Sunday, December 27, 1942
Fourteen Mile Drome, Port Moresby, New Guinea
The weather ship departed at 0630, rolling down Fourteen Mile Drome’s dirt runway with a stripe of dust rising in its wake. The P-38 banked during its climb out, turning for the forbidding Owen Stanley mountain range, which was often shrouded in clouds or fog that concealed its deadly peaks. The first order of the day was to find out what the weather was like over the passes the 39th used to get to the north side of New Guinea.
Over the past two months, the fighting had migrated to the north side of the Owen Stanleys. The Aussies managed to hold the Kokoda Trail. Then, with Kenney’s bombers and fighters wreaking havoc on the Japanese supply lines, the Imperial troops ran out of food and ammunition. They fell back, leaving their dead and dying alongside the trail—along with more evidence of how they treated their prisoners of war. Being captured by the Japanese was a sadistic death sentence.
The weather bird continued climbing, turning north to pass over the foothills at the threshold of the Owen Stanleys. Though the 5th Air Force possessed weather planes anweather stations, the 39th’s new commander, Major Prentice, did not take any chances. Since Prentice arrived in New Guinea, sending a lone plane off to gather weather intel had become a daily ritual.
The P-38 weaved around packs of cottony cumulus clouds until the pilot reached the pass. The Kokoda Trail lay somewhere below, shrouded by the jungle overgrowth from above.
The pass was clear. The pilot keyed his radio and called back to Moresby, “Wigwam this is Kekini One, over.”
“This is Wigwam, go ahead Kekini One.”
“Condition okay.”
“Roger, Kekini One. Condition okay.”
Had the pass been socked in by clouds, the pilot would have called back, “Condition sour.”
There would be much flying today.
At Fourteen Mile, the pilots went through their morning routines and gathered at a chalkboard in the operations hut. The ops officer listed every pilot assigned to fly that day, along with his flight and aircraft assignment.
Dick Bong stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow pilots and studied the board. He found his name under the second flight scheduled to patrol. Beside his name, he saw the number fifteen.
“Bong.” The farm kid heard his name called and turned around.
“You’re on my wing today.”
Tom Lynch regarded him with dark and serious eyes. He was one of the veterans of the 39th, a pilot of rare skill whose intelligence and gentle demeanor on the ground endeared him to the others in the squadron. Though he possessed prototypical movie hero good looks, he was not the prototypical cocky fighter pilot. He was a thoughtful kid who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania coal country. His dad worked at Bethlehem Steel in Allentown, and before flying became the obsession of his life, Tom Lynch had wanted to join his dad at the plant. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in chemical engineering. Half rugged coal-town kid, half science nerd, he embodied that innate ability to motivate others with just a few soft-spoken words.
It was this combination that helped him survive the 39th Squadron’s P-39 deployment. He shot down three Japanese planes in Airacobras over Port Moresby, but returned with a bird full of holes on one occasion. On June 15, 1942, four Zeroes pounced on him. He tried to dive away—the only thing a P-39 could do in its defense—but cannon fire blew holes in his fuselage and knocked out his engine. He ditched in the water off the Moresby beaches, only to have the ’39’s car-door hatch jam. As the plane sank, he put so much pressure on the door that he broke his arm. He escaped at the last moment and was back flying in August, after his arm healed. Eight days after returning to duty, while flying a freshly assembled P-38 at Amberley, he lost an engine on takeoff and crash-landed. He walked away unscathed. In fact, it didn’t even seem to faze him.
Bong, like everyone else, looked up to this quiet veteran. He was about four years older than the other new pilots in the outfit, and when Major Prentice went home, Lynch was sure to get the squadron.
The other two men in Lynch’s flight, Ken Sparks and John Mangus, gathered around him. Mangus was one of the Golden Gate ’38 pilots, a new kid like Bong who’d already shown tremendous heart and eagerness. He was a consummate team player, willing to do anything to help the outfit.
Lynch sketched the mission for the day. For the past month, a battle had raged on the north coast at a place called Buna. Australian troops and American National Guardsmen from Wisconsin launched repeated assaults against entrenched, desperate Japanese who routinely fought to the last man. They were a mix of starving survivors of the Kokoda Trail and more fit replacements smuggled in at night by the Japanese Navy. Short of everything but courage, the Japanese clung to their shoreside pocket with such fanatical intensity that they stacked their dead around their fighting positions for additional protection. The rotting stench of these corpses proved so overwhelming that some Allied units took to wearing gas masks as they pressed forward in the assault.
On the twenty-seventh, the lead elements of the Wisconsin National Guard captured one of the two Japanese airstrips at Buna. They found the place littered with wrecks and partially intact Zeroes, which Allied intelligence sorely wanted to recover and test-fly.
