In November 1942, Hangar 7 at Eagle Farm outside Brisbane was given a mission no other unit in the theater had received. The men inside were rebuilding Japanese fighter planes from wrecks and then flying them. The unit was the Allied Technical Air Intelligence Unit, made up of US Navy officers, Army Air Force officers, Australians, and a small number of British personnel. It was agreed from the start that the Americans would manage every evaluation operation.
The first material worth acquiring came from the Buna airstrip on the northern coast of New Guinea on December 27, 1942, after fighting there had ended. Japanese fighters had been left in the field, some nearly intact. Engines, wings, and airframes were moved to the water on tanks and then sent south to Brisbane. Of the five machines built in the hangar, only one managed to fly.
It took until the middle of the following year. The first test flight was on July 20, 1943, and lasted 25 minutes. The pilot landed and asked only for a trim adjustment. The next day, the plane flew twice more.
On the second flight, the engine stopped during a slow turning maneuver and would not restart. The plane landed without power and veered off the runway. The carburetor had frozen. The right main landing gear bent enough to require replacement, and after that change, the plane kept veering in the other direction on landing, which was corrected by a lock on the tailwheel.
Brakes were a continuing problem. Technicians replaced linings, adjusted them, and checked them repeatedly, but they remained poor. Eventually, every pilot was ordered not to use them except in emergencies. All of this was recorded in Technical Intelligence Report No.
163, dated September 16, 1943, under the heading of recovery and rebuilding. Flying the aircraft was not the hardest part of the work. In the early months of 1942, before any of this was organized, a nearly intact Japanese fighter appeared in New Guinea in such good condition that the men who inspected it thought only a little work was needed to make it fly. Orders were issued to ship it to Melbourne for testing.
To put it on a truck, the recovery crew cut off the outer panels of both wings. By the time the shipment reached Brisbane, souvenir hunters had stripped nearly every instrument, lever, and manufacturer’s plate. Cables and pulleys had disappeared with them. That was the lesson, and it was not a cheap one.
Troops stripped enemy machines as soon as they found them, and it was not limited to one type of force. Construction battalions, defense units, and ship crews that came ashore after the shooting stopped all took part. The army had a regulation covering this: Article 80 of the Rules of War, which made dealing in captured property a crime and required individuals to hand it over. That regulation accomplished nothing at all.
What achieved some results was the censorship office. Letters headed home were opened and examined, and manufacturer’s plates came out by the hundreds, because a small metal card stamped with a few Japanese characters was what analysts wanted most, and what a soldier thought would look nice on a shelf at home. The practical solution came from Rendova, where an officer allowed a soldier to keep what he found after three officers approved it, on the view that souvenir collecting, if managed properly, had benefits. Eagle Farm was not a secret base.
It was the old Brisbane civilian airport, taken over as the main assembly depot in the theater, and the 81st Air Depot Group assembled more than 100 Thunderbolts there. Fighter planes were unloaded from ships at the wharves and towed along Nudgee Road on trailers with their wings removed. Hangar 7 was at the heart of all that and did work no other hangar was doing. The rebuilds proceeded without manuals, without parts lists, and without anyone to call on the phone.
Labels had to be translated before a technician knew what he was holding, and translators were scarce everywhere. Serial numbers, engine numbers, and manufacturing dates were recorded on paper before any part was removed. Cockpits were measured and photographed. Armor plates were extracted and placed on scales with their thickness recorded to a tenth of a millimeter.
Guns were removed from their mounts and added to the file with the locations of their fittings and the ammunition they carried, whether armor-piercing, incendiary, or high-explosive. From about April 1943, the entire process moved to a standard form: the report on destroyed enemy aircraft, so that a technician in New Guinea and an officer in Washington could fill in and read the same boxes. Some outputs never came near a test pilot. The unit received a small team that began work in 1942 on a code-name system for Japanese aircraft, because no one could keep the Mitsubishi and Nakajima designations in their head under enemy fire.
