The Forgotten US Carrier Raid Japan Never Watched For – New Guinea, March 1942

At 2,300 m, above a wall of rock that ran the length of a country, one man flew alone. Below him, cloud filled a notch in the mountains like water in a wound. Behind him, still climbing out over the Gulf of Papua. 104 American aircraft were coming, carrying 38 tons of bombs and 13 torpedoes. Two aircraft carriers, two air groups.

Three months of humiliation stacked behind them like cord would. And not one of them knew whether they were going to fight that morning because that decision did not belong to an admiral. It belonged to the man in that single scout bomber circling in the thin air looking down into the gap. His name was William Alt.

He had been given the authority to call the whole thing off alone on what his own eyes could see. It was the 10th of March, 1942. The Japanese sat in the Huan Gulf with 16 ships unloading an invasion, and they were not worried. The sea to the east was guarded. The sky was theirs. And to the south stood the Owen Stanley Range, 3,000 meters of jagged stone and storm and jungle that no man had walked end to end.

Nobody comes over the mountains. That was the whole of the Japanese defense that morning. Four words. And it was about to fail. If you’re one of the generation that remembers these stories, we’re honored you’re here. What year were you born? The morning of the 8th of March came up gray over the Huan Gulf, and the men who watched it come were not afraid of anything.

16 ships stood off Lei and Salamawa, two small settlements on the northern coast of New Guinea, separated from each other by about 30 kilometers of swamp and coastline. Rear Admiral Sadamichi Kajayoka’s invasion force had sailed from Rabbal on the 5th. Now the landing craft went in and the men went ashore and there was almost nothing there to stop them.

What defended Lei and Salamawa was not an army. It was a few dozen Australian volunteers, most of them gold miners and plantation men who had signed up for a militia that nobody had ever expected to fight a war. They had rifles. They had no artillery, no aircraft, no reason to believe help was coming.

They fired what they had and then they did the only sensible thing left to them. They walked into the jungle and disappeared. By midday, the air strips belonged to Japan. The value of those two strips was out of all proportion to their size. From Lei and Salamawa, Japanese bombers could reach Port Moresby, the last Allied position of consequence on the island, sitting on the southern coast like a door that had not yet been kicked in.

Take Port Moresby, and the whole region belonged to the Empire. The map would close. Overall command in the area belonged to Vice Admiral Shigayoshi Inoay, running the fourth fleet out of Rabba. and in a way had every reason that week to feel that things were going well. Three months into the war, nothing had stopped the Japanese Navy anywhere.

Not at Pearl Harbor, not in the Philippines, not at Wake, not in the Java Sea, not off Malaya, where two British capital ships had gone to the bottom in a single afternoon. The empire was expanding faster than its own planners had projected, and Lei was safe. Look at it on a chart and you can see why they believed it.

To the east and north lay open water and open water was where the Imperial Japanese Navy lived. Any American force coming from that direction would be spotted by patrol aircraft hours out and met by ships that had not yet lost a serious fight. To the south between the Huan Gulf and the sea the Americans would have to be sailing in stood the Owen Stanley Range.

The Owen Stanleys were not a defensive line in the way soldiers understand the term. They were something older and more absolute than that. A spine of rock running the length of the Papuan Peninsula, peaks above 3,000 m, jungle so dense on the slopes that large sections of it had never been surveyed by anyone.

The range carried the name of Captain Owen Stanley of the survey ship Rattlesnake, who had charted that coast in 1849 and had not gone far inland because nobody sane went far inland. The Highlands took 4,000 millimeters of rain in a year. Storms built over those peaks in the afternoon with the reliability of a clock.

There were snakes in that jungle that could kill a man, and mosquitoes carrying malaria in numbers that made the disease less a risk than an appointment. From the air, the canopy ran on without landmarks, green and identical in every direction, which meant a pilot who lost his heading over that country did not simply take longer to get home. He did not get home.

Later, when American aviators from the carrier Yorktown were briefed for a flight over that range, part of their survival equipment was a bottle of aspirin and a machete. That was the arithmetic. If the Americans came, they would come by sea from the east, where the ships and the search planes were waiting.

