H.E. “Gene” Jones

U.S. Army Air Forces
Pacific Theater

“…the Japanese had moved from Japan right on down south to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Guadalcanal was extremely important to them because they were getting ready to invade Australia…”

Jones went into the Army Air Forces in 1940 and ended up serving as a B-24 pilot for two and a half years. He conducted bombing operations throughout the Pacific Theater of Operations. He advanced quickly in the ranks and became a Lieutenant Colonel. Jones earned two distinguished Flying Crosses, five Air medals, one Silver Star, and one Legion of Merit for his service. One of his best stories is about how he escorted an “important person” into Guadalcanal with a nighttime formation of 40 fighter planes.

When the draft came out in 1940, I decided I wanted to fly instead of being in a trench. So I applied for flight training and I went in before the war. I graduated from flying school four days after Pearl Harbor, so I was in early. Everything was a mess at that time. I was suppose to go into training to be an instructor because they were expanding the flight schools at that point. But I was sent up to Westover Field in Massachusetts to fly co-pilot on sub patrols out over the Atlantic. I was there for two weeks, came in off of a mission on New Year’s Eve and they said “pack up, we’re going to change your station.” They picked ten of us out of the group to be sent to Albuquerque, New Mexico for an experiment to see if they could take a green Second Lieutenant with 120 hours of flying time and convert them into four-engine pilots. Up to that time before the war, you had to be a Lieutenant or a Captain and have about 1,000 hours of time to qualify for four-engine training.

December 1941, Jones graduated as a twin-engine cadet.

So ten of us went to Albuquerque and thirty days later we were the youngest, greenest and the most-envied and sometimes resented four-engine pilots walking around when all these other fellows that had been teaching, had 1,000 hours and were First Lieutenant or Captain waiting in line to get a four-engine rating. Ten of us went ten different directions. My classmate, Charlie Sweeny, who I had been with in training all the time, was the fellow that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. So that’s how close I came.

Our training now was getting ready to form a bomb group. They sent me to a training center in Pendleton, Oregon. There they trained all aspects of a bomb group. They were training people to be navigators, bombardiers, mechanics, supply personnel, to handle the administrative functions, everything. Then they would peel off a cadre, which would consist of personnel of each type, which would be sent out as a nucleus for a new group.

I was a pilot and I became a squadron commander. Then I would be responsible for training or helping to train the pilots that would fill the group. The whole training process took from January until we were sent overseas in October. I was sent to Hawaii first in October of 1942. We were in Hawaii for about two or three months and then sent down to the South Pacific. We were the first group of B-24 bombers sent down.

We were sent down to Guadalcanal—the first four-engine bombers to be based on Guadalcanal. That was just after Guadalcanal had been secured enough and they had captured Henderson Field.

Guadalcanal is a long island. Henderson Field was somewhere in the middle. The Japanese were pushed back and their supply lines came down through the rest of the Solomon Islands. They kept bringing men down trying to re-take the island. You see, the Japanese had moved from Japan right on down south to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. Guadalcanal was extremely important to them because they were getting ready to invade Australia. Australia was at serious risk because all of their soldiers were overseas in Africa fighting in part of the European war. The Japanese had taken New Guinea and had taken the Solomon Islands, and they were ready to go into Australia.
The Japanese had come all the way down, captured the Philippines, and captured Indonesia. So Australia was undefended and Australia had tremendous resources and would be quite a prize. The main mission for our forces when we first got there was to protect Australia. Guadalcanal was as far as the Japs got. Our Marines had a major landing at Guadalcanal and pushed the Japanese back. Once we were able to have an air base in the Solomon Islands at Guadalcanal, we could begin bombing back up this way.

One of the first places we bombed was at Bougainville; they had a big base at there. Then we would bomb Rabaul, which is here in New Britain. They had a big base there. We gradually pushed them back, kept moving forward, forward, and forward. There would be periodic landings by the Marines or the Army forces on the islands to the northwest.

