Vic Socotra

21 June 2010

Joltin' Josie (The Pacific Pioneer)

(Joltin' Josie Nose Art. USAF Picture)

Bill Mccullough was having a pretty good Father’s Day yesterday, and the memories came back with precision. It was a long time ago now, the day he got his draft notice and was called up for service from Gober, Texas, located ten miles southeast of Bonham in southeastern Fannin County, Texas.

Gober was a hardscrabble town centered on a quarry. The population peaked in the early 1930s at 300 citizens, and has been declining ever since. Bill was about to see the wide world, still a teenager, in the 873rd .

He talked to me from his home in San Antonio about the days when he wore the three stripes of a buck Sergeant in the Army Air Corps, and was heading out for a little island that no one had ever heard of before.

At 4:15 p.m. Saipan time, on July 9th, 1944, the Commander of the landing force, Marine General Holland “Howlin’ Mad” Smith  announced that the island was officially "secured." That would be news to the dozens of Japanese troops still in caves or in the jungles of Saipan, or for the shocked jarheads of the 2nd Marine Division and the dogfaces of the Army’s 27thInfantry.

But it was time to move on to the next vortex of the rising storm.

Here is the down payment in blood for the little airstrip on the southern end of a little island in the Marianas:

Japanese known dead:                      23, 811
Japanese dead in caves:                   "Uncounted thousands"
Japanese Prisoners of war:               298
Korean Prisoners of war:                  438
Americans wounded in action:          13,061
Americans killed in action:                3,225
Americans missing in action:            326

The loss of Saipan meant that an Allied toehold that placed the Home Islands within range of the new wonder weapon of the Super Fort shocked the Japanese government. Premier Hideki Tojo resigned, along with his entire cabinet.

Securing the island was only the beginning. Saipan, along with Tinian Atoll across the narrow strait and the regained American possession of Guam were about to become the nexus of colossal streams of material, men and activity.

The training stream for this moment had begun months before. Bill was headed for basic Army training, and then the specialized school at Lowrey Field in Denver that would teach him to maintain the remote control gun systems of the Super Fort.

His cousin Hal was being taught the mysteries of the bombing system at Clovis, New Mexico, and then Kansas.

They all came together in the 873rd Squadron (Very Heavy) of the 498th Bomb Group, 73rd Bomb Wing, 20th Air Force. In the late summer of 1944 they began to get organized to move around the world.

In the meantime, not counting smaller divert fields, the engineers were busy on Saipan. They had to shoehorn six Siper Fort bases with eleven runways onto three islands with a total area of nearly 300 square miles.

Work began first of Saipan. The construction process began with the arrival of the Navy Construction Battalion- the SeaBees. They attacked two coral hills and crushed the bleached white bone with bulldozers. The coral gravel was loaded onto a hundred trucks, each with a payload of of four tons, and they shuttled around the clock from the dwindling hills to Isley field.

SeaBee officers estimated that between the trhee islands, the crews went through twelve tons of dunamatie a day, and nearly 5,000 blasting caps. The amount of material spread around was enough to construct three Hoover Dams. A hand-built asphalt pant smoked in the humid sun as gigantic roller pressed it down on what were becoming the longest airfields in the Pacific- nearly 8.500 feet in length.

The first Super Fort- “Joltin Josie, the Pacific Pioneer,” arrived on Saipan on the 12th of October, 1944 with General Haywood S. Hansell in the pilot seat. Major Jack Catton - the aircraft commander - in the co-pilot's position. Hansell headed the XXI Bomber Command.

Catton was a flight leader of the 873rd squadron in the 498th Bomb Group. The 497th, 498th, 399th and the 500th Bomb Groups and their associated organization made up the 73rd Bomb Wing. The strategic air campaign was about to begin.

Josie had some cool nose art, and Bill recalls her well. I will have to ask him if he worked on her- the remote fire control techs had to service the upper turret when the Super Forts returned from missions. It was a hazardous job, since a screwdriver inserted into the wrong aperture could release the firing pin on the machine guns and blow off a finger.

Bill told me Josie wracked up  400 hours flying and 24 missions over Japan, during which she never suffered an abort and always hit the primary target, Major Catton was transferred to General LeMay's Headquarters on Guam. Captain Wilson C. Currier took over as aircraft commander.

Josie was lost on the first mission following Major Catton's departure. Immediately after taking off on 1 April 1945, she plummeted into Magicienne Bay  and exploded on impact. There were no survivors.

There is much more, but we will have to get to that tomorrow.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com