The Record Behind His Words — Allen E. Sweigert, Sr.

About This Chapter

llen told his story from memory, sixty-four years after it happened, with no notes in front of him. This chapter is what happens when you take him at his word and then go looking. Nearly everything he says that can be checked, checks — the dates of his crossing, the Dutch markings on his first aeroplanes, the way the Port Moresby strips were named, the ranking of malaria as the theatre’s worst enemy, the reclamation depot he worked at for a fortnight after the war. Where the record corrects him, it is almost always on a detail he had already hedged himself.

Each note below is keyed to something he actually said. Every claim in them was researched on its own and then handed to a second reader whose only job was to knock it down; anything that reader could not corroborate was cut or rewritten rather than quietly left in. Where a note is marked likely, it rests on a reading of the evidence rather than on a document that says so outright — and it will tell you as much in its own words.

Two things are worth saying plainly. Where a fact belongs to the 3rd Bombardment Group as a whole, it is credited to the group rather than to Allen’s own 90th Squadron: the two are not the same, and what survives for the squadron is much the thinner record of the two. And where Allen himself is the only source, you will be told so — a mission that never flew, or an aerial strung between two trees against regulations, leaves no paperwork behind.

He Was Eighty-Seven in Front of the Camera

Allen was born on 9 September 1918 and the tapes were made in the summer of 2006, so he was eighty-seven when he sat down to them; he turned eighty-eight that September. What he was describing lay between sixty-two and sixty-four years behind him — he had sailed from San Francisco on 31 January 1942 and his foreign service ended on 29 September 1944. He worked without notes. His grandson asked the questions and the camera ran. Objects came into his hands as he talked, and at one point he reads a surrender leaflet aloud, but there was no script in front of him and nothing written down.

Some of what he produced unprompted, a document later confirmed. Four of the Port Moresby strips by their numbers — 3, 7, 14 and 17, every one of them real — and the naming system behind them. The date the ship tied up at Brisbane, 25 February 1942, to the day. The instruction he passed on to bring an aircraft into 7-Mile on the dirt and not the metal, which fits the strip layout recorded in a survey of 9 December 1942. The designations of the training outfit he served in for six months after he came home, the 399th Fighter Squadron of the 369th Fighter Group, both of which stand in that group’s published history. And the word he was still reaching for sixty years on, when he said “Revent” — a revetment, which is exactly the thing he was describing.

The record corrects him too, and almost always on an interval or a side rather than on a fact. He put about nine months at Camp Stewart, where the regiment had been barely seven weeks. He remembered waiting three or four days at the port of embarkation; Jack Heyn, who crossed on the same ship, logged seven. He had the infantry going ashore at Hollandia a day or two before he did, when the assault had gone in three weeks earlier. He put the strafer’s extra guns out on the wings when they hung in packages on the fuselage. And in the same sentence that gets the mile numbers right, he counts them from the coast when they were counted from Port Moresby. Several of those he hedged aloud as he said them — “I guess”, “maybe”, “about”. The mile posts and the wing guns he stated flat.

One miss is of a different kind. He said the Japanese occupation notes were printed for when they “got into Australia”, and no historian of standing now believes such a landing was planned. But that was his own side’s public claim at the time: Canberra announced on 25 September 1942 that the notes were intended for circulation in Australia in the event of a successful invasion. He was repeating what he had been told, which is not the same fault as misremembering.

Of the hundred and forty-five dated entries in this document’s register, nineteen carry the tapes as their source, several of those corroborated elsewhere as well; a hundred rest on a newspaper, a unit record or an official document, twenty-one on family photographs and family memory, and five on his own wartime letters. Something over a hundred separate statements — from the tapes, from the 1942 letters and from the service record book he filled in at each posting — have been set against a document somewhere in these chapters. Eleven have nothing to test them by at all. Of the remaining ninety-eight, about nine in ten stand whole, or stand with one detail adjusted. That last figure is soft — where the line falls around any single statement moves it — and it is an estimate rather than a count.

Method: his 2006 interview, his 1942 letters and his service record book set against the documents cited in these chapters, September 2026. Counts of dated entries taken from the register. That he worked without notes: Jeremy Sweigert, who asked the questions.

The Ship, and the Road Inland

The crossing: San Francisco to Brisbane, 31 January – 25 February 1942, drawn on a globe because that is the shape of it. The arc is a great circle.

This drawing, set out in words

San Francisco, where Convoy 2030 cleared on 31 January 1942 with the USAT Ancon among its transports. He was promoted corporal somewhere at sea.
Brisbane, where the Ancon docked on 25 February 1942 — twenty-five days.
Charters Towers, inland to the north-west, where the 89th and 90th Squadrons entrained on 8 March.
The arc is drawn dotted and labelled as a geometric assumption. The convoy's actual track is not recorded anywhere in this collection, and no distance is computed from it.
A filled disc marks a place he is documented to have been. An open square marks a place documented for his unit rather than for him. An open square with a diagonal tick marks his own squadron. A dashed circle marks a place that is inferred rather than recorded.
A brass ring crossed by a bar marks a place he never stood on — a target, or somewhere his group went without him. Each carries the words HE WAS NOT THERE.
A solid line is a journey whose means of travel is recorded. A dashed line is a move that is documented while the means is not. A dotted line rests on his own account alone.
No plate carries a computed distance. His own “about 12,000 miles” already stands here against a measured 9,500 to 10,200, and a third figure, quietly worked out, would only muddy the water.

He never knew the name of the ship he crossed on, or why half the convoy vanished overnight. Both are on the record.

The Ship Had a Name

Allen never learned what he crossed the Pacific on. He describes a big convoy out of San Francisco, ships that halved overnight and a group that rejoined days later, submarine alerts, and a captain who waited until the day before landfall to say where they were going. The 3rd Bomb Group’s own veterans’ record supplies the missing word in one line: the group “arrived in Australia from the US on board the S.S. Ancon on 25 February 1942 without planes and a 1st Lieutenant as Group Commander.” That is Allen’s date to the day, his squadron’s arrival with no aircraft and no airfield — and, for good measure, an explanation of the first name on his own list of commanding officers, which is 1st Lt. Bennett G. Wilson.

Source: 3rd Bombardment Group, Australia @ War (ozatwar.com). See also the convoy note above, which identifies the Ancon as one of six transports in Convoy 2030 — the convoy itself was larger.

Convoy 2030, and the ship that never told them

Allen’s dates are almost exactly right, and the documented record fills in everything he was never told. The 3rd Bombardment Group crossed the Pacific aboard the US Army transport Ancon, one of six ships in Convoy 2030, which cleared San Francisco on 31 January 1942 escorted by the light cruiser USS Honolulu and the destroyers USS Morris and USS Ellet. Men of the 39th Fighter Squadron, who sailed on the same ship, recorded boarding on 30 January and standing out into the Pacific at 1515 the following afternoon. His own group boarded at half past one on the morning of the 31st, which explains the 30th he carried for seventy years at least as well, and from closer to him. Either way, the men were aboard before the day the Commonwealth later paid him from. The convoy was never one body: the transports Ancon, Tasker H. Bliss, Hugh L. Scott and Maui were routed to one destination while the President Taylor and President Johnson were bound for two others, so the ships Allen watched vanish overnight had simply gone their own way, and the group that later appeared on the horizon was a rejoining, not a rescue. On 24 February, the day before landfall, the escorting destroyers dropped depth charges alongside the convoy and claimed a Japanese submarine, though Japanese records show no boat lost in that area. The date is the 22nd Bomb Group’s, whose men were on the Hugh L. Scott; Jack Heyn, who was aboard the Ancon with Allen, put the same incident on the 23rd. The two accounts are a day apart, and both are allowed to stand. The Ancon tied up at Brisbane on 25 February 1942, the date Allen gives; the 39th’s diarist puts the hour at 1300.

Sources: 3rd Bombardment Group — Australia @ War (ozatwar.com); 39th Fighter Squadron History 1941–1944 — 5th Air Force Association; 22nd Bomb Group, The Red Raiders — Australia @ War (Convoy 2030 composition and escorts); 35th Fighter (Pursuit) Group, USAAF — Australia @ War.

When the Cablegram Went, and From Where likely

Neither notice is dated and neither paper has been identified, but the cable behind them can be placed. Heyn describes what the men did at Ascot in the days after landing: “We were allowed short passes and got into town 2 or 3 times, took in a couple movies, bought some necessities and sent a calbegram to the folks. Letting them know that we had arrived safely and were somewhere in Australia.”

The group came ashore on 25 February 1942, and the 89th and 90th Squadrons entrained for Charters Towers on 8 March. Cable traffic home therefore began inside that fortnight, from Brisbane, and was evidently allowed to name the country — which is what both notices report. Since the second says the sergeant’s promotion came soon after arrival, the cable cannot predate the landing, and the notices were most likely set in March or April 1942. That window is built out of Heyn’s account and the notices’ own wording, and out of nothing firmer. No cable form and no telegraph record has ever turned up.

Sources: Jack Heyn, U.S.S. Ancon — Australia @ War; 3rd Bombardment Group station dates.

Promotion at Sea: the Conditions, and No Evidence

No order, diary entry or unit history recording a promotion aboard the Ancon, or aboard any ship in this convoy, has been found. Heyn kept a dated log of the crossing — the alerts, the depth charges, the equator, the day lost at the date line, the white ship that joined on 22 February — and records no promotions at all. Nor does the 39th Fighter Squadron’s history.

What the record does show is the situation that would have made promotions necessary. The group sailed having left its senior officers and, in Heyn’s words, “some high ranking enlisted men” behind at Savannah, and reached Brisbane “without planes and a 1st Lieutenant as Group Commander.” Grades emptied at the top have to be refilled from below. The technician grades, too, had been created by War Department circular three weeks before he sailed. None of that is evidence about Allen Sweigert’s own stripes, and no order, date or morning report has been found. But the corporalcy does not rest on his parents’ word alone. Answering a direct question from The Call three months later he wrote, “I was promoted to Corporal aboard ship somewhere in the Pacific” — the man himself, in writing, about fifteen weeks after the crossing.

Sources: Jack Heyn, U.S.S. Ancon — Australia @ War; 3rd Bombardment Group — Australia @ War; War Department Circular No. 5, 8 January 1942.

What He Was, Going Up the Gangway likely

Both notices make corporal the first of two promotions since he left the United States, and the cabled one the second. Read at face value, that puts him on 31 January 1942 in a grade below corporal — private first class, or private. It follows that the SGT. of one headline and the Sergt. of the other describe a rank he did not hold on the voyage, and that the man who walked up the Ancon’s gangway at half past one in the morning was a nine-month Air Corps private not long out of radio school.

That is arithmetic done on the notices, and it is a guess rather than a finding: no pay record, morning report or promotion order has been seen, and neither notice states his grade at sailing. It does sit easily with the rest: he enlisted in April 1941 and spent twenty-two weeks of that year in school, which is not a year in which a man collects stripes.

Sources: Pottsville Republican, 28 May 1942, p. 18; The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 29 May 1942, p. 1.

His Overseas Clock Started at the Golden Gate

Foreign service was a pay quantity before it was a biographical one, and that is why his official overseas time begins on a day he was still in American water. The Pay Readjustment Act of 1942 raised an enlisted man’s base pay by twenty per cent for service beyond the continental limits of the United States, and the Comptroller General stated the rule plainly in 1943: the increase “is authorized from the date of departure from the United States,” ceasing on return. The separation form followed the same accounting.

His own figure settles it arithmetically. From 31 January 1942 to 29 September 1944 is two years, seven months and twenty-nine days — the figure on his discharge paper. Measured from the Brisbane landing it would be two years, seven months and five days. The clock he was paid by started at the Golden Gate, not in Australia.

Sources: Pay Readjustment Act of 1942, Public Law 77-607, section 2; Comptroller General decision B-34809, 23 June 1943; TM 12-236, Preparation of Separation Forms, War Department, April 1945.

Five Days on a Troop Train, Seven in a Warehouse

The twelve days between leaving Savannah and standing out of San Francisco were not spent travelling. Jack Heyn, who crossed on the same ship, kept a log: “Jan. 19, ‘42 we boarded a troop train and headed west... It took us five days to cross the country and arrive in Oakland, Ca.” He notes a delay at St. Louis, three hours near McCook, Nebraska behind a wreck on the line, and another wait in the Denver yards. “On the 24th we pulled into Oakland and were taken out to a huge new warehouse bldg., big enough to hold the whole Gp.” — cots already up, each squadron its own area. “The next seven days were a waiting and wondering time.”

The 3rd Attack Group Association gives the Oakland arrival as the 23rd, a day earlier than Heyn, and nothing found here chooses between them. Allen remembered “maybe three, four days” of waiting at the port. Heyn’s log says seven.

Sources: Jack Heyn, The Early Days — Australia @ War; 3rd Attack Group Association, World War II; transcript-part1.html.

“Some racetrack” was Camp Ascot

The racetrack Allen could not name was almost certainly Ascot, beside Eagle Farm in Brisbane’s north. Camp Ascot was among the very first American camps in Australia: the men of the Pensacola convoy marched into it on 23 December 1941, the day after landing, and it was kept on afterwards as the staging camp where newly arrived units were parked while somebody worked out where to send them. It stayed a tent city for the duration, the tents pitched down the middle of the course, small and low and holding two to four men apiece, with some officers quartered in the converted stables and at least one block signposted simply “Camp B”, and it lay a short way from the Hamilton wharves where the transports tied up.