The B-24 had a very long range. Before the B-29 came out it had the longest range. There were basically two airplanes that were involved in the early part of the war before the B-29. One was the B-17 and the other was the B-24. Each one had limitations that defined the way they were used. The B-17 can only carry 4,000 pounds of bomb but they could go higher than the B-24. That was important for them in the European theater because of the anti-aircraft. It was constantly being aimed at them as they flew from England over Europe to their target. The B-24 had two bomb bays, with separate doors. We could put 8,000 pounds of bombs in the two bomb bays, or we could put 4,000 pounds of bombs in the one bomb bay and two 400-gallon tanks of additional gas in the second bomb bay. We were able to fly twelve and thirteen hour missions, which was important. We didn’t need to go as high as the B-17s did in Europe. Our operating altitude was basically 25,000 feet, because we weren’t facing constant anti- aircraft fire that we faced when we came over the target. We would be subject to heavy fighter attack. When you flew over a target they’d throw everything they up at you, but you were in it and out of it in a short time because the bases were always on the shoreline. Our problem was more fighter attacks.

We had been attacked at Pearl Harbor and stories came back of the horrible atrocities that the Japanese did. It’s hard to look at the Japanese today and think that they could have been that horrible the same way it is horrible to look at some of the Germans and think that they could have been that horrible. The Japanese were so beholden to their emperor, they would die for the sake of the emperor, and that would put them up in heaven some place with lots of goodies. So you were fighting mad and angry. You have to put it in the context of the times. The whole country was this way. It’s a totally different atmosphere than anything now. Totally different. The country just came zooming together. Everybody was willing to give and sacrifice and it was an amazing unification of the country. We didn’t have the divisions that we have today.

I was out there for two and a half years, two tours, because I was a little older then the typical draftee. I had the flight training early on in the four-engine plane and so forth. I advanced rather rapidly. I was a Captain at the end of the year and a Major six months after that and then a Lieutenant Colonel. I was moved up into a staff positions after I did my thirty-five missions.

Then I was due to come home. I had an eighteen-month-old daughter whom I had never seen, born after I was overseas. The officer that I reported to initially in Massachusetts had taken me with him every place he went. He had me come with him as we worked very well together. He was promoted to Brigadier General and was given the job commanding the 13th Bomber Command. A Bomber Command controls all the bombers within a certain area. We were in the 13th Air Force. The 13th Air Force was composed of the Fighter command, the Bomber Command and the Supply Command. In other words, three divisions. We could have planes here, here and here, and they would be part of the 13th Air Force. He asked me if I would go back on leave for thirty days and then come back with him and become the operations officer for the 13th Bomber Command because at that point all the experienced people had rotated through.

So he and I took off in a B-24 and flew back to San Francisco. We went to Hawaii first and flew over night to San Francisco. He had a cot put in the back of the B-24 and he flew the plane for the first five or six hours and went back to bed and I flew the rest of the night. We landed in San Francisco. The first thing they did was to run you through the line to bring your inoculations up to date. We’d been overseas for eighteen months so we were quite far out of date. They were worked on both arms as you went down the line. The General had brought a bunch of stuff back that he had collected. He lived in Seattle. His wife met him in San Francisco and they were going to stay down there for a while. He asked me if I would fly his stuff up to Seattle and leave it at the base and then I could take the plane to the east coast. So I rounded up a crew. There’s always somebody around that was looking for rides. I rounded up a crew and had a young Second Lieutenant that had just recently graduated in single engine as my co-pilot. We flew up to Seattle and I left the stuff at the Officer’s Club for him, and then tried to call home to let them know I was coming. We have a summer home in New Hampshire in a little town that if you blink as you are going through it, you’ve missed it. Back in those days, this was back in 1944, the town had a general store. When you go in the store, first there’s a little bunch of mailboxes for the post office. Then in back of that was a little switchboard with a bunch of cords because it was a hand cranking phone system. The store closes at nine o’clock and the telephone service shuts down at nine o’clock. My wife and child were up with my family at our summer place, and I tried to call them to let them know I was on my way, and couldn’t get through. So I rounded up the crew and said, “We’re going to go tonight.” We took off and flew overnight and landed for gas in Detroit. I was able to call there so my wife could get down to Manchester, New Hampshire where the airport was.

