Forgotten
Valor
By John D. Lukacs
he San Antonio Rose II, steel
propellers slashing the skies
above the Celebes Sea, was
hurtling toward hell at 200
miles an hour. The B-17 was
leading a flight of 10 B-25s and
two other Flying Fortresses,
and had just reached the palm-fringed coast of
Mindanao when a wall of black cumulus clouds
suddenly appeared, towering to 20,000 feet and
seeming to bar any approach to the southern
Philippine island.
None of the pilots thought of throttling back.
Not this close. Not with Ralph Royce, an unflappable aviator who had built his career on long
flights under less-than-ideal conditions, personally commanding the mission. Navigators hastily
plotted course corrections and the bombers
proceeded to their destination: a secret military
The triumphant crew of a battle-damaged B-25
gathers at an air base after the Americans’
newsmaking attack on Japanese targets in the
Philippines; pilot “Big Jim” Davies is at center.
An accident of
timing consigned
a groundbreaking
mission to the
shadows
airfield in the highlands of northern Mindanao.
As Royce’s bomber banked to bypass the rumbling tropical thunderheads, the 51-year- old
brigadier general and the plane’s ranking passenger calmly bit into a chocolate bar and
flipped to the next page of his book, The World’s
Greatest Adventure Stories.
The storm, not to mention Royce’s choice of
reading material, was apropos. It was Saturday,
April 11, 1942, the conclusion of America’s dark est, most turbulent week of the war. Two days
earlier, 75,000 American and Filipino troops on
the Bataan Peninsula had surrendered, the largest
capitulation in U.S. military history. That devastating defeat was the latest in a staggering series
of Allied setbacks in the Pacific stretching back to
December 1941, and news of the surrender cast
a pall over the nation. Never was the need for
heroes greater.
In the days to come, Royce and his men flew
into that void and executed the United States’s
first large-scale offensive bombing mission of
the war. Their sorties, originating deep behind
enemy lines, inflicted significant physical and
PHOTO COURTESY OF RONALD HUBBARD; NEWSPAPER: THE NEW YORK TIMES, APRIL 16, 1942 ©1942 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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psychological damage upon Japanese forces occupying the
Philippines. The crews also evacuated key military and civilian
personnel from the doomed territory. And they employed
death-defying, unconventional tactics, quite literally on the fly,
that provided a blueprint for aerial victories that would turn
the tide of war in the southwest Pacific. Yet due to a twist of
timing, only days after the triumphant completion of their mission their sensational, singular adventure story all but vanished
from public consciousness.
The operation that would come to be known as the Royce
Special Mission to the Philippines, or the Royce Raid, was conceived not by a young pilot or air officer, but by an old army
cavalryman. In late March 1942, Lieutenant General Jonathan
Wainwright, commander of the besieged troops on Bataan and
Corregidor, had radioed a plea to General Douglas MacArthur
for bombers to clear a path for supply ships blockaded in the
Philippine Visayan Islands. MacArthur ordered the commander
of the Australia-based Allied Air Forces in the southwest Pacific,
Lieutenant General George H. Brett, to proceed—despite Brett’s
protestations that such a mission was impossible.
As if the distance wasn’t daunting enough—4,000 miles
of enemy-controlled skies and seas separated Manila from
Australia’s northernmost air base, at Darwin—Brett’s command
was paralyzed by the Pacific pandemic of defeatism. In the wake
But there was someone
in Australia who could.
of Japan’s early conquests, a flood tide of refugee military personnel had inundated Australia. But there was little with which
to arm them, especially the pilots. Aerial assets included
Australian Wirraway trainers and Hudson bombers, and a handful of worn-out B-17s and P-40 fighters.
Brett had access to a pool of officers who could lead the mission, but given the circumstances there was really only one
choice: Ralph Royce. The West Pointer had served with the 1st
Aero Squadron in the 1916 Mexican Punitive Expedition and
in World War I, when he received the French Croix de Guerre
for flying the squadron’s first reconnaissance mission over
enemy lines. In January 1930, Royce shepherded the 1st Pursuit
Group on a long-distance test flight through freezing temperatures from Michigan to Washington state that earned him the
prestigious Mackay Trophy. Four years later, Royce again braved
blizzards and ice piloting a B-10 bomber on an experimental
expedition led by then-Lieutenant Colonel Hap Arnold from
Washington, D.C., to Alaska.