From measuring and photography came recognition charts and images sent to every squadron and every gun crew in the theater. A ship gunner who could tell a Betty from a Judy at three miles was the end result of a wrecked plane in a hangar. Men had to be trained quickly. Wright Field in Ohio set up a course on air technical intelligence, borrowing its structure from the British, who had been working in this field since 1939 and had assigned officers to each area of the British Isles, where each would go directly to the wreck of a targeted aircraft to question any surviving enemy pilot on the spot.
By the end of March 1943, 33 Army Air Force officers and 10 Navy officers had completed the American course. They went to Washington for 10 days of briefing, then headed overseas. The course taught them how to fill in the standard form and, harder than that, how to make an instant decision about what was worth sending and what could be left in place. An officer who made the wrong call was causing shipping space to be taken up with scrap metal.
The naming process was full of confusion from the start. The square-tipped model found at Buna looked so new that Allied intelligence gave it its own code name: Hat, after General Henry Arnold. But someone thought it was better not to give the commander-in-chief’s nickname to a Japanese fighter, so the name became Hamp. Then it turned out the plane was ultimately just a version of the Zero, so the whole thing was abandoned without ceremony.
No one in that hangar put his name on any of the work done there. Once an aircraft was able to fly, it was tested against the men who would have to face it in combat. The rebuilt fighter flew over Brisbane against American types. In August 1943, it went south to Laverton in Victoria for three mock combats with a Spitfire Mark 5, led by Squadron Leader Les Jackson of the Royal Australian Air Force.
Two Oscars, rebuilt in the same workshop, flew in Australian skies during March and April 1944. What was recorded in the reports after the Spitfire tests, written under the Oscar heading, was that the Japanese fighter was superior in combat below 20,000 feet. That result was circulated directly to air squadrons. There was an obvious difficulty in flying an enemy plane over an allied country during wartime, and it was handled in two simple ways.
The aircraft were painted in Allied colors and marked with Allied insignia. In cases where that was not enough, a second plane flew alongside to confirm identification by its presence. Police in Brisbane received phone calls from people who had seen a Japanese fighter over the city, and they told them they were mistaken because the police had not been informed of anything. On December 29, 1943, Marines took control of the airstrip at Cape Gloucester on the western end of New Britain, and intelligence men arrived the next day.
More than a dozen wrecks appeared in the first 24 hours, and more in the following days. Whatever the Japanese thought was worth salvaging had been moved well away from the working runway and covered with cut leaves. Some of what remained had burned completely. One aircraft remained intact.
Among them was a Tony standing in floodwater up to its wing, splotched green on top and unpainted underneath. Its engine carried the number 2522 dated March 1943, and it had two heavy guns, two light guns, and fuel of the 92-octane class. It was sent to Australia for repair and testing. The armor behind the pilot’s seat was 10.
3 mm thick. When fired at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, it gave way to a . 50-caliber bullet, and in a close-range test it failed to stop a . 30-caliber bullet.
Less than a month after the Turner aircraft were captured at Cape Gloucester, another appeared with enhanced pilot protection of 17, 20, 5, and 12. 7 mm thickness, with a new plate added around the radiator. Until that airstrip fell, almost nothing was known about the Nick and nothing at all about how its crew was protected, but the photographs taken there settled the matter. There was a 9.
5 mm plate behind the pilot’s head, and another wider and thinner one behind his back. Most Japanese aircraft that went down ended up in the sea, and those that did not usually ended up in places without roads. On Santa Isabel, a dive bomber of a type no one had seen before crashed six miles inland on a 1,500-foot hill. The straight engine was so sought after that a group of locals cut a path to it with machetes for one shilling a day, about 16 cents, and removed the engine in four hours on a cradle woven from tree bark.
In places the teams reached later, there was often nothing left to collect. The locals valued metal and carried it away as soon as it cooled enough to handle. Compared with the number of aircraft shot down in the Pacific, the number that underwent technical inspection was very small. The teams worked with what the sea and the jungle had left them by chance.
Manufacturer’s plates became a work program of their own. A unit called Jack Plate did nothing else. In the end, 6,000, 3,000, and 3,000 plates, or prints taken from plates that could not be removed, were sent for documentation. The purpose was target selection.
