Friday, June 12, 1942
East of Hamilton Field, California
On the first day of Dick Bong’s house arrest in June, an unusual formation of fighters passed just east of his quarters at Hamilton Field. Heading north, the planes touched down outside Sacramento to refuel. The pilots rushed to the supply warehouse, where they drew cold-weather flight suits. A quick lunch and they rushed back to their waiting Bell P-39 Airacobra fighters.
Brand-new like the P-38, the P-39 was supposed to be a hangar mate to the Lockheed that could defeat the German Messerschmitt fighters and the Japanese Zero while taking out incoming enemy bombers. Yet the P-39 was a weird plane, built around a massive 37mm automatic cannon. Bell’s designers could not figure out at first how to mount such armament into a single-engine fighter. They finally hit on moving the engine behind the cockpit so they could stick the cannon in the nose. A long driveshaft ran under the pilot’s seat from engine to propeller. Instead of a sliding canopy, Bell conceived the car door hatch as the way to get in and out of the cockpit. It made for a very cramped arrangement, which forced the USAAF to select smaller pilots for their new fighter.
The pilots squeezed into those tiny cockpits, took off, and pointed their P-39s northward. The 54th Fighter Group’s 57th Squadron was going into action.
As part of the Midway operation, the Japanese invaded the Aleutian Islands, off the Alaskan coast. Now, the American high command feared, the enemy would build bases there that could be a springboard to an invasion of Alaska or even the Pacific Northwest. The defenses in the far north needed immediate reinforcement, which triggered the 57th Squadron’s migration north from San Diego.
It was a breathless rush north. The need for help was so urgent that the men didn’t even have time to pack their belongings. They grabbed overnight kits, stuffed them into their P-39’s tiny baggage compartment, and took off for the long journey up the West Coast.
With the 57th that day were two pilots who’d already become close friends despite wildly diverse personalities. Wally Jordan was the squadron’s bad-boy party animal who affected a look of casual indifference. He was older than the rest of his lieutenants, with a receding hairline and a Clark Gable mustache that gave him a rakish vibe. Respected as a talented, aggressive pilot, he was gruff, gritty, and devoid of sentimentality. When not partying, he was all business.
Black-haired Gerald Johnson, a five-foot-seven, handsome Oregonian from Eugene, was the squadron wild card. His flying showed great potential. He was a conscientious officer who’d made first lieutenant just six months after graduating from flight training. Yet he was erratic, emotional, and prone to deep depressions.
When he joined the 57th earlier in the year, Johnson was sort of an island, never quite fitting in with most of the other men. He’d joined the squadron straight from flight training with a pilot named Harry Huffman. At first, Harry was his only friend in the outfit. He’d been Harry’s best man and hoped Harry could return the favor for him someday.
Among the married pilots, Johnson earned a reputation as a mooch. He’d show up at their off-post houses just in time for dinner and expect a last-second invite. The guys started hassling him about it. In response, Johnson told them to be at Harry’s house early with their wives, and he would treat them to a night on the town. He arrived at the appointed time driving a rented limousine, decked out in a chauffeur’s uniform. Obsequiously, he ushered them into the limo, holding doors and making deferential comments. Then he climbed behind the wheel and tore off, hell-bent for leather for the restaurant he’d chosen. His guests were flung around in back as Gerald drove over curbs, skidded along sidewalks, and even spun the car in a 180-degree turn that took them bouncing over the center meridian. As the wives screamed in terror and the pilots shouted to Johnson to slow it down, he punched the accelerator, puckish grin on his face, and blew into town like a four-wheeled banshee. He paid for the dinners and drinks, then set off for Harry’s house in another wild ride. The night broke the ice, and Gerald was starting to become one of the guys at last.
Then Harry got hurt, and Johnson withdrew. In May 1942, a squadron newbie collided with Harry’s fighter during a training mission over Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Harry bailed out but lost part of his leg in the accident. When the squadron moved to San Diego, Harry was left behind in a New Orleans hospital.
This Oregon kid was such a mix of contradictions. After he visited Harry in the hospital, the shock of seeing his best friend in such bad shape caused him to turn inward. It rattled his confidence. At times, Wally Jordan saw a fun-loving, easygoing side to him. Yet, often he came across as high-strung, emotional, equal parts brilliant in the air, and utterly unpredictable. He could be judgmental and morally righteous. He seemed committed to his girl back home, but he would often go out on the town with the other pilots with a date of his own. He had all the trappings of a young man still trying to find out who he really was.
