Generals Called His “Tactic Suicide” — Then He Sank 12 Ships In 22 Minutes

At 6:42 in the morning on July 30th, 1942, Captain Howard Pacwin pressed himself against the cold metal of his B-25 Mitchell’s cockpit framed somewhere above the Solomon Sea and watched something that should have been impossible to watch without feeling a specific and burning kind of fury.

He watched his bombs fall and fall and keep falling for what felt like an eternity drifting sideways in the upper wind.

Currents the way a leaf drifts when you drop it from a second story window.

And then he watched them hit the ocean in a neat line of white geysers that were close enough to the Japanese transport below to spray its deck with seawater and far enough away to leave every person on that deck completely alive and completely unheard.

And the transport continued on its heading without even changing speed, as if the entire attack had been a minor inconvenience, roughly equivalent to a passing rain shower.

This was not a story about a crew that made an error in their calculations or failed to account for the wind or released their bombs at the wrong moment.

Pacwin’s crew had done everything the manual told them to do with the precision of men who had practiced it until the steps were as automatic as breathing.

And the result was the same result that American bomber crews over the Pacific had been producing with depressing consistency since the opening weeks of the war, which was a pattern of near misses that looked impressive from a distance and accomplished absolutely nothing that mattered.

And the Japanese captains below them had figured this out with a speed that suggested they had read the same manual and understood its limitations better than the generals who wrote it.

The problem lived inside a number and the number was 20,000 which was the altitude in feet that American bombing doctrine insisted was the correct height from which to attack enemy shipping.

In understanding why that number was catastrophically wrong for moving targets requires understanding something simple about the physics of a falling object that the men who wrote the doctrine had apparently chosen not to think about too carefully, which is that a bomb dropped from 20,000 ft does not travel straight down.

It travels in a long curving arc that takes approximately 30 seconds from release to impact.

And in 30 seconds, a ship’s captain standing on his bridge with one hand on the telegraph and one eye on the approaching aircraft can order a turn that moves his vessel several hundred ft sideways from the point where the bomb was aimed.

And the bomb, which has no ability to change its mind once it leaves the bay, continues to the spot where the ship used to be and makes a very large and very useless splash in the empty water.

30 seconds sounds like a short time until you are the captain of a Japanese transport in the Bismar Sea watching a formation of B-25s at 20,000 ft.

At which point 30 seconds is an enormous amount of time.

It is enough time to light a cigarette to walk the length of your bridge twice to give a clear order and watch it carried out completely before the bombs that were aimed at you arrive at a patch of ocean your ship left behind half a minute ago.

And the Japanese convoy captains operating the resupply routes to New Guinea in 1942 had internalized this arithmetic so thoroughly that they had essentially stopped worrying about high altitude bombers.

The way a man stops worrying about a dog he has learned is all bark and no bite.

The geography that made this problem lethal rather than merely embarrassing was the Bismar Sea and the Vishz Strait, the protected stretch of water between New Britain and New Guinea that the Japanese were using as a resupply highway with the calm confidence of men who believe their route is safe.

Running convoys of troop ships and destroyers carrying soldiers, artillery, ammunition, and everything else needed to sustain and expand their grip on the northeastern coast of New Guinea.

And those soldiers once they arrived and unloaded were the men who would dig into the jungle and kill the American and Australian troops fighting their way up the beaches and through the mountains in conditions that made the word difficult sound like an understatement.

And the B-25 crews burning fuel and absorbing anti-aircraft fire at 20,000 ft were watching those convoys arrive intact and unload their cargo while their bomb patterns decorated the ocean around the ships like a very expensive and completely pointless art installation.

The fifth air force was bleeding for nothing.

And everyone from the lowest crew chief to the highest staff officer knew it.

And the institutional response to this knowledge was to do what large military organizations always do when confronted with evidence that their doctrine is wrong.

Which is to suggest that the problem is not the doctrine but the execution.

That the crews need more practice.

That the bombarders need better equipment.

that the answer to missing ships from 20,000 ft is to get better at missing ships from 20,000 ft rather than to ask whether 20,000 ft is the right altitude in the first place.

And this response had a certain organizational logic to it that would have been entirely convincing if the Japanese convoys had been cooperating by holding still.

into this specific and expensive failure walked a B-25 pilot named Major William Robert Ben.