The 39th Fighter Squadron, who had crossed with Allen aboard the Ancon, recorded being quartered by the Australian Army at Ascot Race Track the day they came ashore. The 3rd Bomb Group was under canvas there into early March before it entrained for Charters Towers, where its station date is 10 March 1942. One caution: the neighbouring Doomben racecourse, just across Nudgee Road, was requisitioned as a camp as well, and if any part of the group was sent there instead, there is now no way to tell the two apart.

Sources: Camp Ascot, Brisbane — Australia @ War (ozatwar.com); 39th Fighter Squadron History 1941–1944 — quartered at Ascot Race Track on arrival; Charters Towers — 3rd Attack Group Association; 3rd Bombardment Group — History of War (station dates Brisbane 25 Feb, Charters Towers 10 Mar 1942).

“There isn’t any yet”

Allen was not exaggerating, and the dates make the point better than any adjective. Work began in earnest on the Charters Towers strip on 16 February 1942, nine days before his convoy reached Brisbane; hundreds of men and every available earth-moving machine were brought up from Townsville, the first gravel strip was finished in seventeen days against a fourteen-day target, and houses near the field were taken over so that personnel could be housed inconspicuously. The 3rd Bomb Group’s station date at Charters Towers is 10 March 1942, so the field Allen walked onto was days old, not years.

Nor did the group bring aircraft: it reached Australia with none, and the first machine onto the new strip was an A-24 Dauntless dive bomber, flown in during March by Major “Big Jim” Davies of the 8th Squadron. The Mitchells came after, when men of the group went down to Archerfield in Brisbane at the start of April 1942 to collect B-25Cs originally consigned to the Netherlands East Indies air force, the aeroplanes with the Dutch markings and the Dutch handbooks he remembers so vividly. The other strips that grew up around the town, Breddan to the north and Reid River out towards Townsville, came later and belonged to other outfits, so the bare, baked, treeless ground Allen describes is the Charters Towers strip itself, on the ridge at the edge of town.

Sources: Bore Sight Range and Compass Swinging Platform at Charters Towers Airfield (Queensland Heritage Register history); Charters Towers airfield (‘Charley’s Trousers’) — Australia @ War; 3rd Bombardment Group — Australia @ War (arrival without aircraft; Dutch B-25Cs collected April 1942); 3rd Bombardment Group — History of War (station date 10 March 1942).

His Own Letter Home, May 1942

Everywhere else in these pages, Allen’s voice comes from a recording made in 2006, when he was eighty-seven, remembering across sixty-four years. Not here. The Call of Schuylkill Haven — the paper a Lions Club was posting out to him in Australia — asked him for news, and he sat down and answered. It is the only thing in the collection he wrote at the time.

The standing head the paper ran his letter under.

Somewhere in Australia,
May 19, 1942

To “The Call”:

First of all I want to express my appreciation to the Lions Club for having The Call sent to me. I certainly do appreciate it. It sure feels good to get the paper from around home, especially when you are about 12,000 miles from home. The mail doesn’t come very often but when it comes there is always a few Calls among it.

We had quite an interesting trip over here but I can’t tell about it. At present we are very busy with our work. I can’t tell you what we are doing but we’re right in there giving a good account of ourselves.

As for the information you asked for, I have had two promotions since I left the States. I was promoted to Corporal aboard ship somewhere in the Pacific and recently I was promoted to Sergeant and Air Mechanic First Class in radio operating and maintenance.

Previous to my service in the Air Corps I was with the 213th Coast Artillery and was inducted into federal service with that unit. It was while encamped with this unit at Camp Stewart, Ga., that I joined the Air Corps. Since then I have graduated from the Air Corps technical schools at Scott Field, Ill., on Oct. 27, 1941, and participated in the army maneuvers in the Carolinas last fall.

The most popular times here are when the mail comes, chow and the broadcasts each night from San Francisco and New York. We manage to get to a town once in a while to the movies.

The people here are very friendly and we get along fine with the Aussie soldiers that we come in contact with.

Give my regards to the boys of Btry. “F”, 213th. The last time I seen the old gang was on Dec. 7th when I visited Camp Stewart the day before war was declared.

You will be interested to know that there are three Schuylkill Haven men here where I am. Sgt. Milton Kramer, Sgt. Thomas Maberry and Sgt. Edwin Yerger, and they are all O. K. and send their regards.

Thanks again for the news from home.

Sgt. Allen E. Sweigert.

Printed under the standing head “Shots from Camp” in The Call, Schuylkill Haven, Pennsylvania, 12 June 1942, page 1. End-of-line hyphens forced by the column measure have been closed up; every other mark, including the grammar, is as set. Nothing on the clipping is illegible.

The whole column as it appeared: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, Friday 12 June 1942, page 1. Credit: The Call, Schuylkill Haven.

What He Could Not Say, and Said So Twice

Set against the press rules in force on 12 June 1942, clause by clause, the letter is clean — and clean in a way that looks deliberate. He names no unit he is then serving in — not the 90th Bombardment Squadron, not the 3rd Bombardment Group — which is the one thing an Office of Censorship ruling of 28 March 1942 forbade outright. He names no place inside Australia; the dateline is the approved formula. He names no ship, no port and no date for the crossing, only “aboard ship somewhere in the Pacific.” He describes no aircraft, no airfield and no operation.

Twice he says plainly that he cannot: “We had quite an interesting trip over here but I can’t tell about it,” and “I can’t tell you what we are doing.” And in a letter written from north Queensland he says not one word about the weather — at a moment when the code was asking American papers to avoid even rain, overcast, windy or clear. A man whose trade was signals knew exactly where the line was.

Sources: Office of Censorship, Code of Wartime Practices for the American Press, 15 January 1942, and the release to editors of 28 March 1942; Robert E. Summers, Wartime Censorship of Press and Radio (1942).

Twenty-Four Days, Tent to Press

He dated it 19 May 1942 and the paper printed it on 12 June. Inside those twenty-four days the letter had to be handed in unsealed, read by a unit censor, carried out of north Queensland, cross the Pacific, cross the United States, reach a weekly in Schuylkill Haven, be set in type and go to press.

Surface mail from Australia took longer than that on its own, so the letter almost certainly flew part of the way and cannot have sat about at any stage. The figure is worth keeping because it sets the scale for everything else: nothing else in the collection got from his hand to a printed page faster, and any undated letter behind a later clipping should be reckoned to have taken at least this long, and probably a good deal longer.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1; War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, 29 July 1943.

“Air Mechanic First Class” Is His Own Phrase uncertain

He writes that he was “promoted to Sergeant and Air Mechanic First Class in radio operating and maintenance.” Three weeks earlier the Pottsville Republican, working from his parents’ cable, had rendered the same thing as “1st class air merchanic sergeant.” Two papers setting the same odd words independently means the wording came from him and not from a compositor, which disposes of the easy explanation that a home-town paper garbled it.

No United States Army or Army Air Forces grade, rating or specialty called Air Mechanic First Class has been found in any source consulted. The nearest American structure is the old specialist ratings, first through sixth class, carrying extra pay — and those were replaced by the technician grades on 8 January 1942, three weeks before he sailed. Air Mechanic 1st Class was a Royal Air Force rank, and he was working alongside Australians. The likeliest explanation is a first-class specialist rating described in the language men actually used. That is a guess, and worth saying so. His phrase is quoted here rather than translated.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1; Pottsville Republican, 28 May 1942, p. 18; War Department Circular No. 5, 8 January 1942.

The Broadcasts, a Week Before There Was a Service

“The most popular times here are when the mail comes, chow and the broadcasts each night from San Francisco and New York.” The Armed Forces Radio Service was established by War Department order on 26 May 1942 — seven days after he wrote that sentence.

The Radio Division that preceded it had been broadcasting overseas since the spring of 1941, as this chapter notes elsewhere, and shortwave carried news and sport from both American coasts. What the letter adds is a dated, first-hand instance, from a man whose trade was radio and who would have known what he was listening to. The San Francisco signal was almost certainly KGEI, General Electric’s shortwave station, for a time the only American shortwave station heard across the Pacific; the New York end was General Electric’s transmitters at Schenectady. And it bears out something said elsewhere here: a squadron’s news depended on whoever happened to have a receiver.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1; KGEI, General Electric’s shortwave station; Armed Forces Radio Service.

A Lions Club Was Paying for His Newspaper

The letter opens with thanks “to the Lions Club for having The Call sent to me.” So in May 1942 a Lions Club was buying overseas subscriptions for servicemen, and one of them reached a tent in north Queensland. It does not say which club. The Call was Schuylkill Haven’s paper, Allen lived in Cressona, and he sends regards to three Schuylkill Haven men, so a Schuylkill Haven club is the obvious candidate.

The point is not settled, but it is narrower than it looks. His obituary calls him a charter member of the Cressona Lions Club, and that club’s charter night is now on the record: Wednesday 18 June 1947, five years after this letter, with Schuylkill Haven as its sponsoring club. If the club posting him the paper were Cressona’s, this letter would have it buying overseas subscriptions five years before its own charter night. How long a group may meet before it is chartered, this document has no source for; on its own wording the letter will not carry that weight either way, and it does not say he belonged to whichever club sent it. Five years later his name was on the printed roll of charter members at Cressona; eight years later that club elected him a director for two years; fourteen years later he was in the room when a Lions scrap drive was read out; and at some later date, which the obituary does not give, he held its Melvin Jones Fellow Award.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1; The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 20 June 1947, p. 1; Pottsville Republican, 19 June 1947, p. 20; Pottsville Republican, 18 May 1950, p. 2; The Call & Orwigsburg News, 12 April 1956, p. 9; Republican and Herald, Pottsville, 30 March 2012, p. A12.

Three Other Men, and a Battery He Had Left

He names three Schuylkill Haven sergeants serving where he was — Milton Kramer, Thomas Maberry and Edwin Yerger — and reports them well. None of the three appears anywhere else in this collection.

He also sends “regards to the boys of Btry. ‘F’, 213th,” the battery he had left thirteen months earlier, and dates his last sight of them: “on Dec. 7th when I visited Camp Stewart the day before war was declared.” There is a small tangle in that sentence. 7 December 1941 was the day of the Pearl Harbor attack; the declaration followed on the 8th. So “the day before war was declared” is literally correct for a visit on the 7th, and it reads oddly all the same. Either it is his own shorthand or the visit was the 6th and the date slipped. Nobody can now say which.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1.

Twelve Thousand Miles Is a Figure of Speech

“Especially when you are about 12,000 miles from home.” It is the one quantity in the letter that does not check. He was rounding, not measuring.

Cressona to Charters Towers, where his squadron then was, is about 9,570 miles by great circle; Cressona to Brisbane about 9,520. The route he actually travelled — the rail journey west, the Pacific crossing and the run north from Brisbane — comes to roughly 10,200 miles measured point to point, and rather more as convoys and troop trains actually went. Twelve thousand is high by fifteen to twenty-five per cent depending on how it is counted. It was a serviceman’s round number for Australia, and nothing turns on it.

Sources: The Call, 12 June 1942, p. 1; Great-circle distances computed from coordinates.

Standing By for the Coral Sea

A pre-dawn call, a ten-minute gunnery course, and three days beside an aeroplane waiting for a mission that a sea battle cancelled.

His Own Commanding Officer Flew the One Contact

There is a detail in the 3rd Bomb Group’s own veterans’ record that closes the circle on Allen’s story, and it turns on a name in his own handwriting. Land-based aircraft took almost no part in the Battle of the Coral Sea — with one exception: a single sighting, and an hour spent trailing the Japanese ships, by Lt. Hubbard and Lt. Rose in a B-25 Mitchell of the 3rd Bomb Group. Hubbard is the second name on the list of commanding officers Allen wrote into his own service record book: Lt. Col. Ronald D. Hubbard, of the 90th Bomb Squadron. So the job Allen was woken in the dark to do — shadow the fleet, stay on the air, let the squadron home in on his signal — was, in the event, done in outline by his own squadron commander, in the same type of aeroplane, over the same water, while Allen sat beside a parked Mitchell in Queensland waiting for a truck that never came.

The same page carries a photograph of the group’s club, “The Last Slug,” at 26 Aland Street in Charters Towers, with the men named step by step. On the sixth step, side by side: Harry Rose, Bob Ruegg, “Pappy” Gunn and Bob Strickland. Rose and Hubbard, Gunn and the officers whose surnames Allen copied into his book at every posting — for a few months in 1942 they were all in one small Queensland mining town, and two of them flew the only land-based aeroplane to find the fleet.

Source: 3rd Bombardment Group, Australia @ War (ozatwar.com) — “Land based aircraft took no part in the Battle of the Coral Sea, except for a single sighting and one hour trail of Japanese ships by Lt. Hubbard and Lt. Rose in a B-25 Mitchell bomber of the 3rd Bomb group”; and the group’s own transcription of Allen’s service-record commanding officers.

