Rex Barber with a sheared P-38 wingtip
Courtesy of the National Museum of the Pacific War
THE JAPANESE BID TO RETAKE GUADALCANAL ISLAND THAT BEGAN in earnest on October 13, 1942, came in two waves: the first, smaller, one aimed at setting the stage for a massive second one. It started that Tuesday with a major convoy of Japanese troopships arriving to the coast west of Henderson Field, where the Japanese ground forces had relocated. The convoy’s task of depositing several thousand more infantry was the latest in a steady buildup of troops for the climactic assault, a buildup that would reach about 25,000 men. What made this delivery different from previous ones was the cover Yamamoto was providing. From his naval headquarters at Truk Lagoon, 1,300 miles away in the central Pacific, the admiral had sent a task force of two mighty battleships, Kongo and Haruna, along with nine destroyers, to attack Henderson Field. Intended to freeze the Americans in place, the shelling would be the fiercest and most concentrated since the marines had taken over the airfield in August.
The naval task force, aided by a plane dropping flares to illuminate targets, unleashed its firepower shortly before midnight October 13, firing hundreds of rounds of armor-piercing high explosives and blasting Henderson Field for nearly two hours. In addition, twenty-two Japanese bombers, escorted by Zero fighters, bombarded the base. Joining the action was “Pistol Pete,” the long-range 150-mm howitzers, lobbing shells at the Fighter Two airfield from their position near the Matanikau River. The ground artillery assault began on October 13 and continued into the next day and the one after that.
The seventy-two hours that followed October 13 came to be known as Three Nights to Remember. Shells from Yamamoto’s battleships systematically tore apart the main runway, with exploding gasoline tanks lighting up the night. The bombing pattern moved from the airstrip to campsites in the palm grove and on the surrounding hillside. There were moments when the flares and the ammunition and gas dumps that burst into flames combined to make it seem as bright as midday. Seabees of the 6th Construction Battalion scurried to try to keep the runway in operation, unloading dirt from dump trucks and slapping precut Marston matting over the bomb craters. They’d duck and run to fill a crater, tamping down dirt, laying down the mat, and then scattering as more bombs whined overhead. But as soon as they filled one crater, another bomb created a new one. They could not keep up. The bombardment was relentless as the Japanese bombers continued to attack Henderson Field during the stretches when Yamamoto’s battleship assault from the ocean was halted.
The US forces sprinted, jumped, and threw themselves into foxholes, where they spent the nights trying to stay out of harm’s way. Mitch jumped into a hole with the rest. “It was very hot. Lots of men puked.” In the morning, the men emerged to find shells from the battleship guns—their jagged noses measuring fourteen inches in diameter—littering the ground, unexploded. Tents had been either sliced by shrapnel or crumpled. Forty-one men were dead. The day before the attack, Henderson Field had had ninety working aircraft, a combination of navy SBD dive-bombers, navy F4F Wildcat fighters, and army air forces P-39 and P-40 fighters. Mitch and the others checked on their planes and found them in shambles. Together they pushed most of them off to the side. They counted forty-two planes still able to fly. Henderson Field was so pockmarked with bomb craters, however, that heavy bombers didn’t have enough room to take off. The nearby grassy strip known as Fighter One—though rough and short at 2,000 feet—proved usable, although only for the lighter planes that had survived the attacks. But the US forces also faced a fuel crisis that would not be resolved anytime soon; cargo ships carrying fuel could not be expected to get through to the island, given all the Japanese warships and fighter planes still in the area. “We don’t know whether we’ll be able to hold the field or not,” one marine colonel reported.
Their prospects only got worse. During the afternoon of October 14, two waves of Japanese bombers and fighters descended virtually unimpeded, freely inflicting further damage and more US casualties. Nighttime saw continued bombardment from the warships, and at dawn on October 15, the Japanese convoy reached the waters off Lunga Point. In plain sight of the US forces at the crippled Henderson Field, the five Japanese transport ships unloaded supplies and troops, protected by escorting warships. The message couldn’t have been any clearer: the enemy was readying for a ground offensive. Japan’s Seventeenth Army leaders were emboldened, at once believing that the US troops’ morale had been crushed by the bombing and supremely confident that their plan to encircle Henderson Field from several directions with their beefed-up infantry divisions would bring them victory.
The marines could only dig in and await the anticipated ground attack. In the meantime, aerial assets were used as best as possible, with flights cobbled together to challenge the Japanese buildup. With little fuel left, the ground crews scrounged around the jungle along the runway for gasoline drums that hadn’t been hit, while others siphoned fuel from disabled planes. Pilots with their parachutes strapped on bolted from foxholes during breaks in the bombing raids and ran in a zigzag to planes loaded with 100-pound to 500-pound bombs. Firing up the engines, they looked like drunk drivers weaving down the pockmarked runway that the Seabees had treated with their first aid of dirt and mats. “The Seabees were marvelous,” pilot Doug Canning said, “the way they ran out with tampers after raids to fill holes, repairing the field fast and then putting the Marston mat back down.” Several of the flights managed to strike the oncoming troopships using the 100-pound bombs, but the damage did not slow the convoy. Another group of planes went looking for “Pistol Pete,” hoping to silence the nearly constant artillery fire, but they couldn’t locate the jungle-concealed cannons sharing the nickname and, running low on fuel, had to give up. On the third day of the Japanese push, October 15, the fuel crisis eased a bit when C-47 transport planes arrived at intervals from the US base at Espiritu Santo, six hundred miles to the south. Each plane could carry only twelve drums of fuel, however, just enough to keep twelve planes in the air for an hour. But everyone—pilots, mechanics, and ground crew alike—was now pitching in to get the fighters into the air, patching up and fueling aircraft, loading bombs by hand, and belting ammunition into the guns.
