Lanphier, Holmes, and Barber
Courtesy of the Mitchell family
CAPTAIN JOHN MITCHELL AND THE REST OF THE FIGHTER PILOTS in Major Henry “Vic” Viccellio’s squadron decided to stage a special celebration of America’s Independence Day and, in the days leading up to July 4, 1942, got all caught up in preparty preparations. The way the pilots saw it, a big reason—or excuse—for a bash was to return the favor to local Brits and New Zealanders who had befriended them while they had trained at Nadi on Fiji’s western coast. The locals had hosted them plenty of times to dinner, drinks, and other leisure events, and the army fliers decided it was their turn to host the hosts, and what better time than July 4? With plenty of Texans around, including Wallace Dinn of Corpus Christi, who’d become Mitch’s closest friend, everyone liked the idea of throwing a Texas-style barbecue. Just as in flying, the proud pilots were eager to show their skill—at partying hard.
The Texans took the lead, along with Second Lieutenant Rex Barber. Though not from the Lone Star State, the country boy from Oregon with his big, bullish, derring-do personality might as well have been. The organizers lobbied the other men to chip in money to cover the feast, lined up a small orchestra, and tapped local contacts to gather a flock of girls to join the dance they had in mind for the day’s end at a nearby farmhouse. The men persuaded the squadron’s physician to hand over ten gallons of medicinal alcohol to create a “Fiji Punch.” With whiskey in short supply—about as rare as a snowflake in the tropics—securing the 180-proof alcohol was critically important. The beer that was occasionally on hand was never cold, causing Mitch to make a promise: “When this war is over I’m going to buy a big refrigerator and keep nothing but beer in it.” Last, the party planners negotiated with a nearby rancher for the purchase of two cows.
The other big reason for the bash was that when the pilots weren’t in the sky training or on an occasional reconnaissance flight, they had plenty of time to spare. In their five months on Fiji they’d flown countless drills in the P-39 Airacobras, logging some four hundred hours. During June, they’d even had the benefit of being tutored by navy pilots who’d fought at Midway. The pilots’ aircraft carrier had been damaged, and they were stuck on Fiji for several weeks. Like other Midway combatants passing through Nadi, the fliers had lots to say about the unexpected victory against Yamamoto’s Imperial Navy. “They really scattered yellow meat all over the ocean” was the way Mitch enthusiastically summarized their combat tales in his diary. Even so, Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz and other top military leaders back home began to strike a slightly more cautious note, warning the public not to get carried away. One story that ran in many stateside newspapers was headlined “Jap Sea Power Blunted, But Still Mighty.” It said, “Japan has suffered a terrible defeat in the battle for mastery of the mid-Pacific, naval experts agreed today, and her striking power has been badly blunted, but she still has left great strength with which to attempt a comeback.” Complicating matters—and Nimitz was not about to share this publicly—was a dramatic falloff in intelligence. Not only had the Japanese navy changed its version of JN-25 in late May to confound the code breakers, it had made another switch in early summer, which, as one historian observed, “plunged Allied crypto teams into almost total eclipse.” In July, the United States was left mostly to guess the next moves by Yamamoto’s navy.
For several weeks, the visiting navy pilots watched Mitch, Barber, and the others handle the P-39s, offering tactical tips on fighting against the Japanese Zeros. The two groups performed exercises together, the navy pilots in their Grumman F4F Wildcats, which in some ways resembled the speedy Zeros. “We’d been dogfighting with other P-39s and now had a chance to learn combat and weaknesses against other planes,” Rex Barber said. The navy pilots advised how best to take on the Zeros in combat by flying in pairs. “They taught us how to scissor—back and forth with two planes—and keep the Zeros off our tails.” Worrisome was the realization that the heavily armored P-39s were cumbersome and slower than the nimble Wildcats-cum-Zeros, prompting anxious talk about when the faster, high-performing P-38 Lightning, still in development back home, might be ready.
Mitch and Vic were now convinced more than ever that their pilots, nearly all of whom were only ten months removed from flight school, were combat ready. But although they continued to hear about Midway and other conflicts, no action had come their way. “Outside of the mail coming we have had absolutely no excitement here at all,” Mitch complained to Annie Lee in mid-June. Weeks later, he sounded like a broken record. “Things are absolutely quiet here,” he said. “Only mail breaks the monotony, so don’t feel your time is misspent.” Vic was pushing his superiors to get them moved, as Mitch put it, “to somewhere where the fighting was going on,” even to Europe if need be. The challenge was now less about training than about maintaining a high level of readiness.