Woken Before Dawn: What Headquarters Already Knew

Allen was pulled out of his cot in the dark, told he was flying, and then left standing by an aeroplane for two or three days with nothing to do. The reason lay in signals traffic he was never shown. Allied codebreakers at FRUMEL in Melbourne had read enough Japanese naval cipher by 9 April 1942 to name Port Moresby as the objective of what the Japanese called Operation MO, and on Anzac Day 1942 General Headquarters, South West Pacific Area, signalled the north Queensland ports about the “Possibility of AIR Raid by carrier based aircraft in force against EAST coast of Australia, by 2 May. Combined with landing attempt at PORT MORESBY.” Port commanders were ordered to see that the anti-aircraft weapons on every ship in harbour were manned, twenty-four hours a day. Townsville’s schools had already been closed under a ban on coastal schooling and its pupils sent inland to Charters Towers. The Japanese troopships carrying the South Seas Detachment sailed from Rabaul for Port Moresby on 4 May. Allen never dates his long, useless wait beside the aircraft — but the pre-dawn alert, the days of standing by, and the raid nobody on the flight line would explain are exactly the shape of that week in north Queensland.

Sources: Front-line Townsville 1942 — Anzac Day Commemoration Committee; Operation Mo (Wikipedia); Battle of the Coral Sea, 4-8 May 1942 — Australian War Memorial; 3rd Bombardment Group — Australia @ War.

Homing Them In: What His Job Actually Was

Allen was not sent to bomb anything. His job was to transmit, and to let the rest of the squadron find the Japanese fleet by finding him. The equipment made that genuinely possible. A B-25C carried the SCR-287 liaison set, a BC-375 transmitter with a BC-348 receiver, and the BC-375 could be tuned as low as 200 kilocycles; the aircraft’s SCR-269 radio compass covered 200 to 1,750 kilocycles and swung its loop onto whatever it was tuned to.

One aeroplane keying steadily down at the bottom of that band was therefore a beacon any other Mitchell in the group could steer straight down. Shadowing an enemy fleet for hours and radioing its position was recognised work — the Royal Navy had ordered two purpose-built “fleet shadower” prototypes in 1938, before radar made the idea redundant and the project was cancelled. At Coral Sea the finding fell to others: Australian-based B-17s bombed the invasion force on 6 May and reported a carrier at sea, and it was a Yorktown scout bomber that sighted the covering force on the morning of 7 May and sent the strike that sank Shoho on its way. If the 90th Squadron ever wrote Allen’s particular scheme down, the paper has not survived. He is the only source for it.

Sources: SCR-269 radio compass (BC-433, 200–1750 kc) — RadioNerds; BC-375E Technical Description (200 kHz — 12.5 MHz, liaison transmitter, SCR-287 with BC-348); Transmitter BC-375 — Radiomuseum; General Aircraft Fleet Shadower (Wikipedia) — the shadowing role.

Why the Crew Called It Suicide likely

Allen says the verdict in the crew was unanimous and unsentimental, and the arithmetic behind it is not hard to reconstruct. A single B-25, unescorted at that range, would have had to hold station in daylight above a force screened by carrier fighters, and it could not go quiet to hide, because keeping the key down was the entire mission.

A transmitter that never stops hands out a bearing, and the Japanese were working the same low band themselves, with direction-finding gear aboard their warships and homing beacons of their own. Nothing in the documented record says that higher command regarded that crew as expendable, and no unit history found for this project mentions the standby mission at all — a mission that never flew tends to leave no operational trace. What survives is Allen’s memory of what his crew decided about their own chances while they sat by an aeroplane in the Queensland heat and waited for a truck.

Sources: The Naval Radio Beacons of Imperial Japan (Zuikaku transmitting on 359 kHz at Coral Sea) — RealClearHistory; General Aircraft Fleet Shadower (Wikipedia) — the shadowing role; Battle of the Coral Sea, 4-8 May 1942 — Australian War Memorial.

A Ten-Minute Course on the Worst Turret in the Air Force

The guns Allen was hurriedly shown were real, and so was their reputation. The B-25B, C and D carried a Bendix retractable belly turret with twin .50 calibre machine guns that were not aimed over the barrels but remotely, by a gunner kneeling over a periscope gunsight — an uncomfortable crouch nobody could hold for long.

Gunners tracking a fighter through that lens and mirror system suffered vertigo, and the turret was hard to work and prone to jamming, often in the lowered position. Squadrons took to pulling them out in the field, the phase-out began as early as the B-25C, and on the B-25H the position was finally eliminated altogether, its weight traded for waist guns and an armoured manned tail turret. Allen gives the end of that story himself, later in the same interview and in six flat words: “The lower turret was taken out.” Ten minutes was, in fairness to the man who gave the course, about as much of that turret as anyone could usefully teach.

Sources: B-25 History Project — B-25B (2 .50 calibre guns in bottom Bendix turret; jammed in the down position; often removed in the field); North American B-25 Mitchell preview — Hangar 47 (kneeling gunner over a periscope-gunsight; vertigo); North American B-25H Mitchell — aircraftinformation.info (ventral turret eliminated; waist guns and tail turret).

The Fleet That Never Arrived

Allen’s ending is the right one. The light carrier Shoho was sunk on 7 May 1942, and the Japanese carrier air groups were cut about badly enough that the survivors had to go home to re-equip and retrain. The Australian War Memorial’s account records that the Port Moresby landing force, aware of Rear Admiral Crace’s blocking squadron and already bombed by land-based aircraft, “had turned back permanently.” Port Moresby was never taken from the sea at all; the Japanese Army tried instead to walk over the Owen Stanley Range by the Kokoda Track, and failed at that too. The mission Allen waited two or three days to fly was cancelled by a battle he never saw, fought out over water he would afterwards cross by air more times than he could count.

Sources: Battle of the Coral Sea, 4-8 May 1942 — Australian War Memorial; Operation Mo (Wikipedia) — convoy sailed 4 May, turned back, Kokoda attempted instead; Battle of the Coral Sea — Britannica; Battle of the Coral Sea (Wikipedia) — Shokaku’s damage and Zuikaku’s aircraft losses kept both from Midway.

What the Coral Sea Searches Cost the 90th

The searching Allen’s group was doing that autumn in Queensland was not free of cost. On 21 April 1942 a 90th Bombardment Squadron B-25C, serial 41-12455, coming home to Charters Towers from a reconnaissance search for Japanese warships in the weeks before the Coral Sea, flew into Mount Bartle Frere at about seven in the evening, striking it about 4,300 feet up. All seven men aboard were killed.

A search party reached the wreck on 29 April, but the remains were not brought down off the mountain until early December, when a local man, Ted Richards, took a pack of mules up to it; they were buried at Townsville on the 14th. The group kept at the work — more than 120 reconnaissance sorties in May 1942, in part looking for the Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea. Allen remembers losing two of the radio men from his own tent in crashes of exactly this kind, though he places them in the Owen Stanleys rather than in Queensland, and no record found here ties either man to this particular aeroplane. One point about the period is worth making alongside it. The “Fifth Air Force” of later fame barely functioned in the spring of 1942: the name was applied at Melbourne on 5 February, but the headquarters was not re-staffed, at Brisbane, until 18 September.

Sources: 3rd Bombardment Group — HistoryOfWar.org (more than 120 recon sorties in May 1942, partly looking for the Japanese fleet in the Coral Sea); Pacific Wrecks — B-25C Mitchell 41-12455, 3rd BG / 90th BS, Mount Bartle Frere, 21 April 1942; 21 April 1942 crash of a B-25 Mitchell on Mount Bartle Frere — Australia @ War; 3rd Bombardment Group unit history — Army Air Corps Museum.

The Airfields, Counted in Miles

The airfields around Port Moresby, about five units apart at the scale of the map above. Both are drawn and neither is chosen, because nobody wrote down which of the two was his.

New Guinea: Port Moresby to Hollandia, 1943 – 1944. An earlier drawing of this map put Port Moresby north of Nadzab and of Dobodura, and set Wewak at Hollandia's longitude; every point on this one is plotted from its coordinates.

This drawing, set out in words

Port Moresby on the southern coast, the group's station from 28 January 1943.
The Owen Stanley Range between Moresby and the north coast. Two of the six radio men in his section died crossing it.
Dobodura, on the north coast, where the 90th Squadron went on 21 May 1943.
Nadzab, up the Markham Valley, where the 90th flew on 30 January 1944.
Hollandia, at the far north-west, from May 1944.
Wewak, Rabaul and the Bismarck Sea are marked as places he never stood on.
Dulag, on Leyte, lies off this panel to the north-west. His group went there on 16 November 1944, ten weeks after he had gone home.
A filled disc marks a place he is documented to have been. An open square marks a place documented for his unit rather than for him. An open square with a diagonal tick marks his own squadron. A dashed circle marks a place that is inferred rather than recorded.
A brass ring crossed by a bar marks a place he never stood on — a target, or somewhere his group went without him. Each carries the words HE WAS NOT THERE.
A solid line is a journey whose means of travel is recorded. A dashed line is a move that is documented while the means is not. A dotted line rests on his own account alone.
No plate carries a computed distance. His own “about 12,000 miles” already stands here against a measured 9,500 to 10,200, and a third figure, quietly worked out, would only muddy the water.

Allen remembered the Port Moresby strips by their distance out the road. Every number he gave is a real airfield.

The Mile Posts

Allen had the system exactly right. The airfields ringing Port Moresby were not given proper names at first, only numbers, and the number was simply how far out the road from town you had to drive to reach the strip. By 1943 there were seven of them: 3-Mile (Kila, sometimes Kila Kila), 5-Mile (Ward’s), 7-Mile (Jackson), 12-Mile (Berry), 14-Mile (Schwimmer, also called Laloki for the river beside it), 17-Mile (Durand, also Waigani), and 30-Mile (Rorona, renamed Rogers in November 1942).

Allen names four of them, and every number he gives is real: 3, 7, 14 and 17. What he most likely remembered was not the whole complex but the four strips his own outfit had business with, since the 3rd Bomb Group’s squadrons were spread across Kila, Jackson, Schwimmer and Durand. The three he leaves out were other men’s country: 5-Mile Ward’s, which by 1943 was reportedly the busiest aerodrome in the southern hemisphere; 12-Mile Berry, a fighter strip of crushed rock and pit gravel; and 30-Mile Rorona, unsurfaced and too soft for heavy bombers, further out the road again than Allen’s own 17.

Sources: Port Moresby Airfield Complex (Wikipedia); Schwimmer Airfield (Wikipedia); Berry Airfield (Wikipedia); Pacific Wrecks — 17 Mile Drome (Durand, Waigani).

17-Mile: Durand Drome

The strip Allen was sent to had been cut out of a swamp only months before he saw it. During August 1942 the U.S. Army’s 808th Engineer Aviation Battalion, under Captain Andrew D. Chaffin, Jr., cleared jungle north of the Waigani swamp and had a single northwest-southeast runway fit to land on in roughly three weeks; Chaffin’s citation described the ground beforehand as a jungle swamp unfit even for foot travel. Gravel from a nearby quarry surfaced the runway and taxiways, revetments were carved into the hillsides southeast of the strip, and anti-aircraft gun pits were built from empty fifty-five-gallon drums packed with soil.

The Air Force’s own official history says the field was made in the first place for B-17s whose missions could not wait on the unfinished runways at 7-Mile; and when torrential rain washed out the shale base at 7-Mile on 21 October 1942, two-thirds of the battalion went back to enlarge Durand for the Fortresses. Steel matting was laid over the bitumen only after the bombers had been using it a while, “a sequence that did not make for stability of the subgrade.” On 10 November 1942 the field was formally named Durand, for 1st Lt. Edward D. Durand, a P-39 pilot who bailed out near Lababia Island coming home from a strafing run on Lae that April and was never found. Allen’s “a little strip, and a defense around it” is a fair description of what the engineers had managed in three weeks.

Sources: Pacific Wrecks — 17 Mile Drome (Durand, Waigani); Durand Airfield (Wikipedia); The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. VII, ch. 10: Aviation Engineers in the War with Japan (HyperWar); Pacific Wrecks — P-39F Airacobra 41–7128 (1st Lt. Edward D. Durand, MIA 30 April 1942).

The Question Mark Beside the 90th likely

There is a small gap in the published record that Allen’s voice happens to fill. Pacific Wrecks lists the units based at 17-Mile Drome and shows the 3rd Bomb Group’s 13th Bomb Squadron arriving with B-25s on 7 October 1942 — and then the 3rd Bomb Group’s 90th Bomb Squadron with no date at all, only a question mark.

The Durand airfield entry likewise names the 90th among its residents without saying when. Yet the same archive’s own page for the 90th Squadron records it moving to 3-Mile Drome (Kila) on 28 January 1943, the date the group officially changed station from Charters Towers to Port Moresby, so the two records do not sit easily together. The likeliest explanation is that the 90th operated forward from Durand alongside its sister B-25 squadron in late 1942, the period Allen describes as his three flying trips up from Australia. That is a guess, and worth saying so: no document settles it. Allen’s own account, that the outfit went to 17 after unloading at Moresby, is the clearest statement anyone has of where he himself lived and worked.

Sources: Pacific Wrecks — 17 Mile Drome (Durand, Waigani), Allied units based list; Pacific Wrecks — 90th Bombardment Squadron (90th BS); Durand Airfield (Wikipedia); 3rd Bombardment Group (OzAtWar).

The Dirt Strip and the Metal Strip likely

The instruction Allen passed over the radio fits a layout that was surveyed and written down. A survey of 7-Mile Drome dated 9 December 1942 records three parallel runways running northwest to southeast: in the middle the original fighter strip, 3,000 by 100 feet, surfaced with Marston matting; to the northeast a newer bomber strip, 3,000 by 150 feet, also matted and later stretched to 3,750; and on the southwest side a crash strip, 7,500 by 100 feet, for which the survey lists dimensions but no surfacing at all.