Throughout the day and night of October 15, Mitch and Wallace Dinn were part of a group of army fliers dispatched to disrupt the enemy’s unloading of troops and supplies. During one of their flights, the P-39s fired on a Japanese transport while an accompanying navy SBD bomber hit and sank the ship with a 500-pound bomb. One P-39 pilot was shot down during the attack but was immediately picked up unharmed. The next attack was even more intense and dramatic: the fliers ran into a bunch of Zero fighters. The notoriously fast planes were covering for the ships and barges unloading troops, but the army fliers still managed to get through. Dinn made a direct midship hit on a transport. The bomb blew the vessel apart and sent wounded and dead enemy soldiers flying into the ocean. The water turned red from blood, and Mitch watched sharks dart in to grab flesh. He stared in horror: “The sharks were having a heyday.” The next morning, Mitch, Dinn, and the others were back at it again, this time coming upon beached transport ships unloading men. “Troops went into the water but we strafed the hell out of them,” Mitch said.
For a day and a half, the pilots had flown as often as they could, returning at dusk or even later. Landing at night was difficult, with only a handful of makeshift lights dimly illuminating an airstrip often drenched in tropical rain. They managed during that time to sink two transport ships, set several others on fire, and repeatedly strafe the beach landings, losing some of their own planes and men in the process. But their effort was a nuisance at best, for by the time the Japanese convoy departed Guadalcanal on October 16, it had succeeded in landing thousands more troops and most of its cargo and ammunition.
THEN CAME A LULL, SAVE FOR SPORADIC SKIRMISHES. YAMAMOTO’S main task force cleared the area and set sail for the naval base at Truk. Meanwhile, the 2nd Division of Japan’s Seventeenth Army left its stronghold in the village of Kokumbona west of Henderson Field and began hacking its way through the jungle. The battle plan called for Lieutenant General Masao Maruyama of the 2nd Division, leading nine infantry battalions totaling about 5,600 men, to loop around the field and set up for a surprise attack from the south. Another Japanese unit, the Seventeenth Army artillery, headed for the ridges overlooking Henderson Field, from which it would shell the airfields, simultaneously diverting the marines and providing cover for troops charging from the west across the Matanikau River as well as General Maruyama’s men from the south. Completing the three-pronged assault, a coastal force consisting of about 2,900 men, a tank company, and extensive heavy artillery—150 mm howitzers, field artillery pieces, and other guns—departed along the beach for Henderson Field. The Japanese commanders enveloping the airfield from the south and west and the coastline were instructed to annihilate the enemy and not let up until Marine General Vandegrift himself and his staff emerged carrying a US flag and a white flag to surrender. Then, once Henderson Field was retaken, the forces were to report their victory to headquarters using the code word “Banzai,” an expression translated as “Ten thousand years,” or “Long live.”
Changes in US leadership were afoot. Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the US Pacific Fleet, decided that a more forceful frontline leader was needed to tackle the perilous situation on Guadalcanal. He chose Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, Jr., and on October 15, the order was delivered to Halsey as he arrived at the island of New Caledonia: “You will take command of the South Pacific area and South Pacific forces immediately.” The crusty, tough-talking Halsey was known widely for his go-get-’em aggressiveness. Following the Pearl Harbor attack, he’d told the press, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will only be spoken in hell.” News of his appointment spread quickly in the South Pacific, providing a morale jump on Guadalcanal.
On October 16, the US forces emerged from their foxholes and ate their first hot meal in days, having survived on an underground diet of cold hash and hardtack, a bland, dry biscuit. Some of the men took the opportunity to scrub their damp, sour clothes to try “to keep down some of the stink,” as Mitch described it. Mitch used the respite to write to Annie Lee. “You can see now that I do get around. Here I am in Guadalcanal,” he announced in the October 22 missive, ignoring the custom of using code words for the islands. It was his first letter since arriving at Henderson Field two weeks before. He mainly chitchatted, asking Annie Lee for news from home, passing along what little he’d heard from his father, Noah, and telling her that he had relished reading a bunch of her letters, some dating back to May, that had been forwarded from Fiji, where he’d been stationed previously. “I enjoy them so much,” he said. “Since things are well blacked out here at night and since I’ve been going pretty hard and fast during the daytime I haven’t even had a chance to read all of them. But that gives me something to look forward to—very much so!” He was hoping, too, that she’d get his letter in time for her birthday—she would turn twenty-six on November 11—and poured on the love and affection: “I know I have the best, sweetest and most beautiful wife in all the world. It seems that my being apart from you just makes me realize more and more how much I love you and how much I need you to make my life complete.”
Mitch included a peek at the war but cast the combat in a rah-rah way, bragging that he was “going to town with the Japs and loving every minute of it.” He told her about the enemy plane he’d destroyed—his first—and boasted that more kills were coming, as he’d “only gotten started.” The pounding Japanese attack that had just ceased? He downplayed it. “We are being bombed every day and have an occasional shelling,” he said, “but it’s really not too bad as we usually manage to get in a well-protected spot.” Overall, he said, if not for an agitator at night—an oblique reference to Washing Machine Charlie—things were going great. “I have never felt better in my life,” he said. “We work hard but have no way of stepping out of line. Haven’t had a drink in weeks. If these yellow devils would leave us alone at night so we could sleep it would be about perfect.”
The truth was far less rosy. His letter contained no hint of the worry and the mounting tension felt by the US forces waiting for the renewed Japanese effort to overrun Henderson Field. The best that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox could muster when reporters in Washington, DC, pressed him on whether Guadalcanal could be held was “I certainly hope so.” Editorial writers were not reassured. “Secretary Knox, in a game effort to be optimistic, simply stated that he hopes our boys will win,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. “There is not the slightest doubt the enemy has succeeded in landing considerable reinforcements, not only in men, but also in mechanized equipment and field artillery.”