There was no way they would come over the mountains. Far to the southeast on the flag bridge of the carrier Lexington, a 59year-old man was carrying something heavier than a mountain range and it was his own reputation. Vice Admiral Wilson Brown had been in the Navy since before the century turned.

Anapapolis 1902, a destroyer command in the first war, a Navy cross, the Naval War College, aid to two presidents, superintendent of the Naval Academy. He was by every measure the peacetime navy used exactly the sort of officer you wanted holding a task force and in February he had turned around. The plan had been a strike on Rabbal the great Japanese base on New Britain set for the 21st.

On the 20th with Lexington still hundreds of kilometers short of her launch point. American radar picked up aircraft coming in. Japanese patrol planes had found the task force. The fighting that followed made one man famous forever. A Lexington pilot named Edward O’Hare, who came back from a single engagement, having done something nobody had done before.

But the operation itself was finished. Surprise was the only real weapon a carrier had in 1942, and Surprise had just been taken away. Brown called it off. He turned his ships around and withdrew. It was almost certainly the correct decision. Carriers were the rarest thing the United States possessed in that spring.

There were four of them in the entire Pacific. Trading one for a raid on a defended base with the enemy already alerted and counting your masts was not courage. It was arithmetic run backward. But there is a difference between being right and being seen to be right. And Wilson Brown was learning it that month.

Three months into a war, the United States was losing everywhere. The American carriers had not yet landed a blow that mattered. And the man who had just turned one of them around was now the man who had to explain why. The pressure came down from Washington in the plainest possible language. Find the enemy. Attack the enemy.

There was no room in it for a commander who kept deciding that the moment was not right. So when word came that a Japanese invasion force had put men ashore at Lei and Salamawa, Brown did not treat it as bad news. He treated it as a target. On the 6th of March, his task force 11 built around Lexington had joined Task Force 17 built around the carrier Yorktown under Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher.

Two carriers, eight heavy cruisers, 14 destroyers. It was the largest concentration of American naval power that had been gathered in the Pacific since the war began. And for the first time, there was something worth throwing it at. Japanese transports sitting still, unloading in a bay. The original idea had been a night raid on Rabbal on the 10th.

Two problems killed it. Only Lexington’s crews were qualified to fly at night, and reconnaissance said most of the Japanese shipping had already left Rabbal anyway. Hitting an empty harbor in the dark was not worth two carriers. Lei and Salamawa were the better target by every measure. Ships still in the water, cargo still on deck, men still sorting themselves out on an unfamiliar beach.

An invasion force is never more vulnerable than in the 72 hours after it lands. The only question was where to attack from, and Brown’s staff laid the chart out and worked through it. From the east, the simplest approach, straight in from open water, also the one the Japanese were watching.

Search planes would find the carriers well before the strike launched, and by the time the aircraft arrived, the transports would be scattered across the Gulf, and the surprise would be gone. from the north, possible on paper, but the charts for those waters had been drawn by French surveyors in the 1700s, and no admiral was going to steam two irreplaceable carriers through reefs plotted by men who had died before the United States had a navy.

From the south, 160 km of flying over the Owen Stanley range. every hazard already described, plus the ordinary problem of loaded aircraft trying to gain altitude they were never designed to reach and one advantage nobody could match. The Japanese were not watching the mountains because it had never occurred to them that anyone would use the mountains.

An attack from the south would arrive out of empty sky and there was a second quieter gift folded inside the first one. The sort of thing that only shows up when a professional studies a problem long enough. If the weather over the range turned bad, the strike could simply turn around. The enemy would never know an attack had been attempted.

There would be no alerted garrison, no reinforced air cover, no cost at all for trying. An attack from the east was one throw of the dice. An attack from the south could be walked away from. The remaining obstacle was that nobody in the United States Navy knew whether the range could be crossed at all by aircraft carrying full bomb loads.

The answer did not come from naval intelligence. It came from Australians. At Townsville and at Port Moresby, there were transport and reconnaissance crews who had been flying that country for a long time. And they knew the Owen Stanley’s the way a fisherman knows a river. They knew where the range sagged. There was a pass roughly 2,300 meters at its lowest, low enough that a loaded aircraft could get over it instead of around it.