Anyway, talking about the baby, the baby had been sick and had to go into the hospital. Back then there was gas rationing. The hospital was nine miles away from where our home was, so my wife had to get a room down there as she didn’t have the gas to go back and forth everyday. So she stayed down near the hospital. The baby was in the hospital for three days being poked by a lot of different people. Finally she came home and I arrived the day after she came home. She was still not totally recovered. With all the strange faces around when she saw another strange face she yelled like hell. This was quite a shock, you go to pick your baby up and ahhh. That went on for the first day and night. The second day we decided we had to put an end to this. So my wife carried the baby and we went down the beach. I carried all our beach gear and we got out of the way so the people couldn’t hear the baby crying. About two hours later we walked back and she was on my shoulders. Of course everybody was very happy about that. My daughter is now a professor at Stanford. So she’s come a long way.

I flew down to Washington, picked up the General and then we had to make a tour of the factories that were producing the B-24 just to say, “hey, your doing a good job”, that kind of thing. Worked our way across the country and then flew back to Biak where our outfit was at that time. We continued operations from Biak bombing the Philippines, getting ready for the Philippine invasion and bombing Truk which was a major Japanese naval center. Truk had been given to the Japanese early after World War I. They were not supposed to use it as a base but just to handle the administration of the island. However, they had built up this terrific base. Our Navy came in the area and for three days they had what you call a “turkey shoot”. It was nonstop bombing and torpedoing. They sank about sixty vessels. Most of them were commercial vessels, very few were Naval vessels. But it just really decimated them. Truk is a very interesting place because it is a sunken caldera, a round circle of islands that has a very large sunken volcano in the center. It’s perfect for a Naval base because the waters are not disturbed as if they were out exposed to an ocean. After the Navy did their job, our job was to keep the runways neutralized and eliminate their fighter planes, as our forces were moving into Guam and the Marianas. We went over thirty times to Truk. At first there were a lot of fighters but after thirty days no more of their fighters planes came up. So we did our job.

You bombed basically the runways to mess them up and make them unusable. Some planes carried 500-pound bomb to plow up the runways. Other planes carried 20 to 40 100-pound bombs to destroy any planes on the ground. The first mission that I went on was the first aerial attack in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. We bombed Wake Island. On this mission we carried 100-pound bombs to destroy planes on the ground. We flew from the Hawaiian Islands into Midway and then had an all night mission from Midway to Wake, bombed Wake, and came back to Midway.

I had an interesting experience on Wake. We went in formation to Wake and then broke out of formation and went in low over the island taking them obviously quite by surprise for our individual bombing run. When we went over, my bombs didn’t release. When I went over I didn’t see the signal light showing bombs away. The bombardier called me on the radio and said, “They didn’t go”. I said “Okay, we’re going back in.” And so I turned around and went back in. Now this time they were awake and shooting all over the place. I was the only plane that got hit. This is an inspection plate on the plane that was hit by a piece of shrapnel. I was the only one that got hit and I got hit because I went in twice.

Then we moved from here down to the Solomon Islands and started to bomb Rabaul and Bougainville mostly. Then there’s a little island here called Munda that we use to work on. They had a good-sized base there which was their closest base to Guadalcanal. We’d work on that here and up here. When we first got there we didn’t have any fighter cover, as there were no fighters in the area yet. On our first mission to Bougainville our losses were much too heavy. Out of twelve planes in a squadron, I think we lost something like two or three and you couldn’t put up with that. They were shot down by anti-aircraft and by their fighters. We were going in at a relatively low altitude, at twelve thousand feet, just trying to hit shipping in the harbor. So we converted to night bombing and we would go over every night possible. Part of this was psychological. We would get them up at night when we went in to bomb their camps. They would have to get out of bed and head for their foxholes. You do this night after night, all night long, you know that would wear them down a little bit. That kept up for two or three months until we got some fighters, then we began to make more progress.

