Late August 1942
Amberley Field, Brisbane, Australia
The first wave of General Kenney’s fresh-faced P-38 pilots from California landed at Amberley Field at the end of August, just as Aussie stevedores unloaded the first crates filled with dismantled Lightnings from a cargo ship in Brisbane harbor. They arrived only a few weeks after General Kenney first reached Australia and flew up to New Guinea to see his weary and emaciated combat units. The new planes and men from the Golden State were just what he needed to help defend Port Moresby. Kenney’s future would be tied to how they performed.
The replacement pilots were an eager lot, filled with the desire to get into battle that only men who have yet to experience combat can feel.
Kenney wanted these men in New Guinea in the heart of the action as soon as possible. Those fifty ’38 jocks would be spread through three squadrons that Kenney planned to reequip with the Lightnings. That way, there would be a mix in every outfit of combat veterans and P-38-trained pilots. It seemed like a great idea, blending knowledge of the new aircraft with the bitterly gained battle experience of the 5th Air Force’s best outfits. The new guys would show the old hands how to fly the P-38, while the veterans would teach them how to stay alive in a fight against the Japanese. A quick exchange of knowledge as the mechanics assembled the Lightnings, and the squadrons would race back to New Guinea to jump back into the fight.
It didn’t work out that way.
The 39th Fighter Squadron received the first batch of P-38s. Fresh from a grueling tour up at Moresby, the “Cobras in the Clouds” squadron had lost ten planes in six weeks of combat—about 40 percent of their aircraft. Miraculously, all ten pilots survived. Then their squadron commander died during a training mission, leaving the outfit in temporary command of a second lieutenant.
The rush was on to get the 39th back into combat. Mechanics swarmed over those first Lightnings, working day and night to assemble them. The first ones completed were handed off to the newly arrived P-38 pilots, who started checking out the veterans. Everything looked to be going to Kenney’s plan.
Then the wheels fell off. The first few test flights at Amberley resulted in near accidents as engines quit on takeoff. Investigating the problem, the mechanics discovered the internal fuel tanks were damaged in transit or improperly manufactured. Most had to be thrown away. Other issues developed. The Fifth had received the newest P-38 model, the F. Between the D, E, and F models, Lockheed undertook over two thousand modifications. They fixed some bugs but created a host of others.
The electrical inverters did not work. The oil intercoolers and superchargers leaked. This was not the savior of the skies Kenney needed. Instead, he received a bird crippled by mechanical gremlins.
As the ground crews tried to solve the problems, the second batch of P-38s arrived. These showed up without the ammunition-feed systems for the guns. Others lacked critical parts.
These could not be manufactured locally; they had to come from the Lockheed factory. Urgent requests for new tanks and parts reached the United States, and top-priority transport planes soon winged across the Pacific to deliver them to Amberley.
As the new fuel tanks arrived, the mechanics and pilots joined forces to get them installed. Each replacement included a thousand screws that needed to be hand-turned. The men grabbed screwdrivers and went to work, sometimes for eighteen hours at a stretch, until their blisters ran crimson with blood.
Gradually, a few birds emerged ready to fly, but it was not the aerial armada Kenney wanted. He had imagined a walloping new force to shock and awe the Japanese. Walking on the field one morning, he took a look at each of the six planes ready for combat, and he could only sigh.
In early September, a new contingent of Stateside ’38 pilots arrived at Amberley. Dick Bong was among them, flying across the Pacific and making the best out of the horribly uncomfortable LB-30 used for such journeys. In that long flight, crammed in with his peers, he came across as distinctly un-fighter-pilot-like. He was quiet. Self-contained, nice enough when somebody talked to him, but otherwise he largely kept to himself. Jay Robbins, a second lieutenant from Texas, recalled—in what after the war would seem ludicrous—looking around the plane during the trans-Pacific flight and pegging Dick Bong as the weak link.
Once he arrived at Amberley, he rubbed some of the veterans the wrong way. His confidence in the P-38 and his ability to fly it struck some as cockiness, and it pissed them off. They’d been flying for months while he’d been Stateside, and they were not about to suffer what they saw as a rookie’s tinhorn bravado. Especially when that rookie was a fervent believer in a plane that had yet to impress anyone in the 5th Air Force.