Annie Lee Mitchell would have to rely on the press coverage, not her husband, for the broader reality—that US control of Henderson Field hung in the balance. And Mitch’s epistolary spin clearly did not have a calming effect. “Johnny is in the Solomons,” Annie Lee fretted to her Aunt Ludma, “and I can hardly stand the thought of that.”
THE JAPANESE DRIVE BEGAN THE DAY AFTER MITCH WROTE HIS letter, and it started with thousands of fresh troops and tanks moving eastward across the Matanikau River toward Henderson Field. The new commander in the South Pacific, Admiral Halsey, monitored events from New Caledonia, where a chaplain from Guadalcanal conveyed the concern, even despair, felt by the US defenders bracing for the attack. Halsey would have none of it. “We’re going to win,” he said, “and you and I will see Yamamoto in hell.”
Four times that Friday night and into the next morning, Japanese soldiers and tanks emerged from the jungle and attempted to cross the river, hordes of soldiers rushing the entrenched marines. Each time, the marines managed to stop them, with enemy bodies stacking up on the sand bar. One reason the marines were able to repulse the attack was that their attention was undivided. The second Japanese force, led by General Maruyama, had not yet reached the south side of Henderson Field, slowed by the unexpectedly grueling march through the gnarly, hot, rainy jungle, meaning that the grand plan for a coordinated assault fell apart. Two more days passed before Maruyama’s battalions began multiple frontal attacks; nighttime charges continuing for the next two nights by infantrymen screaming battle cries, throwing grenades, and firing weapons. Equipped with rifles, machine guns, antitank guns, mortars, and other artillery, marine and army soldiers at the perimeter time and again mowed down the storming Japanese troops. Some gunners peed into the machine guns’ water jackets to keep them firing and not overheating. The US defenders bent but did not break, even though the Japanese soldiers managed several times to close within a few hundred yards of the airfield. But a US counterattack succeeded in killing them and clearing the field. The carnage was jaw-dropping. Whereas the United States lost about 60 men during the raids, the enemy death toll exceeded 1,500. The Japanese had grossly underestimated the US troops’ strength, and the roughly 23,000 Americans they faced overall, though stretched thin, were more than three times the preassault estimates.
The fliers pitched in from the sky: Mitch, Wallace Dinn, Doug Canning, Mitch’s wingman, Jack Jacobson, and others from the Army Air Forces, Marines, and Navy. Mitch led several raids on the Japanese base at Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel Island, about 170 miles from Guadalcanal. In one, he, Dinn, and Jacobson dropped 500-pound bombs and then joined marine fighters, dive-bombing and destroying eight floatplanes. Mitch strafed a gasoline dump of about three hundred barrels and set it afire. During a return raid that afternoon, Mitch and Jacobson fired on two planes sitting on the beach, and then Mitch, on a final pass, suddenly felt his P-39 rock. Bullets from a ground gun had riddled his plane. He was not wounded, but his right wing was hit, severing the cables to the ailerons, the panels at the tips of the wings that go up and down and enable a plane to bank and roll. Mitch compensated and headed back to Guadalcanal. Both ailerons had dropped an inch or so, and he had to fly home holding his stick all the way to the right side of the cockpit.
The marine commanders also put Mitch and his pilots to work assisting the ground forces, dive-bombing the enemy troops mobilizing around Henderson Field. They’d attack a specific location from the air and then watch as the marines mopped up. Mitch said, “The Marines would find dead Japanese, their shoes blown off and no visible wounds. They were already dead or almost dead. The Marines finished the job.” In one instance the pilots were directed to hit a hillside near the airfield where the enemy had dug in. Mitch burned the grass off the hill with incendiary bullets. Several Japanese ran out of foxholes into nearby woods. The pilots dive-bombed and strafed just in front of the marine advance. Other times they dropped depth charges into the jungle to flush out the enemy, whereupon marine shooters picked them off. Mitch later learned that the infantry had rounded up a cache of souvenirs—samurai swords and the like—and was irked when the soldiers wanted to peddle the combat mementos for money or a precious bottle of whiskey. “That made me sore since I knew we’d killed lots of the enemy for them.” The souvenir grab during the vicious fighting in the Pacific devolved into macabre barbarism on both sides. Japanese beheaded dead marines and mutilated their corpses, while marines made a point of rifling through the packs and pockets of the enemy dead. “Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets emptied, and good teeth extracted,” one marine wrote later. “Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized.” Some of the infantrymen took to wearing necklaces made of the teeth of Japanese soldiers or affixing severed ears to their belts. Admiral Nimitz, appalled by the gruesome trophy taking, issued an order that “no part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir,” but the abuses continued nonetheless.
Mitch got his second kill during one of the many dogfights over Henderson Field the first day, October 23, that the Japanese resumed all-out fighting. He and navy pilots flying Grumman F4F fighters were up against sixteen Japanese bombers and twenty escorting Zeros. “Grummans got 19 Zeros and I shot down one,” he wrote matter-of-factly in that day’s combat report. Very quickly, in three weeks of intense fighting, Mitch had received his combat baptism by fire—harrowing encounters he survived while absorbing lessons that he then noted in his diary, combat reports, and letters. “There are all sorts of things to be learned that one learns only from experience,” he wrote. The takeaways covered the gamut, from the strengths and weaknesses of the P-39 (“Very good for strafing and dive-bombing,” he said, “not too suitable for combat at high altitudes.”) to the role luck played in whether he returned from a mission or not. “We’re not out there playing tiddlywinks,” he wrote. It was kill or be killed, and “luck is part of it. But you make your own luck. I believe that. I think if you’re prepared and you’re ready, when the time comes, you’re going to be able to handle the situation.” He also discovered something else during October’s pivotal Battle of Guadalcanal, something he hadn’t necessarily expected. “I really like it out here,” he wrote. Sure, the conditions were tough, and he missed “the nice things I could have if I were in the states.” But there was also this: “Great personal satisfaction in being up on the front lines—of getting in there and really scrapping and of knowing you are doing your very best to lick hell out of ’em.” He continued, “It’s a satisfaction nothing else can replace. It lets a man know how much guts he really has got, and allows him to revel in that fact.”