And they knew one more thing, a small, local, unglamorous piece of knowledge worth more that week than a squadron of fighters. The pass tended to be clear of cloud in the morning, roughly between 7 and 11. Four hours a day, a door stood open in a wall that everyone had agreed was solid. Late on the 8th of March, Wilson Brown made his decision.

The strike would go in from the south over the mountains on the morning of the 10th, which left one thing unresolved, and it was the thing that mattered most. All of it depended on weather over a pass that no one on either carrier had ever seen, 640 kilometers away at an hour when the strike would already be committed and climbing.

You cannot ask a weather report about a mountain in New Guinea in 1942. There was no station there. There was no one there. Somebody would have to go and look. The man who would go was Commander William B. Alt, who had taken over as Lexington’s air groupoup commander in July of 1941. Alt was a professional aviator of the old kind, a man who had grown up with naval aviation while it was still deciding what it was going to be.

And he was about to be handed a responsibility that almost nobody in that war was handed. On the 9th, with a wingman, he flew across to Port Moresby to hear about the pass from the men who had actually flown it. He listened. He asked his questions. He came back and then the order was set and it was extraordinary. The following morning, ahead of everyone, Alt would fly out alone, not with the strike, ahead of it.

He would cross to the pass by himself, and he would look at the cloud with his own eyes, and he would decide, not advise, decide. If Commander William Alt said the weather was bad, 104 aircraft would turn around and the largest American naval air operation of the war so far would be cancelled by one man in one cockpit over a mountain.

The bombs went onto the aircraft that night. Below decks on both carriers, the 9th of March ran on into the dark and the work went on under red lights. An aircraft carrier preparing a maximum strike is not a quiet place, but it has a particular kind of concentration to it. The sound of men doing something exactly right because there is no version of doing it approximately right.

Ordinancemen wheeled bombs on dollies down the hanger deck. Armorers set fuses. The weapons went up on hoists and were bolted to racks under wings. And each one was checked and checked again by somebody else. If you have never stood in the belly of a carrier at night, try to picture it, because it is a world of its own, and it does not resemble anything ashore.

The hangar deck of Lexington was a steel cavern longer than two city blocks, and it smelled of aviation gasoline and hydraulic fluid, and hot metal, and the sweat of men who had been working since before dinner. Under the red battle lights, everything went the color of dried blood. steel plate carried sound the way water carries it. So a dropped wrench three aircraft away arrived at your ear like a rifle shot.

Men spoke in short sentences or did not speak at all. The ship rolled a few degrees very slowly the way a big ship does and every loose thing on the deck answered it. They worked all night on aircraft they had flown that day and would fly again in a few hours. Mechanics with flashlights in their teeth lay on their backs under engine cowlings.

Somebody chocked a name on a bomb casing. Somebody else wiped it off because there were rules. The load that went aboard those aircraft came to about 38 tons. Six bombs of 450 kg each, the heaviest thing either air groupoup could carry. 79 bombs of 230 kg. racks of smaller bombs for targets of opportunity, for trucks and fuel dumps and whatever else presented itself, and 13 torpedoes hauled and cradled and set with the particular care that torpedoes always got because everyone in naval aviation understood that a torpedo was the one weapon that could break a ship’s

back in a single stroke. In the ready rooms, the pilots were briefed, and the briefing had a hole in the middle of it. The charts of the Owen Stanley range were close to blank. Coastline was good. Coastline had been surveyed for a century. Inland, there were contour lines drawn from partial information, elevations that were estimates, whole valleys with no names on them because no one who made maps had ever stood in them.

A navigator planning a route over that country was planning across a rumor. The survival briefing did not help morale. If you went down over the range, the guidance amounted to this. Get out of the aircraft, get to the ground, start walking south, and hope. Yorktown’s aviators, by more than one account, were sent off over that jungle carrying a bottle of aspirin and a machete.

That was the plan for a man alone in one of the least forgiving landscapes on the planet. Painkillers and a blade. Nobody in those ready rooms said out loud what everyone had already worked out for himself. A man who came down in the Owen Stanley’s was not going to be rescued. There would be no search because there was nowhere to search and nothing to search with.

He would either walk out of that country on his own legs through terrain that had defeated professional expeditions. Or he would not come out at all and his family would receive a telegram with a date on it and no place name that meant anything. Some of them were very young. The average age in a carrier squadron in that spring was somewhere in the middle 20s.

