#394： The Incredible True Story of the Renegade WWII Pilots Who Helped Win the War in the Pacific
Episode Stats
Summary
In 1942, a group of enterprising and rebellious U.S. bomber airmen stationed in Papua New Guinea grew tired of playing defense against the Japanese and decided to take the war to the enemy by going on daredevil, near-suicide missions. In his book, Lucky 666, Bob Drury tells the incredible story of these airmen and their ringleader, Captain Jay Zemer.
Transcript
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purchase of a website or domain. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of
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Manliness podcast. In 1942, the United States was fighting a war in two major theaters, Europe and
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the Pacific. But in the early days of World War II, the U.S. and its allies had a Europe-first
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strategy, which resulted in more troops, supplies and attention being funneled to that theater.
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American forces in the Pacific were charged with protecting Australia from Japan and preventing
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their spread, but given scant resources to fill that mandate. But a group of enterprising and
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rebellious bomber airmen stationed in Papua New Guinea grew tired of playing defense against the
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Japanese and decided to take the war to the enemy by going on daredevil near-suicide missions.
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In his book, Lucky 666, Bob Drury shares the incredible story of these airmen and their
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ringleader, Captain Jay Zemer. Bob walks through the history of the war in the Pacific, including
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internal battles between U.S. commanders and the lack of logistical support American forces
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in the Pacific received in the early days of the war. He then introduces us to Zemer, sharing
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what set him apart from other airmen and why so many were drawn to his charismatic leadership.
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Bob then shares how Jay and his renegade crew took an old dilapidated B-17 bomber and fixed
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it up themselves so they could take the war to Japan. And how these men split their time between
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landing in the brig and receiving awards for valor. It all leads up to a climatic dogfight,
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the longest in U.S. aviation history that would help turn the tide of the war in the Pacific.
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This is a story about friendship, leadership, and gritty boldness that's also incredibly moving.
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Grab a tissue, you're going to need it by the end. After the show's over,
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check out the show notes at aom.is slash lucky666.
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So you co-authored a book called Lucky 666. This is an incredible story. How did you learn
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about this story of a bunch of ragtag airmen who flew an impossible mission during World
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Believe it or not, Brett, it was from a friend of mine now, a grizzled old Marine,
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Dick Bonnelli. And he was a protagonist in a previous book that Tom and I wrote together
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called The Last. It was about the Chosen Reservoir during the Korean War, the last stand of Fox
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Company. And Dick and I just became friends. Uncle Dickie told me to call him. And we still speak
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every couple of weeks. He's in his 90s now. And Tom and I were working on a book about the 11 Marine
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security guards who were mistakenly left on the embassy roof in Saigon in 1975. And Uncle
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Dickie called me. He said, what are you working on next? That's how he spoke. That's how he still
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speaks. And I said, I don't know, Dick, we're kind of searching around. We got a few ideas.
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And as you probably can imagine, Marines are not very fond of the Army. But he said, I got a story
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for you. I can't believe I'm saying this about the Army. But you ever hear about these guys,
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the longest dogfight of World War II? And I said, no, Dick, what are you talking about? And he gave
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me some information. And I started poking around into it. And this magnificent story just,
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it appeared before us. And as we dug further into it, we realized it wasn't just about this dogfight.
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It was about the entire Southwest Pacific Theater, how ignored it was, the infighting between the Army
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and the Navy, between MacArthur and Chester Nimitz. And we just knew we had something. And to this day,
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I thank Uncle Dickie for turning me on to Lucky 666.
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Well, so before we get to the two characters, the main characters you follow in this book,
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there's a whole bunch of, there's a whole host of characters. But two is Jay Zeemer and Joe
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Sarnowski. Let's get some background of the book. Because as you said, this theater of war is often
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overlooked when people think about World War II. I mean, there's, everyone always talks about Normandy
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and Europe, and then, you know, certain parts of the Pacific, Guadalcanal, Midway. Let's talk about
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what was going on. Where did this book take place? And what role did it play in the war?
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Well, let me give you a little background, Brett. Believe it or not, within months of Pearl Harbor,
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the Japanese Empire controlled one-eighth of the Earth's surface. Now, granted, a lot of that was
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ocean. But they were so ready to fight, and they just spread in the West. They were on the Burmese-Indian
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border. And due south from there, they had taken the Dutch East Indies. If you went northwest,
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they had a large chunk of China, and even briefly, a couple of the Aleutian Islands. And then,
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if you curve south from there, they had the Solomons. And in other words, they were girding
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Australia. And everybody expected Australia to be next. But our policy, President Roosevelt's policy
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and the War Department's policy was Germany first. So what little resources we had in the Pacific,
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and specifically in the Southwest Pacific, were basically MacArthur and Chester Nimitz, we're told,
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hold off the Japanese until we take care of the Nazis. 85% of all material, men, grounds,
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crews went to Europe, Germany first. And so these airmen who were in Australia and eventually made
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it to Port Marsby in Papua New Guinea, they weren't content with just playing defense. And believe it
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or not, Australia had a secret plan. They so expected to be invaded that they had a plan to cede the top
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half the continent to the Japanese and hold out in Melbourne and Sydney. And so that's the background
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of where our characters, this is the world our characters in Lucky 666 stepped into. Kind of
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forgotten, half-assed. They didn't get the material they needed. And they were told, just try to put up
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a good fight until we can help you out after we defeat Hitler.