Mitch was on the fast track to becoming an ace fighter pilot—a status defined by five or more kills—and got his third on “Dugout Sunday,” the name the soldiers and press gave to the unrelenting Japanese bombing assault on October 25. “Today marked the most persistent series of air blows in any single day of the bitter struggle for Guadalcanal, to say nothing of the machine gunning and shelling by warships and shore batteries,” wrote Robert Cromie, a war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. The heavy fire started shortly after midnight, startling the troops and sending them into their foxholes. Breakfast, wisecracked Cromie, was butter, eggs, “and Zeros.” The continuous bombing was supplemented by a rare daytime appearance of a cluster of Yamamoto’s destroyers off Lunga Point and a steady diet of shelling by “Pistol Pete,” the enemy’s land battery. The Japanese pilots at first focused on some planes at one end of Henderson Field that were parked in formation, blowing them apart, but they were actually disabled, battered hulks that the Seabees had positioned as decoys while camouflaging working aircraft along the edges of the airstrip. The skies were a clear blue, but heavy overnight rains had turned Fighter One into a wet bog, grounding US aircraft and preventing any immediate response. “Field was muddy, and there were Zeros over the field all day,” Mitch complained. “Five dive-bombers bombed us, a Japanese destroyer sneaked in and destroyed three of our Guadalcanal to Tulagi boats.”
By early afternoon, the hot sun finally dried the strip, and orders were given to go after the warships using all available P-39 fighter planes equipped with 500-pound bombs. Only four were ready, however. Mitch took one up, along with Dinn, Jacobson, and another pilot from Texas, named Fred Purnell. Mitch’s engines faltered and he lost speed, requiring him to turn back. The others dropped their payloads but made no hits—misfires that were frustrating but not all that unexpected. It was difficult to dive at a ship that was moving, turning, and twisting. “Once you commit to a dive you don’t have the ability to twist and turn like they can, so we didn’t have much success,” Mitch’s wingman, Jacobson, said. The four tried again later in the day, and that time Jacobson landed a bomb directly on the bow of one of Yamamoto’s battleships. Several B-17 Flying Fortresses followed with additional hits, and Mitch had a perfect view from his cockpit as the battleship sank. Then, just before dark, it was Mitch’s turn. He and the others were sent north of Guadalcanal to attack one of Yamamoto’s naval support groups, made up of a single cruiser and fourteen destroyers. But on the way they spotted a number of Zero floatplanes and got sidetracked. Taking advantage of the cloud cover, they attacked the Zeros before they themselves were seen. “I got one on the first pass, Lieutenant Purnell got one on his first pass and Lieutenant Jacobson got one,” Mitch reported later. They ended up not going after the naval force, having dropped most of their bombs.
The Japanese losses at sea, in the air, and on the ground were continuing to mount. By nightfall, US fliers had shot down twenty-two enemy planes, and antiaircraft artillery had picked off another five. Similarly, on the ground, the US infantry followed the pattern of previous nights, under siege but holding tough and slaughtering a dwindling number of soldiers from General Maruyama’s 2nd Division. Several thousand corpses had piled up on the two main fronts, south of Henderson Field and along the Matanikau River to the west. Wrote war correspondent Cromie, “Japs in all the curious postures of death lay awaiting burial, some sprawled across barbed wire and still clutching their useless weapons.”
The next day, October 26, the Japanese commanders decided to call off further attacks, and their hopes of a resurgence at sea were dashed that same morning when a fleet of carriers and battleships that Yamamoto had ordered to an area east of Guadalcanal was stymied by a smaller US force scraped together by Admiral Halsey. Technically speaking, the Japanese won the two-day Battle of Santa Cruz, sinking one US carrier and damaging another while losing none of their own. But the outnumbered Americans inflicted significant damage to two Japanese carriers and destroyed so many Japanese planes—nearly a hundred—and, just as crucially, their skilled crews, that Yamamoto ordered the fleet’s withdrawal. The bid to retake Henderson Field, begun so confidently, had failed.
On Guadalcanal, the US forces felt their situation improving considerably, with time now to repair the two airstrips and finish another, Fighter Two. Their fuel, ammunition, and food stocks were resupplied, and they even initiated offensive operations against the Japanese headquartered in the village of Kokumbona across the Matanikau River. Army air forces, navy, and marine pilots flew daily missions, and early on the morning of October 28, Mitch took off in a P-39 Airacobra for yet another attack on the Japanese seaplane base at Rekata Bay on Santa Isabel Island. Pilots Jack Jacobson and Wallace Dinn accompanied him, each in a P-39. Their job was to fly cover for four navy SBD Dauntlesses, strafing and dive-bombing while the SBDs released their bombs, and then to accompany the SBDs safely back to Guadalcanal. The flight began routinely enough. The SBDs did their part and left, while Mitch and his two pilots strafed enemy floatplanes sitting in the bay and blasted a few ground installations. There wasn’t even any enemy fire during their several runs.
Then, just as they were about to head back, a new opportunity arose. Wallace Dinn called Mitch’s attention to a camouflaged gasoline dump on the beach. Mitch signaled him to go ahead and strafe it. Within seconds, though, he wished he hadn’t. Dinn dove at the dump and fired his .30-caliber wing guns. He hit the target, and one end of the fuel dump exploded into a small fire. But when Dinn circled back for a second run, his plane was hit by ground fire, temporarily stunning him. Smoke filled the cockpit, while leaking antifreeze pooled at his feet. He managed to veer left, away from the Japanese base.
