In November 1943, Admiral William Halsey ordered two American aircraft carriers (Saratoga and Princeton) to attack Rabaul Harbor, the most heavily defended Japanese base in the Pacific, despite having no heavy cruisers within range. The raid, conducted by Commander Henry Caldwell's Air Group 12, successfully damaged four heavy cruisers and two light cruisers while losing only 13 aircraft. This bold carrier strike strategy proved decisive, as it destroyed the Japanese cruiser fleet that had been sent to destroy the Bougainville landing, and critically depleted the air groups Japan had stripped from six fleet carriers to defend Rabaul, fundamentally altering the strategic balance in the Pacific theater.
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He Didn't Know If Anyone Behind Him Was Still Alive
Added:November 5th, 1943.
10,000 ft over Rabaul Harbor.
Commander Henry Caldwell's rear gun turret is dead. His photographer is dead in the seat behind him. Camera still in his hands.
Eight Japanese fighters are turning back for another pass. Below him, Rabaul.
367 anti-aircraft guns. 200 Japanese fighters spread across five airfields.
And in the harbor, every heavy cruiser Japan could reach rushed south from Truk less than 24 hours ago.
More naval firepower than the entire United States Pacific Fleet has within a thousand miles.
Admiral Halsey has exactly two aircraft carriers in the South Pacific. He sent both of them.
Straight at that.
What happens in the next 20 minutes decides whether the Marines holding Bougainville have a beachhead or seven Japanese cruisers waiting offshore in the dark.
It also decides something else.
Something that won't surface for another seven months, 1,500 miles north in a battle this raid is quietly setting up right now.
Almost nobody has heard Caldwell's name.
Almost nobody has heard what two American carriers did to the most heavily defended harbor in the Pacific that morning. Or what it cost the men in the planes.
If stories like this matter to you, the ones that never made it past a single paragraph in the history books, that's what the like button is for.
It's how more of them find their way back into the light.
18 hours earlier, nobody thought this was even possible.
Four days before that, on November 1st, 14,000 Marines come ashore at Cape Torokina on the western coast of Bougainville.
Not the strongest beach on the island.
Not the obvious choice. A patch of jungle 200 miles south of Rabaul.
Close enough that once an airfield goes in, American fighters can finally reach the fortress everyone has been talking about for 2 years.
The Marines dig in.
Engineers start clearing jungle for a runway.
And 200 miles north, Rabaul wakes up.
By the fall of 1943, Rabaul isn't just a base, it's the largest concentration of Japanese military power outside the home islands.
Five airfields, close to 600 aircraft when everything is counted.
Anti-aircraft guns ringing the harbor.
Guns that have been waiting 2 years for something to shoot at.
The morning after the landing, they get their chance.
Waves of dive bombers and fighters come down out of Rabaul's airfields going after the ships still unloading off Bougainville.
The beachhead holds.
The very next day, November 2nd, the Fifth Air Force went after Rabaul directly.
72 B-25 Mitchells and 80 P-38 Lightnings going in low over Simpson Harbor in broad daylight skip bombing Japanese shipping at near masthead height.
They lost roughly a dozen aircraft in a few minutes over the harbor.
The Fifth Air Force would later call it Bloody Tuesday.
The men who flew it described the defenses as the heaviest they had ever encountered anywhere in the Pacific.
Rabaul had already shown, just 3 days earlier, what it did to aircraft that came after it.
But Tokyo isn't done.
November 4th, a B-24 on routine patrol north of the Admiralty Islands radios back a sighting. Warships, 19 of them, heading southeast toward Rabaul.
By the time the report reaches Halsey's headquarters on Espiritu Santo, the picture is clear.
Admiral Mineichi Koga, commander of Japan's Combined Fleet, has sent a force of heavy cruisers south from Truk.
Six heavy cruisers, one light cruiser, five destroyers arriving in Rabaul Harbor on November 4th to join cruisers and destroyers already anchored there.
Combined, it is the most powerful surface force Japan has assembled in the South Pacific in over a year.
The plan is straightforward, and it has worked before.
Wait for dark, race south to Bougainville, stand off the beach, and put 8-in shells into every American ship still unloading.
The same way Japanese cruisers had torn apart an American formation off Savo Island 14 months earlier before American sailors had figured out what was coming. Kurita's ships left Truk on November 3rd. They reached Rabaul on the 4th.