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And I mean, also, they weren't getting the materials they needed, but like the material they
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had, a lot of it was decimated at Pearl Harbor. Exactly. And the planes that they managed to get
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out of the Philippines, the B-26 Marauders mostly, a couple of B-17 Flying Fortresses,
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and any planes that they already had in Australia, that's all they were getting. I mean, it was
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official policy. We cannot send you any more planes. So a fun part of the research of this book was just
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talking to, there were still a few guys alive when we were researching the book, but their sons
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and their nephews, they all had letters saying, these guys were going up and there was no troops
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on the ground in Australia. There was not even any Australian troops. They were all fighting in North
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Africa under Montgomery, the British general. And so it was just airmen. And the Navy was loathe
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to give MacArthur any of their ships. He wanted them all, of course. So he had this ragtag group
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of airmen and the planes they had were the only planes they were getting. They did not have grounds
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crews. They had to act as their own grounds crews. And a lot of them became not only ace pilots and
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bombardiers and turret gunners and tail gunners, but they became mechanics and maintenance men.
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And they were going up, they were patched, they were hammering out soup cans to patch the bullet
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holes in their bombers. They discovered that the Australian sixpence coin was, it fit perfectly in
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the ignition's magneto of a B-17. Believe it or not, they even, when they ran out of air filters,
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they would use women's sanitary napkins. I remember one letter we wrote, one guy preferred
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Kotex over any other plan, over any other brand, because it works so well as an air filter. And
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this is just, I say this by way of the Rube Goldberg-esque nature of the fifth air force,
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the forgotten fifth, they were called. Of course, over in Europe, there was the mighty eighth air
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force. And that got all the ink and all the reporters and all the maintenance crews and all the
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backup parts. And the forgotten fifth down in Australia, they had to make do with whatever they
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could find. And believe it or not, they did. And they did a very good job of it.
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Right. Not only were their planes terrible and sort of the stuff that was left over,
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but like the food, like I think one of the generals went over there to do an inspection and he saw
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there's like maggots in the rice and like, just disgusting. They were eating it because that's all
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That's all they had. There was a protein. That was their protein, lice and maggots. And then when they
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finally, now people, I'll probably have to explain where Port Morrisby is. The Japanese were planning
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to invade Australia from a base in New Guinea, Papua New Guinea. And they had landed and they
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had set up a couple of bases in the north of the country. And it's a big country. In the south,
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on a little peninsula, there was an air base. It was an old Australian air base. The US took it over
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and it was a hell hole. It was surrounded by jungle. There were usually more people in sick
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bay than there were air crews ready to go up. Dysentery ran rapid, malaria, the jungle itch,
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they called it. And this is where our men, our boys, our fly boys were stationed. And the Japanese
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bombed them every single day because in order to invade Australia, they had to drive the Americans out of
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Port Morrisby. And finally, MacArthur and I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I just want to set up
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the scene. MacArthur, of course, he wanted to be the Eastern Ike. He wanted, if Eisenhower was running
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Europe, MacArthur and his gargantuan ego, he wanted to run the Pacific War. But the Navy, believe it or
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not, had been planning, even though they were surprised at Pearl Harbor, they had been planning for a war
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against Japan for decades. And they said, no, all this planning, we're not turning it over to MacArthur.
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We're not turning it over to any other service. We know what we want to do. And of course, they
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eventually carried it out. It was the famous island topping campaign led by Chester Nimitz and Bull
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Halsey, where they took one island and then the next and the next and the next. But in order to
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kind of solve the turf war between MacArthur and Nimitz, instead of making one man the Supreme
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Commander in the Pacific, the War Department, George Marshall, FDR, they kind of drew a line,
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almost went right down the Solomon Islands. Everything to the west was MacArthur. And that
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would be Australia, New Guinea, and everything to the east, all the islands that we took, that the
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Marines took. That was Nimitz. So MacArthur is chafing, A, that he does not have complete control
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of the Pacific War, and B, that he has no troops. And at one point, he put forth a plan to dissolve
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the Marine Corps and make those troops army under him. And of course, you can imagine how well that
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went over with the Marine Corps and with the Navy. So this war within the war almost hampered the
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efforts, the coordination efforts that we had against the Japanese at the time. Now this early
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in the war, I might be, I might be overstating it when I say coordination effort, because as I said
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before, it was just, the plan was hold Australia until we defeat Germany. Please hold Australia. But
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these, these airmen, they weren't content to hold Australia. And in New Britain, at the top of the
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Solomon Islands, the best harbor in the Pacific was at Rabul. New Britain was an island, Rabul was the
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capital of the island. That's where the Japanese set up their air base. Now we could not reach that
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Rabul to bomb it from Australia without refitting and refueling at Port Morrisby. It was 500 miles
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from Port Morrisby, which is why we had to take over the base of Port Morrisby. So we could fly our,
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at first, our B-26 Marauders. And finally, the one when they did get some shipments of the
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B-17 Flying Fortress. So a thousand mile round trip, you couldn't have fighter escorts. Fighters
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couldn't carry enough fuel to fly that far. And these guys started taking the war against Washington's
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orders almost to the Japanese. They started looking for convoys to bomb. They started to see how many
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planes they could get into Rabul and out of Rabul. Now, sometimes it wasn't worth it. They might,
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they might send up a bombing run of, say, 12 B-17s and only eight would make it back. Two might've
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been shot down and two more might've had to ditch into the sea. But they decided that they were going
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to go on the offensive no matter what the War Department thought. And not only were they just
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going to defend Australia, but they're going to strike back against the Japanese. I know that was
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a long answer. I apologize. No, no, it's great. Well, and so we, the state of the U.S. military in the
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Pacific was, okay, resources scarce because it's all going to Europe. Sort of the ragtag
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of the military was sent to the Pacific. And there was this conflict between Nimitz and MacArthur.