Yet for all of Royce’s experience with long journeys and long
odds, he could not magically summon an air fleet. But there was
someone in Australia who could.
As a teenager in Arkansas in 1917, Paul Gunn was
caught running moonshine. A judge gave him a choice: go to jail
or join the service. Gunn chose the navy, where a career as a chief
petty officer and carrier pilot unlocked talents for mechanics and
aviation that would become legend. By the time the United States
entered World War II, Gunn, 42, had retired from the navy and
was living in the Philippines with his family, managing Philippine
Airlines. MacArthur called him out of retirement with a captain’s
commission and orders to shuttle VIPs and supplies on the airline’s twin-engine Beechcrafts.
When the capital city, Manila, fell to the Japanese in January
1942, Gunn’s wife and four children were interned. Japan’s defeat
and his family’s freedom became Gunn’s obsession. Called Pappy,
Brigadier General Ralph Royce radiates confidence in
Australia just before leading his special mission to the
Philippines in April 1942. The Royce Raid was America’s
first large-scale offensive bombing raid of the war; Royce
said it “threw the Japanese into a terrific panic.”
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WORLD WAR II
the bourbon-loving flier was all over the southwest Pacific,
swaggering around wearing a pair of shoulder-holstered .45 automatics and exhaling clouds of cig smoke, exhorting superiors and
civilians with salty language, and exhausting men half his age
while pulling double duty uncrating and assembling A-24
Dauntless dive-bombers and flying combat missions on Java and
supply runs to the embattled Philippines—one of which, on
March 20, 1942, earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Fate guided Gunn on that flight, as it did days later on a
moonlit night at a field in Melbourne, Australia. Gunn was
scouting for machine shops that could service American transports when he made an exhilarating discovery: two dozen B-25
Mitchell medium bombers belonging to the Netherlands East
Indies Air Force, which had no pilots to fly them. Gunn despised
the Dutch—he felt American forces had done a disproportionate share of the fighting in Java—and the find left him furious.
He had recently arranged a transfer to the 3rd Bombardment
Group, which was still awaiting delivery of aircraft from
the United States, so he flew 1,500 miles from Melbourne to the
group’s base at Charters Towers airdrome in north Queensland
and marched straight to the office of his commanding officer,
the 6-foot-6 Colonel John “Big Jim” Davies.
“Jim, I just saw 24 of the prettiest B-25s you would ever want
to see,” Gunn said.
Davies was frustrated with his planeless outfit’s inability to
fight in the Philippines. But when Gunn suggested they grab the
Dutch B-25s, he objected. A military court could call that theft.
COURTESY OF NATHANIEL GUNN; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE
The freewheeling Paul “Pappy” Gunn—shown here in a B-25
called Out of Stock because Gunn used it to scour Australian
bases for aircraft parts that were often “out of stock”—was a
master at getting what he needed, and making it work.
“Goddamit, Jim, the planes have been sitting there for two
weeks,” Gunn barked back. “I want you to get off your ass. Go to
one of your buddies that’s a general and ask him, beg him,
threaten him, but come back with authorization to pick up our
planes from Melbourne! I’ll have them ready for combat in a
few days and we can give the Australians in New Guinea some
much-needed help!”
Two days later, with orders secured from an accomplice at Far
East Air Force Advance Headquarters in Brisbane, Davies
launched a daring plan. He would snatch the Dutch bombers
and when caught, as was inevitable, simply claim he had taken
the wrong B-25s.
Davies, Gunn, and 22 other pilots rode the mail plane to
Melbourne. There, aided by paperwork authorizing the pickup
of the 3rd Bomb Group’s aircraft, they made off with 12 Dutch
B-25s. By the time they stopped at Brisbane to refuel, complaints
and condemnations had caught up with them. But Gunn duped
a duty officer and the 3rd Bomb Group bandits were back on
their way, parking the purloined bombers in revetments at
Charters Towers in the early morning hours of April 3.
Protests by the American and Dutch ambassadors failed to
make a difference. And the Dutch were destined to lose another
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battle: While prepping the bombers, Gunn discovered their
Norden bombsights were missing and brazenly flew one of the
planes back to Melbourne to secure them. A standoff with a
Dutch supply officer ended when Gunn drew both his .45s;
he returned with the Nordens. “Military rules and regulations
bothered him not,” Lieutenant Harry Mangan, a pilot who would
participate in the Royce Raid, said of Gunn. “Rules be damned.
He was fighting a private war.”