Fiji had become a quiet and comfortable stopover for a variety of bigwigs. Politics even seemed to come into play, as Texas congressman Lyndon Baines Johnson, a lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve, inspected the forces there as part of a two-month Pacific tour of US bases. Johnson had asked President Roosevelt for the assignment. For many observers, the trip seemed to be more about the ambitious thirty-four-year-old wanting to buff up his résumé for future campaigns than about FDR’s need for eyes and ears on the ground. Indeed, Johnson earned what became a controversial army Silver Star as a result of his brief swing through the Pacific. He was aboard a B-26 as an observer during a bombing raid of New Guinea and, according to himself, came under heavy fire from Japanese Zeros. Others, including members of the bomber’s crew, later said that had never happened. Either way, Johnson proudly wore the medal en route to the presidency.
The army fliers at Fiji certainly saw more combat-hardened brass than LBJ. One was an Army Air Forces general named George C. Kenney, a decorated World War I veteran who was on his way to Port Moresby to take command of the Fifth Air Force. Another was Army General Henry “Hap” Arnold, a senior officer and longtime proponent of airpower who’d actually learned to fly in a Wright Brothers biplane. Arnold, the commanding general of the Army Air Forces, was making the rounds in the Pacific to assess frontline needs. In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s main focus was on Europe and fighting Hitler’s Germany, which meant that more efficient coordination of the limited military resources in the Pacific was essential to halting Japanese expansion and protecting Australia and New Zealand. In that vein, the next to come through Fiji was a group of high-ranking officers under the command of Army Major General Millard F. Harmon, Jr. They were on their way to New Caledonia, about 840 miles west of Nadi, where Harmon would start bringing order to the chaos that had followed Pearl Harbor, when Army Air Forces units had been deployed hastily throughout the region. As the commander of Army Air Forces in the South Pacific, with headquarters at Noumea on New Caledonia, he would pull together under a single command the various fighter squadrons scattered about the different islands.
Mitch, Vic, and the others—such pilots as Rex Barber, Tom Lanphier, Wallace Dinn, and Doug Canning, all of whom had been training together for months—were left to wonder, what about us? Mitch and Vic knew Harmon from Hamilton Field in San Francisco. Before that, Harmon had been the officer who had shaken Mitch’s hand on the podium at flying school graduation in Texas in 1940. They hoped that their personal connections might help get them off the sidelines. “It may be that he can do something for us,” Mitch wrote in his diary. Vic also knew one of Harmon’s top aides, Lieutenant Colonel D. C. “Doc” Strother, and began working on him. The pitch was that Mitch and Vic “honestly believed that this squadron is better trained right now than anywhere in the U.S.” For his part, Mitch thought, “I feel as though I am being wasted. Not that I’m so valuable, but at least I have two years’ service, about 800 hours, have been to England and have observed and learned all I can here. I have done the biggest part of the training of the younger pilots and know them to be as well trained as they will ever be, until we get some aerial gunnery and actual combat.”
In the meantime, as spring turned to summer, the squadron continued to cope with the monotony. Some found novel outlets. Late in the summer, Tom Lanphier talked his way aboard a B-17 that took part in a bombing run at Truk Lagoon, the main forward base of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet. When he returned, he elatedly told others about the raid, claiming that he had even climbed into the waist gunner’s position and shot down a Zero. The reaction of the other fliers was mixed—the kid from Stanford, a son of a decorated army general now working in Washington, was seen as either ballsy or out of his mind. Vic, the squadron leader, was angry, not just because the ride had been unauthorized but because Lanphier, at this point emerging as one of the best pilots, had risked his life. To Vic, the life of a trained fighter pilot had far more value than that of an airman second class. Red Barber asked Lanphier afterward why he had done it. Lanphier replied, “Rex, you are over here because you are patriotic. Well I’m here because I’m patriotic, but I have another reason.” He was looking ahead to a future in politics—the presidency, even—and figured that a sterling war record would be a prerequisite to fulfilling that goal. Lanphier years later denied that explanation, saying that his goal had been “to do as well as I could as a military pilot in order to at least approach the standards my old man had set as a flier.” But it wasn’t as if a political calculus never entered a serviceman’s mind. Lyndon Johnson’s brief time in the Pacific that spring was seen in part as politically motivated, and when a National Guard division showed up on Fiji Island, Mitch looked down at the reserves as “one of the God damnest messes I have ever seen. Nothing but a bunch of politicians.” Their first night at Nadi, he said, they made a beeline to the shortwave radio to touch base with the governor of Ohio. “They are all from Ohio and all have political aspirations.”
