HAVOC AT WEWAK

Designed by a team headed by the legendary Ed Heinemann at Douglas Aircraft Company prior to the outbreak of World War Two, the Douglas A-20 HAVOC was first ordered in quantity by the French, who knew it as the DB-7, and then by the British, to whom it was the BOSTON. To the Japanese in New Guinea, recipients of the destructive firepower of Ed Heinemann’s masterpiece, HAVOC would certainly have been most appropriate. It was here, in the minimum altitude combat environment above the jungles of New Guinea that the A-20 became all that it could be, a fast, powerful, hard hitting attack aircraft unlike anything the Japanese Imperial Army Air Forces could launch against the Allies.

In the painting, we see two A-20G gunships of the 386th Bomb Squadron, 312th Bomb Group bomb and strafe anti-aircraft gun positions strategically located around the Japanese Army-held Australian Mission hospital on a hill above Wewak town in Papua New Guinea on May 7, 1944. Aware of the Allies’ reluctance to bomb near a hospital, the Japanese located some of their air-defense gun emplacements (overlooking the runway at the Wewak airfield) in close proximity to this structure. The 312th Bomb Group called themselves “the Roarin’ 20s”, referring, of course, to the A-20s that the group operated so effectively against the Japanese throughout the war in the Pacific.