11 June 2010
 
Thirty and Out: Harold’s Story


(B-29 Cockpit and Bombardier Station. USAAF picture.)

Harold McCullough was assigned to the 73rd Bomb Wing, which began combat operations in October 1944 from Isley Field, Saipan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saipan> . The first raids were against naval targets on the fortress island of Truk.
 
Hal was the bombardier for an un-named crew which came to be known simply as “Crew 17,” from its position on the Operations board. Others got the fancy and sometimes ribald names that were painted with the naked ladies on the nose of their bombers. It just happened that Crew 17 was what they were called, and that is the way they went through their particular hell.
 
These are the nine men who served together in thirty missions against Japan, out of Saipan:
 
Lt A.C. Bonner, Pilot
Lt H.F .McCullough, Bombardier
Lt J.O. Leplante, Navigator
S.Sgt C.V. Greer, Flight engineer
S.Sgt M.J. Colsman, Gunner
S.Sgt B.S. Peterson, Gunner
S.SGT M.J. Cox, Gunner
S.Sgt Rudd, Radioman,
T.Sgt Fontentot, Gunner

In the European theater, there was a grim joke in the Wehrmacht of 1945: “If the airplane is silver, it is American. If it is dark colored, it is British. If it is invisible it is German.”
 
The Americans in the Pacific flew silver bombers, so there was absolutely no confusion for the Japanese. The 73rd marked its aircraft with a letter denoting the group, painted on the upper third of the tail fin, with a square symbol in the center, and an aircraft identifier, known as the "victor number," in the lower third.
 
Aircraft commonly used their tail identifiers as radio callsigns, i.e. Lucky Irish (tail number 42-24622) of the 870th Bomb Squadron, 497th Bomb Group had the voice call "A Square 26."

(B-29s with Mt. Fuji. USAAF picture.)

November of 1944 was a tough month for all the rookie crews on Saipan. They had crossed the vast pacific in their virgin aircraft and were now confronting the dual enemies of distance and Japan. This month was the baptism of combat, since it included strikes against heavily defended industrial targets on the Kanto Plain and the first Super Fort raid on Tokyo itself.
 
Remember, if you will. The blood expended to take Saipan from the Japanese Army bought an airfield on a tiny island two thousand miles away from the intended targets.
 
There were other problems. The Super Fort was a technical wonder, no question. But the hasty way it was forced through the design process had left it with troubling and systemic problems. The first of those was the Wright R-3350 engine. The problems were fixed, but not until after the war was over. Early models were had serious durability problems, since the cowling Boeing had designed for improved aerodynamic performance had flutter and vibration problems in virtually all flight regimes. The cylinders overheated because of insufficient cooling air, which in turn caused exhaust valves to unseat.
 
These two defects combined to make engines overheat at combat loads, particularly during climbs after takeoff, and burst into flame. A fire not immediately contained in the forward part of the engine by fire extinguishers became impossible to put out, and magnesium alloy components in the back of the engine, could produce heat so intense that it could burn through the firewall to the main wing spar in a minute and a half.
 
So the birds themselves had problems, and the crowding on the islands made the process of launching the strikes a challenge as well. On a two-hundred plane raid, one B-29 launched every 15 seconds from each operational runway until all were airborne and proceeding to assembly. But no takeoff happened without at least one plane crash, eleven men and their machine hurtling into the jungle or the surf at the end of the runway, so there was never a mission that began without death.
 
One hell of a thing, in all senses of the word.
 
Crew 17’s first trip to the Kawasaki Heavy Industry complex north of  the big naval base at Yokosuka was terrifying. I have been there, in today’s world, and the broad runways and massive industrial buildings give it the sort of solidity that it must have had once before the bombers came and knocked it all flat.
 
That mission in November, Japan growing dark and chill with the coming winter, was one that pilot Al Bonner thought “St. Peter had tickets out there for us. It was a night mission, suitable for incendiary delivery, and quite near the coast. Crew 17 was picked up almost immediately at the feet-dry position in a concentration of searchlights and then passed from one battery of Anti-aircraft artillery to the next. A piece of shrapnel penetrated a fuel cell on the right wing, releasing 170 gallons of highly volatile aviation fuel; another penetrated the left wing tip, while two more tore the rear bomb-bay doors open to the slip steam and left them banging back and forth.
 
Then it was downtown to Tokyo on the 24th, and the flak, the searchlight batteries, dodging night fighters and day VFR fighters, and wild thermals from the raging firestorms below for the next 28 missions. Radio Operator Paul Rudd carried an 8 x10 picture of his girlfriend on every mission, giving him something familiar to look at as the aircraft danced around the sky. It was no coincidence that there were tables set with whiskey for the crews when they got back. They needed it.
 
Three days after getting back from introducing Tokyo to what would be its fiery fate, Flight Engineer Hugh Lumbard was sitting in his crew position while still on the ground. He was filling out some forms when Japanese fighters showed up to strafe the field. Hugh was hit in the shoulder as he jumped from the plane and ran toward a foxhole. The Super Fort was destroyed in the attack, and Crew 17 had to take a new one.
 