A field with a matted strip and a long unmatted strip alongside it is precisely the choice Allen was relaying — go to 7-Mile, put it down on the dirt and not on the steel. Across the complex the surfaces were genuinely mixed: Kila was black loam under steel mat, Schwimmer was matted about October 1942, while Berry at 12-Mile was crushed rock and pit gravel and 30-Mile began life unmatted. That the crash strip was bare graded earth is read out of the survey’s silence rather than stated in it, and that is worth saying plainly.

Sources: Pacific Wrecks — 7 Mile Drome (Jackson Airport), runway survey of 9 December 1942; Pacific Wrecks — 3 Mile Drome (Kila Kila); Berry Airfield (Wikipedia); Schwimmer Airfield (Wikipedia).

Marston Mat

The “metal strip” was pierced steel planking, universally called Marston matting. Each panel was a length of hardened steel ten feet long and fifteen inches wide, fourteen hundredths of an inch thick, punched with eighty-seven holes in three rows of twenty-nine, weighing sixty-six pounds; interlocking slots and tabs along the edges let men with sledgehammers link them into a continuous deck, laid over graded earth or, on the islands, over rolled crushed coral. Engineers could roll out a usable runway in days rather than months, and mat routinely took bombers of sixty thousand pounds landing at ninety miles an hour on ground that would otherwise have been mud.

And there is a coincidence in it for Allen: the mat took its name from Marston, North Carolina, where in November 1941 — during the Carolina maneuvers Allen says he attended with the 3rd Bomb Group just before Pearl Harbor — Army engineers laid a 3,000 by 150 foot test runway in eleven days, then took it up, loaded it into eighteen railroad gondola cars and shipped it to Langley Field. General Arnold hailed it as the year’s greatest achievement in aviation. Whether Allen ever saw that strip is not recorded, but within eighteen months he was sitting at a radio in New Guinea trying to keep an aeroplane off the stuff.

Sources: Marston Mat (Wikipedia); “Marston Mat”, Air Force Magazine, April 1989 (Air & Space Forces Magazine archive); Marston Mat — Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame; These Portable Runways Helped Win the War in the Pacific — Smithsonian Air & Space.

Where He Turned for Home

The last leg, and the campaigns that belong to his war rather than his group’s.

Where He Turned for Home

Hollandia was the last overseas station Allen saw. He came home on the points system in the autumn of 1944 — word reached him on the night of his birthday, 9 September — and sailed east across the Pacific alone in a converted passenger liner, under the Golden Gate and on to Fort Dix. The 3rd Bombardment Group stayed at Hollandia until 16 November 1944, when it moved forward to Dulag on Leyte and then to San Jose on Mindoro at the end of December, finishing the war on Okinawa.

Allen missed the return to the Philippines by about ten weeks. The Grim Reapers’ streamers for Leyte and Luzon were earned by the men he left behind on that beach; the group credits that fall inside his own war are four — East Indies, Papua, New Guinea and Bismarck Archipelago — and they end where his war did, on the north coast of Dutch New Guinea. If his discharge papers name others, go by the papers.

Sources: Army Air Corps Museum — 3rd Bombardment Group station list and campaign credits; 5th Air Force Association — 3rd Bomb Group; 5th Air Force Association — 3rd Bomb Group campaign credits (no Northern Solomons); historyofwar.org — 3rd Bombardment Group stations and squadrons.

Decoding His APO Numbers

Eight numbers in his own handwriting, each standing for a place he was forbidden to name. Seven of them decode.

In his hand	Where it stood for	Dates in the Army register	Note
APO 1106	Not in the register	—	No APO 1106 exists in the Army Postal Service’s master list of every number used between 1942 and 1947. Either it is not an APO at all, or it is a slip of the pen.
APO 501	Theatre headquarters, Australia	Melbourne 1/42 → Sydney 9/42 → Brisbane 2/43	A theatre-level address rather than a place — what a newly landed man could give his family before he was on any base roll.
APO 922	Townsville, Queensland	opened 18 March 1942	The port town he passed through, and the nearest large postal facility while the group was settling into the scrub inland.
APO 710	Charters Towers, Queensland	17 Sept 1942 → Townsville 29 April 1944	His own base — but with no post office of its own for his first six months there, which is why 922 comes before it on his list.
APO 929	Port Moresby, New Guinea	opened 23 July 1942	The V-mail plant he describes ran under this number.
APO 503	Oro Bay, New Guinea	Melbourne 1/42 → Sydney → Townsville → Oro Bay 1/43	The deep-water port some twenty miles from Dobodura, and the reason Dobodura could be supplied at all. A surviving 3rd Attack Group address reads “Hq. 3rd Atk Gp, APO 503.”
APO 713-1	Lae, New Guinea	Oro Bay 18 Aug 1943 → Lae 9/43	Lae sits at the mouth of the Markham; Nadzab lies about twenty miles up the same valley. The “-1” is most likely a branch office — an inference, not a record.
APO 565	Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea	Goodenough Is. 1/44 → Hollandia 28 April 1944	Base G. The number on his last letters home from the Pacific.

Allen's handwritten service record book, the source of the APO list. — The page of his own service record book that the table above decodes — eight APO numbers in his own hand, each one standing for a place he was not allowed to write down.

APO 922 and APO 710 — Townsville and Charters Towers

Two of his numbers cover the same stretch of north Queensland, and the dates explain why he listed them the way he did. APO 922 was the post office at Townsville, opened on 18 March 1942 and running without a move until February 1946 — the port town he passed through, and the nearest large postal facility while the group was settling into the scrub inland.

APO 710 was established at Charters Towers itself on 17 September 1942, and stayed there until 29 April 1944, when it withdrew to Townsville; it later went forward to Owi Island off Biak in August 1944 and on through Leyte, Mindoro, Clark Field, Okinawa and Japan, a path Allen never followed, since he was home by that autumn. His group had been at Charters Towers since 10 March 1942, so for his first six months in Australia there was no post office at the field bearing his own base’s number. His list runs 501, then 922, then 710, which is that sequence exactly.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 185 — APO 922: Townsville, Australia, 18-3-42, ceased 13-2-46; Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 159 — APO 710: Charters Towers 17-9-42, Townsville 29-4-44, Owi Island 8/44, Mindoro, Clark Field, Okinawa, Japan; 3rd Bombardment Group — Charters Towers from 10 March 1942; APO-locations.csv — APO 710 full itinerary including the Leyte stop (1 Jan 1945) omitted from the sidebar.

APO 929 — Port Moresby

APO 929 is among the best attested numbers on the list. The Army’s register gives it a single location for almost the whole war — Port Moresby, New Guinea, from 23 July 1942 until 7 August 1945, when it followed on to Leyte, then San Fernando in Pampanga, then Sasebo and Fukuoka in occupied Japan. The National WWII Museum holds a photograph of the V-mail plant in operation at APO 929 in 1944, its sorting and printing rooms set up in the field under timber and canvas. Allen’s group moved up to Port Moresby on 28 January 1943 and on to Dobodura that May, so this was the number under which his mail travelled for something under four months. It is also the number behind the V-mail he describes: letters written on a standard form were photographed onto microfilm for the voyage and printed small again at the far end, and the plants that did that work looked exactly like this one.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 186 — APO 929: Port Moresby, New Guinea, 23-7-42; Leyte 7-8-45; San Fernando (Pampanga) 3-9-45; Sasebo; Fukuoka; Army Post Offices in Australia during WW2 — APO 929, Port Moresby, New Guinea; V-mail operation in the field at APO 929 in Papua New Guinea, 1944 — The National WWII Museum; V-mail operation in the field at APO 929 in Papua New Guinea in 1944 — caption verified, page live.

APO 503 — Oro Bay, the Address for Dobodura

The place Allen calls Dogadura is Dobodura, the great grass airfield complex the Americans cut inland from Buna between December 1942 and early 1943, and it had no post office of its own name. Its mail went through APO 503, which the Army register places at Oro Bay, New Guinea, from January 1943 — the deep-water port some twenty miles away at the end of a newly bulldozed road, and the reason Dobodura could be supplied at all. APO 503 had begun the war at Melbourne in January 1942 and moved by way of Sydney and Townsville before settling at Oro Bay, where it remained until 31 August 1945. A surviving wartime address for one of Allen’s own group’s officers reads, in full, “Special Service Officer, Fifth Air Force, Hq. 3rd Atk Gp, APO 503” — direct documentary confirmation that the Grim Reapers used this number. His group reached Dobodura on 20 May 1943.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 121 — APO 503: Melbourne 1/42, Sydney 1942, Townsville 8/42, Oro Bay 1/43, Tokyo 31-8-45, Yokohama 3/46; 3rd Bombardment Group, Peter Dunn’s Australia @ War — address “Special Service Officer, Fifth Air Force, Hq. 3rd Atk Gp, APO 503”; Dobodura Airfield Complex, Oro Province — Pacific Wrecks; Oro Bay port and the road to Dobodura — Dobodura Airfield Complex (1942).

APO 713-1 — Lae and the Markham Valley likely

The number Allen wrote as 713-1 is the only one in his hand carrying a suffix, and the base number decodes cleanly: the Army register shows APO 713 opening at Oro Bay on 18 August 1943 and moving to Lae, New Guinea, in September 1943, where it stayed until October 1945. Lae sits at the mouth of the Markham; Nadzab, the airfield he remembers as the best place they were stationed, lies about twenty miles up the same valley, and Australian wartime postal tables associate APO 713 with Base E, the supply base covering the Lae-Nadzab area.

The 3rd Bombardment Group moved to Nadzab on 3 February 1944. The “-1” is almost certainly a branch or unit designation for a smaller post office working out of the parent APO, which would put the Nadzab counter under the Lae number. That last step is a guess: no source consulted names a Nadzab branch of APO 713, and the register itself lists only Lae.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 159 — APO 713: Oro Bay 18-8-43, Lae 9/43, Nagoya 1-10-45, Kyoto 11/46; Army Post Offices in Australia during WW2 — APO 713, Base E, Nadzab, New Guinea; 3rd Bombardment Group — Nadzab from 3 February 1944; APO-locations.csv — APO 713: Oro Bay 18-8-43, Lae 1-9-43, Nagoya 1-10-45, Kyoto 1-11-46.

APO 565 — Hollandia

The last posting on his list is also the last one he served. APO 565 first opened on Goodenough Island in January 1944, shifted briefly to Cape Cretin on 29 February, returned to Goodenough in March, and then moved to Hollandia in Dutch New Guinea on 28 April 1944, where it remained until it closed on 31 January 1946. Australian wartime postal tables identify it as the post office of Base G, Hollandia. Allen’s group arrived there on 12 May 1944, a fortnight after the post office opened and days after the fighting he describes wading ashore behind. He was on his way home by that September, so 565 is the number under which his final letters from the Pacific were sent.

Sources: Numerical Listing of APO’s, January 1942 — November 1947 (AGO), p. 135 — APO 565: Goodenough Island 1/44, Cape Cretin 29-2-44, Goodenough Island 3/44, Hollandia 28-4-44, ceased 31-1-46; Army Post Offices in Australia during WW2 — APO 565, Base G, Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea; 3rd Bombardment Group — Hollandia from 12 May 1944; APO-locations.csv — APO 565: Goodenough Is. 1/44, Cape Cretin 29-2-44, Goodenough Is. 1-3-44, Hollandia 28-4-44, ceased 31-1-46.

The Nervous System of a Squadron

Technical Sergeant, and Where That Put Him

The paper calls him Tech. Sgt., which was neither a technician’s rating nor a junior grade. Under the pay-grade scheme of 1920 enlisted men ran from the seventh grade, private, up to the first, master sergeant; technical sergeant sat in the second. On 22 September 1942 first sergeant was moved up into the first grade, which left technical sergeant alone in the second — the second-highest enlisted grade in the Army, one rung below the master sergeant he finished the war as. The insignia was three chevrons and two rockers against a master sergeant’s three and three.

So the wire story catches him one promotion short of the top, and already senior enough that a reporter reached for the phrase “the unit’s communications expert.” It does not date the promotion. It only proves he had not yet had it.

Sources: War Department Circular No. 303, 5 August 1920; AR 600-35, Change 3, 22 September 1942.

The Australian at the End of the Story likely

The story closes with the organisation’s Australian liaison officer giving a summary of his own. That was not a courtesy attachment. The Australian Army decided early in the New Guinea campaign that its units and the air force needed someone between them, and from 1942 began posting liaison officers to RAAF and American squadrons.

One of them can be named. Captain Richard V. Saunders was attached to the 3rd Bomb Group from 20 May 1943 until June 1944, and he lived with the 90th Squadron the whole time — Allen’s own squadron. Of the job he wrote: “I kept the crews abreast of the war both locally and abroad.” That is the morning meeting in the liaison officer’s own words. Five other Australians are listed as attached to the group over the war. Whether Saunders is the man in this particular story is not established; the story names nobody.

Sources: Richard V. Saunders, 3rd Attack Group veterans’ pages.

Somebody Else Wrote This Down at the Time

Everything this chapter says about the shortwave listening has rested on Allen. Here is a stranger, writing while he was still in New Guinea, for a wire service, saying the same thing and naming him: the unit’s news was built on short-wave intercepts he made during the night, and he was the unit’s communications expert.

It corroborates the practice, the man and the town. It does not corroborate the scene he describes, and the two accounts are not the same. He remembered reading the news out himself, in the evening, by the open-air theatre, with another squadron running a line to his tent. The wire story has him listening overnight and two officers presenting at a seven o’clock morning meeting. These may be two habits of one man, or one habit told from both ends. Nothing found settles it, and the two are left side by side rather than merged.

