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All night and next day George Kenney's airmen hammered at the convoy and its protecting planes. Mitchell bombers sank a transport which rolled over in the shallow water near the Lae jetty, knocked down five Zeros which attempted to interfere. Beaufighters swept into the Lae airdrome, burnt up one Zero, shot up others on the runway. In the late afternoon the oft-derided Kittyhawks were attacked by 18 Zeros. Score: 13 Zeros shot down, one Kittyhawk (pilot safe). When 20 more Zeros jumped some Lightnings they lost all but five. Total Jap planes lost in three days: 85 certain, 48 more maybe. Said MacArthur's communiqué dryly: "The enemy's air losses over the last three days may be regarded as serious." Allied losses: "Comparatively negligible."
Flyers' General. In five months in the Southwest Pacific, the man chiefly responsible for these successes has yet to have a day off, or even to want one. General Kenney's office is wherever he and Captain Chase are at the moment. Places are always laid for George Kenney at two luncheon tables, one at Port Moresby, the other nearly 2,000 miles south in Australia. Most weeks he manages to have several meals at each of them. Last week he had three lunches at his mainland headquarters, two with MacArthur in New Guinea.
George Kenney was born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, 53 years ago. His parents were Americans whose vacation he spoiled by arriving a week early. His expatriate birth was in the tradition of his mother's family: she had been born on shipboard on the Atlantic and one of her sisters had been born in Sweden.
George Kenney was raised (to a height of 5 ft. 6 in.) in Brookline, Mass. He studied civil engineering at M.I.T., but left after three years to become an instrument man for Quebec & Saguenay Railroad. Then he became a civil engineer and a contractor. In 1917 he enlisted in the U.S. Signal Corps as a private. He learned to fly under Bert Acosta, who was later to achieve fame as a transatlantic pilot. His first three landings were all dead stick, but he was notably successful once he got to France. Twice he was shot down. He was credited with two German planes, came out of the war with a captaincy, the D.S.C. and Silver Star.
Between wars Kenney married twice, fathered a son Bill (now 20) and a daughter Julia (16). He went through the routine which is designed to round out an air general: War College, Supply, Air Corps Engineering School, instructor in observation. In France in 1940 he riled other military observers by recommending that the U.S. throw its Air Force into the ashcan—"It's so out of date for the kind of war the Germans are going to have here."
Between times he experimented. George Kenney was the first man to fix machine guns in the wing of a plane: back in 1922 he installed two .30-caliber Brownings in the wing of an old De Havilland. Kenney is the inventor of the parachute bomb, which enables bombing planes to fly lower, bomb more accurately. He invented this bomb in 1928, but it was never used until last September, when he dropped 240 of them on the Japanese at Buna. Twenty-two Jap planes were standing on the strip; 17 of them were destroyed and all the ack-ack in the area was silenced.