1150 Hours, December 27, 1942
Buna, New Guinea
As Tom Lynch’s flight prepared for the day, a most unusual collection of Japanese aircraft lifted off the coastal strip at Lae. A hundred miles from Buna, Lae remained the most important Japanese air base in Papua, New Guinea, since it served as home to the Imperial Navy’s crack 582nd Kokutai. Its pilots were veterans of China, the fighting in the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. And, of course, they had been thrashing the 5th Air Force all summer and fall.
Fifteen of their Zeroes and seven Val dive-bombers orbited over Lae that morning, waiting for the veterans of Nomonhan to get aloft and join them.
After the disaster of Kokoda, the Japanese high command wrestled with how to win the air war in New Guinea at the same time the units at Rabaul were supposed to defeat the U.S. Marines and Navy at Guadalcanal in the southern Solomons. The Imperial Navy knew it needed help. They asked the Army to send air units to the Southwest Pacific, and at first, the Army balked—their fighters and bombers were fully engaged against the British, Americans, and Chinese on the mainland. In December, though, they grudgingly agreed to help. An elite brigade of fighters transferred from Sumatra to Truk Atoll in the Central Pacific, then on to Rabaul.
This would be their second mission in New Guinea. On Christmas Day, the 11th Sentai—what the Japanese called their air regiments—staged to Lae and refueled with thirty-one sleek Nakajima Ki-43 Hayabusas, or “Peregrine Falcons.” Incredibly agile, they were dangerous opponents in the hands of a capable pilot. The Allies code-named them “Oscars.”
The men flying those Falcons ranked as the most experienced veterans in the Japanese Army Air Force. Three years before, the brigade battled the Russian Air Force in a furious border war in Mongolia known as the Nomonhan Incident. The men of this brigade ran up incredible scores—one pilot alone shot down fifty-eight Russian planes during the summer of 1939.
Two of the brigade’s fliers went down behind Russian lines. The Army assumed they died at the controls of their fighters. There were ceremonies for their spirits at the Yasukuni Shrine. The press termed them fallen “gods of war.”
Then they showed up in the fall of 1939. They’d been taken prisoner by the Russians and released after the border war ended. Rather than being greeted with surprised elation, the Army confined them to quarters and convened a secret court to determine their fate. At the end of the proceedings, coffins were left at their door with pistols nearby. The men accepted their fate. They swallowed the barrels and pulled the triggers.
Message received to the rest of the brigade. Fight to the last breath. Never surrender.
These were the men Dick Bong and the rest of the 39th would soon face.
The pilots who arrived in New Guinea that morning included several triple aces, men adept at shooting down enemy planes no matter the nationality. A few had Russian, British, Dutch, and Chinese aircraft to their credit. They were masters of the freewheeling dogfight and ready to tackle the challenge of finally putting the 5th Air Force out of business.
The Army pilots soared aloft in their graceful Hayabusas and took station with the Zeroes above the Val dive-bombers. The Japanese Army and Navy rarely got along—at times the tension between the services bordered on open hostility. A joint Army-Navy air strike was something new, forced upon them by the situation in the Southwest Pacific.
Time to see if the experiment would work.
The fighter formation topped out at thirteen thousand feet. The bombers cruised below a protective blanket of aerial firepower. Turning southeast, they sped for Buna.
Just before noon, an Aussie radar station established near Buna picked them up. The news was flashed to fighter control.
“This is Wewoka Control. Bandits inbound Buna. At least twenty-seven.”
Lynch called back, “Wewoka Control, what angels?”
“Look for them at angels fourteen.”1
Wewoka gave them a vector. Lynch altered course and led his flight off to find the intruders. Meanwhile, the other flight over Cape Hood headed their way as Fourteen Mile Drome scrambled eight more P-38s.
Five after noon, and the Americans made first contact. Spread out below Lynch’s flight was an enormous formation of fighters and dive-bombers. There were at least forty, maybe more. Dive-bombers around four thousand feet. Fighter flights layered up to thirteen. Wewoka padded the altitude to make sure they didn’t drop down too low and get bounced from above.
“Drop tanks, and let’s go,” Lynch called to his flight. He was taking four untested fighters into combat against forty-five Japanese fighters.
In Dick’s cockpit, his hands flew across the controls. To get a Lightning into fighting trim took a blizzard of activity. Forget a step, and you’d be in trouble.
Adrenaline poured through his body. Dick struggled to remain calm and remember exactly what to do.
Switch to internal fuel.
Release the drop tanks.
Flip the gun switches on.
Switch the gun sight on.
Throttle forward.
Fuel mix rich.
Don’t forget prop pitch and RPMs.
Watch manifold pressure.
Double-check the RPMs.
Coolant’s in the green.
Lynch led them down in a howling dive. As Dick followed, one drop tank hung on its rack. Fighting with one of those things under the wing would leave him slow, sluggish and unbalanced. He hit the release again. No luck.