Sources: The clipping, from the family’s copy; his own interview, 2006.

A wire story out of New Guinea, printed in an American paper while Allen was still there: “The war news is based on short wave intercepts made during the night by Tech. Sgt. Allen Sweigert of Cressona, Pa., the unit’s communications expert.” The yellow band is a search highlight on the library’s own image, not a mark on the paper.

What a communications chief actually worked with — and the aerial he strung against the rules, which worked better than the one in the manual.

Communication Chief, MOS 542

Allen’s job had a number, and the War Department’s own description of it reads almost like a summary of what he tells the camera. Military Occupational Specialty 542, Communications Chief, covered supervising a communication section in the installation, operation and minor maintenance of two or more of the following: wire, radio, or air-ground contact. In practice that meant directing the laying, testing, maintenance and recovery of wire; selecting the locations for central and sub-stations; directing telephone, switchboard, teletype and radio operators in the receipt and transmission of messages; superintending air-to-ground and ground-to-air systems; and supervising the adjustment and minor repair of the radio sets, field telephones, switchboards and wire lines themselves.

The alternate titles on the same card say the rest of it — Communication Sergeant, Radio Sergeant, Signal NCO, Wire Sergeant — not a specialist tucked behind one set but the man answerable for every circuit a bomb squadron ran on. That breadth is why a squadron could still function with a radio crew of six when, as Allen says, the establishment called for about twenty. Everything else on this page, the aerial in the trees, the switchboard, the wire through the branches, the radio compass, is one man’s MOS written out longhand.

Sources: Communications Chief (542), WWII Army MOS codes — The Military Yearbook Project; Military Specialty — Military Occupational Specialty — Army Air Corps Museum; WWII Military Occupational Specialist Code Database — Strictly GI; WWII Army Communications MOS codes index (542 Communications Chief, with alternate titles and the one-sentence duty description) — Military Yearbook Project.

The antenna between two trees likely

The rule Allen was breaking was a real one. Signal Corps ground stations came with specified aerials — the 100-foot AN-21 and the 20-foot AN-22 were the wire antennas listed in 1940 for the BC-191, the transmitter at the heart of the Army’s SCR-177 and SCR-188 ground sets — and the manuals fixed both the length and where the lead-in was taken off. What he put up instead, a wire slung low between two trees and tapped wherever it suited him, is what would now be called a near-vertical incidence skywave antenna. A horizontal wire hung a small fraction of a wavelength above the ground sends most of its energy almost straight up; the ionosphere reflects it back down over a circle reaching out some 400 miles, so the signal falls into valleys and over ridges that ground wave and line-of-sight cannot reach.

Between Port Moresby and the strips on the far coast stood the Owen Stanley Range, topping out at Mount Victoria at 4,038 metres, 13,248 feet — exactly the barrier that mode is good for, and one reason armies still use it in mountains and in the tropics. Allen said he never knew why it worked so well. The name for it came later; his aerial in the trees was simply, and accidentally, the right answer to the mountain. That his squadron was the only one able to work aircraft across the range is Allen’s word alone. No unit paperwork has turned up to confirm it, and none to contradict it.

Sources: Near vertical incidence skywave — Wikipedia (low horizontal wire, 0-650 km coverage, use over mountains and in the tropics); NVIS Propagation: Near Vertical Incidence Skywave — Electronics Notes; SCR-188 (BC-191 transmitter, BC-342 receiver; TM 11-233, March 1942) — RadioNerds; AN — Antennas: AN-21 100 ft and AN-22 20 ft wire antennas for the BC-191 — RadioNerds.

The Series, by Shortwave

Allen’s remark that the men could follow the ball games describes something the War Department was deliberately arranging. The Armed Forces Radio Service was established by War Department order on 26 May 1942, and the Radio Division that preceded it had been broadcasting music and sports overseas since the spring of 1941; shortwave broadcasts continued from both American coasts to carry news and sport to troops. Military personnel around the world heard the 1942 World Series that way, and in 1944 the War Department announced that play-by-play of the Series would be broadcast to troops in all overseas theatres, beamed live by five powerful shortwave transmitters to a list that included the Southwest Pacific.

What the Army could not supply was a receiver. The standard account of Pacific broadcasting is blunt about it: programming from America came in on shortwave only, and shortwave sets were not generally to be had. AFRS did not put its own transmitters into New Guinea until 1944, when the stations of what became the Jungle Network appeared, most running a 50-watt transmitter with a staff of five or six men. Through the nine months the 3rd Bombardment Group held Dobodura — 20 May 1943 to 3 February 1944 — a squadron’s news still depended on whoever had a shortwave receiver and the patience to sit at it.

Sources: Armed Forces Radio Service — Museum of Broadcast Communications radio encyclopedia; #Shortstops: War and the World Series — National Baseball Hall of Fame; September 30, 1942: Yankees’ Red Ruffing wins World Series opener in St. Louis — Society for American Baseball Research; AFRS Pacific Overview — Radio Heritage Foundation.

Shorthand off the Air

Learning to write fast was not a private trick; it was the standard newsgathering method of the entire theatre. Guinea Gold, published daily by the Australian Imperial Force at Port Moresby from 19 November 1942 to 30 June 1946, never failed to appear — 1,320 consecutive days, a record for service publications — and was written by soldiers with newspaper experience who took shorthand notes of shortwave bulletins from Australia, from the US Armed Forces station at San Francisco, from the BBC, from All-India Radio and others. An American edition was flown daily to Buna, Gona and Milne Bay, and at the 1944 peak the two editions together ran to 64,000 copies a day, 37,000 of them American.

This mattered more in New Guinea than anywhere else, because New Guinea was the only war zone in which the US armed forces did not produce a local edition of their own newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Buna sits on the coast below the Dobodura strips — supplies for the Buna-Gona fighting came in through those airfields — so the printed paper very likely reached Allen’s field, but it reached it once a day and already hours old. Between drops, the only news on that airfield was whatever a man with a receiver and a pencil had taken down himself.

Sources: Guinea Gold — Australian War Memorial; Anzac Day, Typewriters and Guinea Gold — oz.Typewriter; Guinea Gold — Wartime Press; Stars & Stripes — Baseball Reference Bullpen.

A Sheet on a Bulletin Board likely

The typed or hand-lettered unit news sheet was one of the most widespread institutions of the war and one of the least recorded. Between 1942 and 1945 the number of newspapers published by and for American servicemen grew from fewer than five hundred to nearly four thousand, and most overseas combat units were limited to a single-page mimeograph with a plain design; the printed weeklies belonged to big formations with presses behind them.

The War Department encouraged the habit: the Camp Newspaper Service in New York supplied copy and features to camp and unit papers and ran an achievement award judged by civilian editors across Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard publications — 350 entries the year a division weekly took it — while the Army News Service, created in 1943, digested American press-association and newspaper reporting for transmission to troops by service radio. So a squadron news sheet was well within policy. Whether anyone above Allen told the 90th Bomb Squadron to have one, nobody knows; no Fifth Air Force or 3rd Bomb Group directive on squadron news services has ever turned up. Allen’s own account is that he thought of it himself, and that a neighbouring squadron had to come over and ask how the news was being got.

Sources: The Buffalo: 92nd Infantry Division’s Weekly Newspaper during World War II — The National WWII Museum; Information, Education & Media — The American Soldier in World War II; Army News Service.

Before the Picture Started likely

An open-air film show at a forward strip was an official program, not an improvisation. In February 1942 the War Activities Committee delivered its first shipment of 16mm films, free of charge, to soldiers in combat areas, and the screenings that followed — carried by jeep, parachute, PT boat and whatever else was going — were called the two-hour furlough and treated as a serious morale measure; in 1943 alone the studios shipped 218 features and more than 6,100 16mm prints to the War Department.

A sound projector of that era came with its own amplifier and a separate loudspeaker, and surviving Bell & Howell Filmosound panels carry a microphone input beside the volume and tone controls, so a man with a script could speak through the film rig as easily as the film could. The example that documents that input plainly is a civilian machine of about 1950, so the exact set he plugged into cannot be identified, and no count of Army projectors is offered here without a source to stand on. That the Army thought of loudspeakers as broadcasting in their own right is not in doubt: at VJ-Day the Armed Forces Radio Service counted 154 stations plus 143 public address systems and hospital bedside networks among its installations.

Sources: The Motion Picture Industry During World War II — Encyclopedia.com; Everyday Movies: Portable Film Projectors and the Transformation of American Culture (review) — Spectator, USC; Bell & Howell “Filmosound 179” 16mm Sound Projector — The Henry Ford; Armed Forces Radio Service — Museum of Broadcast Communications radio encyclopedia.

When the Batteries Ran Out likely

A personal portable of 1940 or 1941 was a battery set in the literal sense: it needed a low-voltage A supply for the tube filaments and a separate high-voltage B battery for the plates. Civilian radio receivers were put under War Production Board Limitation Order L-44, which appears in the Board’s March 1943 index of priorities actions alongside L-71 for flashlight batteries — the dry cells were rationed too — and by August 1943 Popular Mechanics was printing plans for a home-built B-battery eliminator on the flat statement that B batteries were unavailable because of the war. An eliminator ran off house current, which is not what a forward strip offered a man’s tent set.

Allen’s own description fits a domestic broadcast-band portable rather than a communications receiver: he says all it would pick up were the local stations, which in Queensland and Papua meant the Australian broadcasters. So the radio he carried from Cressona was never going to be the squadron’s news source. Once it went silent it stayed silent, and from then on his listening was done on equipment he did not own. Whether his was the only receiver on that airfield, nobody wrote down.

Sources: Wartime B Battery Eliminator (Popular Mechanics, August 1943) — OneTubeRadio.com; Priorities, War Production Board, March 1943 — GovInfo; Television and radio in the Second World War — National Science and Media Museum.

Malaria, Mud and Bully Beef

“Malaria was our greatest enemy.” The Army agreed with him, in numbers.

“Malaria Was Our Greatest Enemy”

Allen’s judgement was also the Army’s. The Army Medical Department’s own history records that the malaria rate among American forces in New Guinea climbed from under 200 cases per 1,000 men per annum in October 1942 to nearly 600 by that December, and peaked at 970 per 1,000 per annum in February 1943 — a figure that works out to roughly one hospital admission per man per year. Over the months from October 1942 to April 1943 there were about ten times as many hospital admissions for malaria in the theatre as there were battle casualties.

In May 1943 General MacArthur put it to the visiting Army malariologist Paul F. Russell that the war would be long if for every division he had facing the enemy he had to count a second in hospital with malaria and a third convalescing. A concerted control programme — drainage, screening, oiling, spraying and drug discipline — brought the New Guinea rate back down to 200 per 1,000 by August 1943. One thing he never mentions is Atabrine. The suppressive drug, taken in the Southwest Pacific on an approved six-tablet weekly course, was pressed on every man in the theatre, turned the skin a sallow yellow, and was widely resented, rumour-ridden and widely dodged — and it does not come up once in the interview.

Sources: Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. VI: Communicable Diseases — Malariology, Chapter X: Southwest Pacific Area (US Army Medical Department, AMEDD Center of History & Heritage); Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. VI, Chapter I: Introduction (contains the MacArthur statement to Paul F. Russell, May 1943); Australian malariology during World War II (Pioneers of Australian Military Malariology, Part 3), Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health; Malaria in World War II, Army Heritage Center Foundation.

Dengue: The Other Fever

Allen names the second fever correctly, and ranks it correctly too. The Malaria and Epidemic Control Board of the South Pacific rated dengue second only to malaria among the tropical diseases of military importance, and the Army’s malaria history identifies Aedes scutellaris as the principal dengue carrier in the New Guinea region. It travelled with the Americans from the start: an outbreak that swept two US infantry divisions staging in Queensland and the Northern Territory in 1942 is estimated to have affected some 80 per cent of the men within three months.

For 1944-45 the US Army counted roughly 27,000 dengue cases in the New Guinea area, with epidemics reported around Hollandia and Biak — Hollandia being Allen’s last station before he came home in the autumn of 1944. Across the Pacific between 1942 and 1945 about 80,000 American servicemen were hospitalised for dengue, which the troops knew as breakbone fever. Allen’s remark that at first you did not know what you had was the ordinary clinical difficulty of the campaign: the two fevers opened much alike, and only a blood smear settled which one a man was carrying.

Sources: Dengue and US Military Operations from the Spanish-American War through Today, Emerging Infectious Diseases (CDC), Vol. 18 No. 4; Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. VI, Chapter X: Southwest Pacific Area (Aedes scutellaris as principal dengue carrier); Dengue Epidemics During the Second World War in Queensland, Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health; Allen E. Sweigert, Sr., Enlisted Record and Report of Separation, Separation Center, Fort Dix, New Jersey, 8 June 1945 (reproduced in the interview PDF) — gives return to the USA as 29 September 1944.

Under the Mosquito Bar likely

“Mosquito bar” was the Army’s own term, not slang — the netting was issued as a bar, pitched over the cot — and in New Guinea it was anti-malarial equipment before it was a comfort. Allen’s description of going to bed as an ordeal, of swooshing the air clear and diving in under the netting to undress, and of holding a light up to see the mosquitoes lined up waiting for him to roll against the mesh, is the most vivid single passage in the interview.