I came back one time with two engines shot out on one side. It gives you only one shot at the runway for a landing. I was not able to maintain altitude and was gradually losing it. Fortunately I was close enough to home to be able to make it. It’s a little tricky because you are flying cockeyed like this and you have trim tabs on, as you pull the power back the plane starts going to go the other way. It was a little tricky but we made it. That’s the closest I came to any serious problem.

April 1941 Taken at Basic training, Jones before and after being suited up to fly in an open cock pit plane.

My wife and I have done a lot of scuba diving. We have been scuba diving all over the world. We went on a scuba diving trip off of Australia, and decided to come back up through the islands that we bombed. We went into Rabaul where we had bombed and that was an amazing experience. We took off from Port Moresby and went up to New Guinea and came down through the Solomon Islands. It was on a small airline plane that served that region. I got to talking with the pilot and the co-pilot before we took off. When we came into Rabaul they invited me up into the cockpit. It was an interesting experience to be coming down that runway to land, because that runway was the one we would plow up all the time. I knew that runway quite well but not from a landing approach. So we got a chance to see it from the ground.

Then there was an interesting experience we had in Truk. We took off from our bases here to fly to Truk. Out and back was about a twelve-hour mission, which we were doing, everyday. We wanted to vary the time as much as we could, so there wasn’t a pattern to our arrival time. Because it was a twelve-hour mission, we couldn’t vary it too much. We wanted some daylight left so if anybody was in trouble coming back and couldn’t make it we wanted some rescue time. One time though there were two submarines in the harbor and they had been there a bit and every time we came over, they would get the word and submerge. One time one of them submerged, didn’t have all the holes closed, and it sank. The records show that they tried to rescue the people. When they went down to the sub, they communicated by tapping on the side of the submarine while trying to figure out how to get the men out. But after a while there was no tapping on the inside and there was no way that they could get to them. The submarine was in water about one hundred and twenty feet deep. The top of the tower was close to ninety-five or so feet from the surface. It would be remotely possible that I was on a bombing mission on the day the submarine went down. We don’t know the exact date it sank, and have never tried to put the dates to it. We dove down to the submarine and I was able to go in it. You had to take your flippers off, because the bottom of the submarine on the inside was filled with silt, and if you had flippers on, you would stir up all the silt. So you just let yourself down the coning tower with a light and looked around. What had happened when they began to run out of air, they tried to get as high as possible to get whatever air remained. When you flashed the light around you could see the skeletons. The Japanese later on wanted to recover all the remains. This has been documented and written up in the scuba diving magazines. The Japanese, because respect had been shown for the bodies there, invited an American group of divers to go down with them to recover all the bones. Then they cremated the bones and packaged them in little packages. On our trip when we landed in Guam there was a group of Japanese that were being brought to one of the islands to receive the bones of their father. There were eighteen of them sitting a row, all in white skirts and blouses, or white pants and blouses, just sitting there waiting. They were each presented with a box with a ribbon tied on it and that was the ashes of their father. It made you really feel sad.

One other experience that I want to mention, you can’t be out there for two and a half years, and being shot at and having to get out of your bed and getting into a fox hole because they are trying to bomb you, and having experienced kamikaze attacks, without having strong feelings about them. Towards the end of the war they would try kamikaze attacks, trying to dive into our formations. That’s similar to the suicide bombers today. The Japanese started it—that was the only defense they had towards the end.