Navigator Joe Laplante said later that Crew 17’s juiciest mission was on December 13th, 1944, when they went to Nagoya. Hal was at the Norden, and when the computer whizzed around to release the bombs, nothing happened. Hal immediately went to manual salvo and the bombs dropped along with a 300-gallon fuel tank that was in the rear bomb bay. They needed that fuel to get back to Isley Field on Saipan.
 
At the mission debrief, some of the other crews started congratulating us for our quick thinking on salvoing the ‘that burning gasoline tank.” That was the first time we knew that damn tank had been hit by the unusually heavy flak and was already on fire when it left the plane. We could have gone sky high-high- literally- if Hal had not jettisoned the tank along with the bomb-load!
 
On that same mission, Gunner Fred Colsman damaged a twin-engine Nakajima JN1 IRVING.
 
Two days after Christmas, Crew 17 went back to Tokyo, and it was not a good one. Flak and fighters crippled number 1 and 2 engines. They both kept running until they were over blue water about an hour and a half away form base. Number One had to be feathered, and Al directed the crew to prepare to ditch. When they got the shot-up Super Fort back on the ground they discovered there was shrapnel damage throughout the aircraft, and almost everyone was a very lucky man. There were holes in the fuselage above Al’s head in the cockpit, near Charlie Greer’s in the special instrument operator’s compartment, under the engineer’s feet, near Paul’s head in the radio shack, and a shell shattered a thermos jug. Four 20-mm slugs had also ripped into the plane, one of them into the bomb bay fuel tanks, which mercifully did not explode.
 
The pace of operations kept mounting, and the Japanese were not out of the war yet by a long shot. Hell, there were still more than forty Japanese soldiers out in the bush around the airfield who did not come out until the war was over.

Two weeks later, on January 14th, they were able to put nearly 300 fighters in the air to meet the bomber stream. Mark Cox, the right gunner, got four kills and three probables in the combat rotation, some of them that day as 200 of the Japanese harassed the bombers until they were feet-wet and headed back to Saipan.
 
Hal will never forget what happened on the March 27 raid on Kyushu. Crew 17 was ordered to replace the designated lead on the formation when it developed mechanical problems. Did I tell you about the problem with the Super Fort’s engines?
 
Anyway, Crew 17 slipped down about 50 feet in the bomber stream and slipped under the former lead aircraft to spearhead the formation. In the process, a bomb was accidentally released from above and it took about three feet off the left wing and a large hunk of the aileron was torn away. Al coaxed the plane home to Saipan, but it took 16 hours and fifteen minutes- the longest mission of the combat tour.
 
Crew 17 was lead plane of nine that hit Shizuoka on 12 April, and were credited with destroying 86% of the target aircraft engine plant. It wasn’t the primary target. Crew 17 had been scheduled to go to Musashino, where another aircraft engine plant was located. The target was weathered out, and rather than dump the fire bombs indiscriminately, Al decided to abandon his fighter escort and divert to the secondary target at Musashino, 125 miles away.
 
Hal was at the bombsite, controlling the aircraft, and when he released the bombs he shouted on the intercom “I’m gonna jump right out of this plane if we don’t hit the target.” Hal got them all on the bullseye, and once he was done with the bombsite and guiding the bomber from the IP to the target was a multi-threat bombardier. Firing machine guns from the Perspex nose of the Super Fort, he was credited with killing three Japanese fighters, three additional probables and one damaged.
 
In the fighter community, five kills made you an Ace, and Hal qualifies for that in my book.
 
Gunner Fred Colsman finally got his confirmed kill in a second encounter with a Nakajima IRVING on the 24th of April. Fred said he also scared one off, which amounted to the same thing: life for Crew 17.

(Iriving going down in flames over the Kanto Plain. USAAF Picture.)

The whole thing was done in May, with the 30th mission passing uneventfully. The second crew to bag their thirty missions were confident.
 
"Lucky Irish" finished a day behind Crew 17. They were fortunate. They never had anything spectacular happen to them in the first 29 missions. They never aborted, never were scratched and never took serious damage in the air. Of course, the whole thing was a crap shoot, and wasn’t it ironic that it was on the 30th mission that Lucky Irish got nailed over Tokyo. They lost #3 and 4 engines, dropped suddenly 7,000 feet before they could pull out, were savaged by two night fighters, and lost instruments. Flying by magnetic compass, they made the emergency divert field at Iwo Jima and crash landed, ground looping the Super Fort. The seven original crewmen climbed out to count more than seventy bullet arty and bullet holes in the fuselage, and two eight-inch gashes in the engines.
 
Luck Irish- the human part, the rest being just scrap- was ferried back to Saipan for further transportation back to the land of the Big PX. Thirty and out. Back home alive.



Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!