Mitch could not raise Dinn on the radio and watched as the plane shook and trailed smoke. Dinn had to bail out. The P-39 crashed into the sea, and the last Mitch saw was his friend’s parachute disappearing into the jungle below. Worried and shaken, he and Jacobson hurried back to Henderson Field. They returned to Rekata Bay that afternoon on another bombing mission and also searched for their missing friend. They flew up and down the beach several times looking for Dinn but saw no sign of him or his parachute. Days passed, with more missions and still no indication whether Dinn was alive or dead. Then, eight days later, on November 4, the suspense finally ended when a small boat docked at Henderson Field. Wallace Dinn stepped ashore along with some other servicemen and, of all things, a Japanese prisoner. The weakened Dinn had made it back with a jungle survival story about natives who had hidden him from the enemy and then transported him by canoe to the safety of a British boat on the other side of Santa Isabel Island. The pilots shook their heads, impressed that Dinn and his native protectors had even taken a prisoner. It was all pretty amazing, for sure, but, drama notwithstanding, Mitch was mainly relieved and happy to have his best combat buddy back.
AT THAT POINT, MITCH AND THE BAND OF PILOTS WHO MADE UP his flight merited a break. “They say we are due for some rest,” he reported to Annie Lee. “Personally, I would just about as soon stay on and fight these yellow so and so’s right here.” But orders were orders, he said. “The powers that be say we have earned a vacation.” Mitch, Dinn, Jacobson, Canning, and a few others departed Guadalcanal on November 10, first stopping at “Poppy,” the code name for New Caledonia, and three days later, arriving in Australia. The break was scheduled for a week, but Mitch ended up being gone a month. When it came time for him to board a plane for Henderson Field, he was shaking with a bad case of the chills. He’d quit taking atabrine during his leave, which wasn’t an uncommon thing to do. Soldiers disliked the antimalaria drug, whose side effects included sweating, shaking hands, and, over time, a yellow discoloration of the skin. There was also a false rumor that atabrine caused impotence. Mitch was not allowed to depart with the others and, instead of returning to the front line, was ushered to a hospital, where blood tests confirmed that he had malaria.
Mitch’s hospitalization meant that he was not around for the ongoing combat on Guadalcanal, fierce fighting that steadily but stubbornly tilted in favor of the Americans. The Japanese commanders desperately sought to reload for one final try to dislodge US forces from Henderson Field. Yamamoto once again ordered his destroyers to bombard the air base while transport ships scooted down the Tokyo Express from Rabaul to drop off more reinforcements and supplies. The fighting that month, including another sea battle at midmonth, was chaotic and costly for both sides, although more so for the Japanese, whose overall morale plummeted and whose battered infantry was hit hard by exhaustion, tropical illness, and malnourishment. “Their uniforms, little more than rags, hung from emaciated limbs,” observed one historian. “Their hair had grown long and crawled with lice; their skin was dirty and pocked with open sores.” By month’s end, the Americans succeeded in restricting the Japanese resupply efforts to submarines, which hardly sufficed to overcome the severe shortages in food, ammunition, and fuel. For the Japanese army, Guadalcanal had become known as “Starvation Island.”
Mitch didn’t cotton to being sidelined, but the hospital stay did provide him with an opportunity to surprise Annie Lee. From the hospital in Sydney he was able to send her a telegram via the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company early on the day before Thanksgiving. Annie Lee received it after nightfall in her tiny apartment at 147½ East Woodland Street in San Antonio. She’d fallen asleep on the couch when the ringing phone awakened her at 10:30 p.m. It was Western Union calling to say it had a cable from Captain John Mitchell. Annie Lee sat bolt upright. She’d been anxious ever since learning that Mitch was on Guadalcanal, and some of her relatives hadn’t helped matters by telling her that if Mitch was in the Solomon Islands, she probably shouldn’t count on seeing him again. The husband of one cousin had said it would take all of Annie Lee’s prayers and then some to keep him safe—hardly the kind of support she needed. Annie Lee had snapped back, “If they couldn’t say anything better just keep quiet.” Now she held the receiver and waited for the Western Union worker to read her the cable: WEEK LEAVE EVERYTHING FINE ALL MY LOVE = JOHNNIE MITCHELL. It was a brief, simple message in which Mitch, not surprisingly, made no mention of his illness; he would get into that in a later letter. But it was just what Annie Lee needed. There was no way she could fall back to sleep, and she later wrote her Aunt Ludma about the telegram and especially the part about Mitch saying he was safe. “That cable, of course, was after the big naval battle in the Solomons on the 14th and 15th,” she said, “so I felt much better. I’m sure you realize how eager I am to have word from him.”
Mitch returned to Guadalcanal on December 5, “itching to get going again,” he wrote his wife, this time disclosing his illness. “I’m completely cured of my malaria,” he continued, and “gonna run that three [kills] up to ten this time, give myself a couple of yellow bellies for a Xmas present.” He joined the aerial assault against a last-ditch Japanese effort to resupply troops using the “drum method,” whereby empty fuel drums were sterilized and stuffed with provisions and ammunition. The drums, roped together, were then dropped from ships into the ocean waters close to the Japanese encampment at Kokumbona, west of Henderson Field, so that small craft and Japanese soldiers could pull them ashore. The drops were made at night to avoid detection, and hundreds of drums would still be adrift at daylight, sitting targets for Mitch and other pilots to strafe and destroy on a daily basis. “I have been going from 3:30 a.m. until about 10 p.m.,” Mitch said.