A man from the kind of background that produces people who solve problems by looking at them directly rather than by looking at what the manual says about them.

And what Ben saw when he looked at the problem of hitting a moving ship with a bomb was not a training deficiency or an equipment shortfall, but a geometry problem with a blindingly obvious solution that the doctrine writers had somehow managed to overlook.

Which was that the reason a bomb drifts sideways and gives the target time to maneuver is the distance it has to fall.

And the way to eliminate both of those problems simultaneously is to eliminate most of the distance to bring the airplane down from 20,000 ft to 50.

To get so close to the target that the wind cannot push the bomb sideways in any meaningful way and the captain cannot turn his ship far enough to matter before the bomb arrives.

and to release it at a low enough angle that it skips across the surface of the water like a flat stone thrown hard at a pond, arriving at the hull under the waterline where the steel is thinnest and the flooding is most catastrophic.

The generals heard this proposal and produced a response that was as unified as it was immediate.

And the word they reached for was not wrong or impractical or needs more study.

The word they reached for was suicide.

Because a B-25 flying at 50 ft over a Japanese convoy is not a bomber conducting an attack run.

It is a very large and very slow target flying through the effective range of every anti-aircraft gun and every deck-mounted machine gun on every ship in the formation at an altitude low enough that the gunners do not even need to calculate a lead angle.

They simply point at the airplane and fire.

and the airplane is close enough that the pilot can see the muzzle flashes on the ships he is flying toward.

And the bomb itself, if it is not fitted with exactly the right delayed fuse, will detonate and kill the crew that dropped it before they can get clear.

And every one of those objections was technically accurate.

And not one of them changed the fundamental fact that the current approach was accomplishing nothing at a cost that the fifth air force could not indefinitely afford to pay.

Ben understood the fuse problem and the deck gun problem and the altitude problem better than the generals who were listing them because he was the one proposing to fly the mission rather than the one proposing to approve it from a headquarters building.

And he was not asking for permission to be reckless.

He was asking for permission to be precise.

And the difference between those two things was about to become the most important lesson the Pacific Air War had to teach.

The permission that General George Kenny gave Bill Ben was not the kind of permission that comes with a formal order and a brass band.

It was the kind of permission that a commander gives when he is desperate enough to let a junior officer try something insane on the condition that the junior officer understands that if it doesn’t work, the conversation about whose idea it was will be very short and very one-sided.

And Kenny was exactly that kind of desperate because he had been watching his B-25 crews fly mission after mission against Japanese shipping and come back with gun camera footage full of near misses and afteraction reports full of the kind of carefully worded language that professional military men use when they are trying to describe a failure without using the word failure.

And the Japanese convoys were still arriving at Lei and unloading their cargo.

And the soldiers on the beaches of New Guinea were still dying.

And the doctrine that was supposed to fix all of that was still producing the same results it had been producing since the first week of the war.

Ben took his permission and a handful of crews who had not yet been convinced by the institutional consensus that low-level bombing was synonymous with dying.

And he flew them out over the water north of Port Morsby to a practice range where the target was a decommissioned Hulk anchored in the shallows and the bombs were concrete dummies filled with sand that would show an impact mark without producing a crater.

And what followed over the next several weeks was the kind of education that cannot be conducted in a classroom or described in a manual because it exists entirely in the space between the pilot’s hands on the controls and the surface of the water rushing past 50 ft below the belly of the airplane.

A space where every variable has to be felt rather than calculated and every mistake has consequences that are measured in feet rather than in percentage points on a bombing accuracy report.

The first attempts were instructive in the specific way that all first attempts at something genuinely difficult are instructive, which is that they revealed exactly how many things had to be right simultaneously for the technique to work and exactly how unforgiving the margin was when any one of those things was slightly wrong.

Because a bomb released at 250 mph from 50 ft of altitude over open water does not behave like a bomb released from 20,000 ft.

It behaves more like a very heavy and very fast flat stone, skipping across the surface in a series of impacts that each change its trajectory slightly.

And the difference between a bomb that skips twice and arrives at the hull at the water line and a bomb that skips three times and sails over the deck of the target ship is a matter of air speed and release distance that can be measured in singledigit miles per hour and tens of yards.

margins so thin that a pilot who is thinking about them consciously is already too slow to act on them correctly.

