April 11, 1942, The Royce Mission;

jonjac

On April 11, '42 ten B-25s from the 13th & 90th Sqs, 3rd Bomb. Gp.(with the aid of auxilliary bomb bay tanks); and three B-17s from the 19th Bomb. Gp. took off from Darwin, Aust. and flew non stop to Mindanao Is. in the Phillipines.  They spent the next three days on bombing missions in what became known as the "Royce Mission".
http://home.st.net.au/~dunn/people/royce.htm
It was the Air Force's first offensive moves of the war in the S.W. Pacific; but never got the publicity due to the "Doolitle Mission" to japan a day or two later. 
Jack Heyn
Photo Section, 3rd Bomb. Gp.

PacificAirwarBuff

Approaching its sixty-eighth anniversary, the Royce Special Mission to the Philippines is beginning to receive more of the attention it deserves.  Everyone interested should read the 2008 book, Operation Plum: The Ill-Fated 27^th Bombardment Group and the Fight for the Western Pacific, by Adrian R. Martin and Larry W. Stephenson, published by Texas A & M Press.  It devotes an entire chapter to the Royce Raid, plus a highly valuable appendix that includes plane numbers and names of all crews and passengers who were evacuated from Del Monte to Australia at the end of the mission.

Regarding Pappy Gunn’s April 13 flight to Santa Barbara, Panay, to pick up four important evacuees from Corregidor, he took off from Valencia at 1615 hours and returned to Del Monte with his passengers at 1945 hours in good weather without encountering anti-aircraft fire on either leg of the flight.  After spending a rainy day improvising a replacement belly tank for his B-25 at Del Monte on April 14, he took off at 0430 on April 15 and arrived at Batchelor Field at 1400 that afternoon.  His passengers included a stowaway, Sergeant Jefferies, of the 19^th Bombardment Group, who was immediately placed in custody of the commanding officer of the AC Detachment at Batchelor.

What is less well known about Pappy’s April 13 payload is especially interesting.  A little explanatory history may help. 

In a 1965 article in “Air University Review,” the distinguished historian Robert F. Futrell made an early attempt to explain why the Far East Air Force had been caught on the ground at Clark Field on December 8, 1941.  Who was at fault?  MacArthur?  Brereton? Sutherland?  He concluded in part that no one could fix blame unless missing records from General MacArthur’s USAFFE command were recovered.  

Now back to the Royce Raid.  Colonel Davies ordered Pappy Gunn to pick up a load of approximately 200 pounds of “official mail” that had made its way off Corregidor with the four special passengers early in the morning of April 13^th.  In his excellent 1992 book, Doomed from the Start, historian William Bartsch confirms that the “mail” – long believed lost – actually consisted of the important daily USAFFE logs and records that Futrell would report missing twenty-five years later.  General MacArthur subsequently donated them to the MacArthur Memorial in 1960, and they eventually turned up in the Norfolk collection, but apparently not in time for Futrell to see them.

One can only surmise that these crucial primary-source documents were sped from Batchelor to Melbourne by General Royce and Colonel Davies aboard their B-25 as they flew south to receive their medals from General Rush Lincoln at Laverton Aerodrome the night of April 14, 1942.

As soon as the “New York Times” and other newspapers began printing page-one reports of the Royce Mission, Lieutenant General George Brett and Brigadier General Ralph Royce received many cables and letters of congratulation in Melbourne.  On April 15, Dutch Kindelberger, head of North American Aviation and manufacturer of the B-25 bomber that had performed so well on the Royce Mission, cabled, “Congratulations to you, Ralph and Jack [Fox] for a beautiful job.  Entire North American Aviation organization thrilled by exploit and determined to see that you get plenty more B-25s to do more of the same.”

A note:  The two Nisei spies who were evacuated to Australia were Sergeant Arthur Komori (aboard Heiss’s B-25) and Clarence Yamagata (aboard Strickland’s B-25).  Yamagata served in  MacArthur’s Central Bureau, and Komori in the Allied Translators and Interpreters Service (ATIS), with distinction for the rest of the war and followed him to Tokyo, where they assisted in the investigation and prosecution of Japanese war criminals.  Komori went to law school in Maryland in the early 1950s and later became a judge on Kauai, Hawaii, where he died in 2002.