Bibliography and Source Notes
Secondary Sources
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Bong, Carl, and Mike O’Connor. Ace of Aces: The Dick Bong Story. Mesa, AZ: Champlin Fighter Museum Press, 1985.
Bong Drucker, Marge. Memories. The Story of Dick and Marge Bong (Major Richard Bong, America’s All-Time Fighter Ace): A Love Story. Studio City, CA: Drucker Publications, 1995.
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Bruning, John. Indestructible: One Man’s Rescue Mission That Changed the Course of WWII. New York: Hachette Books, 2016.
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General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War. Office of USAF History, 1987.
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Martin, Charles A. The Last Great Ace: The Life of Thomas B. McGuire, Jr. Fruit Cove, FL: Fruit Cove, 1998.
McAulay, Lex. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
. Into the Dragon’s Jaws: The Fifth Air Force Over Rabaul, 1943. Mesa, AZ: Champlin Fighter Museum Press, 1987.
. MacArthur’s Eagles: The U.S. Air War Over New Guinea, 1943–44. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2005.
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. Ki-61 and Ki-100 Aces. Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2015.
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Wright, Thomas W. To the Far Pacific, 1942–1944. St. Louis, MO: Thomas W. Wright, 1993.
Wyllie, Arthur. Army Air Force Victories. n.p.: Arthur Wyllie, 2004.
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. The Imperial Japanese Army: The Invincible Years 1941–42. Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2014.
Yoshino, Ronald. Lightning Strikes: The 475th Fighter Group in the Pacific War, 1943–45. n.p.: Sunflower University Press, 1992.
Websites:
Extensive research was conducted through Fold3.com, Ancestry.com, newspaperarchives.com, and newspapers.com.
Also useful was Pacificwrecks.com, warbirdforum.com (Dan Ford’s section), and Henry Sakaida’s article on Tom Lynch: http://ww2awartobewon.com/wwii-articles/was-famous-p-38-ace-tom-lynch-executed/ and https://www.ozatwar.com/.
Another excellent source that documents an astonishing number of the hundred thousand aircraft produced during World War II here in the United States was http://www.joebaugher.com/usaf_serials/usafserials.html.
Mike Stowe’s incredible site, Accident-Report.com, allowed me to purchase the crash reports detailing McGuire’s forced landing in the Aleutians as well as his P-38 mishaps in Alaska, California, and New Guinea.
Primary Source Material
Interviews and Correspondence Conducted by the Author
From 1991 through 2004, I conducted oral histories with about fifteen hundred combat veterans for a variety of projects.
The basis of the firsthand accounts of New Guinea is the hundreds of hours of interviews I conducted with surviving 49th Fighter Group veterans from 1992–1999 while I was researching my master’s thesis at the U of O on Gerald Johnson. The interviews most relevant to Race of Aces are listed below.
Others—some I conducted for my own research projects, some I conducted for Dynamix’s unreleased flight simulator, Aces of the Pacific II, and still others for EDI/Timeless Media and the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project. When Dynamix was closed down in 2001, and EDI a few years later, I was given the original Betacam SP and digital HD tapes of those interviews. Along with all the combat footage acquired by EDI, those interviews currently sit in 330 boxes stacked and indexed in my office.
The non-video interviews I conducted were all done either in person or over the phone and recorded on cassette tape. The final interviews I conducted for Indestructible and Race were recorded digitally with professional sound gear.
The interviews from all these collections that I referenced for Race are also below.
54th Fighter Group Veterans
Frank Beagle
Harry Huffman
Sandy McCorkle
49th Fighter Group Veterans
George Alber
Oliver Atchison
Ken Clark
Robert DeHaven
Carl Estes
James Gallagher
Ed “Bud” Howe
Alfred Jacobs
Wally Jordan
Blev Lewelling
Walter Markey
James Morehead
Leslie Nelson
Bill Pascalis
Bernard Peterson
Bill Runey
Troy Smith
Ralph Wandrey
Bill Williams
Bob Wood
Harley Yates
475th Fighter Group
Perry “P.J.” Dahl
Joseph McKeon
Joseph Sperling
V and XIII Bomber Command Veterans
Myron “Buzz” Buswell
Jack DeTour
Don Good
John Henebry
Don Tower
Other
Betty Bennett
Bob Bennett
Barbara Curtis
Dave Curtis
Chris Fahey
Marge Goodman Frazier
Nat Gunn
Verla Huffman
Arthur Johnson
Corey Kearby
Gene McNeese
Gary Morris
John Skillern
Gary Smith
Other Interviews Not Conducted by the Author
I am extremely grateful to the 475th Fighter Group Association, which made an exceptional effort to document the experiences of its members through a series of video interviews conducted during the group’s many reunions. The Angels were a tight-knit clan, and their families continue that tradition to this day. A special thanks to Joe Kentz of the 475th Association for providing these interviews on DVD for me.
Perry “P.J.” Dahl
John Ehlinger
Joseph Forster
Fred Gunn
Anthony Kupniewski
Bud Lampert
Howard Max
Jack Olson
Thomas Oxford
Marvin Rose
Douglas Thropp
Curtis Tinker Jr.