The air speed had to be held at approximately 250 mph through the entire approach run, which sounds straightforward until you consider that the approach run happens at 50 ft above the water in a fully loaded B-25 whose pilot is looking at a target that is growing in his windscreen at a rate that every survival instinct in his body is interpreting as a very strong suggestion to pull up and go somewhere else.

And the altitude had to be held at 50 ft.

Not by reference to the altimeter, which at that height is too imprecise and too slow to be useful, but by eye, by the pilot’s judgment of the gap between the belly of his airplane and the surface of the water.

A judgment that has to be accurate to within 10 ft in conditions that include wind chop, glare, and the distraction of knowing that the ships he is flying toward will be shooting at him from the moment he is close enough to be a target, which at mast height is essentially the entire approach.

The release point was 200 to 250 yd from the target.

A distance that Ben’s crews learned to judge by the apparent size of the target ship in the windscreen rather than by any instrument reading.

Because at 250 mph, the time between 200 y and 100 yd is less than a second.

And there is no instrument that updates fast enough to be useful at those speeds and those distances.

And what this meant in practice was that skip bombing was not a procedure that could be learned from a checklist.

It was a skill that had to be drilled until it lived in the pilot’s hands and eyes rather than in his conscious mind.

The way a good carpenter knows when a nail is set right, not by measuring it, but by the feel of the hammer and the sound of the last strike.

Except that in this case, the carpenter is moving at 250 mph and the nail weighs 500 lb.

And getting it wrong means flying through your own explosion.

The fuse problem, which had been the most technically legitimate of the generals objections, was solved by General Kenny’s maintenance chief.

Brilliant and profoundly unconventional officer named Colonel Paul Irvin Gun, who is known throughout the fifth air force’s papy, and who approached the problem of arming a low-level skip bomber, the way a mechanic approaches a seized engine by taking it apart until he understood exactly why it wasn’t working, and then fixing the specific thing that was broken rather than replacing the whole assembly.

And what Papy Gun determined was that the existing bomb fuses could be modified to provide a delay of four to 5 seconds between impact and detonation, which was exactly long enough for a B-25 flying at 250 mph to travel the roughly 1,500 ft needed to get clear of the blast radius before the bomb it had just put into a ship’s hull decided to express its opinion about the situation.

The modification to the airplane itself was the other half of the solution.

And it was characteristically direct in the way that Papy Gun solutions tended to be direct, which is to say that it involved removing something that wasn’t working and replacing it with something that would.

And what was removed from the nose of the B-25 was the Bombardier station with its Nordon bomb site and its associated equipment.

All of it designed for high altitude precision bombing and therefore about as useful at 50 ft as a sundial in a submarine.

And what replaced it was a battery of four to eight forward-firing 50 caliber M2 Browning machine guns mounted in a package that turned the nose of the airplane into something that a Japanese deck gunner would find considerably more discouraging than a bombarder’s window.

Because the fundamental problem with flying a bomber at 50 ft over a ship that is trying to shoot you down is that the ship’s gunners can see you clearly and aim at you precisely.

And the solution to that problem is to give them something to think about other than their aim, which 4 to 850 caliber machine guns firing simultaneously from the nose of an approaching B-25 will reliably accomplish in the sense that men who are being shot at tend to find it difficult to concentrate on shooting back.

The first live fire practice missions against anchored target hulks produced results that Ben’s crews described in their afteraction reports with the restrained language of men who are trying very hard not to sound as surprised as they actually are because the bombs were going where they were aimed into the hulls at the waterline and the delayed fuses were giving the airplanes time to clear the blast and the nose guns were doing exactly what Papy Gun had designed them to do which was keep the heads of the imaginary deck gunners down during the approach run and the whole system was working together with the coherent logic of something that was always going to work once someone was willing to stand close enough to the problem to see it clearly.

The Japanese convoy commanders in Raba were assembling something in the last days of February 1943 that they believed was protected by the same mathematics that had been protecting their ships since the war began.

eight troop ships and eight destroyers carrying approximately 7,000 soldiers and the supplies needed to reinforce the garrison at Lei.