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What was the Japanese military like? What were their, I mean, were they really organized,
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disciplined? Yes. Yeah. Give us. Yes. They knew. They knew from the very beginning, they said,
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we, first of all, their first misstep was not taking out, not attacking parole. Our aircraft
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carriers just happened to be out of the Harbor at the time. If our aircraft carriers had been in the
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Harbor at the time, the war in the Pacific might've been over then and there. But once they realized,
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damn, the U.S. still has its carriers. We have to make quick work of this. We cannot give the giant
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United States time to refit all its factories and all its manufacturing base for a war footing.
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And they knew this. So they needed to conquer as much as possible, as fast as possible. And that was
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the whole Australia gambit. Once we take Australia, Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian Islands are a hop,
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skip and a jump away. The United States will be forced to sue for peace. That was the Japanese point
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of view. And on the other hand, as I explained, our point of view is we cannot let Australia fall.
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As long as Australia is a bulwark against Hawaii and the American West coast, we can go about our
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business in Europe. So we got to hold off the Japanese at all costs. Right. And again, but again,
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not only did they, these guys hold them off, they started taking the fight to the Japanese.
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Well, I, you know, it sounds like such a cliche, but when you read the letters and the journals and
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the diaries from the time, it was kind of good old American ingenuity. We're not going to take this
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lying down. And let's face it, we got knocked, we got knocked pretty hard to the mat at Pearl Harbor.
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But suddenly there's the battle of Coral Sea. Suddenly there's a battle of the Bismarck Sea and
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of course, Midway. And we realized, Hey, these Japanese aren't the, the supermen. Yes, sure.
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They're fighter planes. The zeros control the skies and we don't have fighters that can effectively go
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up and dogfight these zeros. But you know what? Our bombers can fly further. Our bombers can carry more
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of a payload. And yes, we're not content just to, to defend the territory they haven't, that we,
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that we already have, which of course at the time consisted of Australia and a few islands like Guam
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and New Caledonia. And once I think a spurring point might've been the invasion, the Japanese
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invasion of Guadalcanal. Cause once the Japanese were on Guadalcanal, if they had established air bases
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there, they would have been within easy bombing range of Melbourne and Sydney. And that's when we kind
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of made the turnaround and it was Nimitz and Halsey said, we got to retake Guadalcanal. And while
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we're retaking Guadalcanal, we want MacArthur to start putting pressure on the Japanese bases,
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not only in New Guinea, but all the way up in New Britain. We were going to go after Rabool.
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Fortress Rabool, it was called. I mean, it was, everybody remembers Fortress Singapore falling on
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the first day, the same day, the day after Pearl Harbor fell, the British outfit in Singapore. But
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Fortress Rabool was really the key to the, to the Pacific war. And we went after, and we went
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after it. And it took us years, took us years and years, but we got it.
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All right. So that's the background of this story. So kind of, it's, it's a classic underdog story,
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I think. So let's get to these two characters. First is Jay Zeemer. Who was he and what was his
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background like? And how did he end up in Port Moresby?
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Well, it's like, you know what, you put it well, it, the story is almost like peeling an onion.
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The big picture, the outside picture is what's going on in the Southwest Pacific theater.
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The next is the forgotten fifth air force. And the next, you peel the next layer off and you come to
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the men, the men who are actually flying these missions, these recon missions and these bombing
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missions. And of course, the protagonist of Lucky 666 is Jay Zeemer, kind of a handsome blonde,
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upper middle class. Think, I don't know if you've ever seen Stalag 17. Think Peter Graves,
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he's in Stalag 17. He always wanted to be a pilot. He went to a military high school and then he
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went to MIT where he was in the ROTC and he was in the flight club. He flew Piper Club. And then when
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war broke out, he signed up with the army air force. Don't forget, there was no air force,
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a separate service at the time. It was the army air force, but there was just something off about
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Jay. He was affable. Everyone on the ground loved him. He was a great teammate. I think back then,
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if they had had the diagnosis, he might've been diagnosed as some type of autistic because once
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he got in the pilot seat, he just continued to screw up. He couldn't, he was, his first plane
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was a B-26 Marauders. And these planes, these bombers, because their engines were so large,
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they were notoriously hard to take off and land. And Jay just couldn't stick the landing. All his
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flight instructors who loved him, who loved him as a man and who loved him as a friend and loved him
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as an airman, but they would like grab the controls from him because he was going to crash land every
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time he went up. So he could never get out of the co-pilot seat, the right seat, they called it.
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So he's on all these bombing missions and he's in the right seat and weird things are happening.
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He's falling asleep as they're approaching their target. He just didn't feel, he might've been one
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of those, like those kids who are too smart for their grades. That might've been Jay, but he just
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was not happy with the B-26 Marauders. And eventually his squadron became very unhappy with him. They
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didn't trust him anymore. I said, I can't have this guy sitting next to me. He's going to fall asleep.
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So they managed to get him to kind of transfer him out. And he went into a unit that was flying B-17
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flying fortresses. And it was almost the symbiosis between the flying fortress and Jay Zemer.
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Something kicked in. He started as a co-pilot and he learned that the B-17 was almost as maneuverable
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as a fighter plane. And he started to go. And once again, crewmen didn't want to fly with him
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because he was an aggressive, he'd do a bombing run and then he'd start attacking zeros.
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And the crews he was with was like, Hey, wait a minute. Hold on. We did our bombing run. Let's
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get the hell out of here. And he said, no, I got, I'm going after that guy down there.
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So finally, even the B-17 crew said, this guy's crazy. I'm not flying with him anymore.
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So what did he do? He had no options. If he wanted to get up and fly, he had to go out and find his
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domain. And now back to the show. And we'll get to how he found his own crew and his own plane here
00:23:23.900
in a bit, but he had a good friend that he met when he signed up with the military and they reunited.