They dropped below twenty thousand, the P-38s winding up over four hundred miles an hour. The slipstream finally peeled the tank off. He felt it clear his Lightning. Now he was in fighting trim.
Down and ahead lay the Japanese. Some of the fighters were gray, some looked dirty brown. Below were the Vals, lumbering along with 550-pound bombs slung between their fixed landing gear.
Dick had never wanted to be a combat aviator. He joined the military to fly, not to fight. The sky was his home, being a fighter pilot was just the way to get there. But after Pearl Harbor, that started to change in him. Like everyone else in Poplar, he was raised to be a patriot. The Japanese struck his country, and, like others, he wanted to pay them back for the horrors they’d unleashed. On an emotional level, he wanted that chance, grew eager for it. As his skills and experience grew with the P-38, so did his confidence.
It all came down to this moment on the tip of the spear. Time to find out the kind of warrior the AAF made out of Wisconsin farm kids. This was the pivotal moment in his life.
So far, he was a flying catastrophe.
Bong prided himself on his piloting skills. He and the P-38 were one, born for each other. But Tom Lynch was a next-level combat fighter pilot. He pushed his Lightning right to the edge of its envelope, and Bong struggled to stay with him.
They ripped into the Japanese formations. Zeroes and Hayabusas scattered in all directions. Heart pounding, eyes wide, he blazed through the Japanese swarm, shooting wildly. He was jumpy, borderline panicked from the adrenaline jolt, overwhelmed by the speed and number of targets around him. Everything seemed to be happening in split-second increments. One instant, a Zero flitted in front of his nose. The next, it was gone, streaking down and away, a gray blur that became almost indistinguishable from one of the many spots of crud on his canopy.
He flew through the melee, came out the other side trying to remember all the things the veterans had told him.
Keep your speed up.
Extend away, go through ’em. One pass, haul ass.
Stay with Tom. Don’t lose Tom.
Dick checked behind him and found John Mangus tacked on to him. Where was Sparks? No time to figure that out. He caught sight of the dive-bombers hitting the strip at Buna, then pulling out of their dives to the northeast. Lynch took them straight after a flight of four Hayabusas. Lynch missed his target, blew past it, and kept diving. Bong followed, watching as several Japanese planes whipped around in tight turns to get on his leader’s tail.
Dick fired at one. It broke off as Lynch zoom-climbed to the left. When he came back around to dive into the fight, Dick was streaking for the deck, three Ki-43s on his tail.
Lynch pounced on the trailing Oscar and, at three hundred yards, pressed his gun trigger. The fifties chattered. The cannon thumped. A shell hit the fuselage just aft of the cockpit, blowing a hole and sending debris streaming back.
Lynch kept firing as he overran the slower Japanese plane. Finally, he eased on the trigger just as he barreled under it.
When he pulled back up, his target was nowhere to be seen. The second Hayabusa was still chasing Bong, who was rapidly running out of altitude. The situation was getting dicey. Four against forty, and already the fight was almost on the treetops. Sparks and Mangus were nowhere to be seen, but they were calling targets on the radio, so they were still alive. The sky was filled with Japanese planes, wheeling and diving and turning all around them.
They needed helped. Where was Hoyt Eason and the second flight?
Lynch fired at the second Oscar as he came up behind it. The Japanese pilot saw him and juked out of the line of the American’s bullets. The pilot of the third Oscar in line tried to rescue his comrade. Damaged but still in the fight, he went after Lynch until the American was forced to break off.
For the moment, Dick Bong was on his own.
Calm down. Get control of yourself.
Dick was covered in sweat. His mouth was desert dry. He couldn’t swallow. His body shook from fear and adrenaline, the jungle racing toward him. At first just a green mass. Now he was low enough to see individual trees.
The Oscars stayed on his tail, not yet in firing range, but relentless with their pursuit. Thank God for the P-38’s speed.
He leveled off just above the treetops and firewalled the throttles. The engines roared with the sudden power.
Slow down. Think. Watch. Eyes open. Head on a swivel.
The radio hissed with static. Excited voice. Indistinct. Desperate calls to clear Zeroes off tails. They piled one on top of another until Dick heard Lynch yell, “We’re over Maggot Beach! Get down here and get into it!”
He was talking to the first flight off that morning, Hoyt Eason’s men.
“This is Wewoka Control. Zeroes at angels seventeen.”
“Where? I can’t see them?” Eason’s voice came through the static.
Come on. We need the help.
Bong turned left and jetted out over the beach. He could see the surf crashing ashore as he gained a little altitude before settling level at 350 feet.
No enemy fighters on his tail now. Not that he could see. He twisted in the cockpit, trying to see behind the armor sheet protecting his back. Nothing.
“Can’t locate…”
“… Need you down here!”
“Check your tail! Check your tail!”
“This is Wewoka Control, two Zeroes strafing Dobodura.”
“We’re on ’em.”
A moment later, “Don’t see ’em. Where’d they go?”
“Goddamnit, get down here!”
