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| The original model for Air Force gloves? |
There he was, standing tall before "The Man". He knew he was in
some serious trouble. He knew all-too-well that he had violated several regulations
that usually carried stiff penalties for doing so. The seriousness of the
situation was amplified by the fact that "The Man" was a two-star
general; general officers usually have more important things to do than to
discipline lowly lieutenants like him. The general reviewed the list of crimes committed,
reminded the young officer of all the trouble he caused, and shared with him
the fact that he had to smooth things over, from the Governor on down. The
general looked serious and was about to pronounce sentence. Dishonorable
discharge? Turning big rocks into little ones? What would it be?
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| Mean and not-so-mean machines: Photo-recon and fighter versions of the versatile P-38 |
After a few moments of tense silence, the general let him have it: “By the
way, wasn’t the air pretty rough down in the street around the second-story
level?” The lieutenant answered, “Yes sir, it was kind of rough, but it was
easy to control the plane.” The lieutenant then enthusiastically began to
describe the excellent aileron control of the P-38 Lightning before realizing
he wasn’t there to plug the plane. The general, his natural airman’s curiosity
satisfied, went back to the business at hand:
"If you didn't want to fly down Market Street, I
wouldn't have you in my Air Force, but you are not to do it any more and I mean
what I say." After telling the lieutenant that anything resembling a
repeat performance will result in his instant dismissal, the general rounded
out his “sentence” by ordering the lieutenant to report to a certain house in
Oakland. “If that woman has any washing to be hung out on the line, you do it
for her. Then you hang around being useful – mowing a lawn or something – and
when the clothes are dry, take them off the line and bring them into the house.
And don’t drop any of them on the ground or you will have to wash them all over
again. Dismissed.”
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| Where it all happened from: Cockpit of a P-38 |
The lieutenant was in trouble for excessive hot-doggery
one day by looping the Golden Gate Bridge, flying at treetop level down the
aforementioned Market Street, and blasting laundry off a clothesline at least
one house in Oakland, which got the general a call from an angry housewife. The offending pilot was Richard
Bong, destined to be America's Ace of Aces of WW2, and "The Man" was
Major General George Kenney (Bong subsequently denied looping the bridge, but
three other P-38 pilots did so the same day that Bong performed his “air show” ).
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| Heavy cruiser under the Golden Gate Bridge in 1942 |
General George C. Kenney (6 August 1889 – 9 August 1977) seems to be
among the unsung heroes of WW2. Reporting for duty to General Douglas MacArthur
on 28 July 1942 in Brisbane, Australia, Kenney remained MacArthur’s air
commander for the rest of the war. Like everyone else in the Pacific Theater,
Kenney was forced to work with what he had thanks to the “Germany First” policy,
the European/North African Theater having priority. Kenney, demanding no
interference, promptly laid his cards out, putting a dot on a blank sheet of
paper and saying to MacArthur’s micro-managing chief of staff, General Richard
Sutherland, "The dot represents what you know about air operations, the
entire rest of the paper what I know." MacArthur, who took a strong liking
to Kenney from their very first meeting, kept his word to Kenney and reined in
Sutherland.
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| Very much a micro-managing finger-in-every-pie kinda guy: General Richard Sutherland, Big Mac's prickly chief of staff |
Kenney, a no-nonsense operator if there ever was one,
immediately went to work by “clearing out the deadwood”, meaning personnel that
Kenney felt “were playing on the wrong team.” Among the personnel he
specifically requested assignment to what eventually became the U.S. Fifth Air
Force was the pilot whose career came close to ending before it began; Richard
Bong. Focused on his mission, Kenney told MacArthur his first priority was to
destroy Japanese air power “until we owned the air over New Guinea. There was
no use talking about playing across the street until we got the Nips off of our
front lawn.” The Japanese were blissfully ignorant of what was about to hit
them, but not for too much longer.