On April 6, Davies and Gunn received urgent orders to
report to the Melbourne headquarters of the U.S. Army Forces
in Australia. Fearing disciplinary action, they instead were
rewarded with a mission. Two days later, they met General Royce
in a top-secret briefing. Royce told them that to increase the
B-25s’ range, extra fuel tanks would be installed. The bombers,
Royce explained, would stage out of secret fields on Mindanao
still in friendly hands. The latest intelligence and weather reports
would guide their target selection.
Also present was Captain Frank P. Bostrom, a B-17 pilot from
the 19th Bomb Group, which would be teaming up on the
mission. Bostrom knew the route well; just weeks earlier he
had flown MacArthur and his family from Mindanao over
the Celebes Sea, Timor, and New Guinea to Australia. Since only
six B-17s were available, Royce got just three. Ultimately 10
B-25s would participate in the mission—one with Pappy Gunn
at the controls.
The news of the mission surged through Charters Towers and,
although pilots didn’t know the objective, volunteers deluged
Davies. So fierce was the competition that Captain Ronald
Hubbard, scratched as a pilot because of dengue fever, volunteered
to be a bombardier. Optimism was becoming contagious. On
April 10, Brett ordered a Distinguished Service Cross, the army’s
second highest award for valor, be readied for Royce’s return. But
when the expedition landed in Darwin the morning of April 11
en route to Mindanao, bad news caught up with them. Two
days earlier, Bataan had surrendered.
‘So low you’ll think
we’re swimming.’
The needles on their fuel gauges tilting towards empty,
the bombers were about to be swallowed by the storm swirling
above Mindanao when, “as if by magic, there was a hole in the
cloud cover,” Lieutenant Frank Bender, co-pilot to Pappy Gunn,
recalled. Below them, three gunshots punctured the silence at an
airfield the U.S. military had bulldozed out of one of the Del
Monte Corporation’s pineapple plantations. The rifle reports—
Del Monte Field’s air-raid signal—sent men scrambling for cover
and the bombers scudded to successive landings before wideeyed Del Monte personnel, none of whom had ever seen a B-25.
Brigadier General William Sharp, the commander of a few
thousand Allied troops still carrying on the fight in the southern
Philippines, ushered Royce into the Del Monte Officers’ Club,
which would serve as the mission’s operations center. Bataan’s fall
meant there was no longer a need to attack near Luzon. Yet they
had come to attack and that’s what they were going to do: make
aggressive, archipelago-wide strikes on Japanese ships and naval
and air installations, focusing on the ports of Davao and Cebu,
until they ran out of bombs or fuel. They would also evacuate
various civilians, reporters, and military personnel MacArthur
had cleared to leave the islands.
As a precaution against enemy reconnaissance, Davies led five
B-25s to a strip at Valencia, 40 miles away, where Filipinos camouflaged the planes with jungle foliage. At both fields, crews
pumped fuel and swapped the auxiliary fuel tanks for ordnance
before bedding down beneath their planes.
Royce’s raiders found it difficult to sleep. “Here we were surprising the enemy for the first time,” Bender said. “What a
pleasure [to be] going over the target after having taken so
much grief without having anything with which to hit back.”
The raid’s namesake, however, wouldn’t be going with
them. Official word was that the San Antonio Rose II, in
which Royce was to fly, needed repairs to its number 3
engine. But it’s likely that army forces headquarters had
grounded Royce to deny the Japanese a propaganda coup
should he be lost. Royce would instead choreograph the
raids from his “war room.”
The raid successful, Jim Davies scrawled a
telegram to Royce detailing the actions of the
B-25s he led and warning, “Our aerodrome
now known to the enemy.”
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Tactics developed during the Royce Raid—particularly low-level
strafing and skip-bombing—were used effectively in later raids,
loaded with evacuees. A groggy Gunn then took off in his B-25 for
the second—and most fatefully significant—day of the mission.
like this one at Rabaul, New Guinea, on November 2, 1943.
The B-25s drew first blood around bustling Cebu
Harbor, 150 miles north of Del Monte Field, at first light. Half
struck a Japanese airfield; the rest bombed the harbor from
4,000 feet. As American bombers registered hits on two large
ships, Davies’s B-25 loosed five 500-pound bombs, which bombardier Ronald Hubbard watched walk through “dockside
warehouses setting off several fires and dockside explosions.”
The B-25s then raced home to refuel and re-arm for follow-up
attacks the next day.