And a fair number of the men in those back seats were younger than that. Boys who had enlisted out of towns in Ohio and Texas and Pennsylvania and had learned their trade in less than a year. They sat in folding chairs with plotting boards on their knees and copied down headings and altitudes for a flight over a place none of them could have found on a globe 18 months earlier.

Then somebody at the front of the room said what time Revy would be and the briefing was over and that was that. And there was a calculation buried in the operation that the pilots understood better than anyone and which nobody was in a hurry to say out loud. The problem was the torpedo bombers. The Douglas Devastator torpedo bomber had been an advanced machine when it entered service in the mid 1930s.

the Navy’s first monoplane carrier bomber and the pace of aviation in that decade meant it had aged like fruit. It flew on a Pratt and Whitney twin wasp radial engine producing about 900 horsepower. Underneath it hung a Mark13 torpedo weighing over 1,000 kg. Loaded like that, a Devastator climbed at roughly 200 m per minute.

A Japanese Zero climbed at about 900. Read those two numbers together and you have the whole nightmare in one line. Over that pass at that altitude, a torpedo laden devastator would be a heavy, slow, straining machine with no speed to run and no altitude to trade. If Zeros were waiting on the far side of the mountains, the torpedo squadrons would not be in a fight.

They would be in a slaughter, and every man in those ready rooms knew it. So the planners hedge the way you hedge when you cannot fix a problem, only spread it. Only Lexington’s 13 Devastators would carry torpedoes. Yorktown’s 12 would carry two 230 kg bombs each instead, which was lighter, which meant they could climb, which meant they might live.

Then the lights went down, and the men who were going to fly over the Owen Stanley Range in the morning tried to sleep. The 10th of March came up clear. Long before the strike, one aircraft went off Lexington’s deck alone and turned northwest toward the mountains. Alt flew 160 km by himself. There was nothing romantic about it.

It was a navigation problem over water and then over jungle in a scout bomber with no one to check his heading and nobody to help him if the engine coughed. He climbed toward the range and he found the notch in it and he began to circle. Think about what that hour was actually like for him. The cockpit of a dauntless was cold at altitude and it was loud.

900 horsepower turning over about a meter in front of your knees hour after hour. A noise so constant that pilots stopped hearing it and started feeling it in their teeth. Below him the coast fell away and the green came up unbroken. No roads, no clearings, no smoke from any village he could see.

Ahead the range stood up out of the haze exactly the way the charts had failed to describe it, and it went on to the left and to the right until it went out of sight in both directions. And every man on two aircraft carriers, thousands of them, was waiting on what he decided. There was no committee. There was no admiral looking over his shoulder.

There was one officer in one seat at altitude doing the thing that command actually is when you strip the ceremony off it, which is being the person whose judgment is the last one there is. What he saw was the best thing he could have seen. The weather over southeastern New Guinea that morning was close to perfect. Clear visibility, smooth sea behind him.

The pass stood open, cloud thin and broken. The valley beyond it laid out plain, the way through visible from end to end. He keyed his radio and passed the word. It was a very small transmission. It committed everything. Behind him, the machinery began to move. The two carriers had come up during the night to their launch position about 72 km off the southern coast of the Gulf of Papua near Freshwater Bay.

It was a long way from the target for aircraft of that generation, and that distance was itself part of the concealment. No Japanese search was going to be looking that far south. Lexington turned into the wind and began launching at 7:49. Yorktown started about 20 minutes later. By 8:40 in the morning, the entire combined strike was airborne.

104 aircraft, dauntless dive bombers from scouting and bombing squadrons on both ships, devastator torpedo planes, Wildcat fighters flying escort. 22 more aircraft stayed behind with the task force because two carriers sitting in a gulf with their air groupoups gone are two of the most valuable and least defended objects in the world and somebody had to stand over them.

Then 104 aircraft turned toward a wall of rock and started to climb. The Dauntlesses had no trouble. The wild cats had no trouble. They went up past the pass and kept going, some of them to nearly 5,000 m high above the range with altitude to spare. And from up there, the Owen Stanley’s looked like something on a relief map rather than an obstacle.