The camps he describes are the ordinary Southwest Pacific arrangement: dispersed tent cities laid out ahead of the arriving squadrons by engineer and quartermaster troops, at bases such as Dobodura, whose eleven interconnected strips were cut out of the Papuan grass in late 1942 and early 1943. The particulars, though, are his alone, and for the 90th Squadron’s living quarters they are very nearly all that survives — tents on platforms three or four feet clear of the ground, floors of bamboo cut in the jungle and split by a technique he had to learn, canvas rotting through in the heat and rain until a man slung a second sheet over his bunk to catch the drip, and little buckets of oil under the cot legs so the ants could not climb up. The raised platforms and the drainage ditches were as much about standing water, where Anopheles bred, as about mud. One Christmas Eve he reached into his bag for chewing gum and came out with a scorpion hanging from his fingers, went down to the medics for a shot, and then went to the pictures anyway.

Sources: Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. VI, Chapter X: Southwest Pacific Area (drainage, oiling and screening as malaria control); Dobodura Airfield Complex, built by the USAAF December 1942 to early 1943 with engineer and local labour; fifteen landing grounds; Pacific Wrecks — 3rd Bombardment Group “The Grim Reapers”; Interview transcript, Part 1 (Allen E. Sweigert, Sr.) — primary source for the camp construction detail.

Jungle Rot, Wet Feet, and the Solution in the Ears

The men in the islands called every tropical skin complaint jungle rot, New Guinea crud, or the creeping crud. A TIME report of 13 August 1945, drawing on Lt Cdr Robert R. M. McLaughlin’s paper in the Naval Medical Bulletin, describes the range of it — fungal infection of the feet spreading to the trunk, thighs, face and scalp — and the treatments: cleaning, painting with silver nitrate, dressing with sal-sulphur ointment, staying out of the sweat, and in the worst cases a ticket back to the temperate zone. It was not a minor complaint.

The Army’s medical history records General Guy B. Denit calling dermatoses, by July 1945, one of the greatest single problems of hospital admission and evacuation in the Pacific; at one evacuation hospital skin conditions accounted for 54.8 per cent of the evacuations for general medical causes, and the standard countermeasures were foot powders of undecylenic acid and zinc undecylenate and the formalin sterilising of footgear. Allen’s warning about wet feet was exactly the medical finding: severity tracked directly with how long a man’s boots and clothing stayed wet. The ears were a recognised problem in their own right, and this is where Allen’s small memory touches real medical history — before the war acute external otitis was believed to be chiefly fungal, and it was US military work in the South Pacific that established most cases were bacterial. He never says what the medics dripped into his ears, and the preparations of the period varied from unit to unit in any case.

Sources: Medicine: Jungle Rot, TIME, 13 August 1945; Preventive Medicine in World War II, Vol. V: Communicable Diseases Transmitted through Contact, Chapter VII (dermatophytosis in the Southwest Pacific Area); Otitis Externa: Review and Clinical Update, American Family Physician, 1 November 2006 (“research by the U.S. military in the South Pacific confirmed a predominantly bacterial process as the cause”); Nelson, Roy S., “External Otitis in South Pacific”, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, June 1945.

Bully Beef, Battery Acid, and Two Bottles of Beer

There is a reason Allen ate so much corned beef, and it is written down. American forces in the theatre were fed almost entirely from Australian and New Zealand supply under reciprocal aid: the Sixteenth Report to Congress on Lend-Lease Operations, dated 23 August 1944, states that over 90 per cent of all the food consumed by the American forces in the South and Southwest Pacific was provided by Australia and New Zealand without cost. The Australian staple was bully beef and hard biscuit.

The official Army Air Forces history counts the Australian and American canned rations and dehydrated vegetables that formed the basic Pacific menu among the most persistent grievances airmen voiced — men left to “poke at their bully beef or contemplate peanut butter” — and lays the blame on long supply lines and grossly inadequate refrigeration, ashore and afloat, which together made a satisfactory diet nearly impossible. The powdered lemonade Allen remembers was the synthetic lemon-juice powder issued with the rations, which the troops nicknamed battery acid and which some men found worked better dissolved in a bucket for scrubbing a floor than for drinking. The beer was real but scarce: the US government had the brewing industry set aside about 15 per cent of production for the services, limited to 3.2 per cent alcohol, and distribution across the Pacific was uneven and improvised. Nobody seems to have written down exactly how much beer the Army issued in New Guinea, or how often, but a two-bottle allowance of the kind Allen describes sits easily with what is documented — and in a place with nothing to buy, that is precisely why a man’s two bottles were worth a good price to somebody else, or a stake in a card game.

Sources: Sixteenth Report to Congress on Lend-Lease Operations, for the period ended 30 June 1944 (dated 23 August 1944), Chapter 3: Reverse Lend-Lease Aid; The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. VII: Services Around the World, Chapter 14: Morale; How World War II Saved American Beer Brewing, The National WWII Museum; Curator’s Choice: Two is the Limit, The National WWII Museum (beer in the Pacific theatre).

Raids, and the Joker Who Circled

A hundred aircraft overhead before anyone looked up, and the lone night visitor nobody was allowed to shoot at.

Seven Strips, Counted In Miles

Allen counts the Port Moresby fields the way everyone there did, by the miles between them and the town. Seven carried mile numbers: 3-Mile (Kila Kila), 5-Mile (Wards), 7-Mile (Jackson), 12-Mile (Berry), 14-Mile (Schwimmer), 17-Mile (Durand) and 30-Mile (Rogers), with Fishermans making an eighth field in the complex, and the numbers measured distance from Port Moresby itself rather than, as he remembers it, from the coast. His 17-Mile was Durand, built by the 808th Engineers in August 1942, renamed on 10 November 1942 for 1st Lt Edward D. Durand, a P-39 pilot posted missing on 30 April 1942 on a mission against Lae.

Durand is where the 3rd Attack Group’s 13th and 90th Bombardment Squadrons kept their B-25s, which is to say it is Allen’s field, with dispersal revetments cut into the hillsides and taxiways raised for drainage, exactly the ‘revetments’ he describes. One detail worth keeping for the family: 30-Mile Rogers was named for Major Floyd W. Rogers, who commanded the 8th Squadron in Allen’s own 3rd Bomb Group and was lost flying an A-24 on 29 July 1942.

Sources: Durand Airfield (Wikipedia); Port Moresby Airfield Complex (Wikipedia); 3rd Bombardment Group — base list with dates (historyofwar.org); Pacific Wrecks — Durand Airfield (17-Mile Drome), 808th Engineers, revetments, Durand MIA 30 April 1942.

Nothing To Send Up After Him likely

There is a second reason nobody went after the joker: for most of Allen’s time in New Guinea there was almost nothing to send. Detachment A of the 6th Night Fighter Squadron brought a handful of Douglas P-70s, radar-nosed A-20s pressed into service as a stopgap, to the Port Moresby strips in the spring of 1943; one account puts it at 3-Mile on 1 April, and Pacific Wrecks dates the start of operations to 18 April 1943. It was a thin shield, and one the aeroplane itself could not thicken: the P-70 simply lacked the high-altitude performance to catch Japanese raiders.

The detachment’s commander, Captain Warren G. Hornaday, was lost on 7 May 1943 when his P-70 went into the water at the entrance to Bootless Bay on a training flight, and the detachment’s one confirmed kill came over the Moresby fields on the night of 15 May, a bomber claimed at about 2000 hours, recorded variously as a Navy G4M Betty and an Army Ki-21 Sally. By September it was moving back to Hawaii. Purpose-built night fighters came later and elsewhere, the P-61 Black Widow proving ‘a rude and unpleasant surprise’ to raiders that had been ‘virtually immune from interception.‘ For a radio man in a tent at 17-Mile in 1943, in other words, going dark was not one option among several.

Sources: Pacific Wrecks — 6th Night Fighter Squadron; Pacific Wrecks — Japanese air raids against Port Moresby (15 May 1943 night claim); 419th Night Fighter Squadron (Wikipedia); Douglas P-70 Nighthawk (historyofwar.org).

The Last Peacetime Autumn

November 1941, in the Carolina pines.

Manoeuvres With the Regular Army likely

What Allen describes as going “on maneuvers with the regular army at Fort Bragg” was almost certainly the Carolina Manoeuvres, the last of the GHQ war games of 1941: some 350,000 men, in two phases, across the Carolina country between Fort Jackson and Fort Bragg. These were an examination rather than a parade. The Army wanted to find out whether its new doctrine, its two armoured divisions and above all its commanders actually functioned, and both sides were given air support commands — Kepner’s 1st and Duncan’s 3rd — with bombardment and pursuit wings attached, which is how a radio man from a light bombardment squadron in Savannah could find himself spending November in the Carolina pines.

His own 3rd Bombardment Group was stationed at Savannah Army Air Base from 6 October 1940 to 19 January 1942, and the 90th Squadron was flying A-20s there that autumn. For the group’s own part in the exercise, Allen is so far the only witness. He had been back with the squadron a few weeks. Little more than a week after the umpires went home, the aircraft were over Pearl Harbor.

Sources: Carolina Maneuvers — Wikipedia (350,000 troops, area between Fort Jackson and Fort Bragg, Red and Blue air support commands, two phases, November 1941); 3rd Bombardment Group — OzAtWar (unit veterans’ history; elements in the Carolina Maneuvers of November 1941, recall to Savannah, A-20 equipment of the 90th Squadron); 3rd Bombardment Group — History of War (stationed Savannah, Georgia, 6 Oct 1940 — 19 Jan 1942).

The Mood of the Captor

The hardest remark in the interview, answered plainly.

“The Mood of the Captor”

This is the hardest remark in the interview. Allen makes it plainly, and it deserves a plain answer. The Philippines he is reaching for is Bataan: in April 1942 somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 American and Filipino prisoners were marched about 65 miles in Japanese custody, and thousands died on the road — a story every American serviceman in the Pacific knew by 1944. The record shows the reluctance ran in both directions.

Japanese doctrine made surrender close to unthinkable, and commanders in New Guinea went to banzai charges rather than give up; on the Allied side, troops went on killing Japanese who were trying to surrender throughout the war, and the historian Niall Ferguson has argued that fear of being shot while giving up suppressed Japanese surrenders more than fear of disgrace did. From May 1944 senior American commanders ran education programmes aimed squarely at getting their own men to honour the passes, and the numbers moved: Allison Gilmore’s count for the Southwest Pacific is 1,064 Japanese taken prisoner in 1943, 5,122 in 1944 and 12,194 in 1945. Hollandia, where Allen spent his year, shows the odds even so — Samuel Eliot Morison’s figures for the operation are about 3,300 Japanese killed against some 300 captured.

Sources: Japanese prisoners of war in World War II (Gilmore’s SWPA figures; Allied reluctance to take prisoners; Ferguson’s argument; US education programmes from May 1944); Bataan Death March — National Museum of the United States Air Force; Battle of Bataan and the Bataan Death March — The National WWII Museum; Battle of Hollandia (casualty and prisoner figures after Morison, 1960).

The Censor, and the Stamp

What the handstamps on the backs of his prints actually certify — and what they cannot.

Two Censors Stood Between Allen and the Mailbox

Allen describes the first of them exactly as the Army wrote it down: mail was left open, handed in at a tent, and read before it went anywhere. War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, dated 29 July 1943, put the rule in two sentences for enlisted men — “Place your letter unsealed in your organization mail box, never in any civil post office box” — and told officers to seal the envelope and sign their names in the lower left-hand corner. That was the unit censor, an officer of the man’s own organization; the pamphlet takes him for granted and never defines him.

It does name a second review above him. The return address went in the upper left-hand corner, “leaving a margin of 1/2 inch for resealing in case of censorship beyond the unit censor,” because “Both are subject to examination by base censorship detachments.” The circular handstamp on some of Allen’s prints, reading PASSED BY BASE ... U.S. ARMY EXAMINER, is almost certainly the mark of that second tier — which makes it a statement about a piece of outgoing mail, not about the photograph as an object.

Sources: War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, “When You Are Overseas These Facts are Vital,” 29 July 1943 (full transcription); Return to Sender: Mail Censorship in World War Two (Prologue, National Archives).

2415 Is an Examiner, Not a Base likely

The wording runs continuously around the circle, and the likeliest reading is a single sentence: passed by base examiner 2415, U.S. Army. On that reading the number belongs to the person who did the reading rather than to the place where it was done, and anonymity was plainly the intent at both ends — Pamphlet 21-1 ruled that “No geographical location of sender may be shown on an envelope or other outside cover,” and a bare number gives away nothing either.

Whether such a number belonged to one man or to a whole detachment is still an open question. The standard philatelic catalogue of these markings, Richard Helbock’s Passed By Army Censor (2006), has not yet been opened for this, and its published description promises no number-to-name key. The federal censorship records in Record Group 216 are no help either: they belong to the civilian Office of Censorship, which read mail crossing the border, not to the Army detachments that read Allen’s. So 2415 is a censor’s number, and whose it was nobody can yet say.

Sources: War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, 29 July 1943 (censorship rules and return-address restrictions); Richard W. Helbock, Passed By Army Censor: A Catalogue of U.S. Markings Used on Mail from Soldiers; Records of the Office of Censorship (Record Group 216), National Archives; Censorship During World War II: The Question of Examiner 6883.

Pictures Had Their Own Rules, and They Were Local

The Army published no single worldwide rule for soldiers’ snapshots. Pamphlet 21-1 handled photographs in two cautious sentences — “Special rules apply to the transmission of photographs and films. Do not send them until you have ascertained what regulations are in effect in your area” — and sent the soldier to his own theatre for the answer.