They planned to be off Bougainville before dawn on the 6th.
If that force reaches Bougainville, the Marines on that beach have nothing that can stop it.
Halsey doesn't have anything that can stop it, either. His battleships, his heavy cruisers, the ships built to fight other ships, they're thousands of miles away, already moving toward the Gilbert Islands for an invasion that's been on the calendar for months.
There isn't a single American heavy cruiser within range of Rabaul.
What Halsey has is two aircraft carriers, Saratoga and the light carrier Princeton, Task Force 38 under Rear Admiral Frederick Sherman.
And at the moment the report comes in, they're 500 miles away, sitting still, taking on fuel from an oiler near Rennell Island.
Halsey would later call it the the desperate emergency that confronted me in my entire term as ComSoPac.
There's no time to wait for something better. No time to build a different plan.
Just two carriers against a harbor that no carrier has ever been sent against.
Because until now, no one has been willing to risk it.
Halsey sends the order anyway.
Sherman gets the message and turns his ships northwest toward Rabaul at flank speed.
27 knots through the night. Every man not on watch trying to sleep through engines run flat out for hours that won't stop.
On Saratoga, Captain Cassidy gathers the air group commanders.
"Boys," he tells them, "we are hitting Rabaul tomorrow morning."
Dawn, November 5th.
On Saratoga's flight deck, engines are turning before the sky is fully light.
Deck crews moving fast. Chocks pulled.
One plane after another rolling forward into position.
97 aircraft total.
33 Hellcat fighters.
22 Dauntless dive bombers. 16 Avenger torpedo bombers. That's Saratoga's share.
From Princeton, 19 more Hellcats, seven more Avengers.
Every operational aircraft either carrier has.
Nothing held in reserve.
Commander Henry Caldwell climbs into one of the Avengers.
He isn't carrying bombs. His job is to run the strike. Every squadron in the air coordinated over the radio while two Hellcats from Princeton fly escort around him.
Behind him, in the gunner's seat, aviation ordnanceman Kenneth Bratton.
Behind Bratton with a camera, photographer's mate first class Paul Barnett.
There hasn't been time to plan this in any real detail.
No briefing books worked out days in advance. No rehearsal.
Whatever happens over Rabaul, the squadron commanders are going to have to figure it out over the radio in the air as it happens.
2 hours to target. 230 miles.
And the weather, for once, cooperates.
Clear skies almost the whole way.
By the time the formation crosses the southern tip of New Ireland and lines up on St. George's Channel, the pilots can see 50 miles ahead of them.
Rabaul is just sitting there.
Wide open.
Six of the seven heavy cruisers on the target list are moored inside Simpson Harbor.
Some of them are refueling. Fuel lines still running. Sailors still working on deck. Nobody looking at the sky.
For a few moments longer, nobody down there knows what's coming.
Then the harbor's defenses wake up all at once. 367 anti-aircraft guns firing together.
The sky over Simpson Harbor turns black with smoke and tracer fire. Thick enough that the formation has to fly straight through it.
There's no way around.
The American planes go in anyway.
Dive bombers nose over towards the cruisers. Torpedo planes drop down low, skimming the water.
Fighters peel off to meet whatever zeros are scrambling up to stop them.
10,000 feet above it all, Caldwell is still on the radio, still talking squadrons onto their targets.
Then eight Japanese fighters break off and come for him.
The Avenger's main defense is a gun turret behind the pilot.
Against eight zeros, it doesn't last.
The turret takes a hit early and goes dead.
A 7.7 mm round comes through the fuselage and catches Barnett in the head.
He dies with the shutter already pressed. The last frame he ever takes is the zero that kills him, nose on, guns firing, close enough to fill the whole frame.
Bratton is hit, too.
Wounded, but alive.
The intercom is gone with the turret.
There's no way for Caldwell up front to call back and find out who's still breathing.
By one account from that morning, he believed for a while that he was the only man left alive on the plane.
Then someone behind him scrawled a note on a scrap of paper and passed it forward.
The other two were out of commission.
Caldwell keeps flying. He has one gun left, the fixed machine gun in the nose, and he uses it fighting off the zeros himself until they finally break away.
What's left of his Avenger turns back towards Saratoga.
No radio, no hydraulics, no aileron control, only one main wheel will come down.
Caldwell brings it in anyway.
First attempt, one wheel touches the deck, the plane skids hard to one side, and it's down.
