History
The completed plane was delivered to the U.S. Army in July 1942 at a cost of US$314,109 and subsequently flown to Australia, from where it joined the war in the Pacific in early September with the 43rd Bombardment Group, 63rd Bombardment Squadron in Port Moresby.
 
The plane was assigned to Captain Kenneth McCullar and his crew of nine, and served with distinction over the next few months. It was McCullar, an avid gambler, who gave Black Jack its moniker from the last two digits of its serial number—a jack and an ace is a “blackjack hand” of 21 in the card game of Pontoon.
 
Captain McCullar was quite a pilot and one who was highly regarded and decorated for his bravery, but who was unfortunately killed in April 1943 when another B17 he was commanding crashed during take-off from Port Moresby. In his obituary, the commander of the 5th U.S. Air Force commented on McCullar’s bravery and leadership skills and said “he was a master at the art of sinking Japanese ships”.
 
It was McCullar at the controls of Black Jack that developed the potentially dangerous, but devastating technique of “skip bombing” that is credited in his sinking of the Japanese Kagero Class destroyer Hayashio on the night of the 24th November 1942, in the Huon Gulf.
 
That attack left Black Jack so badly damaged that it was out of action for two months and when it returned to service it was under the control of McCullar’s co-pilot, Lt. Harry Staley who had took over from McCullar when he was promoted to Squadron Commander in January 1943.
 
Black Jack performed equally well under Staley until he completed his tour of duty and handed the plane over to it’s next, and final, pilot—Lt. Ralph De Loach.

The Final Flight
Black Jack’s final flight was on
10 July 1943 when it left 7-Mile Airdrome in Port Moresby just before midnight on a mission to bomb the heavily fortified Japanese airfields at Rabaul in New Britain.
 
The plane’s course took it southeast down the coast before it turned northeast over the Owen Stanley Range and Dyke Ackland Bay to the Solomon Sea and on to New Britain. On reaching Kimbe Bay on the north coast, it changed course again and headed east to Rabaul.
 
The flight was a troubled one, with both right wing engines developing problems during the flight to New Britain. However, De Loach, together with his crew of nine, managed to reach Rabaul and successfully deliver their bombs on target.
 
De Loach turned the plane round to return to Port Moresby, but on the way back ran into a violent storm on approach to the coast of New Guinea to the northwest of Cape Nelson, a situation he later described the situation as “the blackest of black nights…the worst flying weather I’d ever seen in my life”.
 
With two engines badly malfunctioning, it was impossible to hold the plane on course for Port Moresby and cross the Owen Stanley’s, and so Black Jack was turned southeast down the coast towards Milne Bay. They made it as far as Cape Vogel where, with virtually no fuel left, the decision was taken to ditch the plane on the shallow reef that runs parallel to the white sand beach at Boga Boga.
 Never having ditched a bomber before, De Loach handed the controls over to his co-pilot, Joseph Moore, who managed to put the plane down but over-shot the reef flat. It ended up over the deep water, where the plane floated briefly before sinking down to the sandy sea bed some 50m below.
 
There was just enough time for the ten man crew, three of whom had been injured in the landing, to get out before Black Jack sank, and they managed to get to shore with the aid of local villagers who had seen the plane come down.
 
An Australian Coastwatcher named Eric Foster also saw the crash landing and informed air-sea rescue to dispatch an RAAF seaplane to evacuate the wounded. The rest of the crew were rescued two days later when a PT boat arrived to take them to Goodenough Island, where they were flown back to Port Moresby, and then given two weeks leave in Sydney before returning to full combat duty.
 
The pilot De Loach, and co-pilot Moore were subsequently awarded Silver Star medals, with some other members of the crew receiving the Bronze Star or Oak Leaf Cluster for their parts in the overall mission and getting the plane down.
 
Black Jack on the other hand lay largely forgotten on the sea floor and remained undisturbed there for another 43 years.

Discovery
The discovery of Black Jack reads like something out of an adventure novel, with three Australians—Rod Pierce, Bruce Johnson and David Pennefather—stumbling on the wreck almost by accident in late December 1986.
 
Pennefather, an ex-Kiap who spent most of his adult life in PNG and developed a strong interest in WWII wrecks, had visited the Cape Vogel area earlier in 1986 where he heard from the villagers of Bogo Boga that a plane had crashed near their reef in WWII. He subsequently organized a Christmas dive trip with Rod Pierce and Bruce Johnson to try and find what they ...