Two anniversaries came up in quick fashion, one of international significance, the other personal. December 7 marked one year since Yamamoto’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and to honor the day the Japanese government-controlled media and propagandists published roundups of the war that were celebratory, full of false data about US losses, and exulting in the nation’s inevitable victory. The truth—that Japan’s prospects had taken a dark turn at Midway and continued to worsen at Guadalcanal—was a closely held secret within government and military circles. Yamamoto, for one, was clear-eyed, writing to a friend, “Here we are, one year since the commencement of hostilities, and I feel sad to see the handicap [advantage] we were given at the beginning being gradually whittled away.” To another friend he included a short poem: “Looking back over the year, I feel myself grow tense, at the number of comrades, who are no more.” Meanwhile, in the United States, a clear lift in the nation’s spirit was evident. An interview with the new commander in the Solomons, the navy’s Bull Halsey, appeared on the front pages of newspapers all over the country. “We are now definitely passing to the offensive; we’re just starting!” said the admiral, who just six weeks earlier had said that the South Pacific war was touch and go. Halsey made certain to single out the country’s archenemy of Pearl Harbor: “Tell Yamamoto that peace will be dictated in the White House but not as he envisaged,” he said. Meanwhile, advertising campaigns promoting war bonds continued to exploit hatred toward Japan’s naval hero. “Remember Pearl Harbor,” exhorted one ad published in the Washington Post on December 7. “One year ago—exactly—Admiral Yamamoto and his talented knifemen exposed the true savagery of their nature.” With that, urged the ad, “Buy War Bonds.”
The other milestone was personal: Mitch and Annie Lee’s first wedding anniversary on December 13. It had been a year since the couple had hustled into City Hall in San Antonio to get married during Mitch’s stopover en route to California. Mitch made a point of writing his wife a love letter dated on their special day, and he was able to tell her that he was going to be promoted to the rank of major. December was the month, too, when Vic Viccellio, Mitch’s boss, told him he’d soon be taking over as commander of the 339th Fighter Squadron, a unit composed of fliers previously attached to several other squadrons, including the 70th Fighter Squadron. His flying buddies Wallace Dinn, Doug Canning, and Jack Jacobson were already in the fold, but by the end of the year he would be welcoming men from the 70th he’d trained with on Fiji who were finally getting to join the war. “It’s going to be fun to see ole Vic and some of the boys,” he said. “Of course, we will have some tall tales to tell them and will naturally have some big bull sessions.”
Reunited were pilots whose last big gathering had been the July Fourth Texas-style barbecue at Nadi on Fiji’s western coast. Rex Barber and Tom Lanphier, two standouts, were among the newcomers, as were Joe Moore, Robert Petit, George Topoll, A. J. Buck, Roger Ames, and Delton Goerke. The fliers were in for a different fireworks display than that of the previous Independence Day; they were greeted on arrival at Henderson Field by one of the frequent Japanese bombing runs. And joining the unit officially was another crack pilot who was already at Henderson. Besby Holmes had arrived in October, in time to participate in the intense fighting over control of the base. He’d yet to record any kills but had blown up a beached Japanese ammunition ship.
Mitch and his squadron took the new men to the pyramidal tents burrowed in the hill overlooking the new Fighter Two airstrip, where they would live and work together. They’d be sharing planes, flying in rotation. “Our routine was mostly eat, sleep, fly,” A. J. Buck said. From K-rations and wormy Japanese rice the menu expanded marginally to include Spam. “Spam spam, spam—a dozen different ways,” Buck said. “Got mighty old, but still better than ‘K’ rations.” Rex Barber in particular was happy to see Mitch and to join the fray. “I was always eager to get into combat just like I would be eager to get into a football game from the sidelines,” he said. “I was out there to fight.” Barber got his chance—and his first kill—in a matter of days. The Japanese were discovered building a new airfield at Munda on the southern tip of New Georgia Island, and Barber was sent to conduct surveillance. Though under orders not to attack, he couldn’t help himself when he spotted a Japanese twin-engine “Nell” bomber making its final approach. “It was too good to miss,” he decided. From an altitude of 7,000 feet, he dived in behind the bomber. He fired away, hitting the right engine, which burst into flames. He watched the bomber crash into the sea and then spotted enemy Zeros to his left. He fled, lucky to have cloud cover to aid his escape. He later won a Silver Star for the action.
Tom Lanphier likewise didn’t take long to make his mark—and, like Barber’s, it happened over the Munda airfield. Lanphier was in a P-39 assigned to defend nine bombers as they attacked the strip being carved out of the jungle. Shortly after the raid began, a Japanese Zero zipped across his line of sight, racing after one of the B-17s. Lanphier gave chase as the speedy Zero curved toward the bomber, which was about a mile in front and unaware, preoccupied with flying its line to the target below. The Zero settled into its firing position to the rear of the bomber, and Lanphier, frantic but locked in, dropped in behind the Zero and turned on his gun switch. “I found myself close enough behind the Zero, who was ignorant of my lethal presence, to have him filling my whole gunsight.” He pressed the trigger atop the P-39’s control stick, and the cockpit shuddered as the .50-caliber guns fired. Lanphier missed, the tracers falling behind and below the enemy plane. He made a correction by lifting his plane’s nose to raise the stream of gunfire. Then it seemed as though he’d overcompensated—it looked as though he was firing above the Zero. But just as the Zero was about to disappear below his line of sight, it exploded. The plane disintegrated before his eyes, bits and pieces flying off in all directions. Lanphier realized, “The same light-weight aluminum aircraft frame which lent the Zero its superior maneuverability also instantaneously converted it into a firecracker.” He had gotten his first kill, and, to his surprise, his second came moments later, when he and other P-39 pilots took on two Zeros climbing after the B-17 Flying Fortresses as they turned to head for home. Lanphier later won a citation for his success during the Munda sweep.