After the war I bought a business that was manufacturing chainsaws among other things. We were exporting to various places in Europe and Australia and Japan. When I bought the company they had a problem with the chainsaw, due to the engine they had bought to put in the chainsaw. They had solved the problem in the States just before I bought the company but had overlooked the fact that a lot of saws had been shipped around the world. So immediately after I took over, I was hit with problems in 5 different countries. I decided I had to go to Australia because they owed us a lot of money and I decided if I’m going to Australia, I’ll go to Japan. Our representative in Japan was based in Hiroshima, so I took the overnight train from Tokyo to Hiroshima and got out in the morning. There was a sign that said, “Welcome, Mr. Jones, President of Lombard Industries.” There was a man and a young girl standing there. They took me to their office. The young girl had been brought along because she spoke good English. We found that the Japanese man’s English was good enough for us to communicate without the girl. He took me out to dinner that night, and in the conversation it came up that he had been a fighter pilot operating in the same areas that I had been. In other words, as we were moving up, he was moving back. He had been on the same missions that I had been on. He invited me to his home the next day. We went in and sat on the floor, typical Japanese fashion. His wife came in practically on her knees with a tray of coca cola. He got out his pictures, which showed he had been based in Bougainville, Rabaul, and on other islands that we had worked on. It suddenly dawned on me there was no reason to dislike him or for him to dislike me as we were both doing our job. If you just get the politicians out of the way, maybe we could solve problems without going to war. It was a complete closure, wiped away two and a half years of intense anger and hatred. Wiped
away several years after that of the residual of it, when you still didn’t like the Japanese. Then all of a sudden you realize that they are human beings just the same as you are. We maintained a relationship for awhile; the little girl was a sweetheart. She was converting to Christianity so I sent her a nice Bible. They invited me out for dinner the last night and presented me with a beautiful Canon camera. We kept in touch for a while, but that was a good way to end everything.
I have to tell you one other interesting experience. The war in the Pacific was secondary for quite awhile which meant that most of the crews we were getting were basically trained for the European theater—we would get whatever they could spare. The training for the European theater was totally different from the training for the Pacific. First of all, in Europe you are flying over land, and here you are flying over water. We were over land a very short period of time and flying at a lower altitude. If a plane goes down and the crew could get to one of the islands, it would be helpful to know how to find food, how to deal with natives, and so forth. I set up a school to train the pilots. We had them for thirty days to train in all the things that we had learned about operations in the area so far to give them a better chance of survival. In fact, if you go to Google and pull up the Thirteenth Bomber Command, there is an article still there that I wrote about the training school that we set up.

One day at the school, I got a call from headquarters saying they wanted me to pick two B-24s, pull a hundred hour inspection, put new tires on. I was to fly one plane and select the best pilot we could find to fly the second. Then select two top-notch crews and stand by. After two or three days had gone by and we had everything all set, I got a call about five o’clock telling me to report to the quarters of Admiral Bill Halsey. He was in command of all operations in the area. Whoever was the ranking officer in the area of whatever service, was in command of everything. Halsey was the Commander of the battle at Midway; he was a very important man. I had my jeep washed, tried to put a crease in my pants, shaved and combed my hair. At six o’clock I knocked on the door of Admiral Halsey’s quarters. He invited me in and had me sit down.

He said, “You are going on a very important mission tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are to fly as escort to a Navy B-24”—which they call a PB4Y. “You are to fly as escort taking an important person who will be in the Navy plane, from Espiritu Santos to Guadalcanal. You are to fly with no lights. The only light that you can have will be the glow of the super charger.”

The super charger is at the bottom of each engine and all of the exhaust gases go through it, heating it up to a dull red glow. That’s the only reference point we would have to fly formation, and you have to be pretty damn close in order to keep seeing the glow of the lights.

He asked, “Do you think you can do it?” I said, Yes, I thought we could.

“At dawn you’ll rendezvous over San Isabel island and pick up forty fighters, to escort you into Guadalcanal.”

“Yes, sir.”
He said, “I will tell you who the important person is. You can tell the pilot of the other plane but you are not to tell your crew members until you are off the ground.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Eleanor Roosevelt.”

She had decided that she wanted to go to Guadalcanal to visit the troops. Now, this has a background. Our forces—we had broken the Japanese code, and knew that Yamamoto was going to be visiting in the Bougainville area. The intercepted messages said that he was leaving to go to Truk at eight o’clock in the morning. If the Japanese say they are going to leave at eight o’clock, they will leave eight. It would not be 7:59, it would not be 8:01 it would be exactly 8:00. That is the way they operate. A flight of six P-38 fighters was put together to go after Yamamoto. The Solomon Islands consist of two rows of parallel islands. The water between the rows was called “the slot” and you could go right up between them. All these islands were inhabited with coast watchers—Japanese, New Zealanders and Australians who reported anything and everything that came up the slot.
Well, you know darn well that if the P-38s flew up the slot, the Japanese would change the scheduled departure of Yamamoto’s flight.