00:23:28.280
It's Joe. Tell us about Joe and Joe Sarnos. Couldn't have been a bombardier, bombardier by
00:23:34.300
trade, probably the best, one of the best in the fifth air force. Joe and Jay had been before they
00:23:39.640
were shipped overseas. They had been stationed together at Langley air base in Virginia, and
00:23:45.600
they did not know each other. Although they were both born in Pennsylvania, unlike kind of upper
00:23:50.400
middle-class J, Joe was one of 16 children of Polish immigrants. His father was a coal miner
00:23:56.800
who was diagnosed with black lung. He bought a small farm. Joe grew up dirt poor. In fact,
00:24:03.860
Joe's first paycheck, he came home at Christmas with gifts for his younger sisters, and it was the
00:24:09.000
first Christmas gifts any of the Sarnoski children had ever gotten. So anyway, at Langley air base,
00:24:14.900
the brass hats from Washington are coming down. They're putting on an exhibition, a bombing exhibition.
00:24:19.000
They're dropping duds, of course, and they have targets laid out, and Jay's watching, and of
00:24:23.780
course, the brass at Langley picked out their best crews to put on this exhibition, and the lead
00:24:29.480
bombardier was Joe Sarnoski, and Jay Zemer's watching. This guy hit the target from 10,000 feet from 12,000
00:24:38.000
feet, and he said, who is this guy? I'm a pilot. I'm supposed to know everything about any plane I fly.
00:24:43.700
If I ever get a B-17, I want to know what makes this bombardier so good. So he sought out. He was
00:24:49.680
an officer. Joe was a staff sergeant at the time. He sought out Joe Sarnoski, and he said, hey,
00:24:55.740
listen, can I buy you a beer? And Joe was a little taken aback. Who's this officer coming up to me and
00:25:00.360
asking me to buy a beer? Is this a joke? Is somebody pulling a prank on me? But as it turns out,
00:25:05.160
they became not best friends quite yet, but they became very good acquaintances, and Jay,
00:25:11.340
the superior officer, picked Joe's brain about everything he knew about bomb sites, about targeting,
00:25:19.460
about lead time. So then they separate. They both are shipped to Australia, but with different units.
00:25:26.400
Joe spent some time in the North Atlantic. He thought he was going to end up in Europe. He was kind of
00:25:30.700
surprised when he found out that he was going to Australia. He's based in Australia. One day,
00:25:36.680
Jay flies in with his B-17, and here comes his new bombardier in a jeep. He said, you're Joe
00:25:41.880
Sarnoski. And he said, yes, I am, Captain Ziemer. How are you? What have you been doing here? So I've
00:25:46.220
been in Australia for three months. And Sarnoski said, I have too, but they have me teaching in the
00:25:51.240
interior. I want to get up on a plane. And Jay said, let me see if I can do something about that.
00:25:55.500
And so Jay basically plucked Joe. Joe was such a good bombardier that they didn't
00:26:00.580
want him up there. They wanted him teaching. Jay plucked Joe and said, I need this man on my crew.
00:26:07.380
And Jay didn't even have a crew. That was the beauty of it. He said, I need this man on my crew.
00:26:12.000
And Jay didn't even have his own crew. So Joe was the first man. And just so happened that the next
00:26:17.520
day they were calling for volunteers for a recon mission over Lai, which was a Japanese base,
00:26:22.820
L-A-I, Lai. It was a Japanese base in Northern New Guinea. Jay said, I'll take that. And he said,
00:26:28.580
Joe, you want to go? And Joe said, I'd love to. Let's load up some bombs. Let's drop some bombs on
00:26:33.760
them while we're reconning. They did it. They hit the target. They came back. And Joe and Jay kind
00:26:38.860
of looked at each other and a light bulb went off over their head saying, you know, we work well
00:26:43.380
together. Let's find some other crewmen like us. I don't know where we're going to get a plane,
00:26:47.700
but let's get the crew first and then we'll worry about the plane.
00:26:50.380
It's okay. So this partnership arises. And what's interesting is like, it's because that
00:26:54.500
no one really cares about this part of the Pacific, that these guys were able to basically
00:27:00.200
do what, I mean, in a way, do what they wanted, right?
00:27:03.440
Exactly. Exactly. This would have never flown. Half the antics we kind of write, Tom and I kind
00:27:10.000
of write about it at Lucky 666 would never have happened. You'd be in the brig if you did this
00:27:14.440
kind of stuff in the European theater of war. But the Pacific was such a vast theater of war
00:27:21.860
and our resources were so few that you could get away with a lot more in the Pacific.
00:27:29.080
You could get away. I mean, there were, I'll give you a perfect example. In the European theater
00:27:34.040
of war and the Pacific theater of war, every airman was required to wear the same uniform,
00:27:40.280
the long, the overall, the coveralls, the flak vest, the helmet. Jay would often go up in a long
00:27:47.580
pair of socks and Australian shorts and Bush boots. And he was not alone. It was a very loose and lax
00:27:55.040
atmosphere compared to the stiffer, more military regulations in the European theater. So when
00:28:02.640
someone like Jay can kind of scam a commanding officer at a teaching post into saying, listen,
00:28:10.620
I need this bombardier for my crew, when he really doesn't even have a crew that would never fly in
00:28:15.660
Europe. But a lot of that kind of stuff went on in the Pacific theater.
00:28:20.080
So how did Jay form this crew? Because like everyone didn't want to fly with, no one wanted
00:28:24.820
to fly with him because he was, he was, he's using a bomber. He's using a bomber to dogfight,
00:28:30.000
Yeah. And he took too many chances. People would come down and say, I'm never flying with you again.