The two B-17s were also on their way home after hitting targets in Luzon. One had sunk a tanker near the southern port of
Batangas; the other Flying Fortress, Frank Bostrom’s, had
bombed the runway and hangars at Nichols Field, a former
American air base near Manila. Bostrom then zoomed past
Corregidor, waggling his wings in view of its dazzled defenders.
Royce, riveted to his radio, was ecstatic. “It was a picnic,”
he recalled.
But no sooner had the B-17s landed at Del Monte than three
dive-bombing Japanese floatplanes damaged them and destroyed
San Antonio Rose II. Gunn and other mechanics repaired the two
Flying Fortresses so they could return to Australia the next day
NATIONAL ARCHIVES; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE
On Gunn’s first run over Cebu, a large freighter evaded
his bombs. Incensed, he instinctively plunged into a steep dive.
Minutiae and memories of Gunn’s navy days went ricocheting
through his mind: the arcane knowledge that ships’ guns automatically stop firing when lowered below 18 degrees, to keep them
from blowing themselves out of their mounts. A pilot flying low
enough could get unbelievably close if he dared to. He also flashed
on the lucrative pots awarded to the pilot who could skip a bomb
across the water the most times during dive-bombing training.
Gunn ordered the turret gunners and bombardier to fire their
.50-caliber machine guns forward; he’d release the bombs.“We’re
going in low,” Gunn told them. “So low you’ll think we’re swimming.” Within seconds, the B-25 was 100 feet off the waves, guns
blazing, screaming straight for the ship’s bridge. Squeezing the
trigger and squirming in the Plexiglas nose, Gunn’s bombardier
pleaded with him to pull up, but Gunn had tunnel vision.“Spray
the deck! Spray the deck!” he yelled over the intercom before
releasing two 500-pound bombs and yanking back on the stick.
One bomb convulsed the ship in fiery explosions.
G-forces pinned Gunn to his seat, but could not restrain his
emotions. “That’s the way to do it, boys!” he yelled as he
whipped the B-25 into a crisp, 180-degree turn for another run
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Royce and Davies were awarded the Distinguished Service
Cross shortly after returning to Melbourne (though a
Distinguished Flying Cross had to fill in until the other medal
was available). The citation noted Royce’s “gallant leadership.”
at the enemy. “That’s the way to get ’em!”
“Yeah, that’s the way,” huffed Gunn’s hyperventilating co-pilot,
Lieutenant Bender,“If you want to get us all killed, that’s the way.”
Flush with adrenalin, Gunn dove again, resulting in catastrophic hits with 500-pounders that skipped across the surface
to slam into the ship at the water line, shearing it in half.
Soon, the other B-25 pilots were emulating Gunn. The raid was
stunningly successful: 10 B-25s hit Davao in the morning and
four more in the evening, and four bombers pounced on Cebu.
Despite antiaircraft fire and fire from Zeros and seaplanes, the
strafing B-25s stitched warehouses, docks, and fuel dumps,
mowing down men and sparking huge fires. The fat 500pounders and shrapnel-spattering 100-pound fragmentation
bombs with instantaneous fuses whistled a symphony of destruction upon the Japanese. At Davao, Davies’s copilot, First
Lieutenant James McAfee, saw three of five bombs—those with
“Mother,”“Daddy,” and “Sally” scrawled on them after members
of his family—obliterate a transport, a wonderful catharsis.“I was
scared to death,” admitted one pilot, Major William Hipps. “But
I’ve never had so much fun in my life.”
They were the first Allied bombers to strike the Japanese and
inflict real damage, as well as shock. Over Davao an enemy pilot
sidled his plane up to Hipps’s ship.“He was so close we could see
his face—and it just registered blank amazement,” Hipps recalled.
“He didn’t seem to know where we came from or how we got
there. He never found out either—the rear gunner got a direct
hit on his motor and a few seconds later he went down in flames.”
Back at Del Monte, bombs sent Royce running to a dugout five
times. He even helped put out a fire. More enemy planes, as well
as ground forces, were undoubtedly on their way. As smoke
mushroomed over Cebu and Davao, the general decided that it
was time to leave the Philippines. He ordered the B-25s home.
Gunn had made up his mind, too. Winging back to Del Monte,
his scattered thoughts coalesced. This was the way to fight with a
B-25. Get right down on the water with the ships and blow them to
hell. He couldn’t wait to tell Davies of his tactical revelations. But
the news would have to wait—he had another mission.