Beyond Lanphier’s adventure, the pilots at Nadi occupied themselves doing what GIs everywhere did during downtime: played sports of all kinds, played poker, drank whenever beverages were available, and passed around magazines as they turned up: Time, The Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, Flying Magazine, and especially Esquire: The Magazine for Men. Mitch received letters numbers 105 and 106 from Annie Lee in a package that included tobacco for the pipe he’d begun to smoke, as well as the latest issue of Esquire. The magazine was always in high demand for the full-page pinups inside. Mitch had tacked up several from prior issues on the wall of his bunk, next to a photograph of Annie Lee standing on her porch in San Antonio wearing a Dutch cap and a flirtatious expression. Mitch had complimented her pose, admiring her “very shapely pair of pens” and insisting that she easily put the Esquire models to shame. The new June issue he received was an instant hit at Nadi and, as it turned out, with military men everywhere. The issue featured Gypsy Rose Lee and a foldout of the Hollywood starlet and sex symbol Jane Russell lying on her back in a hayloft. Most compelling, though, was a luscious portrait of a model named Jeanne Dean in a shimmering gown. In her right hand she held a white orchid, a symbol of innocence and love. “Jeanne,” as the pinup was titled, was done by Alberto Vargas, a well-known Peruvian painter. The portrait was accompanied by a short verse, “Victory for a Soldier,” including such lines as “My heart’s with a Boy who heard a call to March and Fight for all that’s real on Earth.” The combination portrait-poem struck a chord with soldiers stationed in the European and the Pacific theaters who were separated by war from lovers and wives. “The Esquire meets with everyone’s approval,” Mitch told Annie Lee. “The poem with the Varga [sic] drawing was excellent—Thanks darling for sending them.”
Mitch had last partied on his birthday, June 16, when he had turned twenty-eight. The weather was miserable—heavy rain all day—but he and Wallace Dinn finally managed to get through to a nearby club, where they spent the night at the craps table. Mitch started out losing but went home a winner—and sent the $75 home to Annie Lee. With the Independence Day bash next up on the social calendar, he watched the planners kick into high gear in the days beforehand. Slaughtering the cows turned into something of a gory horror show. Rex Barber slashed one cow’s throat with a big knife, releasing a torrent of blood that made men turn away; one actually fainted. The second cow killing was worse. One of the Texans shot the cow in the head several times with a .45-caliber service pistol, but the cow just glared at the shooter and bellowed. They next tried an ax, but the cow did not even blink. The animal finally succumbed when someone retrieved a .22 rifle. Barber watched, later reporting, “The boy came up, shot her through the eye with a .22 and she dropped.” The cows were carved up, basted, and slow cooked. “Basted the beef all night,” Doug Canning said. Next up was making the Fiji Punch—emptying the ten gallons of medicinal alcohol into tubs and mixing in juice from fresh oranges, pineapples, and limes, along with juice from canned fruits—anything to help render the alcohol tasteless so it could be swigged easily.
The party went off spectacularly. In contrast to the rain on Mitch’s birthday, July 4 was sunny and hot. The two main Texan hosts strutted around in cowboy boots with .45-caliber pistols slung low on their thighs like gunfighters, as partygoers played baseball and cricket, devoured the barbecued beef, and drank all through the afternoon. Twilight signaled a second act, as the men showered and changed into formal attire before heading over to the farmhouse, where an orchestra and dozens of women awaited. The men toasted Independence Day and the need to protect the nation’s freedom. They danced and drank as the band played on. “We carried on all night, a hell of a party,” Canning said. The fruit juices succeeded beyond expectation in masking the ghastly taste of the 180-proof alcohol. Many of the men were falling-down drunk. More than a few had to be helped to bed in the huts, while several cars carrying the New Zealand and British guests experienced difficulty driving back to town. “One car, leaving, hit a tree,” Barber said. Mitch had a good enough time, mainly watching the heated action on the dance floor from a perch at the bar. “I never thought they could ever dig up that many girls around here, but they did,” he said. The good time left him feeling sentimental, though, for Annie Lee and what he was missing by not being with her. “The moon has just been full and it makes me think of you even more and the days we spent together in California. Those were the days,” he wrote.