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| Kenney's Kids greeting the Japanese in one of their usual methods | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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| Sayonara motherfuckers! More prafrags on their preferred targets |
Kenney, being the resourceful innovator that he was,
refused to surrender to the circumstances that surrounded fighting a war on a
shoestring budget and scrounged and scraped up everything he could, including
something he devised back in 1928 and found there were several thousand of
still in storage; the parafrag, a standard 25-pound fragmentation bomb with a
small parachute attached, the idea being the parachute would prevent the
aircraft that dropped it from being struck (and possibly downed) by the
fragments when the bombs exploded. Kenney’s Kids (as they became to be known)
proceeded to use them to devastating effect on Japanese airfields. Many
Japanese were also mowed down by the parafrags, thinking they were
paratroopers. The “Kenney Cocktail”, a 100-pound bomb filled with white
phosphorous, was used to great effect as well, particularly on Japanese
anti-aircraft gun positions.
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| On the House! Kenney Cocktails being served with a smile |
In addition to Japanese air power, Kenney also saw to it
that Japanese sea power also suffered severely. Kenney’s bomber pilots became
experts at a low-level bombing technique called “skip bombing”, when the bomb
is dropped and literally skips like a stone across the water before slamming
into the targeted ship, where even a near-miss was enough to severely damage
and/or sink it. Kenney and the aptly-named Major Paul “Pappy” Gunn (an expert
at field modifications) came up with the “commerce destroyer”, a B-25 Mitchell
medium bomber with four extra .50 caliber machine guns added to the nose in
addition to the two guns on each side of the fuselage and the two in the
forward turret, resulting in a total of ten forward-firing .50 caliber machine guns
which made short work of the decks of the ships being attacked, which were then
usually finished off with a good skip-bombing.
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| There's no such thing as too many nose guns |
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| B-25 skip bombers having some fun |
As Kenney started to gain more resources, one aircraft
that was particularly welcome was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, whose twin
engines, long range, and heavy firepower (four .50 caliber machine guns and a
20mm cannon, all tightly clustered in the nose, in addition to a useful bomb
load) made it well-suited to the conditions of the Southwest Pacific. Initially
having many technical problems with the P-38’s, before long their addition to the
fight resulted in the Japanese having many subtractions. Kenney also brought in
a famed aviator with much experience in long solo flights over open water, and
who had recently spent some time helping out Marine pilots; Charles Lindbergh.
Lindbergh, out of favor for his pre-war pacifist activities and serving in a
very unofficial capacity, taught Kenney’s pilots how to almost double the range
of the P-38. The P-38 went on to have a distinguished career in the Pacific
Theater, among other things being the instrument of death for Admiral Yamamoto.
The top-scoring American aces of WW2, Major Richard Bong (40 kills) and Major
Thomas MacGuire (38 kills), were both Kenney’s Kids who flew P-38’s.
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| Bong + MacGuire = RIP JAPS |
It didn’t take long for General Kenney to get airtime in
Japanese radio addresses; by the end of 1942 he was referred to by Radio Tokyo
as “The Beast” and one of the “gangster leaders of a gang of gangsters from a
gangster-ridden country”. To General MacArthur, Kenney was affectionately
nicknamed “Buccaneer”. The “Buccaneer” went on to steadily smash the Japanese
by all means at his disposal, with the Battle of the Bismarck Sea being among
his crowning glories; an entire Japanese convoy consisting of eight transports
full of troops and four of the eight escorting destroyers were sunk.
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| Whatever it took: Captain Robert Faurot |
The battle
was not without loss however; among the pilots killed was Captain Robert
Faurot, who was credited with the first Japanese kill with a P-38 in that
theater by dropping bombs on a runway when a Japanese fighter was trying to
take off from it. Initially balking on a promise to award an Air Medal to the
first of his P-38 pilot who shot down a Japanese plane with the words, “Hell
no! I want you to shoot them down, not splash water on them”, Kenney relented
and decorated Faurot; the words and the actions being the epitome what the
Buccaneer was all about.
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| Big Mac signing World War Two away: Kenney is the short guy in the background, first row, second from the right, probably making a wise crack to old buddy General Carl Spaatz |
General Kenney was among the Allied commanders present on
the USS Missouri to receive the formal Japanese surrender. After the war, he
served briefly as the first commander of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) before
being assigned to the Air University, where he served until his retirement in
1951. His memoir, first published in 1949, is titled simply General Kenney Reports. General Kenney
was also the author of two other books, The
Saga of Pappy Gunn (1959) and Dick
Bong: Ace of Aces (1960).