He isn't the only one who makes it back like that.
A few spots over on Princeton, Lieutenant H. M. Crockett's Hellcat comes home with more than 200 holes punched through it, and a few in Crockett himself.
No flaps, he lands it anyway.
By the time the strike force is back aboard and every plane is counted, the United States Navy has lost 13 aircraft over Rabaul that morning.
Japanese radio claims 49.
The real number is 13.
And in the harbor below, the harbor Caldwell had spent the whole flight looking down on, his own squadron was just getting started.
While Caldwell was fighting for his life at 10,000 ft. His own squadron was finding targets 2 miles below him.
Bombing Squadron 12, Caldwell's squadron, has the heavy cruiser Maya in its sights.
She's one of the ships caught refueling, fuel line still connected when the dive bombers roll in.
By one account, Lieutenant James Newell takes his Dauntless down on Maya, and his bomb goes straight down her smokestack into the engine room.
Maya doesn't sink. She doesn't have to.
A cruiser with her engine room blown open is finished for months. Towed first to Truk, then all the way back to Japan for repairs that will keep her out of the war for almost half a year.
One bomb, one stack, 5 months in drydock.
She isn't the only one having a bad morning.
>> [clears throat] >> Across the harbor, the heavy cruiser Mogami takes a 500-lb bomb and catches fire.
By the next day, she's being towed out of Rabaul by another cruiser, Suzuya.
Smoke still pouring off her as they go.
By the time the American formation turns for home, four heavy cruisers and two light cruisers in Simpson Harbor have taken hits. A pair of destroyers, too.
Smoke is standing over the anchorage in columns thick enough that pilots climbing away can still see it behind them long after the harbor itself has dropped below the horizon.
Not one ship sinks that morning.
That was never really the point.
The idea, as one of Saratoga's fighter squadron commanders put it afterward, wasn't to sink a couple of ships outright.
It was to [ __ ] as many as possible all at once, so that none of them could do anything for a long time.
That's exactly what 97 American planes had just done in about 20 minutes to the cruiser force Japan had sent south to break the landing at Bougainville.
Down in Simpson Harbor, Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita has a decision to make.
His second fleet came south from Truk for one reason.
To put those 8-in guns to work against the American ships and landing craft off Bougainville.
Sail down after dark, find the invasion fleet, and tear it apart in a night action.
The same way Japanese cruiser squadrons had done more than once already in the Solomons.
Instead, several of his cruisers are burning.
One of them has a hole punched straight through her engine room.
And there's no telling whether those American carriers will be back before sundown.
Within a day, Kurita's battered fleet is underway heading north back toward Truk.
The Marines on Bougainville never see those cruisers.
Not that night. Not ever.
A fleet that came south to wreck a landing has been wrecked itself by a force of carrier planes that anyone in Tokyo would have said couldn't be spared. Flown by men who'd had less than a day to put the attack together.
Six days later, Caldwell's air group would be back over that same water.
Six days. That's how long it takes for Caldwell's air group to be back in the air over Rabaul.
This time, they aren't going in alone.
Halsey pulls three more carriers away from the force already gathering for the invasion of the Gilbert Islands, Essex, Bunker Hill, and the light carrier Independence under Rear Admiral Alfred Montgomery.
Essex and Bunker Hill are brand new.
They arrived in the Pacific only weeks earlier.
The Gilberts landings are 9 days away, and Nimitz needs those ships back in position before then.
The window for a second Rabaul strike is narrow. Go in, hit hard, get out. Return the carriers to the Central Pacific before the calendar runs out.
It is, in its own way, the same calculation Halsey made six days earlier.
The same logic. The risk of doing nothing is worse than the risk of going.
Combined with Sherman's ships, that's close to 200 carrier aircraft heading for Rabaul on November 11th in two separate waves.
Saratoga and Princeton, Caldwell's carriers, launch from a position near the Green Islands.
225 miles out.
Farther than the first time.
The weather isn't on their side.
Low cloud sits over the harbor.
Rain squalls move across Simpson Harbor in sheets, one after another.
The pilots find a light cruiser and four destroyers and go after them through the murk.
But the Japanese ships duck into the weather and disappear into it.
A second strike, planned for that afternoon, gets called off before it ever leaves the deck.
The cloud simply won't allow it. For Caldwell's men, that's the whole day.