The Devastators were a different story. They fell behind. Engines at full power, hour after hour of climb, and the altimeter needles crawling. The torpedo hanging under each aircraft did not care about anyone’s schedule. The mountains ahead did not move. Men in those cockpits watched the ridge line sit stubbornly above their nose and ran the sum in their heads that no pilot ever wants to run, comparing the rate they were gaining height against the rate the terrain was coming toward them.

They were not going to make it on engine power alone. Sit with that for a moment because it is easy to read past it. 13 crews were flying toward a rgeline at a rate of climb that was not going to clear it. They could see the ridge line. They could see their own instruments. Both sets of numbers were in front of them at the same time, and the numbers did not agree with survival.

The engines were already at everything they had. There was no more power to add and nothing to throw overboard except the weapon they had come to deliver. Cylinder head temperatures climbing. Oil pressure watched the way a man watches a wound. the air thinning out the higher they crawled. So the engine that was already straining had less and less to breathe.

And in the backseat of each one, a radio man gunner with nothing to do but look at the mountains getting closer and understand exactly what he was looking at. What saved them was the sun. Somewhere along the slopes below, a patch of jungle had been catching the early light, and the ground under it had warmed, and the air over that ground had begun to rise. It was ordinary physics.

The same column of lifting air that a glider pilot spends his weekends hunting and that a hawk uses without thinking about it. The devastators flew into it and the air picked them up. The formation rode the thermal over the top of the Owen Stanley range, torpedoes and all, lifted across a barrier they could not have climbed by themselves.

It is one of the strangest facts of the whole operation. The Japanese defense of the Huan Gulf that morning was defeated in part by a warm updraft over a sunlit stretch of trees. By 20 nine, the leading American fighters came out of the mountains on the northern side and looked down at the Huan Gulf. Lieutenant Commander John Thatch was leading Fighting Squadron 3’s Wildcats, and Thatch was one of the sharpest tactical minds in American naval aviation.

He was already turning over in his head the problem of how eight wildcats survive against faster, more agile zeros. And the answer he eventually built out of that thinking, a weaving mutual support maneuver, would be flown by American pilots for the rest of the war. He did not need it that morning. What lay below him was a target the way targets look in training films and almost never in war.

16 Japanese ships in the Gulf off Lei and Salamawa. Not maneuvering, not scattered, not throwing up a barrage, anchored and working. Transports with cargo halfway out of their holds. Boats going back and forth to the beach. An invasion still busy unpacking itself, and the sky above them was empty. Thak split his fighters, sending part of the squadron north to cover lay while he took the rest south.

And the reason he could split them at all was the thing that still stands out about the 10th of March. There were no Japanese fighters over New Guinea that morning. The airfield at Lei had been prepared the previous evening to receive aircraft of the 24th Airflot. The strip was ready. The aircraft had not arrived.

It was not that the Japanese had left the sky open on purpose. It was timing and the Americans had won it by hours. 11 Japanese fighters would come into those fields later that day and they would be too late for anything except looking at the smoke. At 22 minutes past 9, the Lexington group came down. The Dauntlesses pushed over from high altitude and a Dauntless in a dive was a stable, deliberate weapon.

Dive flaps out, the aircraft settling into its run like something being aimed rather than flown. They released the 230 kg bombs first. Then the smaller bombs went at whatever presented itself. Barges, lighters, buildings along the shore. Then the aircraft came around low and used their 50 caliber guns running the length of exposed decks.

For the first minutes, it was entirely one-sided. Ships that had been unloading in flat, calm water suddenly had columns of dirty water standing up around them. For the men on those decks, it must have been close to incomprehensible. There had been no air raid warning worth the name, because there was nothing to warn them with, and no direction from which to expect it.

One moment there was the ordinary noise of a working anchorage, winches, and shouted orders and boat engines. The next, there was a sound coming down out of the sky that nobody could place, the rising howl of dive brakes, and it was already too late to do anything but look up. Men went over the side. Men ran for guns that were not manned.

Cargo that had taken two days to bring ashore stood in stacks on the beach with nobody near it. A transport is not a warship. It is a merchant hull with soldiers packed into it and crates in the holds and it has almost nothing to fight back with and no armor at all. When a 230 kg bomb goes into one of those, the ship does not put up a struggle. It opens.

