Absurd War Stories: Memorial Day Edition

General Kenneth N. Walker in New Guinea. This is the last photograph taken of him before he died doing something dumb

In a past life, I had the great honor of writing a book about the Pacific air war in World War Two. This book will probably never be published, which is sad for all the veterans and their families who were really hoping to see it hit the shelves before they died, but not sad for the rest of us, because it’s really just 500 pages of mindless war-porn that exalts machines over people and makes no attempt whatsoever at narrative cogency or historical insight. Buffery, as an exasperated colleague liked to put it.

Still, this work exposed me to a treasury of wonderful stories — slice-of-life glimpses at the war-time doings of a thousand faintly sketched characters. Naturally, this being a war book, many of these stories dealt with the slice at the end. None of them was more intriguing to me than that of Brigadier General Kenneth N. Walker.

On January 5, 1943, Walker was riding as an observer aboard a B-17 called San Antonio Rose when that plane went missing during a daylight raid on the Japanese base at Rabaul, New Britain. (I have to remind myself I’m not writing for my previous [non-existent] audience of war-porn buffs — if you don’t know what a B-17 is, might I refer you to the wikipedia page, or to the movies Twelve O’Clock High and Memphis Belle, or to just about any program on the History Channel from ten years ago, before they started soliciting P. Diddy’s expertise on the antebellum South.) In addition to Walker, who was commanding officer of V Bomber Command, the plane carried the executive officer of the 43rd Bomb Group and the commanding officer of the 64th Squadron. (If you’re not familiar with military hierarchy, imagine our army in Australia as a Fortune 500 corporation. Douglas MacArthur, whom I know you know, is like the CEO. Walker is the VP in charge of operations. The other guys are Yale MBAs gunning for his job.)

The thing about Ken Walker is this: First of all, for disappearing on that plane, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, which is the most honorific award a serviceman can receive. Second, at the time, the loss of San Antonio Rose was a big deal because of its high-profile crew, but looking back, it’s a lot bigger because 1.) Walker should not have been on that plane, and 2.) there should have been no daylight raid on Rabaul that day.

This is what happened: Sometime around New Year’s, 1943, George Kenney, Commander of Fifth Air Force (MacArthur’s COO, basically), ordered the largest raid yet on Rabaul. (Rabaul, btw, is a port city on the island of New Britain. In 1943, it was the staging base from which Japan hoped to pinch the supply line between the U.S. and Australia. It was one of three or four very crucial Japanese bases.) When I say “largest raid yet,” I mean more American planes were going to go there and bomb the place than ever before. The reason he did this was because the Japanese appeared to be assembling a supply convoy in Simpson Harbor (on whose shores Rabaul sits), and he hoped to destroy or hamper the convoy.

For Ken Walker, who built his career on a handful of scholarly papers about the efficacy of strategic bombing, this was a good thing, a step in the right direction. In fact, Walker had been agitating for some time about how U.S. bombing strategy in the Pacific was all wrong. We were flying around in small numbers, you see, at night, bombing the odd barge or dinghy (raids on Rabaul focused mainly on the ships that waited in the harbor to bring men and supplies to the front), whereas we should have been doing what they were doing in Europe: Flying around in overwhelming numbers, in broad daylight, totally fucking eradicating entire munitions factories, oil refineries, railyards (also, schools, hospitals, and museums, but that wasn’t the point exactly — well, not at this stage of the war; later, it absolutely was the point).

That is what strategic bombing is (see again Twelve O’Clock High and Memphis Belle): Not simply attacking the enemy, disabling his capacity to make war. Since every bullet, band-aid, and ball of rice that made it to the Japanese front on New Guinea went through Rabaul, it made sense to Walker, who became a general by advocating the idea of strategic bombing, that we should be hitting Rabaul in the same overpowering way that we hit German factories in France.

But even though Kenney ordered more planes than ever before to Rabaul, he ordered them to go there in the same way they’d been going there for months: at night. Walker did not approve. How can you bomb the living shit out of something if you can’t even see it? How did he react? Well, he just went ahead and gave a new order: bomb at noon.

Now, I don’t know how much you know about the military, but this is a pretty big deal. When a general says to you “do this,” and you say yes sir and then go and do something entirely different, that’s really looked down upon. The reason Walker did this was probably because he was sure in the end he’d be vindicated. He just knew that his daylight raid would be a resounding success, and he’d be lauded and rewarded and maybe even promoted.

Walker’s daylight raid was an abysmal failure. What’s more, anyone who’d been in town for more than a few weeks could’ve told him from the beginning that it would be an abysmal failure. Because, you see, the success of strategic bombing in Europe had a lot to do with the fact that we were bombing huge factories that didn’t go anywhere, as opposed to tiny little boats that tend to get out of the way of falling bombs; and that our planes flew moderate distances from England and back, and could count on fighter protection for most of the way, whereas in the Pacific they flew great gaping distances over the ocean, unprotected, dogged by the zero, which was by some measures the most advanced fighter in the world at the time; and that the air corps in Europe had all the planes, two or three times as many as in the Pacific, whose air corps had to make do with the ailing survivors of the Philippines retreat and a boxful of planes stolen from Canada. The result of Walker’s daylight bombing experiment was to get three planes shot down, killing two people and diverting scarce resources to a three-day rescue operation, with no discernible damage done to the enemy at Rabaul — the convoy set sail that very day.

So it was a dumb idea. Fortunately, Walker discovered firsthand just how dumb it was by violating a second direct order from his boss, which was that he never get in a plane and fly on a combat mission. Not only did walker do just that, but he asked all those other important guys to go along with him. And, of course, they all died.

When Kenney found out about the raid, he got on the phone with MacArthur and yelled about how angry he was with Walker, who not only defied his direct orders but got people killed and wasted a lot of time and money in the process. At this time, Kenney was operating under the belief that San Antonio Rose had been found ditched off the coast of some island somewhere, with all crew alive and well. He insisted to MacArthur that when Walker was rescued and returned he be demoted and sent to Sydney to work a remedial desk job in disgrace. MacArthur agreed, then, when it turned out Walker was MIA, he recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor instead. Politics!

(btw, that other plane was flown by a guy named Jean Jack, who had to ditch [like landing but on water] because his plane was damaged over the target. He and his crew had to wait overnight to be rescued. By then, it was his birthday! IIRC, another plane went down on that mission, with two dead in the crash.)

Most of this information comes out of a book by Martha Byrd called Kenneth N. Walker: Airpower’s Untempered Crusader. (I know, but give her a break: She’s Writing for Air University Press.) It’s a pretty sober account of Walker’s life and the January 5th mission, but there is one fantastic chapter called “Lingering Doubts,” in which Byrd throws around all kinds of wild speculations, like that Walker was taken into captivity after surviving the crash, but he put on the dead pilot’s uniform so the Japanese did not know he was a general; or that he survived the war in a POW camp, then reinvented himself and lived a new life under an assumed identity. Best yet is the speculation as to why he defied Kenney’s orders and went on that mission; Occam’s Razor says he liked the thrill of combat, but there’s always the possibility that he was having long-distance relationship troubles and secret hoped to die over Rabaul, isn’t there?

So there you have it, my favorite dead soldier story. Let’s butter an ear of corn and drink a warm Coors for General Walker, everybody!