July 7, 1942
San Francisco, California
After confining Dick Bong to quarters and dumping him from the 49th Fighter Squadron, the IV Fighter Command needed to find something useful for Bong to do while the inspector general prepared the case against him. In such circumstances, a flying position was out of the question, so the Wisconsin native was sent to work in the intercept center in San Francisco.
He spent his days around the plotting board, scrambling alert fighters against unidentified aircraft, which always proved to be a wayward American plane. He tried to put out of his mind that his flying days might be finished for good. If he were court-martialed and kicked out of the AAF, he could be drafted into the infantry once he got home. A worse fate for a fighter pilot who loved being above the clouds could hardly be imagined.
As he came off shift on Monday, July 6, 1942, he was informed that the commanding general of the 4th Air Force wanted to see him in his office Tuesday morning at ten thirty. The summons made him sick with fear. A second lieutenant should never get on a three-star general’s radar. That only happens when a monumental act of bravery is involved, or a monumental screwup. Dick feared he was about to be cashiered from the service.
The next morning, Bong showed up at the southern end of the Financial District, where the 4th Air Force HQ filled a high-rise at 180 Montgomery Street. He took the elevator to the CG’s office.
He stepped out and introduced himself to the general’s secretary. Jump O’Neil arrived a moment later, looking just about as terrified as Dick felt. The secretary stood up, opened the door to the general’s office, and announced, “Your bad boys are outside. You remember—the ones you wanted to see about flying around bridges and down Market Street?”1
A gruff and thundering voice replied, “Send them in!”
The secretary nodded, closed the door, and walked over to the two young pilots.
In a formal tone she said, “The general will see you now, Lieutenants.”
The two lieutenants marshaled their courage and headed for the door.
Gen. George Kenney stood waiting for them. He looked like a middle-aged bulldog with a buzz cut and the grizzled face of a lifelong aviator who survived not only combat over the Western Front during the Great War but the often-fatal Golden Age when planes and pilots fell out of the sky with distressing frequency.
He was a flying general, a man who loved the cockpit more than anything else in his life, but knew his days of tearing around with his hair afire were over. Now, he rode herd over the men he used to be.
The two lieutenants stood at attention at the edge of the general’s desk. They introduced themselves.
Kenny tore into them without mercy. They stood rigid, eyes front, trying not to show the crushing fear they must have felt as their general bawled them out not only for the stupid low-level stunts but for getting him in trouble with the civilian authorities as well.
He lectured. He threatened. He growled. Kenney later wrote that after reading the IG case against them, he was inclined to throw Bong to the wolves. That changed when he saw him, a small, scared “cherub” with blue eyes, whose entire life and identity were tied to flying fighters.
In the end, he eased up on them both. In 1917, as Kenney went through flight school in New York during World War I, he used his first solo fight to fly under the East River bridges. He was self-aware enough to admit that he was the kind of pilot Bong and O’Neil were back when he was their age. And what general would not want daring, ballsy pilots like he had once been serving under his command? He knew the USAAF needed such kids, the ones with the moxie to push their planes and their talents to the utmost. Those were the kinds of pilots who either would die very young or would kick the enemy in the teeth.
He ordered them to write a five-thousand-word paper on proper flying safety and deliver it to their assigned unit as an oral report. He also told Dick to go see the housewife in San Anselmo, apologize, and offer to help around the house for a day. “You hang around being useful—mowing a lawn or something—and when the clothes are dry, take them off the line and bring them into the house… I want that woman to think we are good for something besides annoying people.”2
Dick and Jump O’Neil scrupulously followed through with their punishments. Before dismissing them, Kenney reminded them that if they indulged in any more low-altitude shenanigans, he would see to it that they were court-martialed. They promised to toe the line.
Later in July, after the meeting in Kenney’s office, Bong received orders assigning him to the 78th Fighter Group’s 84th Fighter Squadron, which had recently arrived at Oakland for its final, pre-deployment training. Dick’s grounding and Kenney’s lenient punishment came with an unintended consequence: he went through another five weeks of training with a second unit preparing for combat. This gave Dick the opportunity to rack up almost sixty more hours in the P-38, which made him one of the most experienced Stateside second lieutenants on the aircraft. By early September, he counted over a hundred hours in Lightnings and almost six hundred hours total.