The cards told Washington which companies were making what, in what quantities, and how worn the machines used in production were. This work attracted men who liked doing things in different ways, and they argued. A British officer asked in the fall of 1943 for his opinion of the American arrangements said the Army section at Wright Field was buried inside the establishment, while the Navy section at Anacostia was well organized, and that merging the two would stop duplication. No one merged them.
The Japanese were doing the same work, and they did something with it that no Allied unit did. They started with much better material. Entire squadrons of Allied aircraft fell into their hands in the Philippines, Java, Malaya, and Burma in the early months of the war, and the Army Air Research Laboratory at Tachikawa examined them. Captured Flying Fortresses taught them how to install American armor, which improved their own afterward.
A computing gunsight taken from a Flying Fortress was incorporated into their own sight. Dismantling American equipment showed them how to protect an aircraft radio from interference caused by its own engine. Near Bapiltaup, they recovered the wreck of a TDR drone, the first American guided missile, and loaded it onto an aircraft on November 8, 1944, but the plane was lost in transit. They also flew what they captured.
A Hellcat from the carrier Langley, hit by anti-aircraft fire during the bombing of Formosa on January 4, 1945, belly-landed, and its captors restored it to flying condition, then it crashed again and was found in Japan after the surrender. Then there were the Warhawks. P-40s fell into their hands in crates or at airfields in Java and the Philippines, and perhaps ten were flyable. For a short period in the spring of 1943, a few entered service with the 2nd Squadron of the 50th Air Regiment in the air defense of Rangoon.
The memoirs of an enemy mechanic, found later and translated by the British, contain details of the moment they arrived. Three landed at Alor Star in Malaya on March 11, 1943, carrying the markings of the 50th Regiment on their tails, flown in to join a unit forming for Burma operations. What happened over Rangoon afterward is still told in more than one version. A fighter pilot who was flying in Burma wrote in his memoirs that a Japanese heavy bomber shot down one of the captured Warhawks by mistake.
Aviation historians in Tokyo working on the same material tell it the other way around: the Warhawks fired on bombers from their own side. A third account says the fighters took off to intercept planes that turned out to be friendly, resulting in one bomber being shot down. All accounts agree a mistake occurred. But none agree on its direction, and no official documents have appeared to settle it.
One historian who reviewed the accounts concluded that Curtis products kept shooting down Japanese bombers regardless of who was flying them. The Allies never put a captured fighter into any battle. Instead, they shot at their own aircraft. A Liberator resting on a coral reef at Majuro, controlled by Japan, was bombed and then fired on to prevent the enemy from getting its airframe and weapons.
Roughly 430 rounds of . 50 caliber and 200 rounds of . 30 caliber were fired at it. The men who carried out the attack did not know whether the crew was still aboard.
In late 1943, one of the Brisbane aircraft was shipped to the United States on an escort carrier to Wright Field. A lawyer followed it to Anacostia outside Washington in 1944. In January 1945, the unit moved to the Philippines, where entire airfields full of abandoned machines awaited them. The work stopped being a matter of individual finds.
In the end, General Arnold ordered the preservation of four aircraft of each enemy type: one each for the Army Air Forces, the Navy, the British, and a museum. About 115 Japanese aircraft reached the United States. By the end of December 1945, 73 had gone to Army fields and 42 to Navy fields. The Army restored six and test-flew them.
The Navy restored two and test-flew them. Forty-six aircraft eventually reached museums, and the rest were broken up as scrap. They shipped 115 machines home and got eight of them into the air. Men had to cut a path through the hills with machetes to accomplish part of that.
There is one thing the records do not settle: which machine was at the center of the story. The references say the fighter built from five Buna wrecks was an Oscar. The technical air intelligence history they cite says it was a Zeke. The Australian file on the forced landing calls it a Hamp and gives it the unit number XJW1, adding that the number itself is uncertain.
The three accounts agree it was five aircraft from Buna in the same hangar in the same months. Whatever its type, it flew on July 20, 1943, veered off the runway the next day, and was still flying over a friendly city while people below were calling the police about it when the report of its rebuilding was printed in September.