00:28:34.460
You're nuts. You're crazy. He said, that's fine. I'll find somebody else. And it's exactly what he did.
00:28:39.500
Jay was also a storyteller. Joe was a quiet guy. And Jay and Joe kind of started this
00:28:47.840
class in his tent and people and crewmen would, crewmen of like minds would drop by and they'd just
00:28:54.620
sit all night and they'd talk. They'd talk bombing. They'd talk recon. They'd talk wind shear. They
00:29:00.500
would talk anything that had to do with military flight. And gradually a circle formed around Jay and
00:29:07.200
Joe. And as you can well imagine, it was kind of an ultra circle. I mean, their, their, their
00:29:13.860
tail gunner, Pudge Pugh was a Jack LaLanne buff. They called him Pudge. Ironically. If you see,
00:29:18.880
we have photos of him in the book. He was, he's a big muscular guy. It looks like Schwarzenegger.
00:29:23.820
He can barely, he can barely fit back, get through the tailpipe to get to his, to get to his gun.
00:29:29.160
Their, their waist gunner. Most of the B 17s at the time had two waist gunners who stood back to back.
00:29:34.300
Uh-uh. This George, George Kendrick, their waist gunner said, these guns are all mine. I'm manning
00:29:40.260
both sides. No one else is coming in here. George had been, had, had worked his way through, had paid
00:29:45.940
his way through college on the West coast as a pool shark. So they got a pool shark. They got a Jack
00:29:50.940
LaLanne buff, the youngest staff sergeant in the Pacific theater, Johnny Abel, 19 years old,
00:29:56.100
great mechanic, but he wants to be a top turret gunner. But mechanics and maintenance crews were so
00:30:02.500
few and far between his superior was loathe to let Johnny Abel go up. He needed him. He needed
00:30:08.120
him to fix these rotors. So finally Jay pulled rank and he plucked Johnny Abel to become his top
00:30:13.160
turret gunner. I mean, Brett, their, their communications guy, their commo guy was an
00:30:18.620
expert knife fighter. Why they figured they needed a knife fighter at 30,000 feet. I never found out,
00:30:24.600
but these are the kind of men that gravitated towards Jay and Joe. And before you knew it,
00:30:30.480
they had a crew. Okay. We got a crew. Where's our plane? Well, there's not enough planes to go
00:30:36.520
around. Jay was still co-piloting at the time. Every once in a while, he'd get a pilot's assignment,
00:30:41.280
but for the most part, he was co-piloting. And someone, a colonel said to him, almost half
00:30:46.240
jokingly, sure. You want to go down the boneyard at the end of the runway. That's where they kept all
00:30:51.060
the shot up planes that weren't going up again. Want to fix one of them up? Sure. You can have it.
00:30:55.580
That's exactly what they did. So that was, that was old six, six, six.
00:30:58.660
That's the tail number. They found a shot up plane. And the first thing Jay did, Jay Ziemer
00:31:05.340
instructed the crew, he said, listen, we're going to make this plane the fastest in the Pacific
00:31:11.200
theater. So I want you to strip a thousand pounds out of this. I don't care where you find it, but
00:31:16.700
find a thousand pounds. So they just, they were everything from, well, you can imagine what a piss
00:31:22.880
pipe is. Everything from piss pipes to extra lockers to overhead bins, boom, out the door,
00:31:28.760
out the door. Next, they said, okay, we're going to scrounge every other plane in this boneyard
00:31:34.760
until we get tires, until we get four new engines. They weren't new engines, of course, but there were
00:31:39.360
four engines that worked. And finally, he said, now we're going to make this the most heavily armed
00:31:45.620
plane, not only in the Pacific theater, but perhaps in the world.
00:31:49.020
We're taking out all these little namby-pamby 30-cal machine guns, and we're putting 50-cal
00:31:54.440
machine guns in. And where every other B-17 has one, we're going to put two. And as it turns out,
00:32:00.760
old 666, they never got around to naming it. You know how you see the war movies and they were
00:32:05.860
with Tojo's Death Dream and Here Comes the Bomb. It's like, they never got around. They were so busy
00:32:12.960
building this plane, they never got around to naming it. And because the last three numbers of its tail
00:32:17.060
numbers were 666, they just took to calling it old 666. They put in 19 50-cal machine guns,
00:32:24.400
including one which Jay, he had Johnny Abel hook it up so he could fire it from the steering column
00:32:30.380
in the pilot seat. He called it his schnozzola gun. And when they finally passed their flight test,
00:32:36.260
they were indeed the most heavily armed. Most B-17s would carry 13 to 14 guns. Jay carried 19.