FOUR DAYS LATER, ON JULY 6, 1942, THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF IN Washington, DC, were informed that the Japanese had cleared a strip of land on the north coast of Guadalcanal and were constructing an airfield. The workers were part of a small force that had landed on the island in early June as the Midway sea battle was being fought three thousand miles away. The Japanese plan was to create a single coral runway on a coastal plain near the mouth of the Lunga River as a base for about sixty of Yamamoto’s naval aircraft. Planned for completion by August, the base would then be used for further southerly advances.
The intelligence came not from code breakers at Station Hypo in Hawaii or from other cryptology outposts, who were stymied for the time being by the changes in the Japanese code, but from coastal watchers embedded on Guadalcanal. The watchers were mainly civil servants, planters, and farmers who had stayed behind on the various Solomon Islands following the Japanese invasions. They had hidden in the hills and, with the help of native islanders, monitored the movements of enemy planes, ships, and troops. In that instance, they radioed information about the airstrip on Guadalcanal to allies stationed on the east coast of Australia. Their information was verified by aerial surveillance and photo reconnaissance.
The Japanese had already made substantial inroads across the Solomon Islands. They had built a sea base on Tulagi, a tiny island taken in May, just thirty miles north of Guadalcanal. Its harbor was considered the best anchorage in the southern Solomons, and the Joint Chiefs were already contemplating limited action against the Japanese there. Now news of an enemy airport under construction on Guadalcanal reaffirmed their thinking that something had to be done. Guadalcanal was only 1,200 miles from Australia, meaning that a Japanese occupation of the island could not be tolerated.
Four weeks later, on the night of August 6, US naval gunfire and aerial bombing set afire Japanese barracks and buildings on Guadalcanal. Nearly eleven thousand marines from the 1st Marine Division followed, hustling ashore at Lunga Point, their amphibious landing part of a larger campaign, code-named Operation Watchtower, against Japan’s forward bases on the islands of Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and a third island, Florida. The invading Allied fleet, involving some seventy-five war and transport ships, marked a pivot in the Pacific war: the first time the United States had gone on the offense against the Japanese.
Initially the marines faced little resistance while taking control of the half-built airfield. Though the enemy force on Guadalcanal numbered about 2,800 men, only a few hundred were soldiers, the rest being laborers. Surprised and outnumbered, the defenders fled west to the Matanikau River and a peninsula known as Point Cruz, leaving behind plenty of supplies, food, and construction and military vehicles. One early encounter with the enemy, however, was forever seared into the marines’ collective memory. Near the Matanikau River, where Japanese forces had fled, patrols spotted a white flag, suggesting that the enemy was prepared to surrender. Further, a captured Japanese sailor seemingly provided confirmation of that, saying during interrogation that the Japanese were starving, suffering from tropical sicknesses, and wanted to give up. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Goettge, a senior intelligence officer, led a patrol of two dozen marines to Point Cruz, fully expecting to supervise a major enemy surrender. Only three marines returned. Soon after a nighttime beach landing by the patrol just west of the river, Japanese soldiers perched on a coral plateau began picking them off. Goettge was shot through the head and killed instantly. By morning, another twenty-one marines were dead or wounded. The three survivors, at various times during the night and on orders, ran into the ocean and swam to the 1st Marine Division’s stronghold several miles away. But none made it back in time to bring help. The last one making the nocturnal swim through the shark-infested waters was a platoon sergeant, who told a horrifying story. He had witnessed the Japanese make their final charge, firing needlessly into the bodies of dead and wounded marines pinned down at the beach. Even worse, they had mutilated the corpses, hacking at the marines with swords, cutting off the hands of one, cutting out the tongue of another. News of the ambush and the ghoulish massacre spread quickly, setting the tone for a deep and mutual malice in Pacific theater combat. “They were a fanatical enemy,” one marine veteran said afterward. “The meanest sonsabitches that ever lived.”
“THIS IS THE FIRST OFFENSIVE MOVE WE HAVE MADE,” MITCH wrote in his diary. “I’m very glad to see it. Hope and believe it is the first of many.” Mitch penned the entry three days after the marine landing on Guadalcanal, words showing that he sensed something big was unfolding, something where he might finally get his chance. “The Solomon battle seems to be going our way,” he wrote a few days later. “Sure hope I get in on it.”