A babble of voices crashed together, drowning out any comprehensible words for the moment.
Then Eason’s voice cleared the static, “Three Zeroes, ten o’clock low! Let’s get ’em!”
“I got a Zero on my tail! Somebody get him off me!”
Dick had been in the fight for about five minutes. He had plenty of ammo and fuel, but no altitude. He’d need to climb back up, well out of the way of the fray, then come back into it.
Something caught his eye in front him. Was it a speck on the canopy? No. Dick watched as it swiftly grew into the outline of a dive-bomber. It was a perfect setup—he was running the bomber down from almost dead astern. The Aichi Type 99 D3A Val was a slow, awkward relic of mid-1930s technology, lacking even retractable landing gear.
Three and a half football fields away, his gun sight on the bomber’s tail, he triggered his guns. The fifties ripped pieces off the Val. They spun back in the slipstream just as Bong’s first 20mm cannon shells struck home.
The Val exploded and fell into the water, leaving a greasy smear of oil, smoke, and flames. No way either crew member survived.
Dick didn’t think about that, too focused on what to do next.
He looked back at the coast and checked his compass. He was at full throttle heading northwest, just passing Sanananda Point, four miles up the coast from Maggot Beach. Time to get some altitude and go find Lynch.
He pulled the control column into his stomach while he twisted the yoke hard left. The Lightning leapt skyward in a near-vertical zoom climb back toward the coast. His speed drained away, but he held it as the altimeter needle spun around the dial. The wave tops grew indistinct, and the jungle trees along the beach dissolved into an endless pattern of greens and browns.
A Japanese fighter cut in front of him, also in a vertical turn. They closed so quickly, he only had time for a split-second trigger pull. The fighter rolled on its back and went under him. Still in the climb, he looked behind through the Lightning’s booms to see where the Japanese plane went.
Three more fighters lurked on his tail. The main battle was now spread all over the sky for miles up and down the coast. More Lightnings piled on as Charlie Gallup’s flight arrived from Fourteen Mile Drome. Now the odds seemed a little more reasonable.
Where were Lynch and the rest of the flight?
He dropped his nose and dove back out to sea, the enemy fighters in hot pursuit. Zeroes? Oscars? Did it matter in the heat of battle?
“Come on down here!” somebody called over the radio.
“Do those Zeroes strafing the field have high cover?”
“They’re fucking everywhere!”
“Charlie, break! Break! Four at nine o’clock out of that cloud!”
Bong hit the wave tops. Again the P-38 outran the enemy fighters behind him. They kept up the chase, but the Lightning’s Allisons pulled him clear. As he fled, he ran headlong into a flight of Vals hugging the water as he was doing.
He picked the center Val, drove straight into the formation and opened fire. His guns flared and the P-38 shuddered from the recoil. He overshot and kept going, aware that the fighters behind would pounce on him if he lingered or came around for another attack run.
Did I hit it?
He glanced back. It was still in the air, appearing undamaged.
Dick started a shallow right turn, taking him farther out to sea and encountered a lone Val straggler. The shadowing Japanese fighters saw the Val too and altered course, desperate to save their charge.
Dick drove straight into gun range. The bomber loomed in his sight. Calm and in a groove now, Dick triggered his guns. The cannon barked, then fell silent. The fifties went quiet an instant later.
Out of ammo.
The Val escaped.
Dick kept going in a wide arc, heading back for Maggot Beach, losing the fighters behind him in the process. He sped over Buna, gaining altitude, searching for Sparks or Mangus or Lynch.
He heard Lynch talking on the radio, calling that he was out of ammo and for his troops to form up on him. He gave his location. Dick altered course. Soon, he and John Mangus found Tom and started back for home.
“There’s a ’38 on the strip at Dobo. On its nose.”
As they flew home, the adrenaline drained out of Bong’s system. He felt sick and shaky as his body went through a parasympathetic backlash. Exhaustion set in. His muscles ached. He said later, “I felt like I’d been through a washing machine with the accent on the ringer.”
Lynch landed first back at Fourteen Mile. As he taxied hurriedly for the dispersal area, Bong executed two slow rolls over the field—one for each plane he thought he knocked down—then dropped into the pattern and brought his ’38 back, pulling up alongside Mangus and Lynch’s birds before setting the brakes and cutting the switches.
Lynch practically rocketed out of the cockpit, scrambled off the wing, shouting, “Get me another airplane! The sky’s full of Japs over Buna!” The ground crew raced after him, pointing toward a ’38 sitting nearby. He jumped into it and raced off alone to get another crack at the enemy. Dick and John saw him go, vanishing to the north, throttles open, the P-38 like a banshee whining through the New Guinea sky.
Shady Lane watched the entire scene unfold, frustrated that he wasn’t on the flight schedule. He walked over to Bong, who was now looking at a lone bullet hole in Thumper’s aluminum skin.
“Guess my ship’s pretty good luck after all, isn’t it?”
The farm boy grinned in answer.2