00:32:44.040
17, manned, and two, his motto was, anything doesn't work, throw it out. Your gun jams,
00:32:50.640
throw it out. We're carrying two extra. Just hook it in. Hook it into the ratchet. And so
00:32:55.260
once they passed their flight test, as you can imagine, well, maybe you can't imagine,
00:33:00.720
so I'll explain it to you. They just started volunteering for every crazy mission that came
00:33:05.680
down the pike. This crew, they were as regular as the Angela standing outside the operations hut
00:33:12.180
every morning. What do you got? What do you got? What do you got? Where are you going? You got
00:33:15.480
anything for us? And people were more than happy to say, yeah, we need somebody to lead a bombing
00:33:22.060
run or a boom. Or we need to see, we understand that there might have been reinforcements brought
00:33:27.940
into lay. We need a single recon mission up there. Can you do that? And as it happens,
00:33:33.580
they started to get a reputation. These are the go-to guys. These are the guys we want. When the
00:33:39.660
mission looks almost suicidal, let's get Ziemer and his crew of Eager Beavers. They got our nickname,
00:33:45.100
Eager Beavers. And that wasn't their only nickname. I mean, we found some magazine articles from the
00:33:51.820
time, magazine and newspaper articles from the time. And back then, the word screw was kind of a swear
00:33:57.360
word. And yet in every one of these guys were known as the screw-ups. These were the screw-ups that
00:34:01.920
would do any mission for you. But half the time, you'd have to bail them out of the brig because
00:34:05.720
that's where they'd be after a bar fight. So they volunteer for all these different missions,
00:34:09.740
some of them pretty much suicide missions. Tell us about the mission where it was definitely a
00:34:14.660
suicide mission and they engaged in this epic dogfight that's probably the longest that
00:34:19.720
happened in World War II. This was June 1943. And I wasn't kidding about the brig either. I mean,
00:34:27.640
Jay and Joe were always getting in trouble. Jay, at one point, he didn't like the way the crew was
00:34:33.020
eating. And we talked about it before. I mean, the food was just horrible. So he made a run. He knew
00:34:38.580
a farmer back in Australia where he had been stationed in Australia. He borrowed a B-17, made a run,
00:34:44.360
filled it up with meat and fresh vegetables, and came back and got caught. They threw him in jail.
00:34:49.280
On another point, he and Joe, there was a whorehouse on Rabool that intelligence,
00:34:55.520
American intelligence, had figured out the top Japanese admirals and generals were using the top
00:35:00.800
floor of this fancy old hotel as a whorehouse. And they were bringing in geisha girls from Japan
00:35:06.780
to service them. And so Jay and Joe were told, you got to bomb this hotel. But they went up twice and
00:35:13.200
twice Joe disobeyed order. Once he bombed a fuel dump and once he bombed an ammunition dump. And both
00:35:19.120
times he came back and he just said, you could throw me in jail, but I'm not bombing no geisha girls.
00:35:23.740
So they did. They threw him in jail until a reporter found out about it. A reporter for
00:35:29.300
the Associated Press wrote about it. And a general got all upset about it. No, a congressman,
00:35:33.940
a visiting congressman got all upset about it and got him out of jail.
00:35:36.960
Well, I was going to say to one interesting point with these guys, sometimes they do these
00:35:39.800
antics and it looked like they were thrown in jail, but then like later they would get some
00:35:46.840
They've won a silver star for something they'd been in the break for.
00:35:49.300
That's how kind of loose the rules were, especially in the Southwest Pacific. So in June of 1943,
00:35:58.400
Admiral Halsey, he's retaken, his Marines have retaken Guadalcanal and they're slowly making their
00:36:05.580
way. It's like the mini island hopping up the Solomon Islands and they're taking every Solomon
00:36:10.980
Island from South to North. The big one at the very top of the chain, Bougainville. It's just South of
00:36:17.860
New Britain, which again is the home to Rabul, Fortress Rabul. If they can, if the allies can
00:36:24.800
get Bougainville under their control and put airstrips in Bougainville, now they're close
00:36:30.960
enough to Rabul for fighter planes to give the bombers air escorts. So Bougainville is the next big,
00:36:38.920
I know we talk about Midway and we talk about, but Bougainville was one of the unsung fights of
00:36:45.980
World War II. But Halsey, A, he knows the Japanese control Bougainville, but he's not quite sure
00:36:52.320
where their strengths lie and what kind of defenses they have. And B, he wants to land his invasion
00:36:58.920
force in Empress Augusta Bay, which is known to have some of the worst and sharpest coral reefs
00:37:06.100
in the world. So he needs a recon flight. A fighter plane won't make it. It can't get that far. It doesn't
00:37:11.980
have enough fuel. They're not going to send up a flight of bombers. They need one bomber to fly
00:37:17.640
1,200 miles round trip and take pictures of Bougainville, both where the Japanese defenses are
00:37:25.960
and they had ultraviolet light cameras that would pierce the bay and show them where the reefs are.
00:37:32.960
So, of course, Jay and Joe, they hear about this and then they're down at the operations hut the next
00:37:37.440
morning and say, yeah, we'll do this. We'll do this. And I got to say for the first time,
00:37:41.400
Jay did go to the crew. And as I've been in a lot of, I've been around a lot of military people,
00:37:49.420
war is not a democracy. But for this, this was such a dangerous mission. Jay did go to his crew and
00:37:55.280
explained to every man, listen, I'm pegging our chances of making this at 25%. And if any one of
00:38:02.080
you doesn't want to go, I understand completely. Joe, just a week earlier, had already gotten his
00:38:07.920
papers shipped back to the States. He was going to be a bombardier instructor in the States. He didn't
00:38:13.300
have to go. And they weren't even carrying bombs. There was no sense having a bombardier. But Joe
00:38:18.200
said, no, I'm not sending you up there. There was going to be somebody in the nose. That's where
00:38:23.080
the bombardier was stationed. He said, I'm not sending you up there with somebody you don't know.
00:38:26.520
I'm going. So Jay and Joe and the crew, they step forward. They go out, they take off. They're
00:38:32.480
taking off at three in the morning. Suddenly a Jeep comes out on the runway, stops, stops their
00:38:38.040
plane. Officer runs up to Jay, hands it, actually ran up to the waste gunner, hand him a note.
00:38:45.260
Waste gunner runs it up to Joe, to Jay in the cockpit. And it says, listen, while you're up there
00:38:49.820
reconning Bougainville, can you also take photos of this little island at the tip of Bougainville,
00:38:55.060
the northern tip? It's called Bougainville. We know there's an airstrip there. We just don't
00:38:59.480
know how big. We don't know how many enemy planes. What have they got there at Bougainville?