But Mitch’s take on the early going amounted to wishful thinking. The Solomon Islands quickly became the stage of another bloodbath between the two warring nations—with little clarity this time, as opposed to at Midway, as to which side would ultimately prevail. Caught off guard, the Japanese retaliated within hours of the marines’ takeover, sending Betty bombers and Zero fighters to begin relentless bombing raids. Yamamoto’s Eighth Fleet, including a destroyer and other warships, attacked Allied ships still in the area after transports had dropped off the 1st Marine Division. In Tokyo, military leaders ordered the Seventeenth Army, stationed at Rabaul, to retake the island with support from Yamamoto. And to help direct the effort, Yamamoto moved his naval headquarters to Truk Lagoon to be closer to the fighting.
Under heavy attack, the US ships had cleared the area before unloading the marines’ equipment and supplies. Under the command of Major General Alexander Vandegrift, the marines then dug in to establish a defensive perimeter extending about three miles long from the beach at Lunga Point and in an oval shape around the airfield. They began working to complete the airfield, which they named Henderson Field in honor of a marine pilot named Lofton R. Henderson, who had been killed during the Midway battle. The first plane landed about a week later, when a navy transport plane arrived to remove two wounded marines.
The US commanders were forced to improvise as they went along. “Pretty much a hip-pocket operation,” Lieutenant Colonel Strother called the army’s scramble to provide aerial support for the marines. Strother’s boss, Major General Harmon, was pulling together different fighter units at the army’s new base on New Caledonia, but there was no formal Army Air Forces organization. In fact, Harmon and Strother had not intended to send any of their fighters to Guadalcanal until the marines had fully secured the island—late August, at the earliest. But the Japanese counterattack had changed all that. Harmon urgently sent two dozen P-39s and mechanics from his 339th Fighter Squadron to Guadalcanal. “The intensity of Japanese air operations required that they be deployed much earlier,” Strother said. “To help stem the frequent air attacks and to bolster the Marines.”
In the sky, the two sides went after each other fast and hard. “It’s infuriating,” complained Yamamoto’s chief of staff, Vice Admiral Matome Ugaki. “We shoot them down and we shoot them down, but they only send in more.” The constant demand for more planes at Guadalcanal was hampered, however, by the fact that Henderson Field had only a single airstrip. The challenge, said Strother, was “infiltrating a few aircraft and mechanics at a time, as fast as the flying field facilities could handle.” By the end of August, though, Mitch’s opportunity was at hand. An order went out for a group of pilots from Nadi to report to New Caledonia as a staging area for service at Guadalcanal. “Naturally I volunteered first,” Mitch wrote in his diary that night, August 31. “Fourteen of us are to go from here.” Mitch made certain that the group of pilots he led, Flight B, was selected—a group including his pal Wallace Dinn, Doug Canning, and a young pilot from San Diego named Julius “Jack” Jacobson. The son of a butcher, Jacobson eventually served as Mitch’s wingman. He was not at all surprised by Mitch’s advocacy, calling Mitch “very aggressive; he thought Flight B was the best of the three flights.” Flight B was chosen. Unhappy about being left behind were Rex Barber and Tom Lanphier, who were in another group and would have to wait.
Late in the morning of September 14, Captain John Mitchell and his fourteen pilots arrived at New Caledonia, transported aboard several heavy bombers—B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. Within a few days, they were taken to the Army Air Forces base at Tontouta, thirty miles northwest of Noumea, the island’s capital. The base was circled by steep mountains rising into moisture-thick clouds. One key problem at Tontouta was too many pilots for too few planes—“Only five planes in commission with about fifty-eight pilots ready to fly them,” Mitch observed. He and his men found themselves in limbo until a new shipment of P-39s could be assembled. They settled in to the pyramidal tents housing pilots and mechanics at the foot of one of the tallest mountains. The one comfort was a day room, outfitted with chairs, tables, a magazine rack, a Ping-Pong table, a phonograph, and a GI radio set. One rumor making the rounds was that the much anticipated P-38 Lightning, the twin-engine fighter the army brass had hyped as a speedy match for the Japanese Zero, would soon be making its debut. Mitch listened with mixed feelings. He certainly knew they needed better pursuit planes. “The Zeros have it over us so much there is no comparison,” he wrote in his diary while alone one night in his tent. “They out climb and outmaneuver us two to one.” But the P-38 had had a troubled history, and Mitch would never forget the horrific death of his friend Ellery Gross. He just hoped and prayed that the army had worked out the P-38’s kinks. “I’m not eager to fight in them as you can’t bail out,” he worried. But he also relished the idea of harnessing the P-38’s speed and climbing power. “I really would like to sit up above those damned Japs and let them see how it feels to have someone above you all the time.”