Whatever he was on the ground, in the air Johnson and Wally Jordan shared a similar style. Both men never showed fear and seemed at their best when roaring along on the ragged edge. Johnson was especially tenacious, bordering on reckless at times. Right after the squadron received its P-39s, the young Oregonian was determined to get the highest aerial gunnery score in the outfit. Over Eglin, Florida, each pilot got a chance to shoot at a big fabric sleeve towed by an observation plane. Johnson made such an aggressive attack run that he couldn’t pull out in time. He ended up colliding with the tow cable, severing the sleeve from the observation plane, and wrapping a chunk of cable around his propeller and nose. Somehow, he limped back to base and got it on the ground.
Gerald Johnson had the perfect build for an Airacobra jock. He was slender and wiry with muscles born from years of ice climbing, hiking, and hunting in the Cascade Mountains. He’d taken to the aircraft, deciding it was faster than the P-40 and quicker to accelerate. Speed was always his game. As a kid, he pedaled down steep hills on his bike, thrilling at the wind in his hair. As a teen, he raced through Eugene in his dad’s car, ignoring speed limits in search of his next adrenaline rush. Now, as a young twenty-something, the P-39 provided that thrill.
Late that afternoon, Johnson’s flight passed over the Siskiyou Mountains and reached the Willamette Valley. Below him, Oregon in springtime looked verdant and rich. The valley held some of the most fertile soil on the West Coast, and the May rainstorms transformed the landscape into a rich and colorful sight from above. Orchards dotted the landscape, and broad strawberry fields were just coming into bloom along the Willamette River. On the valley’s flanks, tall firs covered the foothills and added to the lushness.
This was home. In this place, Gerald Johnson knew the greatest happiness of his young life. When the family settled in West Eugene in 1936, he made quick friends of the neighborhood kids. They called themselves the Pack Rats and spent their weekends in the Cascade Mountains, exploring old logging trails, finding abandoned cabins as they snowshoed, skied, hiked, or camped their way through the untamed wilderness. As the fighting in Europe drew American involvement, the Pack Rats joined up, one at a time. Now, only a couple were still left in civilian clothes, and they were getting a lot of flak from the community for that.
The flight reached Eugene. Tucked between two buttes, the town looked unremarkable from the air until eyes fell on the University of Oregon and its stately buildings neatly arranged around the city’s first cemetery. McArthur Court, a massive gray slab of a building stood out as the tallest structure in this section of the valley. Johnson winged over it, thinking about the many basketball games he’d watched there when he was a Duck.
Then he saw the cemetery. Tall firs and headstones stippled a gentle hill rising across the street from Mac Court. He could see the Civil War memorial at the heart of the graveyard, a statue of a Union soldier standing silent vigil over comrades at peace. The memories came hard and sudden.1
The girl walked past that statue, red umbrella open against the light rain. Meticulously dressed yet unafraid to get her shoes and skirt dirty as she followed the muddy trail, an Oregon girl through and through, feminine with that resourceful twist of tomboy.
How many times had he waited for her there, eager to catch sight of her warm eyes and genuine smile?
That red umbrella had concealed their first kisses as love took hold. Johnson was a freshman in college, Barbara a senior at University High School.
He’d first seen her on a hiking trip up a butte north of town in 1939. The Pack Rats were out rock climbing when the girl with the red umbrella showed up with a group of her Uni High friends to eat lunch among the slabs of stone jutting from the butte. She captivated Gerald from the first moment he saw her. She didn’t even notice him.
He asked around to find out who she was. His friends reported her name was Barbara Hall. Determined to meet her, he borrowed his dad’s car and staked out her school, waiting each day for a week for her to come out the front door.
No luck. Day after day she never came through the school’s front doors. Finally, he got out of the sedan and asked around about her. Somebody told him she always left school from the rear entrance and walked home through the cemetery.
Gerald dashed around the school, plunged into the cemetery grounds and saw her, umbrella in hand, back to him, walking up the slope by the statue of the Civil War soldier.
No matter that his week of waiting by the wrong door must have made him feel a fool. No matter that the venue in which Gerald had chosen to make his move was filled with headstones of pioneers and fallen soldiers. Daring as always, Gerald had called out to her. She stopped, regarded the handsome, black-eyed boy.
They chatted like long-lost old friends, the conversation never running lean. As they sparked and laughed, Gerald felt more at ease than any other time in his life. Then she looked at her watch, mentioned that if she didn’t get home, her mother would be angry.2
She hurried off, but not before giving Gerald her number.