Talk developed between old P-40 hands and the new P-38 guys over whose plane was better. Bong somehow ended up in the middle of this growing tension. He was never one to be an advocate or draw attention to himself, but that is exactly what happened. The jawing went from good-natured to acrimonious, until finally, challenges were issued. The new guys received quite a lecture. The P-40 was the only plane in theater that could fight the Japanese, as long as you didn’t try to dogfight with the Zero. Stay fast, go in, get out. Slashing hit-and-run attacks—that was the name of the game. They all agreed the ’39 was a dog. But over Darwin, the 49th Fighter Group had shot down almost eighty Japanese planes with their P-40s.
They told the new guys that no fighter as massive as a Lightning would be able to fight the Zero and its incredible agility. It was a death sled, a stupid Stateside pipe dream of some Lockheed designer who knew little about air combat.
The ’38 pilots didn’t buy it. There may have been some talk about kicking P-40 ass back in California. Things came to a boiling point. You think you and your new plane are that good? Prove it in the sky.
Bob McMahon and Frank Adkins represented the P-40 crowd. They’d seen their war from the cockpit of their Curtiss fighters from the Philippines to Java. They fought in every lost cause in the Southwest Pacific until finding themselves in P-39s over Port Moresby in May. Adkins once wrote in an official report that the 39th should be reequipped with trucks, as they’d climb better and be more maneuverable than their Airacobras. The P-38s’ arrival convinced him that the Air Corps had listened.
They met over Amberley at nine thousand feet. Bong and one of the other new guys in freshly assembled P-38s, the two old hands in P-40s borrowed from a nearby depot. Adkins led the P-40 element, careening straight at the Lightnings in a head-on approach.
At the last second, everyone broke and turned. The fight was on. Bong and the other P-38 pilot stunted their Lightnings all over the sky in ways that left the veterans dumbfounded. At one point, Bong winged over and bored straight for McMahon’s P-40. When Zeroes made this sort of attack, he’d escaped by kicking the rudder, skidding, and cutting his throttle. In combat, the Zeroes would invariably overshoot, giving him a chance to take a snap shot as they passed by him.
Not so with Bong. The farm boy saw the maneuver and reacted instinctively, yanking the P-38 into a zoom climb the P-40 could not hope to follow. Now he had altitude, and he knew that the pilot who controlled the high ground controlled the fight. He dropped on the P-40s, whose pilots tried to escape with split S dives. Soon, the fight spilled down from nine thousand feet to the deck. Tearing over the trees, the P-40s scissored back and forth, trying to scrape the Lightning off each other’s tails.
Nothing worked. Bong and his wingman were relentless. In desperation, the P-40 pilots reverted to a World War I defensive maneuver called a Lufbery Circle. The theory behind it was simple: if two or more planes could circle together on opposite sides of each other, any hostile fighters trying to get on their tail would expose their own tail to the next plane in the circle. Theoretically, it was as solid a defense as the infantry square was to cavalry charges in the Napoleonic wars.
The P-38s countered by keeping the high ground. Staying above the P-40s, Bong and his wingman took turns making slashing, diving attacks into the Lufbery. Before the other P-40 could arrive and help, the Lightnings flitted away, zoom-climbing back up to their perch.
Finally, Adkins surrendered. Point proven. The new plane was a true contender. So were the new pilots.
In mid-September, the crisis in New Guinea reached its peak. Forward Japanese units crested a ridge and looked down upon the Coral Sea and Port Moresby. They were still in the Owen Stanley Mountains, but now they were less than twenty miles from their destination. In desperation, Kenney airlifted American troops into Moresby, with his heavy bombers and transports arriving from the States still crewed by civilian ferry pilots. Meanwhile, the Aussies sent in a veteran infantry division freshly arrived from the Middle East.
Kenney’s new energy and expectation for offensive action transformed the culture in the 5th Air Force. The bombers and fighters at Moresby launched attacks against the Japanese supply lines stretching from the north coast into the Owen Stanleys every day. They strafed and bombed troop concentrations and pulled out wounded troops from forward jungle strips whenever practical. New gunships—light A-20 Havoc bombers modified to carry ten forward-firing machine guns by legendary aviator Pappy Gunn—arrived in early September to strike the Japanese with deadly effect from treetop level.