As they waited, Mitch and the rest got bits and pieces of war news from the radio in the day room. They learned that while they had been traveling to New Caledonia, the marines at Guadalcanal had weathered a nightmarish forty-eight-hour rampage as wave after wave of Japanese infantry—three thousand soldiers in all—had attacked from a narrow ridge along the Lunga River just south of Henderson Field. In what came to be called the Battle of Bloody Ridge, the Japanese, cursing and screaming, had broken through a marine perimeter and almost reached the marine command post before being repelled. The fighting had been hand-to-hand, as the Japanese poured it on. “The Marines had managed to turn the tide,” wrote one war correspondent, “but even when obviously defeated the Japanese kept coming. They went so far as to stage a hopeless bayonet attack in broad daylight.” The body count was eight to one in the marines’ favor, about one hundred marine losses to the enemy’s more than eight hundred.
Mitch and his pilots learned that navy Seabees, the name for navy construction workers, were marking off a grass strip parallel to Henderson Field. The second airstrip, to be called Fighter One, would allow Guadalcanal’s plane inventory to grow more quickly. By mid-September, it included a mix of Army Air Forces P-39s, navy F4F Wildcat fighters, navy SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, and TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. They learned that daily atabrine pill treatments were being enforced in earnest, as malaria had erupted after the troop landing in early August and had become a major medical problem, requiring the hospitalization of more than 1,500 men within six weeks.
Most unnerving, they heard from returning pilots about the Japanese fliers’ renowned aerial prowess. “The Japs had beat them,” Doug Canning said. “And they were scared.” Mitch watched his men—rookie fliers who hadn’t yet seen any combat—listening to the stories of the Japanese as unbeatable foes. “Wild stories,” Mitch observed, “about super planes and supermen, and they told us that if a Zero got on your tail you were dead.” As he watched the accounts send chills down his men’s spines, the moment became a test of leadership: he had to rebut the morale-busting talk on the eve of their own dispatch to the front line. The men turned to Mitch, and it was no wonder they did, not only because he was their flight leader but because he was a natural leader. The way some men are pure hitters in baseball, or shooters in basketball, John Mitchell knew how to lead. Over their seven months together, they had experienced his selflessness, such as the time at Nadi on Fiji when Mitch had gone off on a rant against a Life magazine photo spread showcasing American and British “heroes” from the fighting in Europe against Hitler. Mitch disparaged the gushing publicity as foolish. “There are many who had done much more without any special recognition,” he argued. “Seems to me that all they have done is just their duty.” He called the adulation unnecessary and over the top. “Maybe it’s sour grapes with me, but I do know I would certainly turn down any offer to return to the U.S. as a public hero just because I had been lucky enough to shoot down a couple of Japs.” Or there was the time the previous month when a B-25 bomber descending into Nadi had missed the airfield and had been circling helplessly in the sky. While others had watched, Mitch had run to a plane, gone up, and picked up the bomber about twenty miles away. He had led the bomber pilot back, diving toward the field just ahead of him to show him where it was.
One of his superiors, Doc Strother, had always been impressed by Mitch’s intensity, his “penetrating eyes,” since meeting him at Hamilton Field. His men, at Fiji and now at New Caledonia, admired his humility. His future wingman Jack Jacobson said that Mitch “always lived and flew with us and there was no pretense about him.” It was a role Mitch embraced, eschewing the occasional overture to take an administrative position or, as he described it, “to get on the staff and sit back and write papers, stuff like that. And I said, ‘No, I don’t like that. I like to be responsible. I like for people to depend on me.’”
