Did Aussie airmen in antique flying boats do more to stop Japan than America’s atomic bombs?

A Lost Campaign 

In WWII, an Allied plan seemed so crazy, no American commanders would give it any aircraft.

So, it fell to young Aussie airmen. The mission: to fly very low, right inside Japanese-held ports, at night, under intense fire. It couldn’t get worse.

…Until they saw their planes. Very slow old flying boats saved from the scrapyard, with canvas wings and the speed of a car, openly mocked as ‘Super Planes’ in US Navy newsreels.

The Aussies Did It – Making it a Real Super Plane

And the Aussies did it. Much more, the men turned their antique Catalina flying boats into real super planes and turned aviation history on its head. In Australian hands their flying boats were officially recorded in a wartime document as an astonishing ‘40 times and probably 100 times’ more effective than the fast bombers they replaced. 

Some say the Aussie flying boat crews did more to stop Japan than America’s atomic bombs – at a fraction of the cost in lives and money.

‘I’m convinced the RAAF Catalina mining missions did more to stop Japan than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ said Sydney lawyer and historian Bob Cleworth. ‘I think so,’ agreed Philip Dulhunty OAM who fought in WWII in Australian Infantry Intelligence using the flying boats, and was sent to Hiroshima after America dropped the atom bomb.

Changed the Course of the War

Hidden for years, the RAAF crews were flying top secret missions for the Allied Supreme Commander, America’s legendary General Douglas MacArthur. On lone missions, up to 24hrs as far as China, these autonomous bands of airmen moved between islands, hid in mangrove swamps, worked closely with local people, and were resupplied by US warships. By developing an alternative way to fight, their astonishing successes with recycled Art Deco flying boats, minimal equipment and a tiny budget, changed the course of the war. As a story, it’s right up there with the rough wartime origins of the SOE later the SAS, and the RAF Dambusters.

Yet, mysteriously, despite all their successes, they were then forgotten, denied recognition, their records ‘lost’ in an ocean of files. Why?

Why did their unique air campaign, and sensational story, vanish? By accident? Or design?

‘We hardly got a mention’

‘After the War we hardly ever got a mention,’ RAAF Catalina gunner Cyril Payne said, ‘Jesus, our guys were flying day and night, you know? I was talking to a Yank and he said, “No bloody way would we go and do this.”

And how on Earth did they make it happen?

I traced some of the last surviving RAAF Catalina airmen to explain the mystery for this article and for a film documentary, Flying Boat V Atom Bomb, for the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. The men, and an astonishing lost document, challenge the very way history presents the atom bombing of Japan and the end of the War.

Their flying boats had come to sound like fantasy creations out of a Marvel comic or a Manga cartoon. But a long-overlooked secret wartime document in the National Australian Archive (NAA) has emerged to give credence to the seemingly impossible.

Stopped One Third of Japanese Fleet

‘A disgrace really,’ said Dick Udy, a RAAF Catalina radio operator who campaigned for decades for the men’s recognition, ‘It’s the one thing in Australian aerial history that made all the difference in the world. At the end of the War the Japanese admitted that one third of the Japanese maritime fleet was constrained because of the deep-sea mining we did.’

‘I wasn’t afraid,’ laughed Dick’s friend, navigator Doug Nolan, ‘Just crossed my legs that’s all!’ 

‘One good feature of the aeroplane was a little electric stove,’ said gentle Noel ‘Tiger’ Lyon,

‘We carried a couple of meals for each us on the mission.’ A clue to their 24 hours non-stop flights done from 1943 to 1945. Hard to believe the men were still throwing bombs out of the Catalina’s open windows as America was building the first atom bomb.

It’s a very Australian story about underdogs against ever worsening odds. Full of courage, humour, ingenuity and also tragedy. Here’s a wonderful Aussie antidote to Hollywood’s Oppenheimer movie and Britain’s upper class trash  Rogue Heroes.

And as today’s world leaders ramp up military spending and nuclear threats, can the men’s lost campaign make us rethink how wars can be fought and without the nuclear threat?

The Catalina Flying Boat

The beginning didn’t look promising.

The American Consolidated Catalina was saved from the scrapyard after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour triggered a demand for any aircraft. The $90,000 Art Deco ‘Cat’ seemed a poor choice against the giant $500,000 Boeing B29 Superfortress which would later drop the atom bombs.

Nicknamed the Black Cats for their black camouflage, the Catalina crews had to cross vast areas of the S.W. Pacific and South China Sea, over uncharted islands and through cyclones.

American bombers were doing high-altitude scatter mining. Four RAAF Catalina squadrons conducted precise mining missions inside Japanese-held ports to block them up. The joint Australian, American and British effort - the original AUKUS - was influenced by British Coastal Command mining. They had to stop Japanese naval and merchant ships getting to supply front lines. It demanded great flying and navigation skills to get mines to exact positions they could be retrieved from later if they didn’t go off.

To hide how they got there, special timing devices allowed a number of ships safely pass before they exploded.

Forgotten Document

The forgotten wartime report [details available] from the National Archives notes the RAAF was ‘given full responsibility’ and records its astonishing results: ‘The contents of these (Japanese) ships, once they had been dispersed about airfields and in material dumps, would have required about 12,000 sorties for their destruction. The mine laying operations have inflicted at least 40 times and probably 100 times as much damage as the bombing missions for half the cost in aircraft.’ The report estimates the RAAF flying boats ‘had the same impact on the war in this theatre as is achieved by the employment of fifty heavy bomber squadrons.’