Two transports were sunk. A third ran itself onto the shore to keep from going down. Then the Japanese found their guns. Shore-based anti-aircraft batteries opened up, and the ships that could still shoot began shooting, and the empty sky filled with the black blossoms that every pilot of that war learned to hate.

A dive bomber pulling out low over a defended anchorage is at the worst possible place in its whole flight. slow, straight, and predictable. One bomb of 230 kg struck the light cruiser, Yubari. The American pilots who saw it believed they had sunk her. They had not. Ubari would survive that morning, be repaired, and go on serving the Empire for another 2 years and 2 months until an American submarine, USS Bluegill, sank her in April of 1944.

But something did happen to Yubari at Lei, and it is worth stopping on because it is the part of the story that gets lost when a raid is scored by tonnage. On her decks that morning, nine men were killed and about 50 were wounded. Those were not statistics to the men standing next to them.

That was the whole of it for nine families who would find out months later, and for 50 more who would carry the day in their bodies. Elsewhere in the Gulf, the mine layered Tugaru took bomb damage. Destroyers were hit. Another transport got away untouched. Pure luck. The same luck running the other direction. And then the torpedo planes came in.

The devastators had to descend to the water and fly straight because that was the only way the Mark1 13 torpedo would function. The weapon was notoriously delicate. To have a chance of running properly, it had to be dropped below roughly 160 kilometers per hour and from under about 15 meters of altitude, which is to say the aircraft had to be flying low, slow, and level directly at a ship that was shooting at it.

13 torpedoes went into the water off Lei and Salamawa. One of them found the Japanese Army transport Yokohama Maru and she went down. It was one of the earliest occasions in the war when an aerial torpedo dropped by a United States Navy aircraft actually put an enemy ship on the bottom. And not one man in those cockpits knew he was flying a piece of history because none of them had any idea how badly that torpedo had been performing everywhere else.

Meanwhile, Japan’s entire air response to 104 American aircraft was taking off from the water. two Nakajima reconnaissance float planes, biplanes on pontoons built to spot for gunfire and scout, not to fight anybody. They went up anyway. One of them made a run at a formation of devastators, which took a certain quality of nerve and was chased off. One was shot down by a wildcat.

The other took hits, broke away, and lived. That was it. That was the defense of the sky over the Huan Gulf on the 10th of March 1942. Two float planes, the thing that actually killed Americans that morning, never left the ground. Enson Joseph Philip Johnson of scouting squadron 2, brought his dauntless down low.

Aviation radio man third class JB Juel was in the back seat. We know why pilots did this. From high up, you can miss. From low down on a slow, deliberate run, you are much more certain of your target. And a man who has flown 160 kilometers over a mountain range to be there does not want to have come all that way and miss.

Johnson took his aircraft down to 60 m. 60 m is nothing. 60 m is the height of a modest office building. At that altitude, a man in a cockpit can see faces on a deck, can see the individual splashes his own guns are making in the water, can see the muzzle flashes of the people trying to kill him, and read them for what they are.

At 60 m over a defended shoreline, an anti-aircraft gunner does not need skill. The Dauntless was hit by shore-based fire. It caught fire. It went into the water east of Lei. The men who saw it go in did not have time to watch. That is the part nobody puts in the official reports. You are in a formation. You are being shot at.

You have a job with about 4 seconds left in it. And an aircraft you have flown beside for months comes apart off your wing and goes into the sea. And you finish your run. You count the aircraft again on the way home over the mountains and you get one less than you started with. And you already knew which one it was going to be.

Enson Johnson and Radio Man Juel were the only two Americans killed in the entire operation. Not by fighters, not by the mountains, by one gun on a beach in New Guinea at the moment they were pressing in to make sure. At 10 minutes to 10, the Yorktown group arrived. The second wave found a different battle.

The surprise was spent. The ships were underway now, scattering across the gulf, throwing wakes, turning hard, and every gun that could bear was firing. The Yorktown Wildcats went down onto the airfields and the shipping and strafed. Small boats trying to pull men out of the water were caught in it, too, which is what a strafing run over a busy anchorage means.

And it is not a clean thing to write down. Yorktown’s devastators, the ones carrying bombs instead of torpedoes, went after the sea plane tender Kiokawa Maru and released from around 4,000 m. At least one hit went home and she was badly damaged. She was the same ship that had put those two float planes into the air, the only opposition the Empire had managed all morning. And then it was over.