Both pilots, Barber and Lanphier, possessed the mix of self-confidence, gung-ho attitude, and accountability that Mitch looked for in pilots. “One thing mattered to Mitch—were you there when you were needed?” Barber said. The two were different in other ways, though. Barber was gregarious and a team player who turned to his football-playing days to describe taking down an opposing plane. “Just like on a football field making a tackle,” he said. “You have made an open field tackle, and it’s a little difficult against a good runner, but you nailed him hard and you put him on the turf. And you get the same feeling when you nail this man on the airplane and you put him down. It’s elation.” Lanphier was not the backslapping type—he was more detached—but he was just as ambitious, if in a way that seemed self-centered to some pilots. There was the time, for instance, during the previous summer at Nadi when Lanphier had hustled his way onto a B-17 bombing mission, which had annoyed Captain Viccellio. That unauthorized escapade had left other pilots scratching their heads, but Lanphier had defended it to Barber as being part of his plan to build a war record that would help launch a postwar political career. Whether it was aloofness or the fact that Lanphier, as the son of a decorated colonel, had friends in high places, some of the other pilots grew wary of him. “Selfish motives did begin to appear,” one of the other pilots in the 339th, Lieutenant A. J. Buck, said. “Petty jealousies.” Fortunately, Buck said, the feelings did not impact their performance, even as pilot gossip “did point the finger at Tom Lanphier as being a ‘Glory Hound.’”
THE MEN OF THE COMPOSITE FIGHTER SQUADRONS SPENT CHRISTMAS 1942 together, joining the marines, sailors, and soldiers at Henderson Field for a special holiday meal that had been shipped in for the occasion. While their Japanese counterparts a few miles away at Kokumbona starved on rations of rice and coconuts, the men enjoyed roast turkey, potatoes, cranberry sauce, and mince pie. The mess hall was festooned with red and green rope, Christmas tree balls, and spangles, and under the hot tropical sun church services for different faiths were held. There was even a Santa Claus—a soldier in a red coat and shorts—riding around in a truck with a bunch of musicians playing Christmas carols and other tunes.
Military-wise, an early gift of the holiday season—one that benefited Mitch and his army fighter pilots specifically, as well as the US cause in the South Pacific generally—was the November arrival of the much-hyped Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Hundreds of men turned out to greet the new fighters, lining both sides of the runway and waving wildly as a dozen of them landed. More P-38s arrived on a ferry from New Caledonia. Mitch wasn’t around when the speedy twin-engine fighter planes first showed up—he was still in a Sydney hospital recovering from malaria—and despite all the fanfare that the new plane could climb higher and fly faster than the Zero, some pilots at Fighter Two initially seemed skittish. Their caution was due partly to the P-38s’ troubles during tests in California, where difficulties bailing out had some calling it a “mankiller.” Given its high-altitude flying capability, the cockpit heaters were inadequate, and during steep dives the plane tended to buffet. Finally, training, if it could even be called that, was a hurried, on-the-job affair. “The transition to the P-38 was a chore,” Marine Major General John P. Condon observed. “Twin engines, a wheel instead of a stick. It was a lot of airplane.” The marine pilots had so far been accustomed to having army pilots in P-39s providing cover during their bombing missions, but Condon noticed that during the initial deployment of the P-38s, his marine pilots sometimes couldn’t find the new planes. The P-38s were going so high up, said Condon, that “they often failed to see things happen. They were up at 35,000 feet and didn’t see any Zeros, didn’t see any action.” The marines needled the army pilots, complaining that they were in the clouds to avoid combat. They started calling the P-38 a “high altitude foxhole.”
In early December, when Mitch returned to Guadalcanal and was joined by the likes of Barber, Lanphier, and Besby Holmes, concern about the P-38s was soon “in a total turnaround,” Major General Condon noted. Mitch and the others, Condon said, flew “with a kind of aggressiveness at any altitude. Down on the deck, or up at 35,000 feet. It was another ballgame.” The chiding ended, and Condon was assured that his marine pilots would now be accompanied by just about “the best airplanes and best pilots.”
For Mitch, the death of his friend Ellery Gross in a P-38 training crash certainly gave him pause, but when presented with an actual plane, he did not hesitate. Right off he loved the P-38, the superb tone of the two big Allison engines humming on each side of him. “Very smooth, like a Cadillac,” he said. Most planes had guns in the wings, requiring pilots to shoot from three hundred or more yards out in order to have the angle needed to hit the target. The P-38 had four .50-caliber machine guns in its nose, pointing straight ahead, along with a 20 mm cannon—a design creating a cone of fire that enabled pilots to aim straight ahead with an unobstructed view and unleash a relentless stream of lead. In addition, the plane’s twin engines provided a top speed of 395 miles per hour at 25,000 feet and a rate of climb that made the Lightning the fastest aircraft in the Pacific.
“We’ll clobber ’em now,” Mitch said.
The frustration he’d felt in October about the P-39 not being able to fly as high as enemy bombers was over. To prove the point, he practically begged for permission to go after Washing Machine Charlie in late December after the enemy bomber had buzzed the base and ruined yet another night’s sleep. “Let me go up in a P-38,” he urged, “see if I can shoot him down that way. If you hold him in the searchlight, I’ll get him.” His army superiors gave him a cold-eyed no, saying they preferred using ground artillery to chase Charlie away. Mitch groused, “Ground officers knew nothing about air.”