Pilots often said that the Lightning was an easy plane to fly but a difficult one to fly well. To fly it well meant spending a lot of time in the cockpit, learning the aircraft’s ins and outs thoroughly. The complicated instrument layout, the ergonomic oddities of the fuel control system, the many steps required to prepare to engage an enemy plane tended to overwhelm an inexperienced Lightning pilot.
While Dick’s peers were being thrown into battle against the enemy with only a few dozen hours in fighters, his extra summer in the San Francisco Bay Area helped give him the knowledge and nuanced understanding of the P-38 that others lacked.
As Dick flew nearly every day, honing his skills over the Bay and behaving himself, events above his pay grade conspired to alter his future while connecting him for the rest of his life to the general who had just chewed him out. The two had more in common than they realized when they first met and General Kenney saw a bit of himself in Dick’s devil-may-care flying.
Like Dick, George Kenney felt a little like a castaway, a man who had prepared all his life for a combat command—after proving himself as a pilot in battle during World War I. Through the twenties and thirties, he earned a reputation for being a brilliant engineer who could troubleshoot new aircraft programs and bring them to fruition. He also was considered a renegade, a man who once advised against purchasing the B-17 Flying Fortress—the very weapon that lay at the core of the Army Air Force’s self-styled mission: bombing enemy factories. That made him extremely unpopular in the upper echelons of the AAF. Had he not been such a useful engineer, his heresy could have killed his career. Instead, it ensured he would not get a command in Europe, where the Army Air Force was preparing to unleash a full-scale daylight bombing campaign against Germany. So Kenney was sent to the West Coast to troubleshoot the P-38 and figure out why it was killing so many pilots. It looked like he would be stuck Stateside, just as Dick Bong was, helping get the weapons of war ready for a fight he would never be in.
Then one day that summer, the head of the Army Air Forces, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold called George Kenney and offered him the worst combat command in the service. He was going to serve under Gen. Douglas MacArthur as the commander of the 5th Air Force, which the Japanese were currently beating the hell out of in New Guinea.
There were a lot of reasons that the Fifth was a terrible command. MacArthur hated his previous Air Force generals and considered the AAF to be all talk and no capability. So Kenney would have to work for a man who inherently disliked aviators and was known to have a cliquish staff that made life impossible for generals who did not fit in.
Worse, the Southwest Pacific Theater was at the tail end of a supply line that stretched across the Pacific. General Arnold made it clear the Fifth was the lowest-priority command outside the United States. He told Kenney not to expect many reinforcements; he would have to make do with a trickle of new planes and pilots. The real war was going to be fought in the skies over Germany. Kenney wouldn’t be at the big show, but at least he would be in combat.
As a sop, he offered a few P-38s—enough for a few squadrons—to Kenney and told him he could pick fifty Lightning pilots from the 4th Air Force to go with him to help bring the new aircraft into battle against the Japanese.
Kenney knew that the 5th Air Force was probably the only combat command he would be offered. Turn it down and he’d be stuck in the States for the duration. That would have been a career dead end. Besides, he wanted to fight. He’d spent his entire adult life preparing for another war; missing out on the fighting would leave him feeling like it had no payoff.
Yet, the downsides were significant. The Fifth was a ragtag, beaten force that the Japanese crushed and ran out of the Philippines, then crushed and ran out of the Dutch East Indies. The same thing was happening in New Guinea now. Morale was low. MacArthur was a notoriously quirky and difficult boss. The head of the AAF stressed he wasn’t going to get much support. It seemed like a recipe for failure.
Or a miracle turnaround.
General Kenney accepted the job and started packing. He left the Bay Area just before Bong climbed back into a P-38 that July. Before he departed, he and his staff drafted the list of fifty P-38 pilots from the 4th Air Force who would go with him to the Pacific. Richard Bong, Jump O’Neil, and John Mangus all made that list. The bad boys of the Bay Area would go into battle working for the very general who let them off the hook and saved their careers. Now Kenney was hoping New Guinea would give them all a crack at redemption.