Landing that evening at a small strip on the island of Panay,
220 miles to the north, Gunn hurriedly took on four highpriority passengers: UPI war correspondent Frank Hewlett,
two Japanese American intelligence operatives, and a Chinese
military attaché. Back at Del Monte, other priority evacuees—
pilots, staff officers, and a quinine expert—crammed aboard
the remaining B-25s before they took off and headed for
Darwin at 12:50 a.m. on April 14. It would be more than two
years before large American bombers would again appear in the
skies over the Philippines.
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WORLD WAR II
Royce’s Raiders had departed Australia in secrecy
and anonymity, but returned to fanfare. Royce received an extra
priority telegram from U.S. Army chief of staff General George
C. Marshall: “Good work stop Congratulations.” The April 16
New York Times called the raid “the most spectacular aerial thrust
of the Pacific War.” There were press conferences and popping
flash bulbs, as well as a ceremony during which Royce and Davies
were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Gunn, Bostrom,
and the other dirty, exhausted pilots received medals, too, but
they cared little for the accolades or attention.“Just give me a twoinch beefsteak and bed for a week,” James McAfee said.
It was just as well. While Royce’s patchwork aerial armada had
been descending to storm-shrouded Mindanao, a secret naval
task force led by the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, 16 B-25s lashed
to its flight deck, was sailing toward a higher-profile target: Japan
(see “The Avengers,” March/April 2013). The leader of this nearsimultaneous operation was Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle.
Doolittle’s men had been equally unaware of Royce’s adventure. Captain Ted Lawson, in his book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,
described the “sick feeling” he and his fellow Doolittle Raiders got
when a garbled report of the Royce attacks reached them on the
Hornet and “word spread through the ship that Tokyo had been
bombed by four-motored American planes” identical to those
they had aboard.
News of the Doolittle Raiders’ April 18 strike against targets in
Japan reached the world two days after word came of the Royce
Raid, banishing the accomplishments of Royce and his men—
first to the back pages, then to obscurity. Yet the effects of Royce’s
raid carried into 1943 and beyond, perhaps impacting the Pacific
War more extensively than the more famous mission.
Royce’s men navigated a record 4,000 miles, operated for two
days deep within enemy-held territory, sank eight ships, shot
down five planes, inflicted incalculable damage on Japanese
installations and personnel, suffered no casualties, and brought
home all but one—the San Antonio Rose II—of their invaluable
birds. Furthermore, those immediately tangible results paled in
comparison to the raid’s short- and long-term effects on both the
individual, local, and theater levels. The raid rescued nearly three
dozen important individuals from certain captivity or death,
reinvigorated MacArthur’s command, and signaled America’s
resolve—not only to the subjugated people of the Philippines,
but to anxious Australians as well.
Pappy Gunn went to work in his hangar laboratory almost
immediately afterward, reconfiguring B-25s and A-20s into gunships. The mad scientist’s experiments, coupled with innovations
in ordnance and the revolutionary tactics he conceived over
Cebu, synthesized into a deadly technique for skip-bombing and
low-level strafing that would bring astonishing results at the
Battle of the Bismarck Sea in March 1943 and render a devastating attack on the Japanese stronghold at Rabaul the following
November. Gunn was reunited with his family after the liberation of Manila in early 1945.
Ralph Royce would receive a promotion to major general in
June 1942, and serve in Europe, the Middle East, and the United
States through the war’s end. But, as his Distinguished Service
Days after the triumphant completion of the Royce Raid, the
more sensational Doolittle Raid on Japan grabbed the attention
of the public and military—such as Private Adam Pickerz of the
387th Quartermaster Battalion (below), as his unit prepared to
ship out from San Francisco aboard the SS Boschfontein.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES; OPPOSITE: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE
USS Hornet was sailing
toward a higher-profile
target: Japan.
Cross citation supports, it was in the early days of the Pacific
conflict,“at a time when defeatism was…the mandatory doctrine
of the day,” that Royce and his raiders left their mark through
their “determined combative spirit of aggression…, heroism, and
extraordinary achievement.”
“We came back cocky,” said a prescient Royce after the raid,
foreshadowing the whirlwind of Allied aerial offensives that
would descend upon the Japanese.“That’s the way we should and
will come back every time, too. When you have men who feel
cocky; when they get the idea that they’ve got to lick the world,
that’s the time they usually do it.” ✯
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