the salvageable assemblies bolted onto another machine by sunrise the following morning.
The mechanics worked by hurricane lamp and tarpolins. The mechanics were eaten alive by insects. The mechanics did not stop. The mechanics when they were interviewed long after the war used the same phrase the pilots used. They said it was the strip that had to keep flying. They said it was not really about the individual machines.
It was about whether at any given hour of any given day there would be a Kittyhawk in the air over Port Moresby. That was the mission. Keep a Kittyhawk in the air. Port Moresby could not be invaded from the sea. The Japanese would not put their transports in close to the coast as long as there was a kitty hawk in the sky. So the strip had to keep flying.
So the strip kept flying. Aircraft on strength 20th of April 1942. 12. Pilots on strength 17. The last week of April brought the worst of it. The Japanese had identified Port Moresby as the southern keystone of the entire Pacific defensive perimeter they were trying to build. The Japanese had decided that Port Moresby was going to be taken in May by a seaborn invasion, supported from the air by the same airfleets that had been bombing the town for 2 months.
The Japanese intensified the bombing in late April to prepare the ground. Every dawn brought formations of bombers over the harbor. Every dusk brought another round. The Kittyhawks went up. The Kittyhawks came down. Sometimes they came down on the strip. Sometimes they came down in the harbor.
Sometimes they came down in the hills behind the town. The pilots were tired in a way that was no longer normal tiredness. They were tired in a way that was approaching collapse. On the 24th of April, a Kittyhawk pilot named John Leay Breritton was shot down in flames over Port Moresby. His aircraft came apart in the air. He did not get out. He was 23.
He had been a clerk in Sydney before the war. He had a fiance he had never married. His name was added to the list. On the 26th, a pilot ditched into the harbor and was rescued by a launch. On the 27th, a Kittyhawk came back from a mission, made a perfect landing, and was found on inspection to have a Japanese bullet embedded in the engine block 1 in from apart that if it had been hit, would have killed the engine in flight.
The pilot, when this was pointed out to him, looked at the bullet for a moment and then went off to find a cup of tea. The 28th of April was the day of old John Jackson. The morning came up gray. The Coast Watcher report said the Japanese were coming in heavy. Bombers. Many bombers. Zeros above them. Many zeros.
The squadron had five airworthy Kittyhawks left. Five. Old Jon led the five up. He took the lead slot. He had a hard rule about that. He did not pass it to anyone else. The five Kittyhawks climbed over the harbor into the early sun. The Japanese formation came in from the northeast. The Australians went for them.
The way the surviving pilots told it afterwards was that Old Jon caught a zero almost immediately. Caught it, hit it, killed it. The zero went down, trailing smoke into the sea. Old J climbed back into the fight. There was another Australian Kittyhawk in trouble with a zero on its tail. Old Jon turned to cover the comrade.
The zero pilot saw him coming. The zero pilot pulled up and turned into him. Old Jon’s Kittyhawk was bracketed by two zeros at once. He could not outturn one of them, let alone two. He did not run. He kept turning into them. He went down in flames over the hills outside Port Moresby. His brother Les, also airborne in the same fight, saw it happen.
Less got back to the strip. Les walked into the operations tent, took off his helmet, and said his brother was gone. Squadron leader John Francis Jackson, distinguished flying cross, mining engineer, brother, husband, the man who at 35 was probably the oldest fighter pilot in the world. Killed in action over Port Moresby. The international airport at the modern city of Port Moresby is named in his honor.
They call it Jackson’s. Every aircraft that has landed there in the last 80 years has landed in his memory, although most of the passengers do not know it. Les Jackson took command the following morning, 29th of April. Younger brother to the older man who was no longer there. Less did not say much about it.
He buckled on his harness and walked out to the dispersal pad and stood looking at the four kitty hawks that were still airworthy. He turned to the engineering warrant officer and asked what could be flying by tomorrow morning. The warrant officer said he would do his best. They had been doing their best for 38 days.