00:39:04.820
Jay says, no, I'm not doing that. Because in order for these cameras to work, he had to fly at a slow
00:39:12.220
and steady pace, 500 miles per hour at the same. He could, if he tipped a wing a couple of inches,
00:39:20.080
it would throw off the lat long, the latitude and longitude by miles. That's the only way these
00:39:26.440
cameras would work, especially when they were photographing the reefs beneath the water.
00:39:31.000
And he said, if I fly slow and low over Bougainville, there's an enemy airfield on Bougainville.
00:39:37.000
There's two on Bougainville. They're going to, why don't you just telegraph them and let me know,
00:39:41.960
let them know I'm coming. So they get there. But what they hadn't counted on is that because they're
00:39:47.100
flying with no bombs or just flying with cameras and they're big tailwind, they arrive an hour
00:39:52.140
early. It's too early for the cameras to work. And so Jay gets on the horn, the interplane radio,
00:39:59.740
and he says, okay, fellas, listen, we got an hour to kill. We can either vector out over the sea and
00:40:05.880
come back when the sun's right for taking pictures, or we can do this Bougainville thing that they want
00:40:12.180
us to do. And everybody voted for Bougainville. So they fly over Bougainville. Cameras can't work,
00:40:17.740
but they see, they take notes of how many planes are on Bougainville. Suddenly the tail gunner comes
00:40:22.300
up and says, they're coming up. 12 planes are coming up off Bougainville after them. But now Jay
00:40:26.960
is still hustled. He's got a choice. He can photograph low and slow Bougainville, and most especially
00:40:34.260
the Empress Augusta Bay, and let those Japanese planes catch him, or he can take off. He can run for home.
00:40:40.100
He's already done half his job. He's already found out what's on Bougainville. And he says,
00:40:44.480
no, if we don't get this film back to them, they're just going to send up another crew.
00:40:48.640
Why put another crew in danger? Let's do this. We're here. So they fly low and slow. And sure
00:40:53.580
enough, the planes from Bougainville, not only the planes from Bougainville catch him, but two flights
00:40:58.660
come up from Bougainville. Now they're surrounded. 44 minutes of a dogfight. They shot down six zeros.
00:41:05.480
Everybody, every crew member, except for Pudge Pugh in the tail and the bottom turret gunner
00:41:13.400
is wounded or bleeding out. The plane is shot to hell. Finally, they've been fighting for so long
00:41:20.520
that the Japanese zeros are running out of fuel. That's the only reason they make it back. But they
00:41:25.300
realize we don't have enough. We can't get enough lift to get over the mountains to get into Port
00:41:31.280
Morrisby. Plot us a course for Dobidora, which is on the East coast of New Guinea. He said, I don't
00:41:39.820
know if we're going to make it. We might have to ditch, but we got to get this. It was poignant.
00:41:44.500
And one of the letters to Jay sent to his, to his mother. Yes, it was his mother. And he said, mom,
00:41:51.560
I realized when I'm on a bombing run, when you drop your rocks, that's what they call the dropping
00:41:57.780
the rocks. When you drop your rocks, if you don't make it home, if you have to make a water landing
00:42:04.340
or even a crash landing before you reach the airfield, at least you have the satisfaction
00:42:08.800
of knowing that you've done your job. You dropped your rocks. But now Jay is saying,
00:42:13.920
if I don't get this film back, this entire mission will be for naught. And just sheer force of will,
00:42:21.340
he's sitting in the cockpit, the cockpit, the whole left side of the cockpit is torn off.
00:42:27.040
He has taken a rocket to the cockpit. The co-pilot is out cold. He doesn't know if the co-pilot is dead
00:42:31.840
or not. And he can look down and he can see that his left leg looks like hamburger. And he can feel
00:42:39.640
that he's bleeding out. He can feel his boot filling with blood. And suddenly he looks at his right wrist
00:42:45.740
and with each heartbeat, blood is spurting out of his right wrist. He's also taking shrapnel there.
00:42:52.000
He turns around, he looks up to Johnny Abel. Johnny Abel tries to drop down from the top turret to help
00:42:57.340
him. Johnny Abel drops down and he realizes he's been shot in both legs and he can't stand up.
00:43:02.440
Suddenly there's a fire. There's a fire back in the commo room. They go back to the commo room and
00:43:07.620
Willie Green, the commo guy, is out. He's taking shrapnel to the neck. He's laying on the ground trying to
00:43:12.700
stop the bleeding from his neck. Johnny Abel puts out the fire with his bare hands, burns his hands.
00:43:19.260
And all the while, because of the rocket that blew up their entire cockpit, now Jay can see down
00:43:26.640
right into the nose. And he sees Joe Sarnoski just leaning over his two machine guns, a puddle of blood
00:43:35.060
around him. He's figuring Joe is dead. He doesn't know for sure, but he's figuring Joe is dead. He's not
00:43:40.540
moving. But his main thought is, I got to get this film back or this entire flight will be for
00:43:46.120
nothing. And sure enough, they make Dobadura, crash land of Dobadura. They're being carried out
00:43:53.680
as the meat wagon boys. That's what they call the medics. The meat wagon guys come. They tear off
00:44:00.340
what's left of the glass around the cockpit. And Jay, who's out kind of, he looks like he's out cold,
00:44:05.220
but he, he hears a voice say, forget the pilot, get him last. He's dead. And he wants to scream.
00:44:11.120
I'm not dead. I'm alive. But they got him last. He lost half the blood in his body. They were lining
00:44:18.500
up for weeks to trans, to give him transfusions. And as you well know, Brett, this was the only flight in
00:44:26.760
the history of either the U.S. Army Air Force or the Air Force, where two members of the same flight
00:44:33.200
crew were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Jay Ziemer and Joe Sarnoski were both awarded the
00:44:40.640
armed military's highest honor. One of them was awarded posthumously. Now, I'm tempted to say to
00:44:47.060
your audience, if you want to find out which one, go buy the book. But if you want to know, I'll tell you.