Audio Recordings of Oral Histories Provided by the Bong Memorial and the Air Force Historical Research Agency
Elwood Barden
Marge Bong Drucker
Walter Markey
Marilynn McGuire Stankowski
Tommy McGuire (radio interview, December 1944)
Archival Sources
To prepare for Race, I spent 157 days in 2017 driving across the country in my 2006 Pontiac GTO, stopping at museums, archives, and memorials. I spent a week in a tent at Oshkosh during the airshow, photographing the warbirds between a week at the Bong Memorial and a week at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Along the way, I acquired tens of thousands of pages of documents that I either copied directly with my Canon EOS-1D X DSLR on a copy stand, had photocopied, or acquired in PDF format. The digitized mass of data came to almost two terabytes, some sixty thousand images and files. Additionally, I acquired sixty PDF files from the Air Force Historical Research Agency, each totaling about two thousand pages of microfilmed and scanned documents.
The biggest challenge was not the lack of information, but the overwhelming abundance of it. Fortunately, much of it was set up in text-searchable formats. The most essential documents I copied with the 1DX I pulled into pdf files of their own so that those could be searched as well. All this allowed for cross-referencing everything from V Air Force mission summaries with squadron reports, personal encounter reports, personal letters, diaries, flight records, squadron, group, command dailies, morning reports, and photographs. It was through this data mining that I was able to piece together such things as Neel Kearby’s freelancing and Tom Lynch’s arrival back in theater in November 1943.
United States Air Force Historical Research Agency
Among the most valuable documents acquired at Maxwell AFB were:
• All surviving V Fighter Command documents, reports, and files: This included the daily operation summaries that have survived and technical reports on aircraft performance and engineering issues, as well as reports filed by Neel Kearby on the employment of the P-47 over Wewak and engineering plans to extend the P-47’s range.
• General Whitehead’s letters: Whitehead preserved thousands of pieces of correspondence through his career, including the steady communication between himself and General Kenney during their time together in the SWPA. These proved to be absolute gems, and it was in this back-and-forth that the Flying Circus Squadron was approved by Kenney. This material is a gold mine for 5th Air Force historians.
• General Kenney Collection: The research Kenney conducted for his biography of Bong is included in his collection, as are photos and material related to McGuire’s posthumous MOH ceremony.
• Other 5th Air Force records: These include daily combat reports, correspondence, intelligence evaluations, and interception reports (called Red Alert Reports).
• Group and squadron records: These include the unit histories, the morning reports, and often the personal encounter reports from air-to-air engagements.
• Debriefing interviews: In 1942–1943, veterans returning from combat overseas were interviewed by the USAAF, Marines, and Navy in an effort to glean what was working and what was not. Maxwell’s holdings include hundreds of these, including several key interviews with returning 5th Air Force veterans. I acquired some of these at the National Archives Branch at Laguna Niguel, California, in 1999. The AFHRA’s collection is the most complete I’ve come across, and includes key information on the state of the men at Port Moresby in 1942 (Marbourg interview), a brief interview with Tom Lynch, and even interviews with members of Bong’s first unit, the 14th Fighter Group, after they returned to Hamilton Field from North Africa.
• ATIS reports: These include all translated Japanese documents, diaries, letters, and the like captured in New Guinea and the Philippines, as well as interviews with many captured Japanese aircrew. Those prisoner of war interrogation reports provide valuable insight into the state of mind and condition of the Japanese Army Air Force aviators fighting the men of the 5th Air Force.
• USAF Oral History Program: There were many useful transcripts in this collection, including a ribald and blunt joint interview with Clay Tice and Bob DeHaven. Dick Ellis stated in his interview that in his mind, Gerald Johnson was the best ace and fighter leader he saw in action during the war. Several interviews with General Kenney are also included in the program’s collection.
• Fourth Air Force and IV Interceptor Command records: The story of Dick Bong’s time in California in Race is set against the backdrop of a growing crisis on the West Coast as almost half the P-38s produced that spring of 1942 ended up being destroyed in fatal crashes. These records provided insight into how that happened and how it was ultimately solved, plus how the air intercept system in California worked.
National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland
Extensive use of the USAF’s pre-1954 photo collection found in the Still Pictures Branch at College Park was made to support research and illustration of Race of Aces. Additional film footage, newsreels, and original radio news broadcasts were also used that have been preserved at NARA, College Park, including Report from the Aleutians.
Also of value were the 5th Air Force and V Fighter Command records that are here. The original mission reports for every squadron and group referenced in Race are located here.
National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis
St. Louis is a byzantine and difficult-to-access archive in some ways, but the material here is truly remarkable—and most of it has rarely, if ever, been accessed. Among the most important to Race were
• Personnel files for four of the five aces: Of the five, only Bong’s was complete. Most everyone else’s were either destroyed in a fire in the 1970s, or in MacDonald’s case, still sealed. However, the 293 files for Johnson and Kearby were full of surprising information, including the data plates pulled off a P-47 thought to be Kearby’s that was found after the war. It turned out to be a different Jug and crash site, which caused considerable confusion for years to come. Based on it, at least one historian tried to prove Kearby’s men abandoned him in the fight. In this tale, Kearby limped back toward Gusap in a crippled bird, only to be picked off by a lone Japanese Ki-43. Kearby’s plane was rediscovered in the 1990s and pieces were sent to the USAF Museum in Dayton, where they are on display. Johnson’s file included a description of all his personal effects, as well as a copy of his Missing Aircrew Report.