Sailing under fighter cover through waters where American bombers had been missing ships from 20,000 ft for over a year.

And they had no particular reason to believe that this convoy would be any different from the ones that had preceded it.

And they were wrong in a way that was about to be explained to them at mass height and 250 mph.

The Japanese convoy that departed Raba on the evening of February 28th, 1943 was the largest and most strategically significant resupply operation the Japanese had attempted in the Southwest Pacific since the opening months of the Guadal Canal campaign.

And the men who planned it had done their arithmetic carefully and arrived at the conclusion that the arithmetic was in their favor because they had eight destroyers screening eight troop ships carrying 7,000 soldiers through waters where American high alitude bombers had been demonstrating their inability to hit moving vessels for over a year.

And they had fighter cover flying from Raba and they had the protective geography of the Bismar seas western approaches.

And every variable they had been able to account for pointed toward the same conclusion, which was that this convoy was going to reach Lei and unload its cargo.

And those 7,000 soldiers were going to dig into the jungle and make the Allied advance up the New Guinea coast considerably more expensive in the currency that military advances are always ultimately paid in, which is the lives of young men a long way from home.

What the Japanese convoy planners had not been able to account for was a B-25 pilot at 50 ft who had spent the last several months learning to put a 500-lb bomb through the hull of a ship at the waterline with the focused precision of a man who has practiced one specific thing until he can do it without thinking.

And on the morning of March 2nd, 1943, the high alitude component of the Allied attack went first, as it always did, and produced the results that highaltitude bombing against maneuvering ships in open water reliably produced, which was a pattern of near misses, and a single confirmed hit on one transport that slowed it without stopping it.

And the convoy adjusted its formation and kept moving.

And the Japanese destroyer captains watching the bomb patterns fall wide of their charges allowed themselves a moment of professional satisfaction that was about to be interrupted in a way they had no framework to anticipate.

The skip bombers arrived at 0900 on March 3rd.

Coming in from the northeast at wavetop height in a coordinated attack that had been planned with the kind of specificity that Ben’s weeks of practice had made possible.

The B-25s throttled to 250 mph and held at 50 feet above the surface of the Bismar Sea with a steadiness that required the pilots to override every instinct they possessed.

Because at 50 ft above open water in a fully loaded Mitchell, the difference between controlled flight and a catastrophic cartwheel into the ocean is a matter of inches and fractions of a second.

And the pilots holding that altitude were doing it by eye and by felin aircraft whose wings were close enough to the wave tops that the spray was visible from the cockpit.

The Japanese anti-aircraft gunners on the destroyers saw the incoming B-25s at approximately the same moment the nose guns on those B-25s opened up.

And the effect of 4 to 850 caliber M2 Brownings firing simultaneously from the nose of an airplane at mast height is not comparable to anything a Japanese destroyer crew had previously been asked to work through.

Because the rounds were arriving horizontally across the deck rather than from above, which meant that the gun tubs and the bridge and every exposed position on the ship was being swept by a continuous stream of half-in diameter projectiles traveling at nearly 3,000 ft per second.

And the men behind the anti-aircraft guns, who were supposed to be tracking and engaging the incoming B-25s, were instead finding that their position had become the most dangerous place on their ship.

And the ones who stayed at their guns were being knocked away from them.

And the ones who left their guns were not shooting at the airplanes.

And either way, the result for Ben’s crews was the same, which was that the final 200 yd of the approach run were considerably less lethal than the generals back at headquarters had predicted they would be.

The lead B-25 crossed the bow of the first transport at mast height at precisely the release point that Ben’s practice sessions had established, 230 yards, and the 500 lb bomb with its 4-se secondond delayed fuse left the airplane and met the water and did exactly what a flat stone thrown hard and low across a pond does.

skipping once, skipping twice, and arriving at the transport’s hull at the water line with enough remaining velocity to punch through the steel plating and travel several feet into the interior of the ship before the fuse completed its 4-se secondond count.

And what a 500 lb bomb does when it detonates inside a ship’s hull rather than in the water beside, it is not a matter of degree, but a matter of kind.

Because a near miss from altitude transfers its energy into the water and the water absorbs most of it and the ship’s hull flexes and the seams leak and the crew has a very bad day.

But the ship continues to float.