Yet the skies above the battlefield and Port Moresby did not belong to the Allies. When the Japanese bombers attacked, the defenders of Moresby still lacked the ability to intercept them effectively. Those attacks proved incredibly destructive. Japanese bombardiers were highly experienced veterans who scored deadly hits on the airdromes around the port. Men were killed in their slit trenches. Others died trying to get aloft as the bombs fell. Dispersal areas turned into infernos as precious aircraft were blown to burning bits. After each attack, the wounded and dying were carried into the hospital at Moresby, grim, burned, and broken men who bore the brunt of the Allied failures to stop these Japanese raids.
Kenney needed those Lightnings to stop the carnage. He wanted them up high to bounce the Japanese Zero escorts, giving his Airacobras the chance to go after the bombers with their heavy cannon. The pressure was on to get those birds up to New Guinea. Yet, by September 15, only a dozen were deemed combat ready.
A dozen was better than nothing. Kenney ordered the 39th to go with what they could. Meanwhile, the remaining pilots would continue to train on the other ’38s as they were completed.
For two months, the advanced element of the 39th operated out of Fourteen Mile Drome, flying local patrols that revealed a dizzying array of issues with their new P-38s. The ground crews, struggling to learn the new planes without manuals or much technical experience, learned as they went. For each problem they solved, two or three more cropped up.
Sixty days passed, and the P-38 accomplished nothing in New Guinea.
Just before Thanksgiving, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker blew into Port Moresby. Sent by the secretary of war on an inspection trip to the Southwest Pacific, his B-17 crashed at sea en route. America’s ace of aces from World War I spent twenty-two days adrift in the Pacific, eating seagulls and drinking rainwater to survive.
He reached General Kenney’s headquarters looking like a scarecrow. After a few days of recovery, he met with MacArthur, who briefed him on the situation. Then Kenney took him around to some of the airdromes protecting Port Moresby. He met with the flight crews, talked tactics with them, and generally “flew the hangar” with this new generation of combat aviators to get a sense of what they faced in New Guinea.
While Rickenbacker was visiting a fighter unit, almost certainly not the 39th, the talk turned to air-to-air combat. The young pilots had grown up reading the pulp World War I air combat magazines. Their Depression-era childhoods were spent building models of Captain Eddie’s legendary biplane fighter, the SPAD XIII. Here, in the middle of nowhere on a jungle-covered island thousands of miles from home, they met their childhood hero.
He did not disappoint. Eddie Rickenbacker was a brilliant raconteur of tales. He wowed his audience, first with his epic survival story about drifting on a raft in the middle of the Pacific for three weeks, then reached back to his Western Front days, when his squadron battled von Richthofen’s Flying Circus in 1918.
The fighter pilots hung on every word. Captain Eddie fought against the best of the best. He’d seen countless comrades go down. Yet, he emerged victorious to become one of the great heroes of his age. His journey stood in stark contrast to what these men endured in New Guinea. The Japanese thrashed them almost every time they met. A plucky few scored kills. The rest were lucky to escape with their lives.
At one point, Kenney stepped into the back-and-forth and mentioned that Captain Eddie scored almost all his twenty-six kills between June and November 1918. Five months of combat.
What was supposed to be a morale-boosting moment suddenly became a stark reminder of their struggles against the Japanese. The men grew quiet. The leading ace in the theater, Buzz Wagner, scored eight kills from the first days of the war in the Philippines through April 1942. He’d left for home a short time later. Since then, nobody had even come close to getting eight.
Let alone twenty-six.
Rickenbacker sensed the mood in the room had changed. The men felt humiliated. He stepped in and said, “Well, you have to remember, the Germans were pretty thick at the front in those days. There were always plenty of targets to shoot at.”
That didn’t really elevate the mood. They’d seen plenty of Japanese over New Guinea. Somebody sighed and said, almost offhandedly, that it would be a long time before somebody tied Captain Eddie’s record of twenty-six.
The comment struck Kenney with inspiration. He announced, “Eddie, I’m going to give a case of scotch to the first one to beat your old record.”
Captain Eddie quipped, “Put me down for another case.”
The room brightened. The conversation continued, the men unaware that something significant had just been born. The seeds had been planted. Fighter pilots are naturally competitive, hard chargers. The lack of action and success had worn some of that away in New Guinea, but beneath the surface, the best fighter pilots will always be the ones burning to prove they are better than anyone else in the sky.
The challenge stoked that competitive fire and got the wheels turning. Somebody in that group might become the next Captain Eddie, World War II’s ace of aces and the next American icon from the new war. The stakes went well beyond a few cases of booze. It meant a path to a better life than what they were born into.
The race to twenty-six had officially begun.1