Aircraft on strength 29th of April. Nine pilots on strength 13. Three of the nine were not airworthy, only repairable. The flyable count was four. The final week of the campaign was a slow collapse of arithmetic. On the 30th of April, the Americans arrived. Two squadrons of the United States Army Air Forces equipped with P39 Eric Cobras.
The Australians looking up at the unfamiliar shapes of the American fighters coming in over 7 mi strip watched them land with something close to disbelief. The Australians had been alone for 40 days. The Australians had not slept properly for 40 days. The Australians had buried 12 of their 24 pilots in 40 days. The Americans climbed out of their aircraft and looked around at the strip and at the wreckage of kitty hawks along the edges of the dispersal area and at the gaunt fever yellow men standing in the shade of the operations tent and they
did not know what to say. What the Americans could see was that 75 squadron in any meaningful operational sense no longer existed. There were three serviceable Kittyhawks left on the field. Three. There were seven more in various stages of cannibalization that on a good day, with luck, with a part that arrived in the next supply flight, might fly again. The pilots were sick.
The pilots were exhausted. The pilots were down to half their starting strength. The squadron had been holding the line for so long on so little that the line itself was an act of will rather than a feature of geography. The Japanese did not stop coming. The 1st of May brought another raid. The 2nd of May brought another.
On the 2nd of May, two more Kittyhawks were lost. The Americans flew alongside, learning the lessons that the Australians had paid for. By the morning of the 3rd of May, the squadron’s aircraft on strength was a number that the squadron leader did not at first want to say out loud. One, there was one airworthy Kittyhawk left. The Japanese came back on the morning of the 3rd of May. They came in bombers.
The Australians and Americans went up together. The Australian contribution was that one Kittyhawk, one aircraft, the flyable endstate of an entire squadron that had begun its war with 24. The pilot who flew it that morning, lifted off from the strip alongside the Aracobras, climbed into the haze over the harbor, made his attack, and brought the aircraft home.
The mission was the last operational sorty that 75 squadron would fly at Port Moresby. The Americans were now the air defense of the town, the Australians. The men who were left walked from the operations tent down to the strip in the afternoon to look at the single kitty hawk on the dispersal pad. They stood there for a while.
They did not say much. 44 days had ended. Aircraft on strength 3rd of May, 1942. 1 pilots on strength 12. The squadron was withdrawn from operations the same day. On the 7th of May, the surviving men were ordered back to Australia. They flew out on transports. They left behind the wrecks of more than 20 kittyhawks in the long grass at the edges of 7mi strip.
They left behind the graves of 12 men made. They left behind the makeshift workshops, the operations tent, the slit trenches, the handpainted boards. They left behind the war they had been fighting alone and handed it to the Americans who would carry it on with them. The numbers in the squadron diary are clean. 24 pilots arrived, 12 were killed.
22 Kittyhawks were destroyed, six of them in accidents, the rest in combat or on the ground. 35 Japanese aircraft were confirmed destroyed by the squadron in those 44 days. Another four were probably destroyed. 54 were damaged. The squadron had been outnumbered on most days by something like 10 to1 in the air. The squadron had been outclassed by the zero in almost every measurable parameter.
The squadron had nonetheless held Port Moresby. The squadron had stopped the Japanese from putting an invasion fleet into the harbor. The squadron had bought the time the rest of the Allied forces needed to build up the bases at Mil Bay and along the north coast of Queensland. The squadron had, in the words of its own historian, won a moral victory of incalculable value.
Most of the squadron historians since have said the same thing. They have said that without those 44 days, the Japanese would have taken Port Moresby in May 1942, they would have based bombers there. They would have begun the long process of cutting Australia off from American supply. The battle of the Coral Sea fought in early May would have looked very different if the Japanese had already controlled Port Moresby from the air.