While a contact detonation inside the hull transfers all of its energy directly into the ship’s structure at the point of maximum vulnerability, opening a hole at the water line that the ocean immediately begins filling with the patient and unstoppable determination that water brings to every opening it finds.

The B-25 that dropped that bomb was already past the transport and climbing away when the detonation opened the hull.

The 4-second fuse having done precisely what Papy Gun’s modification had promised it would do, giving the airplane enough time and distance to be clear of the blast before the 500 lb of trion tunnel explosive expressed itself against the ship’s interior framework.

And the pilot climbing away from the attack did not need to look back to know the result because the pressure wave from the detonation was strong enough to be felt through the airframe at the distance he had reached.

a physical confirmation that the geometry had been right and the fuse had worked and the ship behind him had a problem that its damage control teams were not going to be able to solve.

The attack unfolded across the convoy’s formation over the next 22 minutes with the systematic efficiency of a process that has been rehearsed until the individual steps have stopped being decisions and become reflexes.

each B-25 finding its approach angle and its air speed and its release point and delivering its ordinance into hulls rather than into the water beside hulls.

And the difference in the results was visible from every airplane in the formation because ships that have been hit at the water line by internally detonating bombs do not continue on their headings at their previous speeds.

They slow and they list and they begin to settle by the bow or the stern depending on where the flooding is fastest.

And the destroyers that were supposed to be screening the transports were instead maneuvering at emergency speed to avoid the incoming B-25s and pulling survivors from the water and doing everything except the one thing they had been sent to do, which was keep the transports alive long enough to reach Lei.

By the afternoon of March 4th, the arithmetic of the battle had resolved itself into numbers that required no interpretation of the eight troop ships that had departed Raba on February 28th.

All eight had been sunk or were in the process of sinking.

And four of the eight screening destroyers had gone down with them.

And the 7,000 soldiers who had been aboard those transports were either dead in the Bismar Sea or in the water waiting for a rescue that the Allied air forces were actively working to prevent.

And the high altitude B7s that had opened the battle on March 2nd with their pattern of near misses had been followed by the skip bombers that closed it on March 4th with results so far outside the range of what previous anti-shipping missions had produced that the staff officers back at fifth air force headquarters reading the afteraction reports had to read them more than once to be certain they were reading correctly.

The 500 pound bombs that Bill Ben had spent months learning to skip across the surface of the water at 250 mph had done in three days what highaltitude bombing had failed to do in over a year of trying.

And the Japanese convoy commanders who had sailed from Raba with eight destroyers and eight troop ships and the comfortable confidence of men whose route had always been safe before were not going to be making that calculation again.

because the mathematics of the Bismar Sea had just been rewritten at mass height by a pilot who had been told his idea was suicide and had decided that the only thing more dangerous than flying at 50 ft over a Japanese convoy was continuing to miss that convoy from 20,000.

The silence that settled over the Bismar Sea in the hours after the last Japanese ship went under was not the silence of an empty ocean, but the silence of a calculation being completed.

Because the men in the water and the men watching from the air and the men reading the first fragmentaryary reports back at fifth air force headquarters were all arriving at the same number from different directions.

And the number was 8, which was the count of troop ships that had departed Raba on February 28th and the count of troop ships that would never reach Lei.

And the weight of that number pressed down on every subsequent decision the Japanese made about moving troops and supplies by sea through the waters north of New Guinea with a permanence that no formal order or revised doctrine could have produced.

Because there is no argument against a number that large and no way to dress it up as anything other than what it was, which was the complete and total destruction of the most significant resupply convoy the Japanese had attempted in the Southwest Pacific.

General Kenny’s afteraction report to General Douglas MacArthur described the battle of the Bismar Sea in the careful measured language of a senior officer who understands that the results he is reporting are going to be difficult to believe without that careful measured language providing the appropriate framework.

And what the report described was a three-day battle that had produced the sinking of all eight troop ships and four of eight escorting destroyers.

The deaths of somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors.

And the effective closure of the sea route between Rabal and Lee as a viable resupply corridor.

And the instrument that had produced the decisive portion of those results was not the highaltitude B7s that had opened the battle, but the low-level B-25s that had closed it.

the ones flying at 50 feet with nose-mounted 50 caliber guns and delayed fuse 500 pound bombs that went into holes instead of into the water beside holes.

And Kenny was smart enough to know that the difference between those two outcomes was a man named Bill Ben who had been willing to stand close enough to the problem to see the solution clearly.

The institutional conversion that followed was not loud or fast because institutions do not convert loudly or fast regardless of how overwhelming the evidence in favor of conversion happens to be.

But it was complete and its completeness could be measured in the training schedules that began appearing at fifth air force bases across New Guinea and Australia in the weeks following the battle.

schedules that allocated significant blocks of time to low-level skip bombing practice over water and in the modification orders that began moving through the maintenance pipeline directing armament crews to install forward-firing nose gun packages on B-25s that had previously been configured for the high alitude role that the battle had just finished discrediting and in the quiet disappearance from official communications of the word suicide as a descriptor for low-level anti-shipping attacks replaced by the considerably more bureaucratic but considerably less dismissive phrase lowaltitude skip bombing technique which is how military institutions acknowledge that the man they called reckless was right without actually using the words they called him reckless.

The Japanese response to the battle of the Bismar Sea was strategically decisive in a way that even the most optimistic Allied planner had not fully anticipated before the battle.

Because the Japanese did not simply adjust their convoy routing or increase their destroyer escort ratios or develop new anti-aircraft tactics for dealing with mastight attackers, they stopped running major daylight convoys to the New Guinea coast altogether, shifting to nighttime barge traffic and submarine resupply that could move only a fraction of the troops and supplies that the surface convoy route had been capable of moving.

And this shift effectively placed a ceiling on the Japanese ability to reinforce and supply their New Guinea garrisons that the Allied ground forces would spend the next two years pushing those garrisons up against.

And the ceiling had been installed not by a strategic bombing campaign or a naval blockade, but by a B-25 pilot who had practiced dropping bombs at 50 ft until the technique worked and then used it against the largest convoy the Japanese had trusted to the mathematics that he had just proven wrong.

Bill Ben received the Distinguished Service Cross for his role in developing and executing skip bombing doctrine, which is the military’s way of saying that a man did something important enough to deserve formal recognition without being quite important enough to receive the recognition that would require explaining to the public exactly how thoroughly the doctrine he replaced had been failing.

And Ben accepted the decoration with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had never needed the decoration to know that the work was right.

and he continued flying and continued refining the technique through the remainder of his Pacific service with the focused unhurried competence of someone who has found the correct answer to a specific problem and is now engaged in the considerably more manageable task of applying it consistently.

The postwar life that Ben built was the kind of life that the men who changed the Pacific Air War tended to build, which is to say it was a life that looked from the outside like the life of any other man of his generation, a family.

a career, a set of daily routines that bore no visible relationship to the morning.

He had flown a B-25 at 50 ft toward the largest Japanese convoy in the Southwest Pacific and proved that the generals who called his idea suicide had confused recklessness with precision.

And he did not spend a great deal of time explaining the distinction to people who had not been there because the distinction had already been explained in the most permanent language available, which is the language of results written into the floor of the Bismar Sea in the form of eight troop ships and four destroyers that went down because someone was willing to fly low enough to make his bombs count.

Papygun, the irreplaceable maintenance genius who had solved the fuse problem and designed the nose gun package that made the approach run survivable, died in a plane crash in the Philippines in 1957.

And the modifications he made to the B-25 in a New Guinea maintenance, shed with the practical ingenuity of a man who had never been taught that the problem was supposed to be unsolvable went on to influence the design philosophy of attack aircraft for a generation.

The principle that a low-flying airplane needs forward firing suppression capability to survive its own attack run becoming a foundational assumption of ground attack and anti-shipping doctrine that persists in various forms to the present day which is the kind of legacy that does not come with a plaque or a ceremony but is visible to anyone who knows what they are looking at.

We rescue these stories to ensure that Bill Ben does not disappear into silence because he was the man who looked at a doctrine that was killing his people and accomplishing nothing and had the specific courage required to fly low enough to prove it wrong.

And that is a truth worth remembering long after the last B-25 has found its way into a museum and the Bismar Sea has closed over the evidence of what happens when the man closest to the problem is finally given permission to solve it his Okay.