Wewak courage
To war and back

John Bailey flew 75 Kittyhawk fighter missions with No. 75 Squadron in World War II.

PTE John Wellfare relates his account of the war.

John Bailey’s Kittyhawk, A29.571, is loaded with captured Japanese bombs at Noemfoor Island in 1944.

John Bailey today.

Photo by CPL Steve Duncan

NEW GUINEA’S mountainous interior feels almost prehistoric in the early morning hours before sunrise. Columns of mist rise out of the jungle, betraying the thermal currents that snake skywards from the dense forest canopy.

The occasional bird call darts through the foliage into the cool tropical air, but on a still night the silence is audible.

Sound is unpredictable when trapped in the maze of rugged peaks; it scampers along narrow ravines, rebounds off sheer rock faces and rolls over foothills out to the coast, dispersing somewhere above the Pacific.

The Australian pilots of the Kittyhawks escorting the 24 B-25 bombers that wound their way through the mountains at low level in the early morning darkness in 1943 would have hoped the rugged central highlands would capture the drone of their aircraft engines and channel it deep into the island’s interior, away from their target.

The Japanese aerodrome at Wewak, on New Guinea’s northern coast, was home to more than 200 serviceable fighter aircraft and a strong garrison.

If the base had advance warning of the Australians’ approach, the day could prove to be one of the allies’ most significant losses in the Pacific.

The briefing room had fallen deathly silent a few hours earlier when the intelligence officer had revealed the strength of the Japanese position.

It was almost 30 seconds before somebody spoke up – one of the fighter pilots remarked happily, “That’s a bloody good thing; that’s about six each”. It broke the tension, but everyone knew how important the element of surprise would be.

Even the American squadrons of P-38s and P-47s, flying lead-in and top cover for the mission, would not have been enough to fight off an organised Japanese counterattack.

The moment of truth came as the lead aircraft made the final turn to the north through a gap in the mountains to look out over the coastal lowlands that stretched out to the sea – the Wewak base was still and unprepared.

As the bombers fanned out for the final approach, the fighters, Kittyhawks from Nos. 75, 78 and 80 Squadrons, went for altitude in preparation to fight off any Japanese Zeros that might have the chance to get airborne before the bombs fell.

Among the 75SQN pilots was Flight Sergeant John Bailey, who’d worked in the office of F.H. Faulding and Co pharmaceutical company in Western Australia before joining the Air Force in June 1941. It was a decision he’d made with great solemnity.

“I didn’t expect to come back,” he says flatly of his attitude on going to war.

“I felt that it was a pretty dangerous thing and I sold everything that I had. “But things were looking pretty grim for Australia in those days and you feel that you should do your bit.”

After completing basic training at RAAF Base Pearce, Mr Bailey learnt to fly on Tiger Moths at Cunderdin and completed his flying training at Geraldton on Avro Ansons. He received his wings within a few days of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour and was promoted to sergeant as a pilot.

“In those days about one third were commissioned off course. I didn’t believe in this bit about buying drinks for the instructors or anything to try and get a commission, I just went through as one of the ordinary guys.”

Posted to No. 25 Squadron, his first missions were in Wirraways, flying along the coastline searching for evidence of HMAS Sydney, which had disappeared after a battle with the German raider HSK Kormoran in November 1941.

As history records, no trace of HMAS Sydney, or her 645-man crew, was found and the ship’s disappearance became Australia’s worst naval disaster and one of the country’s greatest wartime mysteries.

A shipment of Brewster Buffalo fighters, intended for the Dutch Air Force in the East Indies, was delivered to Australia when their original destination fell to the Japanese before they arrived. Mr Bailey was one of the pilots selected to fly the nine aircraft, which were allocated to 25SQN.

This fighter flight later became the newly-formed No. 85 Squadron, based at and literally taking off from, the fairway of Dunliff Golf Course, which would become Perth Airport. Without spares for the Buffalos, 85SQN was soon re-equipped with the new Australian-built Boomerang fighter.

