The convoy departed Rabaul on January 5 and sailed the shortest route, south to Lae. It was halfway to its goal before it was first spotted by Allied air patrols the morning of January 6. From that point, Allied reconnaissance aircraft demonstrated remarkable persistence and tenacity. In total, thirty-seven separate missions monitored and tracked the convoy. Single planes used squall lines and clouds to conceal their presence and dodge enemy Ki-43 Oscar fighters. Some reconnaissance planes were jumped by as many as nine Oscars but managed to fight off their attackers and escape. Others shot down six enemy fighters and probably destroyed an additional four during these engagements.

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But efforts to attack the convoy, despite some remarkable individual feats of airmanship and courage, suffered from a piecemeal approach and disorganization at the top. Army Air Forces squadrons did not coordinate attacks; units were sent out as soon as aircraft were loaded with ordnance. Of the seven missions flown against the convoy on the first day, six were single-plane sorties. The seventh mission was a sixteen-plane formation of P-38s that engaged Japanese fighters covering the convoy. That night, an Australian Catalina, in a virtuoso piece of navigation, dropped flares at the estimated position of the convoy and then managed to score a direct hit that sank the freighter Nichiryu Maru.

The next day, January 7, the Allies launched another series of ragged and uncoordinated attacks. In all, thirteen missions, of one to twenty planes each, went out. They were a hodgepodge of available aircraft, fighters and bombers: A-20, B-17, B-24, B-25, B-26, Beaufighter, P-38, P-40. Although 78 percent of the airplanes reached their primary targets, Allied air power sank only one transport and drove another, Myoko Maru, up on the beach where it was later destroyed. The majority of ships in the Japanese convoy made it to Lae and unloaded their cargo.

Expressing frustration in his personal journal, General Kenney admitted that his units were, up to that point, “taking it on the chin.” Kenney had been a fighter pilot during World War I and had developed a reputation as a problem solver. He immediately set to work figuring out what went wrong.

To improve bombing accuracy, Kenney advocated flying low-level attacks. But attacking ships at masthead height—which meant flying about fifty feet above the water—would require neutralizing shipborne antiaircraft artillery. For that task, Kenney turned to Maj. Paul “Pappy” Gunn, a colorful and innovative maintenance officer.

Gunn was known for being, in the words of an admiring Bell Aircraft factory representative, “exacting in efficiency and ability” and “able to do things with aircraft which others would not attempt.” In the summer of 1942, Gunn had supervised a major modification of the A-20 in his experimental workshop at Eagle Farm airfield in Brisbane, Australia, that equipped the light bomber with nose guns for strafing. The A-20’s success undoubtedly stimulated Kenney’s interest in further developing tactics that emphasized low-level bombing and strafing attacks to overwhelm antiaircraft opposition. Kenney directed Gunn to transform a number of Fifth Air Force B-25s into so-called commerce destroyers. Gunn installed ten .50-caliber machine guns: four in the nose, two on each side, and two more in the top turret. The 81st Air Depot Group in Townsville, Australia, then swung into production. Making only minor modifications to Gunn’s plan, and putting in twelve- to eighteen-hour working days, it produced thirty B-25C-1s in the first three months of 1943.

The B-25C-1 enjoyed a number of advantages over the modified A-20s—a longer range, a heavier bomb load, heavier firepower, and upper-turret protection. Additionally, the B-25C-1 carried a copilot and included instruments for flying in stormy weather or darkness—“extremely comforting factors for the flyers,” noted a Fifth Air Force report at the time. The B-25C-1 was, however, ten to twenty miles per hour slower than the A-20 and less maneuverable. The two thousand rounds of ammunition for the forward-firing guns made the aircraft nose-heavy, although pilots became accustomed to its unique flight characteristics after a few flights.

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