00:44:51.860
No, we'll, we'll say, uh, you know, go buy, go buy the book. We'll leave it.
00:44:57.880
It was Joe. It was Joe who died because you know why I have a, I have a, a poignant story. I'm
00:45:03.300
jumping ahead a little bit. Jay went through many, many operations, but on the, oh my goodness,
00:45:09.820
I think I'm going to cry on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Jay was invited back to Pearl Harbor.
00:45:16.200
He was living in Maine at the time and he was invited back to Pearl Harbor, uh, for a ceremony.
00:45:23.060
And at one point he was taken to the, the, the punch bowl, which is the giant graveyard there
00:45:29.540
in an old extinct volcano. And as far as Jay knew, Joe was buried back in New Guinea. They buried him
00:45:38.000
on the mound. Jay was in a hospital when they buried Joe. He couldn't even, you know, he wasn't
00:45:42.100
even conscious when they buried Joe, but the guys who could walk or could be wheeled out the crew
00:45:47.080
members who could be wheeled out, they attended the ceremony and they, they buried him under a mound
00:45:51.520
near, near, uh, Port Morrisby. And for all Jay knew, Joe was still there. And so he's being escorted
00:45:59.060
into the punch bowl and a communications officer. By this time he was retired. Colonel, Colonel
00:46:06.400
Zeemer, we have something we'd like you to see. And they led him to a grave and unknown
00:46:13.360
to Jay previously, 10 years earlier, Joe's body had been dug up and transferred back to
00:46:19.440
the punch bowl. And when Jay saw the headstone and the marker, it wasn't even a headstone.
00:46:25.500
It was a marker that it was, uh, Joe Sarnoski. Jay was on crutches by this point. He put his
00:46:32.400
crutches down and he knelt down and he started crying over the grave. And that's how we end
00:46:38.100
the book. And, uh, uh, I don't know. I'm a little speechless. So say something.
00:46:45.220
No, it's, it's a great story of friendship, of heroism, of grit, termination. I'm curious
00:46:52.720
as you wrote this book and you talk to the family members of these, these guys, what did,
00:46:59.740
I mean, this is the art of manliness podcast. What did you learn about being a man after
00:47:02.760
writing about these guys? You know, Brett, uh, I think you're familiar with my background. You
00:47:08.340
know, I've been, not only do I write military history, nonfiction books, but for a good 20
00:47:13.600
years, almost two decades, I was a, I was a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent. And
00:47:18.200
I was hell holes in Afghanistan to Iraq, to Darfur, to Sarajevo. And I think
00:47:26.380
what strikes me the most to answer your specific question is how little it takes, whether it's
00:47:37.360
World War II, whether it's Korea or whether it's Dashtikala in Afghanistan, how little it
00:47:43.500
takes for ordinary men like Jay Zimmer and Joe Sarnosky and, and hundreds and thousands
00:47:50.640
of, of war fighters, kids to me that I've met over the last 20 years, how little it takes
00:47:58.460
them to go from the ordinary men rising to extraordinary circumstances. Let me put it
00:48:04.820
that way. And I think we all have something in us that we don't know we have in us until
00:48:09.880
we're faced with that kind of situation and more times than not. And I've been in some hairy
00:48:14.460
situations. I mean, I took a bullet in my leg in Afghanistan, I got blown off a helicopter
00:48:19.260
in Iraq. I still have some shrapnel in my arms from Sarajevo. And more times than not, I've
00:48:25.820
seen people who could be your neighbor, your grocer, your local cop, your fireman, I've seen
00:48:33.020
them run towards the fighting and run away from the fighting. And it, it, it makes me, I
00:48:42.880
don't want to get all sloppy patriotic on you, but it makes me feel good when I see
00:48:48.200
whether it's older men, guys older than me, like Dick Benelli, the Marine at the Chosen
00:48:53.560
who gave me the idea for this book, or whether it's some 19 year old kid, if they have it
00:48:59.500
inside of you, then I think it's probably inside of me. And I think you could probably
00:49:04.040
say the same thing about yourself. And I think most of your listeners could probably say the
00:49:08.880
same thing about themselves. I don't know if that makes any sense or not.
00:49:12.880
No, it makes perfect sense. It's a great way to end. Bob, where can people go to learn
00:49:18.280
You know what? I have an amazon.com page. If you just go to amazon.com and type in the
00:49:23.140
bar in the subject line, Bob Drury, all my books come up. In fact, I'm line editing. We
00:49:27.700
have to do this again, Brett, because I just last week we handed in our next one will be
00:49:32.300
out in October on Valley Forge. You want to talk about the art of manliness, what
00:49:37.540
those soldiers want you. My goodness gracious. But yes, Bob Drury on amazon.com and you'll
00:49:43.760
see my work and you'll even see a picture of me with my bald head.
00:49:48.340
Well, Bob Drury, thank you so much for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure.
00:49:51.080
Brett, thank you. Thank you for enjoying the book.
00:49:53.800
My guest today was Bob Drury. He's the co-author of the book, Lucky 666. It's available on amazon.com
00:49:58.820
and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is slash lucky666. We can find
00:50:03.580
links to resources where we can delve deeper into this topic.
00:50:07.540
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and
00:50:22.020
advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy the
00:50:25.940
podcast, I've gotten something out of it. I'd appreciate it if you take time to give us a
00:50:28.980
review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done it already, thank you. Please share
00:50:32.920
the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always,
00:50:36.220
thank you for your continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay