December 27, 1942
Fourteen Mile Drome, Port Moresby, New Guinea
Bill Boni smelled a story, and he was damned if he was going to let something like a broken back stop him from scoring it. He had been a sports reporter for the Associated Press, and when war came the AP made him a war correspondent and sent him to MacArthur’s HQ out in Australia. Thirty-two years old and brimming with passion, he spent the fall of 1942 writing stories about the GIs fighting in the jungle around Buna, pounding out his stories on a small portable typewriter he’d set atop an overturned rations crate. Using another crate for a stool, he’d be at it for hours in his makeshift jungle office, still wearing his helmet, chain-smoking as he knocked down pages of patriotic prose.
On Christmas Eve, he was flung from an overturning jeep and fractured two of his vertebrae on landing. Even that didn’t stop him. He used the time at the hospital in Moresby to interview some of the wounded soldiers there and write stories about them.
Three days later, he heard the ’38s at Fourteen Mile had finally gotten into action. That would be big news back home. He limped from his hospital bed, climbed into a jeep, and sped over to Fourteen Mile, where he camped out at the 39th Squadron’s grass-roofed, open-sided operations hut just before the guys returned.
Within minutes, the first jeepload of triumphant ’38 pilots rolled up and the men piled out. Talking happily, they recounted their part of the mission, flying with their hands to illustrate what they’d done. The men noticed Boni, but they’d seen him around before and knew he was a reporter in their corner. He’d written several articles about 5th Air Force crews already, and his willingness to go into the Buna swamps, suffer, and go hungry to make men famous with his typewriter gave him solid-gold street cred. Later, after he was wounded in action during a Japanese air raid, MacArthur ordered that Boni receive a Purple Heart. Boni was one of the few civilians to receive it.
A Dodge weapons carrier rolled up next. More jubilant pilots poured out, laughing and chatting excitedly. They walked inside the hut, standing around its mesh sides, enjoying the midafternoon breeze that kept the ops hut from becoming stifling in the equatorial heat. The squadron’s intelligence officer debriefed them, taking their reports down and furiously writing notes as they talked.
Charlie Gallup’s flight returned last with Tommy Lynch. They flowed into the ops hut and joined the celebration. For all the heartache and sweat getting these birds into battle, they’d just proved their worth. As the pilots talked, the intelligence officer counted the claimed aircraft and tried to sort them out. From the looks of it, they’d knocked down over a dozen Japanese planes.
Dobodura called in to say that Ken Sparks crash-landed there in plane number thirty-six. The ’38 was a total loss, shot to pieces by Zeroes and Oscars, wrecked on its nose during his forced landing. For all that, Sparks emerged unhurt. He caught a ride in a C-47 and was back at Fourteen Mile just after Charlie Gallup’s flight got back.
Boni remained a fly on the wall, taking notes on the debrief. Sparks related how, with one engine shot out, he flamed a dive-bomber over Dobodura before crash-landing. As he talked, he noticed Boni nearby. Sparks was known for his mischievous grin, and he unloaded it on Boni before saying, “I wish they’d have given me another plane right away so I could go back there—that was a beautiful show, and the plane performed beautifully!”
Not all were bug-free, however. Boni listened to Charlie Gallup describe his flight’s late arrival to the fight and how one of his superchargers failed. Then his guns jammed.
Gallup told Boni, “Four attacked us from the same cloud. They made the first pass, but missed.”
Carl Planck, Gallup’s wingman, interjected, “There’s no feeling quite like sitting there and looking up and seeing a Zero on his back looking down at you. You just scrunch down behind the armor plate and give her all she’s got.”
“I had to run for shelter,” Gallup explained after he lost his guns and supercharger. “The Zero got on my tail, but Carl picked him off.”
As the chatter and hand-flying continued, Bong stepped over to the intel officer and described his role in the fight in as few words as possible. Later, while he was listening to the other pilots recount what happened, somebody told him that the Zero he’d shot up went into the water. He didn’t know that, so he filed an amended report and was given credit for two kills. The rest of the time, Bong vanished into the background. Always quiet, always self-contained, he listened and answered questions, cracked a joke here and there, but was otherwise overshadowed by the exuberant Type As in the hut. Maybe he was more subdued because of the parasympathetic backlash he’d experienced on the way home. He felt exhausted, his mouth still bone dry. But part of it was just who he was—an unshowy introvert, naturally inclined to few words.
It didn’t take long before the debrief turned into an impromptu celebration. Major Prentice, the squadron commander, laughed and smiled as he listened to his excited men. The others whooped and hollered, talked freely to Boni, and savored this first victory. At one point, Tom Lynch said what they all were thinking: “This was my first chance to jump some Japs from above.” The days of wheezing skyward in altitude-impaired P-39s as Zeroes dropped on them were over. To the hardscrabble veterans of the 39th, the ’38 more than proved itself that day. They were true believers.
While the debrief continued, a crippled P-40 with “Scatter Brain” painted on the nose above the number fifteen staggered into the pattern at Seventeen Mile Drome. The pilot, Capt. George “Red” Manning, a Darwin veteran with chiseled features and a perpetual fuck with me at your peril scowl, was seething with anger. His P-40 was a sieve. He flopped onto the field and parked his battered bird. Tearing his flight helmet off to reveal a thick thatch of dark red hair, he jumped off the wing and told some approaching ground crew, “I need a jeep! Now!”
They rustled one up for him, and he sped off without further word.
Manning served as the operations officer for the Seventh Fighter Squadron, 49th Fighter Group. He raced back to his squadron, which was based at another Moresby strip, and found the rest of his flight standing around a shot-up P-40. Lt. Clay Tice, another Darwin veteran, stared at Red as he rolled up in the jeep, and uttered a long string of curses.
They conferred, Red growing even more enraged when he saw the bullet holes in the back of the P-40’s canopy. Another series of holes pierced the Warhawk’s skin below the propeller and went into the radiator. It was amazing the engine hadn’t overheated and seized. There were even a few holes in the propeller blades themselves.
Three of the four pilots who were gathered around the P-40 climbed into the jeep with Red. He threw it in gear, stomped on the accelerator, and flew down the flight line, dust pluming in his wake. He drove straight to the 39th Squadron’s operations shack, where he found the Lightning pilots in full revelry.
He bailed out of the jeep and started screaming at the P-38 guys. The celebration came to a crashing halt. Bong and the others stared, stunned at the sudden appearance of four exceedingly pissed-off P-40 pilots, a couple of whom were from Bong’s assigned squadron, the Flying Knights.
“You dumb sons of bitches!” Red screamed at the 39th. “My fucking P-40’s full of .50-caliber holes because of you! I got another one with a shot-up canopy. You assholes just missed taking my pilot’s head off.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“We were over Dobo. Didn’t you hear us screaming at you on the radio that we were friendly? We kept telling you to stop attacking us!”
The Lightning pilots hadn’t heard anyone say anything like that. Of course, at times the radio filled with so much chatter that voices just got lost in the cacophony. Either that, or the Warhawks were on a different frequency.
Wewoka control hadn’t reported other friendlies in the area. The pilots of the 39th were indignant. How was this their fault? At four hundred miles an hour, how the hell do you tell a green P-40 from a green Ki-43 Hayabusa? One engine, one tail equaled an enemy plane since they didn’t know there were P-40s in the area.
The situation escalated. Manning stood his ground, threatening to bring the responsible ’38 pilots up on charges. That didn’t go over well at all. Everyone was hyperemotional after flying combat. The stress, the terror, and knife-edge they’d just been through left both sides without filters, and their fury meters quickly pegged.
Finally, Manning’s rage overcame his self-control. He reached for his holstered pistol and unsnapped its cover. The other three pilots with him saw him do it and grabbed him. He tried to fight them off, but they physically restrained him, then dragged him back to the jeep. A moment later, they drove off. Bong and the other 39th pilots sat there, shocked and shaken.1
Later that afternoon, General Kenney and Gen. Ennis Whitehead showed up to find out what happened on the mission. They conferred with Major Prentice, the squadron commander, then took each pilot’s report and went off to read. Kenney noticed Bong’s name on one of the reports and, remembering him from San Francisco, read it with great interest. He was surprised at its brevity. Some of the other reports went into great detail. Not Bong’s. It was abrupt and contained no fluff.
The others exposed a lot of what Kenney saw were rookie errors. To his eye, they maneuvered way too much with the more agile Japanese fighters and opened fire from too far away. He and Whitehead walked back to the waiting pilots, who greeted his return with anxious looks.
The general laid into them. He was a combat pilot from World War I, he knew the score in the air—at least, he thought he did. First mistake: you want to hit ’em, get in close. Don’t be shooting at flyspecks on the canopy, the real damage is done at point-blank range. Second mistake: the Japanese have it all over us with the Zeroes and their maneuverability. Turning with one, even for less than forty-five degrees, bleeds speed, makes a P-38 slow, and Zeroes will eat alive any slow American fighter.
For the old hands, he was of course preaching to the choir. For the new guys, like Bong, Carl Planck, and Mangus, the veterans had already drilled the same thing into them.
In the excitement and swirling craziness of the moment, apparently, they’d done just that.
One pass. Haul ass. Get out of the fight, climb above it, go back in for more. Anything else will get you killed.
Kenney made no mention of the friendly fire incident. The 49th Fighter Group’s commanding officer, Col. Don Hutchison, later chose not to pursue it since nobody got hurt.
Kenney looked at Sparks, whose trademark mischievous grin was conspicuously absent.
“And you, Sparks,” Kenney said, “owe me two more Japs.”
“How do you figure that, General?” he asked, puzzled. His report detailed his two kills over Buna, including the Val he flamed after a Japanese fighter shot out one of his engines.
“Well, I know I promised you guys an Air Medal for every plane you bring down. But a P-38 is pretty scarce around here. So if you bring one home all shot up, you’re all gonna have to get two more to even things out.”
For most of them, this was the first time they’d been exposed to Kenney’s sense of humor. After being chewed out, they weren’t sure if he was serious.
Sparks attempted a grin, the others tried to stay out of the line of fire.
Kenney turned to Major Prentice and said, “I bet you haven’t even got any liquor to celebrate your first combat!”
Prentice looked sheepish and said, “No, sir. We don’t.”
Kenney looked righteously pissed off. “There you are,” he growled. “Robbing me of my only three bottles of scotch.”
The place erupted. The scotch arrived and the bottles passed from pilot to pilot. Kenney listened to his “kids” tell and retell the story of the day, flying with their hands, laughing and joking once again, now that the tension had vanished. Kenney had a way of mock-upbraiding his young fliers to impart a lesson, but he usually ended with a bit of humor that telegraphed how much he cared about them. It was jarring to some at first, but when they understood what he was doing, his kids couldn’t help but start to love him.
The friendly fire incident was forgotten as December 27, 1942, went down in history as the P-38’s spectacular air combat debut in the Southwest Pacific. But not long afterward, all the ground echelons repainted all of V Fighter Command’s single-engine aircraft with white tails to help avoid such mistakes in the future. Over the jungle, the white really stood out over the green, which was great if you were a P-38 pilot trying to denote friend from foe. Less great was the fact that the Japanese could see them with the same ease. So much for camouflage.
The 39th claimed fifteen Japanese planes that day. Kenney told General Arnold his kids got fifteen, but officially they were credited with ten—six Zeroes, three Oscars, and a Val. The real number was less than five, according to surviving Japanese records. In the chaos of air combat, it could be—and at times remains—almost impossible to accurately determine how many planes went down, especially when the fight took place over water or thick, impenetrable jungle that would camouflage the wrecks. In the sky, things just moved too fast, and to follow a damaged bird down to ensure its destruction usually was too dangerous to attempt. The inflated claims usually didn’t reflect on the pilots’ credibility; after piecing together the air battle afterward, they believed the numbers they submitted. This was true on both sides throughout the war, though the Japanese tended to be more optimistic. In this case, the Army and Navy fliers believed they destroyed seven of the new P-38s instead of the one they actually got, though Sparks’s aircraft later returned to service. The actual numbers mattered little in the moment. Like so many aspects of life, perception was far more important than reality.2
Both sides celebrated victory that night after this first encounter. They also knew this battle over Maggot Beach was just the start of what was sure to be a long and bitter campaign.
Sometime after dinner, Whitehead and Kenney sat down to talk about the day at the advanced HQ in Moresby. The Fifth performed well. Between shooting down the raiders over Buna and a heavy bomber mission that damaged a couple of Japanese cargo ships, the Fifth seemed to be finding its fighting groove.
Whitehead told Kenney that the Moresby squadrons received about 10 percent of their allotted fresh fruit, less than half of the fresh vegetables they were supposed to get, and a tiny fraction of the fresh meat. It would be some time before they could unsnarl that problem. The men would have to make do. Making do while kicking ass was a lot easier than when defeat piled on defeat. The spirit was turning around.
The two generals talked long into the night. They were old comrades, having trained in France together behind the lines at Issoudun in 1918. Through the interwar years, their lives and careers intersected at times. They built a genuine rapport. Now, they were becoming close friends since Kenney had made Whitehead the commander of the 5th Air Force’s forward HQ.
At length, the talk turned to aces. Fighter pilots who could shoot down five or more enemy aircraft were few and far between in the World War I era both generals experienced. It was shaping up to be no different in this war. Any given squadron would have a few malingerers who would avoid a fight whenever possible. The vast majority would carry out the missions, doing their jobs with devotion, if not always with spectacular results. The aces—they were the ones who scored the kills, did the damage, and garnered headlines back home. Fewer than 5 percent of combat fighter pilots, they accounted for 47 percent of all the enemy planes knocked out of the sky.
Kenney and Whitehead took stock of the talent in V Fighter Command. With Buzz Wagner gone, the leading active ace was national hero Maj. George Welch, who earned his first headlines by shooting down four planes over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He’d scored three more while flying P-39s in New Guinea, giving him seven altogether. Andy Reynolds, a hard-charger in the Flying Knights of the 9th Fighter Squadron ranked second, with six. Beyond them, the Fifth just didn’t have many aces. Part of it was the terrible equipment the men flew. Part of it was the lack of air warning for intercepts. Part of it was lack of training—hell, most of the kids the Stateside schools sent them didn’t even have any gunnery practice in fighters. The V Fighter Command resolved to solve that issue by creating its own in-theater “clobber college”—a combat finishing school for fighter pilots where they could learn tactics, shoot at towed target sleeves, and learn their assigned aircraft more thoroughly. But that would take time to get up and running. For now, the lessons would be taught by the Japanese.
All this made the fifteen planes claimed by the 39th that day over Buna even more spectacular. Days like that simply didn’t happen in New Guinea with the ’39s, or even the P-40s. In fact, the day’s haul represented half the total score of the 35th Fighter Group’s three squadrons to date. Set in perspective, the P-38 sure looked like a game changer.
An ace-creator.
“Whitey” and George Kenney speculated about the pilots they met that day. Who among those new Lightning jocks had whatever brew of psychology and talent it took to be an ace? Hoyt Eason, one of the flight leaders, seemed poised to make his mark. Charlie Gallup? Maybe. Sparks? He had the devil in his eye, so perhaps.
General Whitehead thought Tommy Lynch was a sure bet, not just for acehood, but to climb the ladder and beat Welch and Buzz Wagner to seize the lead in the theater.
Kenney couldn’t help but think about Bong.