Kenney had Pappy Gunn assigned to him and put him to work installing racks for parafrag bombs on Douglas A-20 Havoc bombers. When the task was far enough along that other men could do the work, Gunn was put in charge of making good airplanes out of more than 100 wrecks that had been designated for salvage. To build up his air force, Kenney also requested airplanes that he knew were in disfavor in Europe–including Consolidated B-24 Liberators, North American B-25 Mitchell bombers, A-20s and P-38s.

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One of Kenney’s greatest contributions was the use of airlift to support a ground offensive. Shortly after arriving in Australia, he convinced his boss to let him use his small transport command to move an infantry regiment of the American 32nd Division to New Guinea from Australia. On September 15, 1942, an ad hoc troop carrier force airlifted 230 GIs to Port Moresby. The following month, Kenney was promoted to lieutenant general.

While the B-25 was proving successful as a skip bomber in attacks upon Japanese shipping, Kenney reasoned that the technique really needed a heavily armed ‘commerce destroyer’ equipped with a firepower package that could devastate the enemy’s defenses during a high-speed, low-level attack. He put Pappy Gunn to work packing as many .50-caliber machine guns as possible into the nose of a B-25. Gunn modified an entire squadron of 12 bombers as ‘commerce destroyers.’ The 12 planes were placed under the command of Major Ed Larner in late February 1943, just in time for the Battle of the Bismarck Sea.

On March 1, 1943, a reconnaissance B-24 spotted a convoy of eight Japanese transports escorted by six destroyers 150 miles west of the Japanese base at Rabaul. The next morning the convoy was again located and attacked by B-24s and B-17s. One transport was sunk and another damaged. Over the next 24 hours, the convoy was under constant attack. The commerce destroyers got 17 direct hits, while 12 skip-bombing A-20s put another 11 bombs into the sides of the Japanese ships. Within 20 minutes every single transport was sunk or sinking, along with one destroyer sunk and three others badly damaged. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea was the first in a long series of successes for Kenney’s ‘kids,’ as he called the young pilots and crewmen. MacArthur duly noted these successes and dubbed Kenney ‘the Buccaneer.’

In mid-1943, Kenney convinced MacArthur to allow him to construct a forward airfield at Marilinan, on the north slopes of the Owen Stanley Mountains. Every single piece of construction equipment and material had to be airlifted across the Owen Stanleys. An existing strip was used by the Lockheed C-47 crews, who brought in men and materials to construct the new base at Tsili-Tsili, some four miles away. Initially, jeeps and trailers were flown in aboard C-47s for the ground end of the transportation link, but Kenney’s ‘kids’ came up with the idea of sawing in half several 2½-ton trucks, then airlifting the halves to Marilinan. After the idea proved feasible, every deuce-and-a-half in the theater was modified for airlift.

From the time he arrived in Australia, Kenney had envisioned a very bold plan, an airborne assault on the Japanese airfield at Nadzab. In mid-August 1943 the 503rd Parachute Regiment arrived in New Guinea. On September 5, while Kenney and MacArthur observed from overhead in B-17s, Nadzab was attacked by six squadrons of modified B-25 strafers, which poured the power of their eight guns on the field, then dropped 60 parafrag bombs each. After six A-20s laid a smoke screen, 96 C-47s dropped 1,700 paratroopers, who quickly seized the field. MacArthur reportedly jumped up and down like a kid.

With New Guinea finally secure, the Allied forces turned their attention northward, eventually to the Philippines after a Navy plan to bypass the islands in favor of a landing on Formosa was rejected. Kenney accompanied MacArthur into Leyte after first overseeing the destruction of the Japanese-held oil refineries at Balikpapan, Borneo. From Leyte it was on to Lingayen Gulf, then Manila. Next was Okinawa, and finally, the end of the war. Kenney accompanied MacArthur to Japan and stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri to watch the Japanese surrender.

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