(Note: a sortie is one aircraft flight)

Japan’s Rear-Admiral Matsusaki is quoted: “Not only were ships and cargoes destroyed but convoys were delayed and unloading areas were jammed at Surabaya and Balikpapan.

‘I lost my best friend at Balikpapan,’ Dick lamented. The men’s success had a price.

Secrecy

But how was the vast campaign kept secret, and then for decades after the war?

‘The whole campaign was for quite some time cloaked in an elaborate security garment,’ the forgotten report says, ‘Misleading code words and designations were used, as much to foil an enemy reading of RAAF Signals as to keep from those not concerned any knowledge of the campaign.’

Yet, Cyril scoffed at secrecy: ‘All this bullshit about secrecy. Everybody knew! The waitress would say, “You’re all right today. No flying.” It was common knowledge around Cairns.’

This didn’t make sense, until Cyril recalled: ‘Everyone lived in hotels. And no two crews lived in the same hotel. Half the time you wouldn’t even know who they were. You never came to a certain central point to get briefed. Someone would say, “Oh, you’re flying at one o’clock.” So, off you’d go. You wouldn’t know who the next crew was.’

The secret was hiding in plain sight. Everybody knew their own separate parts, including the waitress, without ever knowing the grand plan.

However, the report states the RAAF wanted to publicise its success. ‘Once information from the islands showed that the Japanese had definite knowledge of this new activity some of this could be released’. It never was. Why?

Bob Cleworth stumbled on the secret mining campaign when he was looking for his missing brother Reg whose Catalina vanished in the South China Sea in March 1945. But Reg’s key RAAF documents were missing. It was Bob’s search in Australia and America that began to unravel the lost RAAF mining campaign.

The RAAF Catalinas became victims of their own success. Planes and crews were pushed beyond the limit. The report notes: ‘Constant flying over long distances increased the deterioration and repair problems of the Catalina squadrons enormously. By September 1943, instead of seven on any one night, the number of available aircraft has been reduced to three.

Despite the shortage of aircraft, the list of new targets continued to increase.’

The Catalina’s heavy armour plating was removed to give greater range. But as as technology advanced the Cats stayed the same, becoming increasingly vulnerable.

In 1944, General MacArthur ordered every RAAF Catalina to mine Manila Harbour before his re-invasion of the Philippines. Noel shudders and laughs: ‘‘I was on the guns that night – actually the tracer coming up at us was a bit like fireworks, very beautiful but very frightening.’

Inevitably, the Japanese realised the RAAF Catalinas were mining the ports. Reprisals were brutal. A number of captured crewmen were beheaded.

Bob found the wartime Catalina mining report for his Masters thesis but questioned why its contents weren’t widely known: ‘It was certainly on the record. But the other historians of the period were more concerned with what they considered were the big issues.

‘People concentrated on the big bangs, like the bombing of Berlin, the 1,000 bomber raids.

Who would want to know about a flying boat on a single mission, dropping a couple of mines which would splish, splosh, splash into the ocean? And then a week later the Japanese fleet sails over and blows up.’

Wrong narrative

The RAAF Black Cats didn’t fit the wartime narrative. The atomic bomb gained a terrifying mythical status. The Catalina crews were a discarded reality.

‘They got more recognition from the Japanese after the war than the Americans,’ Bob said.

‘They would have done!’ Philip Dulhunty laughed: ‘The Americans didn’t like to admit it wasn’t them who did everything to win the war. Whereas the Japanese really knew what the Australians were doing - and suffering from it. At the end of war, although it was the Australian Cats that did it, the Americans got all the credit for finishing the war.’

By surprise, one short memo solved the disappearance of his brother and the mining campaign while filming with Bob in the National Archive. Staff found finally a previously unknown file with details of Reg Cleworth’s last flight on March 7, 1944. It was in a US report which stated, his Cat had to fly in at an insane 10 feet above sea level that fatal night.

Bob was stunned. ‘The American’s absorbed our efforts into their history. The RAAF records were absorbed into the American history of the South Pacific operations, therefore they were lost. ’

Philip, a Japanese speaker, was sent to Hiroshima after its atomic bombing. ‘I was devastated by the wreckage,’ he said, ‘There was nothing left standing.’

There he learned a different reason for using the atom bomb: ‘We were going to win the war anyway. The Russians were coming across quickly from northern Asia. MacArthur wanted to get there. That’s why they dropped the atom bomb there – to stop Russia which had declared war on Japan.

‘I’m hoping there’s no need to drop any more atomic bombs. I think people are more aware of the dangers. So, they’d better be very cautious where they might drop them because they might get one dropped on themselves.’

In a cruel twist, in 1970 Cyril’s son Gary, age 15, died of cancer. The family feared it was caused by fallout from subsequent British atomic bomb tests in Australia the 1950s and 60s.

Sitting with his wife Bernice, a wartime nurse, Cyril sobbed, ‘I’m still crying.’

Note: Made with Australian WWII veterans and their families, NAA, RAAF, AWM and a NSW Government grant. Flying Boat v Atom Bomb
Copyright Robert Cockburn, TRAC Productions, Sydney,
Email tracproductions@gmail.com
Website www.tracproductions.com