Guadalcanal has a mountain ridge right down the center. The P-38s flew over the mountain ridge and then got down to about a 150 foot altitude, out of sight of land. By dead reckoning they flew to Bougainville, arriving at the field exactly at 8:00 AM and hit Yamamoto’s plane just as he was taking off and killed him. That ended Yamamoto. It was Yamamoto who had planned Pearl Harbor. He was the head man.

Our forces did not make any claims on getting Yamamoto because they didn’t want the Japs to know that they had broken the code. They were afraid that if Eleanor Roosevelt came in the area and the Japanese somehow or other knew about it, if they had broken our code, they would be there to get her as revenge. So all the military brass were opposed her visit, but she was going to go anyway. You didn’t argue with Eleanor Roosevelt. Bless her heart, they took the bomb racks out of the Navy plane and put in a plywood floor, took two pilots seats out of a wrecked airplane and put them in the bomb bay, and she and the head of the Red Cross, a woman, sat in the bomb bay on a cold noisy night for four hours, to get from Espirtu Santos to Guadalcanal. We took off, met the fighters on schedule, and everything was fine. Of course, all the Brass was out at Guadalcanal to greet her, and all the Brass had been out to see her off at Espiritu Santos. The only women that had been on Guadalcanal had been nurses at the airport; no women had been beyond the airport. So our facilities were rather open. Two fifty gallon drums were welded together, filled with water, a spigot put on the bottom, and put it on a rack of coconut logs, holding it for a shower. You just stand there in the shower and who gives a damn. The toilets were not particularly concealed either. The Brass at the island figured out the route that they were going to take to get her to the hospitals. Her mission was to visit every man that was in a bed. She did a wonderful job. She took the name and address of the patient and his closest relatives and she wrote every single one a card, or made phone call. It was just a marvelous job, but they had to sanitize the route for her. When all the preparation was going on, the obvious conclusion everybody had was that, Betty Grable or Lana Turner was coming. Instead it was Eleanor. She spent the whole day there and we were going to return that night, leaving late at night and getting back at Espiritu Santos at dawn.

Old enemies, new friends: Japanese fighter pilot and Jones on opposite sides during the war became good friends many years later.

The Navy pilot and I had a bit of miscommunication, which could have caused a serious problem. The reason they had to use Army Air Force planes to escort the Navy plane was the Navy B-24 pilots had no training in formation flying. Their missions were strictly search missions where they always went out alone. This was going to be a rather tricky formation, because again there were no lights, and no radio communication. We were not allowed to use the radio at all. Our takeoff procedure is to taxi out to the end of the runway in a line, go through your check list, get your flaps down, get engines, and everything set, and then start taking off. When you fly in formation you take off at thirty second intervals—one goes off and turns, the next one goes off and turns, and the third plane takes off and turns inside to form a unit of three planes. I’m sitting there with my wingman, going through the checklist, and setting everything up and all of a sudden the Navy pilot takes off because he does his run up and comes right down and goes off. So, wow, we got flaps down and took off as quickly as possible. The sky is full of night fighters covering our takeoff. Where is Eleanor? I made one circle and couldn’t figure out what plane was which. There were planes flying all over the place. I decided I better get the hell out of here because all the Brass is sitting down there watching Eleanor leave. So I headed off on course and began to worry that I was going to be a buck Private tomorrow if I don’t find Eleanor. Fortunately we had a sort of primitive radar unit. We barreled down, the throttles to the wall practically and about an hour and a half later, I picked her up and we closed in. When we came over the air field at Espiritu Santos we had the tightest formation I’ve ever flown. She got out and came down the line to shake hands with the crew. It was quite an experience. She did a wonderful job with the morale; some serviceman’s wife or parents suddenly get a call or a letter from the First Lady. It made a difference.