Now there were the “tall tales from a whipped squadron,” as Mitch called them, and he would have none of it. “I took my kids aside and told them this was all crap, that those guys hadn’t really fought Zeros and that if any of them believed those tales and thought we couldn’t lick the Japs, they could stay there and not go to Guadalcanal.” He wasn’t about to share his private worries about the enemy’s Zeros, stressing instead the stronger firepower and thicker armor that made their own P-39s less vulnerable than Zeros. He knew, too, that during maneuvers the previous months his pilots had watched him to see how he did things, and he had made a point to lead by example—by flying aggressively and preaching that “good fighter pilots never think defensively.” That carried over to when they were on the ground and off duty, as he told them he didn’t mind if they got into a fistfight or two while carousing, that a streak of wildness was proof that they possessed the daring required of great fighter pilots. So, fielding the fearmongering about the enemy stoked by returning pilots, Mitch’s message was clear: “I told ’em that if we had team work we could take ’em. I kept drilling that into them and convinced them they were great pilots.
“Soon they couldn’t wait to get into combat.”
THE FIRST WEEK OF OCTOBER 1942, AFTER TWO WEEKS OF WAITING, Mitch climbed into the sky from the base at Tontouta on New Caledonia and veered south. He was leading a group of P-39 Airacobras on an 850-mile flight. Their destination was Cactus, code name for Guadalcanal. The Pacific islands all had code names, used in every communication, even in letters home. Fiji was Fantan. New Caledonia was Poppy. Tulagi was Ringbolt. And Guadalcanal was Cactus.
The army’s top South Pacific commander, Major General Harmon, had argued for days with his superiors that the US forces on Guadalcanal needed immediate help. He said that the Japanese were preparing another offensive. “It is my personal conviction,” he wrote, “that the Jap is capable of retaking Cactus-Ringbolt, and that he will do so in the near future unless it is materially strengthened.” Mitch and his men were part of that reinforcement.
There were not enough P-39s to go around, however. Doug Canning, for one, hitched a ride aboard a C-47 transport aircraft. A young Time magazine reporter named John Hersey happened to sit nearby. Guadalcanal was the future Pulitzer Prize–winning writer’s first assignment in the Pacific. Eager for wartime tidbits, he got little from the army pilot, however. Canning listened politely to questions about the war but shook them off, wanting instead to talk about home. Said Hersey, “Within a few minutes every conversation swings around to home.” Rather than discuss dive-bombing, Canning talked animatedly “about how he used to drive with girls and boys in his gaudily painted 1936 Chevy from Nebraskan town to town for the fabulous three-day fairs of summertime.”
Mitch and eleven others, meanwhile, stopped to refuel and spend the night on another of the Solomon Islands. Then, on Wednesday morning, October 7, they began the last leg of a flight to what, at that moment in time, was the crucible of war in the Pacific: Guadalcanal. The sky was clear, and from a distance Guadalcanal looked welcoming—a tropical island with sun-soaked beaches, coconut groves, green meadows, and inland highlands. Mitch made sure to make a wide turn from shore to steer clear of the Japanese guns he had been warned were embedded west of the Matanikau River. It was then that he spotted Henderson Field, a slice of airfield on a coastal terrain about a mile inland from Lunga Point. Mitch and the pilots following him could see that the base was surrounded by grassy ridges that disappeared into thick jungle, and as they closed in they could make out the defense line the marines had established, the hundreds of foxholes and weapons emplacements armed with Browning .50-caliber heavy machine guns, 37 mm antitank guns, M2 muzzle-loading mortars, and 90 mm heavy antiaircraft guns with fifteen-foot barrels. Looking inside the perimeter, they could see the coconut stumps from the days when the area had been a plantation, and on closer inspection, they noticed bomb craters, tangled plane wrecks, and marine amphibious equipment rusting on the beach next to hulks of Japanese transport ships—the residue of the marine invasion and the fierce fighting since.
The marine base was only about a half mile wide and a mile and a half long. That was the full extent of the US footprint, and from the air Mitch and his men could see how little ground the marines possessed and, worse, how the enemy was all around. The pilots made a final descent through plumes of smoke, one set curling skyward from the cooking fires at the marine base but many more from Japanese camps in the jungle outside the perimeter. It was all there in a single, compact vision, and it looked ghostly. “You could very easily know we were here, and they were there,” one of Mitch’s pilots observed.
Mitch was the first to touch down, the wheels of the P-39 squeaking as they hit the airfield’s glistening Marston matting, long strips of steel rolled out over a base of crushed coral. He had arrived just in time for Yamamoto’s next big push to retake Guadalcanal.