Six days after coming home with a dead photographer in the back seat and an airplane that barely flew, they go back to the same water.
And this time, the weather does more for the Japanese than their own guns manage.
But six days after the first raid, Rabaul still doesn't get a quiet morning.
Montgomery's three carriers find what's left in the harbor and hit it again.
Ships that survived November 5th, some of them still patched together from the last strike, take more damage now.
The light cruiser Agano, already hit once, is hit a second time.
Overhead, Japanese aircraft come up to meet the American formation.
Fighters and bombers, some of them flown down from carriers that have never once left the safety of Truk, sent to Rabaul because there's nothing else left to send.
It doesn't go well for them.
Montgomery's force loses 11 aircraft over Rabaul that day.
The Japanese lose more than 30, fighters and bombers both, shot out of the sky over a harbor that 6 days earlier no one in Tokyo believed an American carrier would dare even approach.
Twice in less than a week, American carriers had gone after Rabaul, a harbor ringed by hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, defended by aircraft from five airfields.
Twice, they'd come home.
By the end of November 11th, the cruiser fleet that came south to crush the landing on Bougainville is finished as a fighting force.
What's left of it limps back toward Truk over the days that follow.
For Air Group 12, this is the last time.
Caldwell's men will fly other missions against other targets before this war is over.
But Rabaul, the harbor with the smokestack that swallowed Newell's bomb, the harbor where Barnett took his last photograph, that's done.
What isn't done yet is the bill, and nobody on either side has added it up.
The bill, it turns out, was never going to show up in a photograph.
Back on Saratoga, the photo lab develops what came home.
Gun camera film, shots from the other photographers on the strike, cruisers listing in the harbor, smoke pouring off Mogami's deck.
Caldwell's Avenger, one wheel down, skidding across the flight deck, caught by a deck photographer who'd spent the whole strike on Saratoga, camera ready, waiting to see what came back. Barnett's film comes back, too. The last frame on it is the zero, nose on, guns firing, the picture and the thing that killed him arriving in the same instant. Every one of those images becomes part of a record.
Maya, 5 months in a shipyard.
Mogami, towed out under fire, repaired, back in service. Dates, repair logs, paper trails that survive in archives to this day.
What the cameras didn't catch, couldn't catch, was happening somewhere else entirely.
To save Rabaul, Admiral Koga had done something Japan couldn't really afford.
Starting November 1st, he'd stripped the air groups off three of his fleet carriers, Shokaku, Zuikaku, Zuiho, and flown roughly 170 of his most experienced naval aviators down to Rabaul as land-based reinforcements.
Pilots who'd spent years training to operate off carrier decks, now flying out of the same airfields that the November 5th and 11th raids had just spent 2 days pounding. Over the next 2 weeks, fighting through exactly the kind of air battles that came with both of those raids, those air groups lost half their fighters.
85% of their dive bombers, 90% of their torpedo planes. Koga had to strip air groups off three more carriers, Junyo, Hiyo, Ryujo, just to have anything left to send. On November 12th, what was left of all of it went back to Truk. The carriers themselves stayed at anchor.
There was almost nothing left to put on their decks. Truk was filling up that month from two directions at once.
Kurita's battered cruisers limping in from Rabaul, and now the wrecked remains of the air groups that had been sent to save it.
If you've seen our video on Admiral Ozawa and the Philippine Sea, you already know what an empty flight deck meant 7 months later.
This is where that clock started.
I keep coming back to that last frame of Barnett's, the one he was still taking when it happened.
Maya got a repair schedule. Mogami got a tow line and a return to service.
Every cruiser in this story has a paper trail you can follow for the rest of its career.
The pilots, American and Japanese, the ones who didn't make it home from either side on either day, mostly don't have that.
Most of them aren't in any photograph at all.
Nobody filed a repair estimate for a man.
The camera could count ships. It was never built to count anything else.
Barnett's film made it home before he did, in a sense.
His shots from earlier in the strike went into the official record. Frames taken in the hour before it all went wrong.
>> [clears throat] >> A photographer's mate first class, who never saw a single one of his own images developed.
Caldwell got the Navy Cross for November 5th, for planning the strike, for fighting off the zeros that nearly killed him, for a landing nobody on that flight deck expected to end the way it did.
The Distinguished Flying Cross came for the campaign around it, Rabaul included.
He kept flying.
