Suddenly the flotilla’s antiaircraft opened fire with a concerted roar. The transports’ long range guns joined it. Their barking reports made the thin steel hulls quiver. Then came the bombs. One struck an 8,000-ton troopship aft of the bridge. A thousand Jap soldiers died in the flaming inferno it made. Live steam from the wrecked engine room cooked fifty other men alive. A second bomb blasted the stricken vessel. Its superstructure leaped into the air and fell overside in twisted pieces. The ship itself rolled, broke apart, and sank. That second bomb was a credit to Chick Enders’ marksmanship. From a three-mile height he had hit the wave-tossed Jap ship with the accuracy of a sharpshooter. He had done it, flying through air that was bumpy with antiaircraft bursts, ignoring the darting Zero fighters that stabbed at his ship from above. Soapy Babbitt in the top turret and Tony Romani in the tail were not ignoring the hornet-like Jap Zeros. While Barry, Hap and Chick were concentrating on their first bombing run, they knocked down a plane apiece. The Flying Fortress squadron had dispersed, and its members were making individual runs over the flotilla. Now, however, the Jap flak was forcing them to fly higher. One bomber already was down in the sea. Several others had been nicked by shrapnel. _Rosy O’Grady’s_ stabilizer showed ragged holes, and Cracker Jackson had been stunned by a direct hit on the ball turret. “We’re going upstairs, too,” Barry Blake decided. “We won’t make so many hits, but we’ll make the Japs disperse, so their flak won’t be so concentrated.” “That suits us gunners, Lieutenant,” Fred Marmon spoke up. “We’ll pick off a few more Zeros up there where our Lockheed Lightnings are dogfighting.” The Jap “cover” of fighting planes certainly looked as if a tornado had struck it. The deadly but unarmored little fighters were torching down all over the sky. Others were fleeing back toward their New Guinea bases, glad of an excuse to return for gas. The reason was simple: plane for plane and pilot for pilot, our forces were better. When the Fortresses got “upstairs” there was not much opposition to deal with. _Rosy O’Grady_ made three more runs before the first wave of Australian _Havoc_ bombers arrived beneath her. Skimming the sea at mast-height, the twin-engined attack bombers strafed the Jap decks with a terrible hail of bullets. They passed over, from stern to stem, and dropped their bombs at point-blank range—sometimes down the enemy’s smokestacks. On their heels came the North American B-26 Mitchells, repeating the same tactics, with even greater effect. Back and forth like a great broom of destruction they swept across the Jap flotilla. Enemy gunners withered and died under blast after blast of hot lead. Those who survived tried desperately to swing their heavier guns into action, but that was like trying to shoot mosquitoes with a pistol.