What a censor was looking for is easier to state, because the same sheet lists ten prohibitions: unit location, strength, materiel and equipment; installations; transportation; convoys; movements of ships, troops and aircraft; plans or forecasts for future operations; the effect of enemy operations; casualties; codes and ciphers; and the writer’s own location. A snapshot of a revetment, a strip under construction, a wrecked aeroplane or a shoulder patch could offend several at once, which is why prints were examined at all. A passed stamp therefore certifies one thing only: on the day it was applied, an examiner judged that this print could go into the mail. It says nothing about who pressed the shutter, whose negative it came from, or whether the print was ever actually posted.

Sources: War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, 29 July 1943 — “Photographs, Films” and the ten prohibited subjects; World War II, National Postal Museum (military mail and censorship).

“DO NOT MAIL”: The Record Does Not Settle It uncertain

The block-capital stamp is the one mark in the collection that this research cannot explain. No source reachable here defines it — not the wartime instruction sheets consulted, not the National Archives descriptions of censorship records, and not the published philatelic literature, though the standard catalogue of Army censor markings was not itself opened and should be before this caption is called final. Two readings fit what is known and neither can be confirmed.

It may be a censor’s or a unit photographic officer’s ruling that a particular print had failed review and was to stay in the owner’s footlocker rather than go home. Or it may be a control mark on prints issued from a service photographic section — official pictures a man was free to keep but not to send, a possibility that sits comfortably beside Jack Heyn’s remark that of the official prints in his own album he holds “just prints” and no negatives. Caution is the only fair course: the stamp is there on the print, nobody knows on whose authority it was made, and the family should not let it decide whether a picture is Allen’s own.

Sources: Records of the Office of Censorship (Record Group 216), National Archives; Jack Heyn e-mails, 3rd Bomb Group Photo Section (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War); Richard W. Helbock, Passed By Army Censor (catalogue of U.S. Army censor markings).

The Darkroom in the Jungle, and What a Count Can Honestly Claim

Allen is careful on camera, and the collection should be as careful as he was: he carried his own camera overseas, and of the pictures he kept, some he took and some he got from other people. The darkroom he remembers was not a squadron’s but the Group Photo Section’s, which served all of the 3rd Bomb Group’s squadrons — the 8th, 13th, 89th and 90th. Jack Heyn, a photographer and lab technician in that section, describes two trailer labs that moved with the group and a crew printing mission film for 5th Bomber Command “many times ... 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning”; at Nadzab the section worked from a prefab frame building set on a concrete slab, screened in under a corrugated roof, with “the two trailer labs parked along side, as usual.” That the equipment was there, and that anyone could use it, comes from Allen and not from Heyn.

Three kinds of print therefore sit in one album — Allen’s negatives, official prints handed round, prints traded between men — and a censor’s handstamp cannot tell them apart, because it attaches to the mailing and not to the taking. A count is worth publishing, but as a range, and with its method beside it: the negatives, Allen’s annotations, his testimony. Not the stamps.

Sources: Jack Heyn, 3rd Bomb Group Photo Section — e-mails to Peter Dunn (Australia @ War); Nadzab — Jack Heyn in the South West Pacific during WW2 (the prefab photo section and the two trailer labs); Pacific Wrecks — John F. Heyn, 3rd Bombardment Group, Photo Section; 3rd Bombardment Group (Australia @ War).

His Own Camera, and the Group Darkroom

How a communications sergeant came home with hundreds of photographs.

The Photo Section and Its Trailer Labs

When Allen said the darkroom was mostly for reconnaissance work and that the men had it second, he was describing the Photo Section that served his group — and it is worth being exact about whose section it was. The outfit that handled the 3rd Bomb Group’s mission work travelled with the group from Savannah as part of the 35th Air Base Group, and was only transferred into the 3rd Bomb Group itself in the summer of 1943.

Its cameras were mounted in the tails of the airplanes and operated electrically; when the bomb run began a gunner hit a switch and, in the section photographer’s own words, “a 150 roll of film would roll thru the camera taking a pix every 3 or 4 seconds.” The section processed that film when the planes came back and delivered the mission prints to Fifth Bomber Command, often at two or three o’clock in the morning. At Hollandia in 1944 the same photographer described the section’s quarters as a tarpaulin stretched over a framework for the finishing area, two pyramidal tents on one side for supplies, the two trailer labs on the other, and dirt floors everywhere except inside the trailers. That is the darkroom in the jungle: not a building but a pair of trailers under canvas, at the same airfields where Allen was running wire and keeping the radios up.

Sources: S/Sgt. Jack Heyn — Ex 3rd Bomb Group member based at Charters Towers (Australia @ War); Doba Dura Part 1 — Jack Heyn in the South West Pacific during WW2; Hollandia — Jack Heyn in the South West Pacific during WW2; Pacific Wrecks — John F. Heyn, 3rd Bombardment Group, Photo Section.

Who Read His Mail, and What He Could Point a Camera At

A privately owned camera sat awkwardly in Army regulation: officially soldiers were not permitted to take cameras on campaign, and in practice the rule proved impossible to police.

The Fifth Air Force was evidently tolerant. The published collection of James P. Gallagher, a communications officer with the 49th Fighter Group in the same theater who carried a Baldaxette among his personal belongings, is introduced with the flat statement that the Army made no objection to its airmen taking pictures so long as they avoided radar equipment and Americans killed in action. Allen’s own testimony supplies the other half, and it is about mail rather than shutters: every letter had to be dropped at a tent and handed over unsealed to be read before it went out. Jack Heyn, the 3rd Bomb Group’s photographer from the summer of 1943, credited the survival of his own four-year pictorial record to “a very lenient Photo Officer that censored our mail and what we sent home.” V-mail, the microfilmed letter sheet Allen remembers being introduced, was photographed and sent as film rather than as paper, so a print almost certainly came home by ordinary censored mail or in a duffel bag. Which of the two brought Allen’s photographs home, nobody wrote down.

Sources: With the Fifth Army Air Force: Photos from the Pacific Theater, James P. Gallagher (Johns Hopkins University Press) — publisher description; S/Sgt. Jack Heyn — Ex 3rd Bomb Group member based at Charters Towers (Australia @ War); V-Mail’s Limitations — Smithsonian National Postal Museum; The Amateur GI Photographer in WWII.

The Camera He Took Along likely

Asked how he got a camera, Allen answered as though the question were the odd thing: he took it along, he took all of it along, he took his portable radio along. That puts the camera in his own baggage before the Ancon left for Australia in the winter of 1942 rather than in a post exchange overseas, and the timing matters more than it first appears. American civilian camera manufacture shut down within months of his sailing: Argus of Ann Arbor, whose cheap 1936 model was the first low-cost 35mm camera sold in the United States and whose rugged C3 became one of the best-selling cameras ever made, stopped all domestic production in August 1942 and turned the plant over to military optics and radio equipment.

Kodak’s first 35mm camera, the Kodak 35 of 1938, was also built in an olive drab version for military use, and the heavy Medalist that Kodak introduced in 1941 was reportedly taken up by several branches of the armed forces. So whatever Allen carried was almost certainly bought before he shipped out, and the likeliest candidates are a folding roll-film camera of the sort sold by the million in the 1930s, an Argus, or a Kodak 35. He never names it on the tape, and no camera has been identified in the collection.

Sources: Argus (camera company) — Wikipedia; Argus Museum, Ann Arbor — History of Argus; Kodak Medalist — Camera-wiki.org; Cameras for the World War II Reenactor.

Film, Chemicals and Paper in a Wet Climate likely

Making prints at Dobodura or Hollandia was not simply a matter of finding a dark tent. The section’s own photographer remembered the ground itself as the enemy: at Dobodura the camp was “virtually in the jungle,” the humidity was “really bad,” and everything had to be built up off the ground because of the wetness — platforms first, then tents framed with bamboo cut out of the bush and floored with the same wood split flat.

Kodak sold roll film in sealed tropical packing in these years, and by 1946 the tropical deterioration of equipment and materials had become the subject of its own government summary report, prepared for the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Against that background the two trailer labs read as the one closed, floored space in a camp where everything else stood on dirt — though the man who worked in them called the Hollandia arrangement the lousiest the section ever had. Whether Allen’s own prints were finished in those trailers, nobody recorded. What is certain is the climate they had to survive.

Sources: Combat Photography, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, October 1944 (Vol. 70/10/500); Tropical deterioration of equipment and materials — Library of Congress; Kodak 828 Film Tropical Packaging — Wikimedia Commons; Storage and Handling of Unprocessed Film — Eastman Kodak technical bulletin.

Two Collections Out of One Bomb Group

The 3rd Bomb Group produced two surviving photographic records of the same airfields, and they are worth setting side by side. Staff Sergeant Jack Heyn served with the group from October 1941 to January 1945 and crossed the Pacific on the Ancon, the same transport that carried Allen; he was eleven months at Charters Towers, then Port Moresby, Dobodura, Nadzab and Hollandia. For his first two years he was a squadron photographer working out of the 13th Squadron photo shack, and only in August 1943, by a mutual transfer, did he reach the Group Photo Section he had joined the army to be in — a trailer lab at his elbow and a lenient photo officer who passed his pictures.

His subjects ran from mission film to Bob Hope’s troupe, and his album survives: scanned and sold as 526 photographs, with selections published on Peter Dunn’s Australia @ War and on Pacific Wrecks. Allen photographed as a communications sergeant on his own time with his own camera, and his remark that some of the pictures came from other people is the other half of the same mechanism — where a lab can run off an extra copy, prints change hands in camp. Heyn died in June 2017. His collection is the unit photographer’s version of this ground, and Allen’s is the radio tent’s.

Sources: Jack Heyn’s Photo Collection — 526 scanned photographs (Australia @ War); Pacific Wrecks — John F. Heyn, 3rd Bombardment Group, Photo Section; Jack Heyn in the South West Pacific during WW2 — index; 3rd Bombardment Group (Australia @ War).

The Mountains, and the Maps They Did Not Have

“New Guinea is a funny place when you try to come over the mountains.” Two of the six radio men in his section died doing it.

The Wall They Had To Cross

The range Allen calls “the old Stanley mountains” is the Owen Stanley Range, the spine of the Papuan peninsula, and it was not a ridge but a barrier. Mount Victoria stands at 4,038 metres, 13,248 feet, at the eastern end of the range, and Mount Albert Edward at 3,990 metres, 13,091 feet, with Mount Chapman, 3,376 metres or 11,076 feet, away at the southwestern boundary; the US Army’s official history of the Papuan campaign says simply that its peaks rise to more than 13,000 feet.

The one crossing everyone knew by name, the Gap, twenty miles south of Kokoda, was described in that history as a broken, jungle-covered saddle about 7,500 feet high at its central point and about five miles wide, though sources still disagree about its width, Pacific Wrecks putting it at roughly eleven miles with a 2,000-foot drop at each end. A B-25 had no pressurised cabin and, as Allen says himself, no oxygen for everybody, and the weather did not permit a high crossing in any case: the country is perpetually wet, the rainfall at 3,000 feet being 200 and 300 inches a year. So crews threaded the notches instead, which is exactly the decision Allen describes, and exactly the decision that killed men.

Sources: HyperWar: US Army in World War II, Victory in Papua, Chapter 5 (terrain of the Owen Stanley Range and the Gap); Owen Stanley Range (peak elevations); Pacific Wrecks: Kokoda Gap; Pacific Wrecks: Owen Stanley Range.

False Gap

Allen describes the precise mechanism of the accident: a pilot flies at what appears to be a clean pass, the walls close in, the floor rises, and the aeroplane is inside a blind valley with no room to turn. Allied pilots in New Guinea had a name for the lookalike. Pacific Wrecks records a feature in the Owen Stanley Range dubbed False Gap by pilots because it looks similar to the adjacent Kokoda Gap, and notes that during the Pacific War it served aircrew as a reference point for navigation over that country.

Nobody wrote down how it came by the name. A pass is not called False Gap unless crews had been taken in by it — but that is a guess, and worth saying so. Allen never uses the name himself, and nothing found so far ties False Gap to the loss of his two radio men. What is beyond doubt is that the country he describes is real, mapped country: he was not misremembering it.

Sources: Pacific Wrecks: False Gap, Owen Stanley Range; Pacific Wrecks: Kokoda Gap.

No Maps Worth The Name

Allen’s qualifier, that they did not have real good maps, understates the case. What existed for Papua and New Guinea before the war was coastal charting made for marine navigation and trade, and patches of photography and mapping prompted by mining exploration; the historian of the theatre’s mapping programme records that there was very little aerial photography, very little topographic mapping of military utility and very little survey control to make more, and that more maps were available for the landings at Gallipoli in 1915 than for New Guinea in 1942. Australian and American military mapping authorities met in Melbourne on 10 March 1942, the same week Allen’s squadron reached Charters Towers, to work out how to produce the maps the campaign was about to require.

A New Guinea Survey Section of twenty-five officers and men was raised that March, and the Australian War Memorial notes that in those early days some of its personnel were not fully trained in surveying techniques and aerial photographs were unavailable, so that accurate maps of the Kokoda Trail were non-existent. Distances in the mountains were given up on altogether and recorded instead as walking times between villages. This is the cartographic world in which two of Allen’s six radio men flew into a mountainside.