A few years after the war, Caldwell was on USS Pine Island as part of Operation Highjump, the Navy's massive expedition to Antarctica in December 1946.
13 ships and 4,700 men sent to map the continent's coastline.
On December 30th, one of Pine Island's PBM Mariners went down on Thurston Island in a whiteout.
Three men were killed in the crash.
Caldwell was one of six survivors.
He spent 13 days on the Antarctic ice, frostbitten, rationing what food they had until a rescue aircraft from Pine Island finally spotted them and brought them out.
The man who had landed a crippled Avenger on one wheel over Rabual now survived a plane crash on the ice at the bottom of the world.
He survived that, too.
Caldwell made rear admiral in 1954.
More than 20 years after Rabual, he was running Fleet Air, Jacksonville.
He died in 1985.
A man who, by any reasonable accounting, had already used up more lives than one person is supposed to get.
11 months after his cruisers limped back to Truk, Vice Admiral Kurita commanded the most powerful Japanese surface force still afloat and took it through an unguarded strait toward the invasion beaches at Leyte.
If you've seen our video on Halsey, you know what happened next. A handful of American escort carriers and destroyers that Kurita mistook for something much bigger and an order 2 and 1/2 hours later to turn around.
Twice, Kurita came close enough to change the outcome of a major American operation and twice, he turned back before finding out what would have happened if he hadn't.
And Rabual itself?
The cruiser fleet that was supposed to be its sword was gone.
The carrier air groups that were supposed to be its shield were gone, too.
Burned up in the same 2 weeks of air battles that put a bomb down Maya's stack and set Mogami on fire.
What was left was still there.
100,000 men, hundreds of anti-aircraft guns, airfields that could still for a while put fighters in the sky.
But the thing Rabaul had been built to do, reach out and break anything that came near it, that part was over.
After November 11th, 1943, Rabaul could still defend itself.
It could no longer reach anyone else.
Add it up, and here's what two mornings in November 1943 did.
The most powerful Japanese surface fleet to threaten an American landing in over a year, broken before it ever fired a shot at the beach it came to destroy.
The carrier air groups Japan had stripped off six of its fleet carriers to defend Rabaul, bled down to almost nothing in two weeks of air battles over the same harbor.
And not one American ship lost doing either.
No American carrier had ever gone after a target like Rabaul before.
Anti-aircraft guns by the hundreds, hundreds of fighters within reach, a harbor that on paper should have eaten two carriers alive and asked for more.
Halsey had called sending Saratoga and Princeton there the most desperate emergency of his entire command.
It worked anyway.
After that, the question the Navy had been asking itself for two years quietly changed.
It stopped being whether fast carriers could go straight at a fortress this heavily defended and come home.
November 5th and 11th had already answered that.
What was left was how many more times, and how soon, a question that would get answered again at a much larger Japanese base before the winter was over.
Three men flew out of that harbor on November 5th in the same airplane.
Two of them made it home that day.
One of them spent the next 40 years walking away from things that should have killed him.
Zeros over Rabual, a plane going down on the Antarctic ice, whatever came after that.
He made admiral.
He died in his own bed decades later, an old man.
The other one didn't get a second chance.
He was a young man doing exactly what his job asked of him and a single round through the fuselage ended it before he ever saw what his last photograph had caught.
There's a photograph in the National Archives that's been reproduced more times than almost anything else from this raid.
Caldwell, one wheel down, climbing out of a cockpit that shouldn't have made it back.
Smoke still hanging over the flight deck behind him.
Barnett's own last frame, the zero nose on, the one that killed him, has been published, too.
Almost nobody who sees it knows whose camera it came from.
Paul Barnett isn't in the history books, not in anybody's memory who's still alive to hold it. Just a name typed in a caption under a picture of the thing that killed him.
That's the part of this story that doesn't usually make it past a single paragraph if it makes it in at all.
If your father or your grandfather served anywhere in the Pacific and ever told you something about days like this one, something that never made it into any book, something you only ever heard once across a kitchen table, write it down.
Put it in the comments below.
Tell us who he was, what he told you, what unit, what ship, what island.
It doesn't have to be dramatic. Most of the real ones weren't. Ships get repair logs. Battles get books.
The men mostly don't get either one unless somebody who loved them decides to write it down before it's too late.
Those stories are disappearing faster than the men who lived them.
Don't let this be the last time somebody hears it.
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