The 39th would fly two standing patrols along the coast. The first off would cover the area over Cape Hood. Lynch and his flight would patrol directly over Cape Endaiedere, known to the Allied troops as “Maggot Beach.” Earlier in the month, a tank-infantry attack took place there in hopes of cracking the Japanese defenses at Buna. The tanks took heavy losses, and the assault failed to gain much ground. Afterward, the surf carried thousands of dead fish to the beach, killed by artillery shells that missed their targets and landed offshore. It was not long before the sand was filled with maggots burrowing in the fish.
When Tom finished the brief, the men headed for a nearby jeep for the drive through the jungle to the flight line and their waiting birds. The patrol seemed routine to Bong. Since arriving in mid-November as part of a contingent of 9th Squadron pilots sent to get some combat experience while the 5th Air Force awaited more P-38s, pretty much all he’d done was patrol over Buna.
They’d seen a whole lot of nothing. In fact, the war seemed more real at Moresby than in the sky over the northern New Guinea coast. At night, the Japanese bombers lingered overhead, keeping everyone awake and driving the men crazy. At one point, an antiaircraft battery moved to a position behind Bong’s tent, deep in the jungle off the side of the strip. When one of those obnoxious night intruders passed overhead, the AA guns unloaded, sending Bong flying out of his cot and straight through his mosquito netting, thinking a bomb had just landed nearby. He ran through the night to dive into a nearby slit trench, still entangled in his mosquito net. He lay in there with several other pilots, listening as antiaircraft fallback whistled into the trees around them.
With the Japanese hitting Moresby only at night now, the ’38s didn’t have any targets. Gen. Ken Walker, the commander of V Bomber Command, wanted the ’38s to escort his crews as they pummeled the main Japanese base in the region at Rabaul. The idea was shot down: the P-38 was still untested, there were mechanical failures on every flight, and nobody thought they could fly the eight-hundred-mile round trip to Rabaul without losing half the 39th to gremlins.
So they patrolled over the jungle battlefields and saw nothing but empty sky.
The jeep stopped in front of Tom Lynch’s aircraft. He jumped out and walked over to the P-38, his crew chief waiting. The jeep moved down the line to the next Lightning. “Thumper” was painted on its nose behind the number fifteen. Its right-engine nacelle sported a garishly painted shark mouth under a powder-blue-and-white propeller spinner. Between the engine nacelles, two fuel-laden drop tanks hung on the bomb racks.
John “Shady” Lane’s ride. He’d beat Bong to the squadron by a month and a half, which made him almost an old hand, and he rated a plane of his own. Bong would be “borrowing” it for the mission, and he knew he’d better damn well bring it back intact. Lane was sort of cool to Bong anyway; if he messed his plane up, it would be bad for the squadron’s dynamics.
Dick bailed out of the jeep to go greet Thumper’s crew chief. The two chatted about the aircraft.
“We replaced all the Kelsey fifties, Lieutenant,” the crew chief told him. “The bird has all Savages now.”
Since starting to fly in combat in September, the ’38s suffered a series of gun jams. The armorers were going crazy trying to find the problem. Finally, they decided that the guns made by Kelsey-Hayes, a Browning subcontractor, were to blame. The ground crews swarmed over the squadron’s birds, pulling out sixty-five of the machine guns and swapping in a fresh batch from the Savage Arms Company’s factories. They hoped that would solve the problem.1
The first patrol finished warming up their engines and taxied out to the runway. As Bong, Lynch, Sparks, and Mangus fired up their planes, the first flight departed for the north coast, leaving a hazy brown cloud of dust swirling across the airfield.
Ten minutes later, Capt. Thomas Lynch launched with his men. The Pennsylvanian learned back in the spring that altitude determines who holds all the cards in a fight. Practically every time he went into battle, the damned Zeroes dropped on him and his comrades from perches way above their ’39s, forcing the Americans on the defensive every time.
Trade altitude for energy. Energy equals speed. Speed equals life.
Now he finally had a plane that could get up high in a hurry and give his men the advantage, and he intended to exploit that. Even laden with their two drop tanks, the ’38s climbed out to twenty-three thousand feet in fifteen minutes, higher than the other flight leaders usually chose to go.
Just before noon, they reached their assigned sector. Flying in a finger-four formation with Tom as the middle finger, Dick as the index, Sparks as the ring, and Mangus as the pinkie—tail-end Charlie—they headed out over Maggot Beach to begin a pattern that would take them up and down the coast for the next two hours. The sky as always, it seemed, was empty, but that would not be the case for long.