The cemetery became their meeting point between college and high school. They shared lunches, picnicking under the trees not far from the Spanish–American War memorial where they could enjoy a view of the U of O campus. They kissed and held each other there as well, hiding from the prying eyes who would report such scandalous behavior to Barbara’s iron-willed mother, who clung to the Victorian values under which she’d been raised.
Johnson and his P-39s passed over the cemetery and University High, speeding westward. Ahead, the town’s airport came into view. While at the U of O, Johnson learned to fly there, taking a Civilian Pilot Training program class taught by, of all things, the local geography professor.
He led his flight slightly north of the airport to stay out of the pattern, though no aircraft were in sight. Another moment, and his old neighborhood came into view. Stately, middle-class houses nestled under broad-limbed oaks, surrounded by big, fenced yards and wide sidewalks. He spotted his family’s two-story, white Edwardian and searched for signs of his family.
Months before, he’d written his dad and mom that if he ever had the chance, he’d give them an epic aerobatics display. “I’ll tear the chimney off!” he wrote. It had been a lighter time, his mood not yet thoroughly weighed down by the heft of the world’s troubles.
He loved that rush he felt whenever he dared to do something others would never have the courage to do. It electrified him. Always had. In his first days in Eugene, he proved himself to the neighbor kids by racing down the buttes on his bike, going faster than everyone else—with his hands locked behind his head.
He never worried about crashing, never worried about getting hurt. He was confident, and such stunts appeared effortless to everyone who saw them.
Now, since Harry’s injury, his head was filled with the memories of the pilots he watched die. Each one was supremely confident that if somebody were to buy it, it wouldn’t be him.
Life failed to work that way. Immortality was a lie men believed to keep reality at bay so they could continue to climb into the cockpits of these dangerous machines.
We haven’t even seen the enemy yet.
The flight passed over Gerald’s old neighborhood. The roar of six Allison engine P-39s sent shock waves through the houses below. People piled through doors to get a look at what was overhead. He could see them, waving and laughing, kids running around excitedly. He hoped his brothers and sister were down there with his folks, looking up and seeing what he’d become.
A fighter pilot.
In 1942 America, there were few more glamorous things to civilians shielded from the dark horrors of such service.
They climbed out over the west-side outskirts of town. Down low, the Airacobra was the fastest thing in the Army Air Force’s inventory, faster even than those brand-new P-38s they’d seen in California.
If not for his family, Gerald resolved to fly boldly for Barbara, too, believing it was the wild-eyed man who never showed fear that she’d fallen in love with. She knew only through a few words penned in letters home of the inner struggle he’d endured since Harry’s injury, the frightful man he was on track to becoming, and he didn’t want to let it get the better of him.
When Gerald saw her next, Barbara would expect the man who volunteered to go join a fighter squadron in the Philippines only three weeks out of flight school. He had been set to depart when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the planned reinforcements stayed Stateside to defend the West Coast.
How could she love him if he let the threat of injury or death snuff out his spark? All those nights he dared Mrs. Hall’s wrath by riding his bike to Barbara’s house, climbing up onto her roof as stealthily as a cat just so Barbara could sit beside him in her window box seat and they could whisper together long past midnight. Kid-stuff courage, to be sure. Here, in the air, for the man of twenty-one, Harry’s injury became the first real test of that courage and daring. What kind of pilot would emerge from that loss?
Johnson peeled off for a second pass and pushed the throttle forward. The Allison howled, and the crowd below resolved. Lower and lower, until he was practically scraping the trees that shaded his childhood street.
Lower still. Air speed touching three eighty, the ’Cobra rocketing along West Twelfth Street, straight for Gerald’s neighbors. A few blocks away now, Johnson rolled on a knife edge, his fighter’s wings vertical with the ground. A little less rudder, and he dipped between the trees, his wingtip skirting just above car roof level.
In a flash, he passed the crowd, pulling up and executing a victory roll. He flipped inverted, dove back down, and made a final pass before rejoining his formation flight.3
Nobody reported their hometown flyboy, and so Johnson escaped Dick Bong’s fate.
Even if he’d known what had happened to Bong, it would have been unlikely to stop Gerald. “Safe” just did not exist in his DNA. Better to embrace the fire than live in fear of the death it might inflict.
Energized, Gerald pointed his Airacobra north, his flight gathered like geese on his wing. They sped for Portland, where the girl with the red umbrella waited for him on a hilltop overlooking the city.