Sources: Peter Jensen, Second World War Mapping Photography, South-West Pacific Area 1942–1945 (Royal Australian Survey Corps); Australian War Memorial: Mapping Kokoda; 8th Field Survey Squadron (pre-war survey coverage; unit raised March 1942).

The Squadron That Drew The Map

The remedy flew out of the same fields Allen worked from. The 8th Photographic Reconnaissance Squadron put its first camera aircraft over New Guinea on 16 April 1942, from Townsville staging through Port Moresby, the first P-38 Lightning flown in combat in any theatre of the war; it shared Port Moresby with Allen’s squadron, and Nadzab with it in March 1944. Its Fairchild K-17 trimetrogon rig carried three cameras, one vertical and two high obliques mounted sixty degrees off vertical, exposing horizon to horizon and laying down a swathe about sixteen miles wide from 20,000 feet.

Early on the work was close to hopeless: with no advance word of conditions over a target, the odds of a successful mapping mission were reckoned at twenty to one, and the fix was to fit radios and fly an aeroplane up in the early morning purely to report where the cloud had opened. The maps themselves were drawn from that film by Australian survey units and the US 648th Engineer Topographic Battalion, whom MacArthur commended in October 1943 for maps and photomaps covering more than twelve thousand square miles, from combat photography never before used in that theatre. By the end of August 1944 practically all the operational areas of New Guinea had at last been photographed for mapping. Most wartime maps of New Guinea still carry the credit line in their margin: air photography, 8th Photo Squadron, 5th Air Force.

Sources: Peter Jensen, Second World War Mapping Photography, South-West Pacific Area 1942–1945 (Royal Australian Survey Corps); 8th Field Survey Squadron (MacArthur’s October 1943 commendation).

Mount Bartle Frere, 21 April 1942

Only one mountain crash in Allen’s own squadron is settled by the documents, and it came while the 90th was still at Charters Towers, on the kind of Coral Sea search flight Allen himself was woken in the dark to fly. On 21 April 1942, at about seven in the evening, B-25C 41-12455 of the 90th Squadron, 3rd Bombardment Group, was returning from a search mission over the Coral Sea hunting the Japanese fleet when it struck Mount Bartle Frere, the highest mountain in Queensland, about 4,300 feet up. All seven aboard were killed: Lieutenant John J. Keeter Jr at the controls with Captain Glenwood G. Stephenson as co-pilot, Lieutenant Eugene T. Tisonyai the navigator, and Sergeants George C. DeArmond, James P. English, William H. Lancaster Jr and J. P. Morris.

The wreck was not located until 29 April, eight days later, and one theory recorded since is that a faulty instrument had the crew believing they were flying higher than they were. This is not one of the two losses Allen describes. He places his in New Guinea, no radio operator as such appears on this crew list, and nothing ties either of his tentmates to this aeroplane. It belongs here all the same: the same squadron, the same season, the same cause — and men he served beside, to whom exactly what he is describing happened.

Sources: OzAtWar: 21 April 1942 crash of a B-25 Mitchell on Mount Bartle Frere; OzAtWar: 3rd Bombardment Group (aircraft list and Australian crashes); Pacific Wrecks: 3rd Bombardment Group B-25 Mitchells (41-12455, pilot Keeter, crashed 21 April 1942).

Black Sunday likely

Allen understood weather as a thing you went around rather than through, and he says why: without oxygen for everybody the aeroplane could not climb over a front, and flying into one was unthinkable. On 16 April 1944 the Fifth Air Force found out what happened when there was no way around. The strike on the Japanese fields at Hollandia is reckoned by Michael Claringbould’s history of the day at some 325 aircraft, among them 59 B-24s, 51 B-25s, 87 A-20s, 80 P-38s and 48 P-47s; they met a weather front on the way home to the Markham Valley bases, and by nightfall thirty-seven were destroyed or missing, not one of them lost to the Japanese.

It is generally described as the worst single day of operational loss the Fifth Air Force suffered, and ten of those aircraft have never been found. Allen’s 90th Bombardment Squadron had moved up to Nadzab, in that valley, at the turn of January and February 1944, and was still flying B-25s there that spring. Whether it put aircraft over Hollandia that afternoon has not been pinned down. What is certain is that he was on that field, as Communications Chief, on the day the mountains and the weather took more aeroplanes in one afternoon than the enemy managed at any time.

Sources: IPMS/USA review of Michael Claringbould, Black Sunday: When Weather Claimed the US Fifth Air Force (force composition and losses); Pacific Wrecks review: Black Sunday (37 aircraft lost, flown from Nadzab, ten still missing); WW2Today: Black Sunday for the 5th Air Force, 16 April 1944; Pacific Wrecks: 90th Bombardment Squadron (moved to Nadzab 30 January 1944).

Rockhampton, and Twenty-One Men in a Mitchell

What the Printed Date Does, and the Difficulty It Makes likely

Nowhere else is the episode dated at all. The item was in print on 29 January 1943, which fixes the latest it can have happened, and it says the two men had been “stationed in Australia for nearly a year” — accurate to the week from the Brisbane landing of 25 February 1942. The 3rd Bombardment Group moved to Port Moresby on 28 January 1943, the day before it ran.

Two details argue for an earlier moment still. The item reports both men enjoying “spring weather,” and spring in Queensland is September to November, so the letters behind it were probably written in the southern spring of 1942. That leaves a difficulty, and it is better set down than smoothed over. On tape he counts three trips and places the Brisbane rail journey in the Australian period; the printed date puts the ambulance meeting in Australia too, before he ever went to New Guinea. And the paper’s “1000 miles” fits no two points inside Queensland comfortably.

Sources: The Call, 29 January 1943, p. 1; 3rd Bombardment Group station dates.

The Crooked Version, Found

On tape he says the story changed on its way back to Cressona. Here is the version that got home, so the two can be laid side by side at last instead of guessed at.

He says they “had to land for some reason or another in Rockhampton” and that “in landing the nose wheel went kaput”; the paper says he “had to make a forced landing,” which is not the same event. He says he walked to the hangar, settled where they would sleep, and “noticed an ambulance there with the marking, so when I knew my cousin was in that outfit, I asked the guys”; the paper says an ambulance “arrived on the scene” carrying the same number as the one Donald drove. He describes sending word, then dinner in the mess hall and a film; the paper compresses all of it to five minutes. And Rockhampton is not in the paper at all. Nothing here needs reconciling. The discrepancy is the thing he was pointing at.

Sources: The Call, Schuylkill Haven, 29 January 1943, p. 1; transcript-part1.html.

The Call, Schuylkill Haven, Friday 29 January 1943 — the chance meeting as it reached home, seventeen days after the group left Australia for Port Moresby. The right-hand column begins an unrelated item about another family and is not part of this story. Credit: The Call, Schuylkill Haven.

A collapsed nose wheel, an overloaded aeroplane, and a cousin recognised from the markings on an ambulance.

Rockhampton: the American town on the Fitzroy

The place Allen names almost as an afterthought was, for the better part of two years, a base area spread across the whole of the city and its outskirts. Camp Rockhampton was not a camp in the ordinary sense but an organisation on a map: Base Area Command No. 2 under Base Section 3 of the US Army Services of Supply, broken into twenty-two lettered areas running from A to V. The 41st Infantry Division was there from July 1942 until early 1944, and Robert L. Eichelberger, who had taken command of I Corps in June and left for Australia that August, put his corps headquarters in the Criterion Hotel downtown; he was promoted lieutenant general in October 1942.

Another I Corps division, the 24th, arrived in September 1943 and was housed at nearby Camp Caves. More than seventy thousand American troops were stationed in Rockhampton at the height of it, more than the townspeople. Area A, along Yaamba Road, and Area B, around Barrett and Atherton streets, were hospital areas, and Area T was Mount Hedlow Airfield, ringed by five hangars. When Allen says the town had movies and stores, he is describing a leave destination that existed in large part because the Army had made it one.

Sources: Camp Rockhampton, Rockhampton, Queensland during WW2 (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War); Camp Rockhampton, Anzac Square & Memorial Galleries, Queensland WWII Historic Places; Detectors uncover WWII relics from US Army base near Rockhampton (ABC News, 15 August 2025); United States forces in Queensland, 1941-45 (National Archives of Australia fact sheet 234).

The markings on the ambulance likely

The detail that makes Allen’s story work is that he could read an American vehicle the way a man reads a licence plate. Army Regulation 850-5, in its August 1942 form, laid down a bumper code stencilled in white in four groups: the largest formation first, army, corps or division, then the regiment, battalion or separate unit, then the company, and last the vehicle’s own serial number within that unit. A medical outfit’s ambulance therefore announced its parent unit in plain figures, and that is how any such marking would have been readable to him — the mechanism, and nothing more. The newspaper of the time claims less than that: it says the ambulance carried “the same number as the one driven by Donald” — a particular vehicle he already knew of, not a formation deduced from a stencil.

Rockhampton had no shortage of candidates: the 116th Medical Battalion of the 41st Division, Companies B and C of the 24th Medical Battalion, the 262nd Medical Battalion of the 2nd Engineer Amphibian Brigade, the 1st, 92nd and 94th Evacuation Hospitals, the 5th and 101st Station Hospitals, the 33rd Surgical Hospital and a string of portable hospitals. Wounded men were moving through Queensland by air by 1943, when the 804th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron of the Fifth Air Force was carrying them out of New Guinea to Brisbane and Townsville in C-47s. Allen never gives the cousin’s name or his unit on the tape. The 1943 newspaper item names him — Pvt. Donald Berger of Cressona, son of Mrs. Annie Berger — but not his unit, and which of the Rockhampton medical outfits he belonged to is still unknown. The paper nowhere calls him a cousin.

Sources: Military Units based in the Rockhampton area in Queensland during WW2 (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War); United States military vehicle markings of World War II; WWII Unit Identification Markings for U.S. Military Vehicles (Lone Sentry); 804th Medical Air Evacuation Squadron, 54th Troop Carrier Wing, 5th Air Force (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War).

Twenty-one men in a Mitchell likely

A B-25 was built for a crew of six, and in the strafers of the 3rd Bomb Group it flew with fewer still. Twenty-one men is therefore three and a half times the airplane’s designed complement, standing and sitting wherever there was floor. The weight, oddly, was the lesser problem: published figures put the B-25 at roughly 19,480 pounds empty, about 28,600 pounds loaded and 35,000 pounds maximum for takeoff, so twenty-one men with their bags, call it two tons, fitted inside the 6,400-pound margin between a loaded airplane and the most one could lawfully lift, even though it was rather more than the 3,200-pound bomb load the type was rated to carry.

What changes with every extra man is the takeoff run, and the strip does not lengthen to match, which is why Allen’s question is the right one and why he still remembered the number sixty-eight years later. Leave flights in converted bombers were a fixture of the Queensland run, and they could be lethal: on 14 June 1943 a B-17C rebuilt as a passenger aircraft for the Moresby-Mackay furlough traffic crashed shortly after taking off from Mackay with forty-one aboard, killing forty. It is still Australia’s deadliest aviation accident, and censorship kept it out of the papers until 1945.

Sources: North American B-25 Mitchell (Army Air Corps Museum) — weights and crew; North American B-25 Mitchell (The National WWII Museum) — crew of six; Bakers Creek air crash, 14 June 1943; 14 June 1943 — Crash of a B-17 Flying Fortress at Bakers Creek near Mackay (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War).

The nose wheel, and which field he came down on likely

Allen remembers the nose wheel going kaput on landing and a replacement being flown in the next day, which is a small window onto how the supply system in Queensland actually worked: one part, one night, and an airplane full of men on leave waiting for it. Where this happened is less certain than it sounds. Mount Hedlow Airfield was Area T of the base, with five hangars around it, and the town aerodrome was taken over by the Commonwealth and occupied by the RAAF, where wartime works produced a bitumen runway of 1,250 yards, roughly 3,750 feet.

Other strips and camps lay scattered through the district as well, from Camp Caves to Nerimbera and Yeppoon. Allen says only that he went over on the hangar, which fits more than one field, and the story of the nose wheel is his own, corroborated by nothing but his memory. Which field he came down on is simply not known, and it is better to say so than to pick one.

Sources: Camp Rockhampton, Rockhampton, Queensland during WW2 — Area T, Mt. Hedlow Airfield (Peter Dunn, Australia @ War); Mount Hedlow Airfield, Anzac Square & Memorial Galleries, Queensland WWII Historic Places; Rockhampton Airport — wartime history.

Why the story came home crooked likely

Allen tells three chance meetings in a row, and then notes almost in passing that the story changed on its way back to Cressona. Censorship is the likeliest reason. War Department Pamphlet 21-1, Secrecy in Wartime, issued 29 July 1943, told every soldier not to give his location in any way except as authorised, not to write the location, strength, materiel or equipment of Army units, and ruled that no geographical location of the sender might appear on an envelope or other outside cover.

Every man writing home knew his letter would be read against that list. What survived such a reading was the human part of a chance meeting, two boys from the same street shaking hands, with the place, the date and the units gone, which is precisely the kind of story that arrives home vivid and unverifiable and grows in the retelling. A version of it did run in the Schuylkill County papers, and it has since been traced: The Call of 29 January 1943 printed it under the standing head “It’s A Small World!” The printed version is set out below, and it does not match his telling in several particulars — which is the point he was making.

Sources: Secrecy in Wartime: War Department Pamphlet No. 21-1, 29 July 1943; Return to Sender: Mail Censorship in World War Two (Prologue, National Archives); World War II (1941–1945), Smithsonian National Postal Museum.