• Form Fives: The flight records for all USAAF personnel are here on microfilm. There are some gaps, but surprisingly few, given these documents bounced around from the SWPA to the States, only to sit in storage at March AFB for decades before being microfilmed and ultimately sent on to St. Louis, where they currently reside. The originals were destroyed.
• Unit Morning Reports: These incredible documents hold the administrative keys to many mysteries. Every unit in the Army had to report its strength and any personnel coming or going from its outfit every day during the war. This was crucial to unraveling exactly where Neel Kearby went after he was pulled out of the 348th Fighter Group, as well as documenting Lynch’s arrival back in theater and Bong’s various assignments within V Fighter Command.
Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center
This beautiful museum and archive in Superior, Wisconsin, includes a treasure trove of documents, letters, articles, photographs, and interviews related to Dick Bong’s life. His surviving high school notebooks, music books, and grades are even stored in the archive. The collection is managed by one of the best archival historians I’ve ever encountered, Briana Fiandt. This book would not have been possible without the assistance and access Briana granted me. While I was there, I scanned or copied with my DSLR over nine thousand pages of material and photographs.
Seattle Museum of Flight
When the Seattle Museum of Flight acquired the Champlin Fighter Museum’s collection, it inherited all the documents archived there related to the American fighter aces association. This included a wealth of material related to Neel Kearby, his last mission, the conspiracy theories behind it, and other letters and documents concerning Dick Bong and Henry Sakaida’s efforts to prove he’d actually scored a forty-first kill during the fighting in New Guinea.
475th Fighter Group Association Archives, Planes of Fame Museum, Chino, California
Over the course of two trips to Chino in February and May 2017, Larry Tovaas and I scanned thousands of pages of material donated to the organization by veterans of the 475th Fighter Group. The wealth of material here was simply overwhelming, and two weeks of work in it behind the tail of the Planes of Fame’s P-38 barely scratched the surface. Gems found here included the squadron war diaries, personnel records, photo albums, scrapbooks, letters, unpublished memoirs, and reunion information and memories shared at them. The personal side of the air war came alive in this material and gave me considerable insight into the 475th’s daily operational realities and what life was like for its men.
National Archives, San Bruno, California, Branch
When I first started the research for Race, I drove the GTO to San Francisco and spent six days at the San Bruno branch of NARA. My intent was to try to discover documentation related to Dick Bong’s alleged Golden Gate Bridge flight. I was surprised instead to discover a wealth of incredible information on San Francisco at war. The entire first section of Race took shape largely from the material gleaned from San Bruno. While there was little USAAF documentation left here (most of it was transferred elsewhere, and a significant amount got lost over the years), the 11th Naval District’s records for 1942 still are kept at San Bruno. In them was considerable insight into how the airspace was divided up around the Bay Area and offshore, disciplinary proceedings, interactions with civilians, and how interceptions were handled.
USAF Museum, Dayton, Ohio
The USAF Museum archives are virtually inaccessible to civilian historians, a source of enduring frustration for all who work to document the service’s history. However, on display in the World War II section of the museum are medals and personal items that belonged to Dick Bong, Neel Kearby, and Tommy McGuire. Tommy’s five-hundred-hour cap, Dick’s clarinet, and Neel Kearby’s Medal of Honor can all be seen here.
Warhawk Museum, Nampa, Idaho
This extraordinary private museum includes a wealth of personal recollections, diaries, and unpublished memoirs by aviators and veterans. Most important to Race was a copy of Shady Lane’s diary and excerpts from letters home during his tenure with the 39th Fighter Squadron.
Additional Primary Source Material
• Gerald Johnson’s letters: From 1991 through 2001, I was given access to Gerald Johnson’s letters to Barbara and his folks, plus his two surviving diaries, photos, and home movie footage he shot while in training and in the Aleutians. This material provided the basis of my master’s thesis at the University of Oregon (“Until Tonight, Goodnight Sweetheart: The Life of Colonel Gerald R. Johnson”) and my second book, Jungle Ace. I copied many of the letters and took notes on key passages. Johnson and Barbara wrote hundreds of letters to each other from 1941 to 1945, including a final letter Gerald wrote on the B-25 he was lost aboard in 1945. He mailed it during a refueling stop in Northern Luzon.
• Film: When I acquired the EDI/Timeless military collection, it included gun camera footage shot by pilots of the 475th and 348th Fighter Groups in late 1943. These invaluable snippets of air combat provided some of the details that went into the air battles from the fall of 1943 that are described in Race. Also included in this collection are raw combat footage of Tacloban and of the bombing raids against Balikpapan, Wewak, and Rabaul.