The pilots were sent to Exmouth Gulf to protect the American submarine base there.

“Around that time somebody in the Air Force found out that we original nine pilots, although we’d been flying fighters for nine or 10 months, we’d never been taught to fly them. So they shot us off to Mildura, over to 2OTU to be taught proper tactics and all the rest of it.”

After the training, Mr Bailey and his eight fellow pilots were posted to squadrons in the Pacific – two to Spitfire squadrons and seven to Kittyhawks. He joined 75SQN at Goodenough Island just after the Milne Bay campaign, in which 75SQN played a crucial role defeating a 2000-strong Japanese attack force – the first major land defeat suffered by the Japanese in World War II.

The Kittyhawk fighter-bombers flown by 75SQN were among the toughest fighter aeroplanes of the war. The all-metal aircraft was heavy and could survive a lot of enemy fire. Its six wing-mounted .50 calibre machine guns and capacity to carry up to 1000 pounds of bombs made it a formidable opponent in both airto- air and ground-attack roles.

But the extra weight meant it was slower and less manoeuvrable than many fighters of the era, including the Japanese Zero. On ground attack missions, the Kittyhawks would fly in low, strafing across Japanese airfields with their six machine guns each firing 600 roundsa- minute to destroy as many aircraft and gun positions as possible.

The aircraft would approach the coastal bases from the mountains and head out to sea after an attack. “You never come back for a second attack because you’ve stirred up the hornet’s nest. In most cases, those strafing surprise attacks were pretty successful.”

During the strike on the Japanese aerodrome at Wewak that night in 1943, the Kittyhawks were along purely as bomber escorts and wouldn’t be attacking targets on the ground. The bombers flew at low level to drop their cargo of anti-personnel bombs.

The small shells would descend under parachute and a contact detonator a few inches long at the nose of the bomb explode it above ground level, allowing for a greater fragmentation radius. The fragments would shred an aeroplane’s fuselage and render it inoperable, making the anti-personnel bombs very effective on airfield raids. The Japanese troops at Wewak didn’t stand a chance.

The few Zeros that made it off the runway scattered and didn’t try to engage the attackers. “I only caught a glimpse of one enemy aircraft that went whizzing past across us and he headed out to sea, so I never even got a squirt at him. “It was a very successful raid.

Probably no more than a handful of their aircraft got off the ground. I think the American squadrons might have caught up with some of them.” It was the first of many attacks on the Japanese positions at Wewak, which didn’t fall to the Allies until May 1944.

In WWII, Mr Bailey flew 75 operational missions with 75SQN in New Guinea, New Britain and Dutch New Guinea and discharged from the RAAF as a flying officer. Not bad for someone who never expected to survive the war. “A very good friend of mine came up to replace me.

He took over my aeroplane and went out and never came back. I got away with it 75 times, so someone was looking after me I think.”

Does it ever occur to him how courageous it all was? “I never think of it in those terms. But for many years I didn’t think about it, I couldn’t even talk about it. “When it’s on, you’ve got a job to do and you go and do it – you can’t afford to think about the circumstances or the dangers or things like that.”

It was the only time Australia had to defend itself against invasion – “and it was damn close too” he points out. “If it hadn’t been for 75SQN inflicting the first defeat on the Japanese at Port Moresby and then with 76SQN, assisted by the Army there in repelling that 8000-man Japanese invasion force, we’d have been in very big trouble.”

After the war, Mr Bailey worked in the Department of Post-War Reconstruction, but soon tired of office work. He owned a farm for 22 years and with his wife raised two boys and a girl during what he describes as “the best time of my life”.

Mr Bailey concluded a letter he sent to a war historian, who was seeking submissions from ex-servicemen recently, by saying that “WWII did have a great impact on my life”.

“I did not expect to return, but I did and although some aspects of the war have been detrimental, especially to my physical and mental health, other aspects have perhaps been beneficial. I value life, my family, freedom and my country dearly.

This is in contrast to those who have not had to fight for these things and take so much for granted. This wonderful freedom can so easily be lost.”

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