How 60 Japanese Bombers Were Caught with Engines Running—The Wewak Massacre of August 1943

The morning of August seventeenth, nineteen forty-three. Boram Airfield, New Guinea. Four hundred miles northwest of Allied positions, the tropical sun had just broken the horizon when sixty Mitsubishi G4M Betty bombers sat in perfect rows along the runway, their engines already turning over. Flight crews were aboard. Fuel tanks were full. The mission briefing had been clear—strike the new American airfield at Marilinan before the Americans could use it as a staging ground.
What none of these Japanese aviators knew was that in precisely twelve minutes, their world would explode into chaos. The warning system they relied upon—visual spotters scanning the horizon—would give them no time to react. The American B-twenty-five Mitchell strafers were already screaming toward them at treetop level, hidden by the jungle canopy, moving at two hundred and seventy miles per hour.
By nine fifteen that morning, the Japanese Fourth Air Army would cease to exist as an effective fighting force. One hundred and seventy aircraft would be destroyed or damaged beyond repair in just five days. The Imperial Japanese Army's air superiority over New Guinea would be shattered in a series of attacks so devastating that Japanese commanders would later call it the death blow to their New Guinea campaign.