The Cakakota track battles fought later in the year would have started with the Japanese already in possession of the place they were trying to reach. The Battle of Mil Bay fought in August. The battle that Lieutenant General Raul would describe as the turning point of the entire Allied campaign in Papua. The battle where the Japanese army was first defeated in the field by Allied troops in open battle.
Would not have been possible at all without those 44 days. A squadron of 24 young men in inadequate aircraft, sick with malaria, sleeping in pits beside the strip, flying on coffee and willpower, kept the door closed. They did it for 44 days. They did it until the line could be reinforced. They did it at a cost of half their pilots dead and almost every machine they owned.
When the survivors walked off the transport aircraft at Townsville on the 8th of May, the men who came to meet them did not know what to make of them. They were the color of yellow paper. They were thin. They had not shaved properly in weeks. They smelled. They had the eyes of men who had been doing something most people would not have believed possible if they had not been there to see it.
Les Jackson was at the head of them. He had taken command of the unit 5 days before his brother was killed and had brought what was left of it home. The squadron was rebuilt at Kingoy and then at Lowwood. Replacement pilots arrived, including men who had flown Spitfires over Europe. Replacement aircraft arrived. The unit reformed.
The unit went back to New Guinea in July. By the end of July, it was operating from Mil Bay alongside 76 squadron, also flying Kittyhawks. In August, it fought the Japanese landing at Milm Bay and ground them into the mud of the coconut plantations there. It then fought through the Cucakota campaign in support of the Australian infantry.
It fought up the New Guinea coast. It fought into Borneo. It fought into the last weeks of the Pacific War. But it was those 44 days between the 21st of March and the 3rd of May 1942 that the squadron has always carried with it. The story of a unit that started with 24 and ended with one.
The story of a counter that ran one way the entire time. Old John Jackson lies somewhere in the hills outside Port Moresby. The exact location of his grave was never identified. Some sources say he is buried at the Bmana War Cemetery on the outskirts of the modern city. Some say he never came down in a place that could be reached.
His name is on the memorial there. Either way, his distinguished flying cross is in the family. His brother Les flew through to the end of the war became an ace and lived. Wilbur Wackett, who walked 320 kilometers back to Port Moresby through the jungle after the lay raid, lived too. He became a senior figure in Australian aviation after the war.
John Piper, who scored the first kill of the squadron on the afternoon they arrived, lived. Barry Cox lived. Bruce Anderson did not live. David Brown did not live. John the Gay Breitton did not live. Nine other men did not live. They were on average 23 years old. They had on average been pilots for less than 2 years.
They were on average a long way from the towns they had been born in. They came from Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane and Adelaide and country places nobody in the city had ever heard of. They flew machines they had only met a few weeks before they died. They held a line they had never seen on a map until they were standing on it.
They held it long enough for the rest of Australia to catch up. If you go to Port Moresby now, you can land at Jackson’s International Airport. The strip is paved. The control tower is concrete. The terminal building is airond conditioned. There is no obvious sign when you step off the aircraft into the heat.
That you are standing on what was once 7 mi strip. There is no obvious sign that the strip was once defended for 44 days by 24 men with a ledger that opened at 24 aircraft and 24 pilots and closed exactly 6 and a/4 weeks later with one airworthy Kittyhawk and 12 survivors. The strip itself is the memorial.
The airport’s name is the memorial. The very fact that there is a city of Port Moresby in Papa Newu Guinea rather than a Japanese fortress called something else is the memorial. Aircraft on strength at 7 mi strip evening of the 21st of March 1942. 24 pilots on strength 24. Aircraft on strength at 7 mi strip evening of the 3rd of May 1942.
One pilots on strength, 12, 44 days. 24 young men, one squadron, three Japanese airfleets. The numbers are what they are. The counter only ran one way. The men flew anyway. They flew until there was one aircraft left, and then one of them climbed into it, lifted it off the strip one last time, and made certain the line had not been broken.
That is the whole story. There is nothing else that needs to be said about
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