In World War II, did Aussie airmen in slow old flying boats do more to stop Japan than America’s atomic bombs – and leave a lesson for today?

It was the first AUKUS. In World War II, there was a plan so crazy, US commanders had no “available” aircraft for it. So, the operation fell to Aussie airmen to fly vast distances, get right inside Japanese-held ports at extremely low level, at night, under fierce fire to stop the mighty Japanese Navy and supply ships before they could set sail.

It couldn’t get worse. Until they saw their planes. Slow old Catalina flying boats with canvas wings, the speed of a car, saved from the scrapyard and mocked in US Navy newsreels as “super planes”.

And by a miracle, their RAAF crews turned them into real super planes, recorded as making them an astonishing “40 to 100 times more effective” than the fast bombers they replaced.

They turned aviation on its head to change the course of the war with a different approach. Some say the men in their antique flying boats did more to stop Japan than America’s atomic bombs – at a fraction of the cost in lives and money.

How? And why were the men and their achievements, and a great popular story, forgotten? By accident or design? To understand this mystery, I traced some of the last surviving Catalina crews to make a film of their story, Flying Boat vs Atomic Bomb.

With the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki this August, their lost campaign has a poignant lesson for today’s leaders ramping up military spending and making nuclear threats. It’s a very Aussie film full of ingenuity, humour, tragedy and great courage. They are the antidote to Hollywood’s mega Oppenheimer atomic bomb movie.

“One good feature of the aeroplane was a little electric stove in one compartment,” Catalina gunner Noel Lyon recalls, “We carried a couple of meals for each of us.”

A mission could last 24 hours. Noel shudders and laughs about a raid on Manila Harbour. “The tracer coming up at us was a bit like fireworks: very beautiful, but very frightening.”

“After the war we hardly ever got a mention,” RAAF Catalina gunner Cyril Payne said, “I was talking to a Yank and he said, ‘No bloody way would we go and do this’.”

Rev Dick Udy, radio operator, campaigned for their 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 their maritime fleet was constrained because of the deep-sea mining we did.”

The plan was simply genius. But to stop Japanese ships leaving port to deliver supplies to their front lines demanded the very highest flying skills to place the mines in exact positions.

Between 1943 and 1945, RAAF Catalinas flew with the US Navy 7th Fleet on secret missions for America’s legendary General Douglas MacArthur on a joint Australian-British-US operations. Crews flew as far as China, over hostile seas, uncharted islands and through cyclones. Painted black, they were known as the Black Cats or MacArthur’s Navy.

The economics

America’s Manhattan Project cost $2.2 billion to build the first atomic bomb. A new Boeing B29 bomber, which would drop the bombs, cost $500,000. A Catalina cost $90,000.

The report

The re-emergence of a forgotten wartime report in Australia’s National Archive explains the men’s seemingly impossible achievements:“The contents of these ( blocked Japanese) ships, once they had been dispersed about airfields and in material dumps, would have required about 12,000 sorties for their destruction. The (RAAF) mine-laying operations have inflicted at least 40 times and probably 100 times as much damage as the bombing missions.” The report estimates that four RAAF flying boat squadrons had the same impact on the war as “50 heavy bomber squadrons.”

Yet, this extraordinary document was on a shelf there all the time, largely ignored.

Secrecy

How was such a huge campaign kept secret, and for so long after the war? Everybody knew their own part without seeing the grand plan. Cyril recalled Cat crews were split up. “No two crews lived in the same hotel. Half the time you wouldn’t even know who they were.”

The Black Cats became victims of their own success. Ever more was demanded of them – heavy armour plating removed for greater range. They became increasingly vulnerable and inevitably the Japanese found out. The last mining mission was on 16 July 1945, shortly before Hiroshima was bombed.

“I’m convinced the RAAF Catalina mining missions did more to stop Japan than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said retired Sydney lawyer Bob Cleworth who found the information while trying to find his brother whose Catalina was lost in 1945.

“I think so,” his friend Philip Dulhunty agreed, “We were going to win the war anyway.”

Philip served in Australian infantry intelligence and worked with Catalinas in the war. A Japanese speaker, he was sent to Hiroshima after the atomic bomb incinerated the city. He was 22. “I was devastated. There was nothing left standing.” Philip saw the world differently, making local friends, including with the headmaster of the girls’ high school who lost so many pupils in an instant, and he taught himself to ski in the mountains beyond the city. He also knew another reason for the atomic bombs. “The Russians were coming across quickly from northern Asia. They dropped the atom bomb to stop Russia.”

Wrong narrative

“They got more recognition from the Japanese after the war than the Americans,” Bob said, “Historians of the period were more concerned with what they considered were the big issues: like the bombing of Berlin, the 1000 bomber raids. Who would want to know about a flying boat on a single mission, dropping a couple of mines?”

The flying boats told the wrong narrative. It didn’t fit the American version. “The Americans didn’t like to admit it wasn’t them who did everything to win the war,” Philip said, “Whereas the Japanese really knew what the Australians were doing.”

While filming with Bob in the National Archive, staff found details of his brother’s last fatal flight to China on 7 March, 1945 – in US Navy 7th Fleet records. “The RAAF records were absorbed into the American history of the South Pacific operations.”

Who will identify today’s military and economic equivalent of the Black Cats?

“I’m hoping there’s no need to drop any more atomic bombs,” Philip said, “So, they’d better be very cautious where they might drop them because they might get one dropped on themselves.”

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.