But he, Dinn, Barber, Lanphier, and the others, flying in what was the first twin-engine squadron in the Pacific, got plenty of other chances to demonstrate the prowess of the P-38. They devised a new aerial defense for Henderson Field against Japanese Zeros and Betty bombers that were accustomed to flying higher and beyond their reach. The new P-38s could now meet the enemy planes at 30,000 to 32,000 feet. “We’d wait for them,” said Mitch, “and it ruined their tactics.” They went on patrols up the Slot, the chain of islands north of Guadalcanal, looking for enemy bombers or fighters, and they learned to box in a Zero when they found one alone. “If we could get a guy on either side of him, we had him, no matter which way he broke,” Mitch said. They learned that the lightly built Zeros were “easy to burn, and poorly protected.” The P-38s were a lot tougher and could absorb punishment. If a Japanese Zero did get on their tail, they could lose him with a high-speed climb. With new confidence, the men accompanied B-17 Flying Fortresses on bombing missions. During one mission, on January 4, 1943, Mitch, Wallace Dinn, Besby Holmes, and others successfully escorted B-17s to the Japanese stronghold on Bougainville, an island in the north Solomons.
“We felt cocky,” Mitch said. The rush felt good—until it didn’t. The very next day, January 5, Mitch, Wallace Dinn, Besby Holmes, and three other P-38 pilots were again escorting five B-17s to Bougainville. The bombing raid went off without trouble. On the return to Guadalcanal, however, they spotted a swarm of Zeros—twenty-five of them, in fact. Mitch and his men, outnumbered four to one, could have flown away. But they did not, and, as the flight leader, Mitch had to make the decision to engage or not. “We went after ’em,” he said, “even though we didn’t have to.” The fighting was over quickly, with Mitch’s fighter pilots managing to hold their own. They had taken out three Zeros, and maybe more, with Mitch accounting for one. But getting his fourth kill was cold comfort for the fact that First Lieutenant Wallace Dinn was blown out of the sky—the burning engine on the left side falling off, the plane crashing into the ocean. Dinn would not find his way home this time.
Back on the ground, Mitch was shaken. He was met by Lieutenant Colonel D. C. “Doc” Strother. Mitch had known Strother since his training days at Hamilton Field in California, and Strother was now overseeing all army pilots on the island as the flight officer for United States Army Forces in the South Pacific Area. Strother got onto Mitch about losing a pilot, and Mitch blew up. He was exhausted, had gone all day without eating, and Wallace Dinn was dead. He yelled at Strother to back off, sore that Strother had said nothing about the good job they’d done, only attacked him about losing Dinn—which Mitch was already down about. Six months into the Guadalcanal Campaign, and some four hundred Allied pilots and crew members had been killed; this one was personal. He wrote Annie Lee the next day, “I lost the very best friend I have. His name was Wallace Dinn and he came from Corpus Christi. I got the dirty so and so that got him, but that is small consolation.”
Mitch made sure to apologize to Strother for talking back to him the way he had. Strother cut him some slack, told him it was okay, that he knew Mitch had been upset and he probably shouldn’t have broached Dinn’s death so soon. Privately, Strother even admired the way Mitch had stood up to him. But for Mitch, the outburst was undisciplined and emotional, which was not good; it was as if he became even more determined as a pilot and squadron commander to channel his anger where it belonged: toward the enemy.
Which he did—channel his anger—a few weeks later. The Betty bomber known as Washing Machine Charlie made a disruptive, maddening bombing and strafing pass over Henderson Field early one morning, and Mitch was fed up. While the warning siren blared, he marched out of his tent, down the hill, and toward the airstrip. Without anyone’s permission, he got into a P-38 and took off. He called the control tower and said, “This is Mitchell, I’m airborne.” He told the tower to notify antiaircraft not to fire at him but then, after a pause, wisecracked, “Well, I don’t care if they shoot at me or not, they can’t hit anything.” Mitch climbed as quickly as he could to about 30,000 feet, scouring the sky for Charlie and hoping that the searchlights would find the enemy aircraft in the predawn darkness. But he saw nothing. Then the tower called, saying the bomber had just flown low across Fighter Two, strafing at about fifty feet off the deck. Mitch dived and flew across the airstrip a few minutes later, also at about fifty feet “looking for this guy, but by then he’s gone.” The tower had spotted him, though, flying over the water just north of the airfield, just “stooging around out there.” Mitch turned in that direction. He looked hard, and, sure enough, he saw Charlie silhouetted against the morning sky. He flew out to sea toward the enemy nuisance.
By that time, many of the men had gathered to watch the show, standing outside tents or foxholes or near the mess tent. A combat reporter for the army magazine Yank, Mack Morriss, was among them, scanning the sky for the hunter and the hunted. Someone yelled and pointed offshore. “At first we could see only the 38 in the distance, but then, beyond it, was another plane,” Morriss wrote later. Mitch, racing to catch up to the Betty bomber, could feel the full power of the plane’s twin engines. Meanwhile, onlookers on the ground were following the action, mesmerized. “The plane in front was going hell for leather,” said Morriss. Even so, the P-38 closed in, and Morriss watched as the Betty bomber suddenly exploded, “a terrific burst of flame—just like the sudden flare of a match, same orange color. The ball of fire kept going and then dropped into the drink.”
Mitch had pulled in right behind him. “I burned him. And he crashed.”
Mitch turned back toward Fighter Two and saw that he had an audience. He steered the P-38 in a slow, lazy roll across the airfield, what was called a victory roll—“To shine my butt,” he joked.
The mission had been unauthorized, for sure, but no one seemed to care. “When the Jap went to blazes we cheered like bastards,” Morriss said. Rex Barber and the other pilots in Mitch’s squadron were beside themselves, jumping up and down and hollering. One ranking officer said contentedly, “Bagged one before breakfast!”
Mitch was greeted like a folk hero. He’d gotten rid of Washing Machine Charlie, which surely provided a measure of revenge, a tonic of sorts for the loss of his pal Wallace Dinn. The kill did something else, too: it displayed the self-assurance at the core of Captain Mitchell’s flying spirit, a reminder that for a special mission, he was the one.