The last aircraft came off their runs and turned south back toward the wall. Behind them, the Huan Gulf was standing up columns of black smoke, oil burning on the water, ships down by the head or a ground or trailing, and the invasion that had come ashore two days earlier, looking untouchable, was on fire in its own anchorage.

Ahead of the Americans, the Owen Stanley range was waiting to be crossed a second time, and now their fuel was low, and their aircraft were shot up, and the 4-hour window in that pass was closing behind them like a door. They got back over the mountains. That was not a small thing. 11 aircraft had been damaged over the target, and every one of them had to make the climb again.

And this time the pass was doing what the Australians had said it would do, filling in as the day heated up. But they went through it and out over the Gulf of Papua and found the two carriers waiting in the same water they had left. The last aircraft came aboard at 1 minute 12, 4 hours and 12 minutes from the first launch to the final arresting wire.

And in that time, the United States Navy had flown the largest carrier air operation it had ever mounted over a mountain range against a target nobody thought could be reached and had brought home everyone except two men. Wilson Brown did not linger. The task force turned away to the southeast and started putting distance behind it because a carrier that has just announced its position with 104 aircraft is a carrier that needs to be somewhere else.

The Japanese response arrived all afternoon, and all of it was late. 11 Japanese fighters came into the fields at Lei, the aircraft the strip had been groomed to receive, and there was nothing left for them to intercept. Later, a Kawanishi flying boat did find the American task force pulling away to the south and got a report off to Rabal. It came to nothing.

The weather was closing and the light was going and by the time anything could have been organized, there was no longer enough day left to fly it in. Allied aircraft came back over the Gulf that afternoon as well. Eight B17s up from Townsville and eight Royal Australian Air Force Hudsons, bombing from high altitude. Hits were claimed.

The actual damage was close to nothing, which was the standard result for highlevel bombing against ships in that war by every air force that tried it. Then the men came down to the ready rooms and did what air crew always do, which is add it all up. The initial American assessment was magnificent. Two heavy cruisers sunk. One light cruiser sunk.

A destroyer sunk. Five transport sunk. A mine layer probably sunk. Two more destroyers damaged. Two gunboats damaged. A sea plane tender damaged. Read out on a flag bridge in March of 1942. That was the best news the United States Navy had heard since the war started. And most of it was wrong. Not dishonest. wrong in the way that combat reporting is almost always wrong.

Because a man in a diving aircraft at 300 km per hour being shot at sees a column of water and a ship healing in a fire and his brain does what brains do. Six aircraft see the same ship and report six ships. A cruiser that stops making way looks like a cruiser that is sinking. Nobody lied. Everybody was sure.

The real accounting established afterward was this. Three transports sunk. Congo Maru, Tenyo Maru, and Yokohama Maru. An auxiliary mind sweeper damaged badly enough that she went down three days later. Two more ships damaged moderately. the light cruiser Yubari, the destroyers Asanagi and Yunagi, the mine layer Tugaru, the sea plane tender Kiokawa Maru, and a transport, all hurt to varying degrees, all of them still afloat.

More than 130 Japanese servicemen were killed. Around 250 were wounded. American losses, one dauntless, two men, and 11 aircraft with holes in them. And there was one more number that nobody wanted to look at directly, and it was the most important number to come out of the whole morning. 13 torpedoes had been dropped.

Three hit, one sank a ship. That was the Mark1 13’s performance in ideal conditions. Clear weather, smooth water, targets that were anchored or barely moving, almost no fighter opposition to disturb the approach. It was as close to a peacetime test range as combat ever gets, and the weapons still failed nine times out of 13.

The men who flew those Devastators had risked their lives flying low and level and slow at gunners who could not miss in order to deliver something that mostly did not work. That defect would go uncorrected for another two years. Other crews would find it out in worse places against ships that were maneuvering hard and shooting well.

Some of them would find it out at midway. So what had it all actually bought? Not New Guinea. That has to be said plainly because the honest version of this story is better than the flattering one. The raid did not dislodge the Japanese from Lei or Salamawa. It did not come close. The Japanese held both places, repaired what they could, brought in more, and used those airirst strips exactly as they had intended, sending bombers against Port Moresby and supporting the brutal fighting along the Kakakota track. Lei and Salamawa would not come

back into Allied hands until American and Australian troops took them in September of 1943, a year and a half later, at a cost that had nothing to do with anything that happened on the 10th of March. Measured by ground taken, the raid accomplished nothing at all. Measured by what it did to the mind of the enemy, it changed the war.

For the Imperial Japanese Navy, the 10th of March was the worst single day it had suffered anywhere since the war began. Not the most ships lost in absolute terms, but the most damage taken in one blow in a place they had judged safe from a direction they had not thought to watch. Vice Admiral Shigayoshi Inoay had spent three months watching his forces expand into a vacuum.

Now he had learned two things in the space of one morning and neither could be unlearned. The first was that American carriers were out there and were willing to be risked, not held back to defend Hawaii, not husbanded, sent forward in pairs to attack. The second was worse. It was that his geography had lied to him.

A range of mountains was not a wall. There was a door in it, four hours wide, and the Americans had found the door before he had thought to look for it. In a way slowed down. The pace of Japanese expansion into the Solomons eased, and the plan to take Port Moresby went back for reconsideration, and when it came forward again, it came with a requirement attached that had not been there before.

Next time the invasion would need fleet carriers of its own. That single sentence is the real result of the 10th of March. Because when the Japanese moved on Port Moresby again in May, they brought carriers and the Americans came out to meet them with carriers and the two fleets fought in the Coral Sea in the first battle in the history of the world in which opposing ships never saw each other.

It cost Japan the use of two carriers for the Midway operation four weeks later. And Midway is where the Pacific War turned. None of that was planned in the Gulf of Papua. Nobody on Lexington’s flag bridge was thinking that far ahead. But it is a straight line, and it starts at a pass in the Owen Stanley Range.

Wilson Brown, the man who had been quietly written off in February as too careful, had just delivered the first genuinely successful American carrier strike of the war. He would leave the Pacific that July for a shore command, and he would finish his service as a naval aid to two presidents. He would not be one of the famous names of the war.

He had simply been right twice. Right to turn around in February and right to go over the mountains in March. The second one is the only kind of correct that anybody remembers. And then there was the man who had gone up to the pass alone. 8 weeks after the 10th of March on the 8th of May 1942, Commander William B. Alt led Lexington’s air group into the attack in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

The battle his own raid had helped to bring about. He put his aircraft into a dive against a Japanese carrier and reported a hit. Then the zeros got to him. Alt was wounded. So was his radio gunner, aviation radio man first class William T. Butler in the back seat. The aircraft was damaged. Alt turned for home and could not find it, and he did not know that behind him Lexington had already been mortally hurt, that the ship he was navigating toward was dying.

He came up on the radio at 49 minutes 2 to say he had about 20 minutes of fuel left. Yorktown handling communications for the wounded Lexington heard him. She could not find him on radar. There was nothing anyone could do and they had to tell him so and they wished him good luck. Alt asked them to pass one thing along to the ship.

His last transmission was this. Okay. So long people. We got a 1,000lb hit on the flattop. He was never heard from again. Neither he nor Butler was ever found. The man who had flown alone to a gap in a mountain range and told hundreds of men that the way was open could not find his own way back. They gave him the Navy cross and they put his name on a destroyer and then the world moved on to the battles that were bigger.

6 weeks after Alt died came midway. The dittle raid had already stolen the headlines in April. The Coral Sea took May. Against those, a 4-hour strike on two muddy air strips in New Guinea disappeared, and it has stayed disappeared for more than 80 years. But go back and look at what happened that morning.

Two aircraft carriers found a route nobody was watching. One man went ahead alone and made the call. 104 aircraft climbed a mountain range that was supposed to be impassible, and some of them only got over it because the sun had warmed a patch of jungle at the right hour. They sank less than they thought. Their torpedoes failed them. They did not take back an inch of ground, and they convinced the Imperial Japanese Navy that it needed to bring carriers to Port Moresby.

Everything that followed in the Coral Sea, and a great deal of what followed at Midway ran through that decision. The Japanese had built their whole sense of safety on four words. Nobody comes over the mountains. On the 10th of March 1942, somebody