April 16, 1943
Dobodura, New Guinea
Seven Miles from Buna
The olive-drab transport plane from Moresby touched down at Dobodura, a wide, flat dirt strip engineers had cut out of the jungle at the end of the Battle of Buna. Originally, it served as an aerial resupply point for the troops, and C-47 Skytrains—prewar airliners called DC-3s—brought in troops and ammo, pulling out the wounded, sick, and psychiatric cases.
With Buna finally in Allied hands, the Japanese in Papua, and New Guinea increasingly isolated at coastal enclaves like Lae, Dobodura took on a new and more important role as the 5th Air Force’s forward-most fighting outpost. On one side of the strip, the ship-killers of the 3rd Attack Group set up camp, their Pappy Gunn–modified A-20s and B-25s tucked away in revetments deep in the jungle. On the other side, the Flying Knights pitched their camp. In between, at the end of the airfield, the wrecked hulks of both bombers and fighters lay in skeletal heaps, some still with their canopies splattered with dried blood.
Wally Jordan, Tommy McGuire, and Gerald Johnson climbed out of the transport that day and were driven over to the 9th Fighter Squadron’s area. The drive in sobered them. The men they saw working on the P-38s were sunbaked and stripped to the waist in the blast-furnace equatorial heat. Shoulder blades and ribs protruded, their eyes ringed with dark circles. They looked like shipwreck survivors, not a fighting outfit of the USAAF.
The 9th had built its living quarters in the jungle along the Samboga River. Initially quartered in mud-filled, boggy tents, the off-duty pilots were busy building wooden floors atop stilts to make the place more habitable.
The squadron adjutant, Jim Harvey, introduced himself and began giving them a familiarization tour. As they walked and listened, an explosion resounded across the area. The new guys froze. Harvey seemed unconcerned.
“Don’t worry. The boys are just grenade fishing in the river. It’s the only fresh meat we get around here.”
Harvey sketched the situation for them. The Japanese were throwing everything they had at Moresby and other targets in eastern New Guinea. Over the past few days, hundreds of Japanese planes carpeted the sky. Bombers. Fighters. The Knights flew intercepts every day, the pilots bounding out of the alert shack by the side of the strip to waiting jeeps for the short ride to the Lightnings. They’d gotten good at this, able to get the aircraft started and moving in only a couple of minutes.
But the battles took a heavy toll. Instead of the twenty-five Lightnings they were supposed to have, the squadron counted only eighteen. Of those, maybe half were ready to fly. Sometimes, the squadron could only manage to get four aloft. Battle damage knocked some out. Others were constant maintenance headaches. Radios arrived improperly installed. Half the time they didn’t work. When they did, the pilots heard little more than static with unintelligible voices washed out in the background. The overworked ground crews discovered the problem: the radio wiring was not well insulated. They field modified the aircraft to fix the issue.
Generators failed, engines quit. Fuel pumps died at the worst times. With no hangars, the birds sat out in the tropical sun, through downpours, and baked in the humidity. Stuff broke constantly. The ground crews threw everything they had into their tasks. They worked harder and longer than everyone else, dawn to dusk and beyond to try to make these fussy, complicated, high-tech planes stay in the air.
When one didn’t, they carried the guilt of the loss with them. It fueled them to even greater outlays of energy and endurance. It also fueled their nightmares.
Around the living area, the adjutant showed the new guys to the day room, where they met some of the other pilots for the first time as they sat in homemade chairs reading or playing chess. The men didn’t look happy to see a pair of first lieutenants, and there was the instant gulf between new guys and the blooded combat veterans that happens in any outfit. This caused some resentment among the new guys since they were veterans too.
Harvey took them to the officers’ club next. A small thatch-roofed wood building, it was the Knights’ pride. They’d built it themselves soon after arriving at Dobodura, stocking it with booze brought back from Australian leaves.
Inside, they saw the pirate from their flight to Moresby, Clay Tice, pulling bottles out of his bag and putting them behind the wooden bar. He greeted them with a scowl and a nod.
Over Tice’s shoulder stretched rows of cubbyholes. Inside each was a silver drinking mug with a pilot’s name inscribed in it. Johnson stepped closer, looking to see if he recognized any of the names.
Beside one that read “Dick Bong,” Gerald saw an upturned mug. The name on it was Bill Sells.
“Why’s that one upside down?” the Oregonian asked.
Clay just stared at him. Harvey diplomatically stepped in and said, “Those are the mugs of the boys who didn’t make it back.”
“What happened to Bill?” Tice asked the adjutant. Clay had been on leave when he went down.
Two days before, the Japanese had launched a raid against the airfields at Milne Bay. Somewhere between forty and fifty twin-engine bombers, covered by clouds of Zeroes. The Knights scrambled, launching all eight available P-38s. Dick Bong took one flight. Sells the other. Bill was a Darwin vet who’d been with the squadron for more than a year. Respected, with two planes to his credit, he was also a short-timer, just waiting for replacements to allow him to finally rotate home for a rest.
On the way to Milne Bay, Bong lost two of his four flight mates to mechanical aborts. Sells lost one. With five Lightnings left, they spotted the Japanese below them, their fighters stacked protectively around the twin-engine bombers. Five against at least eighty. As they dropped their external tanks and prepped for combat, Carl Planck’s P-38 spewed flames straight out of its right supercharger. The engine lost power. He couldn’t go down into the fight with Bong.
Dick went after the Japanese anyway. Alone, drilling straight through the fighter escort to go after the bombers. He scored his tenth kill that afternoon. He, Sparks, and Tommy Lynch were now the leading aces in the theater.
Sells and his two pilots couldn’t get past the Japanese fighter escort. At one point, the others saw Sells diving away, at least a dozen Zeroes chasing him. His plane was shot to pieces, but he somehow managed to shake his pursuers and make for one of the runways at Milne Bay.
On final, something broke. The P-38 dropped into the jungle at the edge of the runway, exploded, and burned. Nothing remained of Sells’s body.
“I still need to write Dulcie,” Harvey said quietly.
“That’s Woods’s job,” Tice snapped. On his last leave to Sydney, Sells married an Aussie girl he’d run into at a movie theater. A whirlwind, hyperintense wartime romance, a quick wedding, and before he headed back to Dobo, Dulcie was pregnant.
The room fell silent. Gerald noticed there were a lot of upturned mugs.
“Hey, new guys,” Clay said. They looked over at him. “Remember something. First time I got a Jap, I found it to be the easiest thing in the world. To kill a man, I mean. That keeps me scared every damned day.”
He paused; the new guys stared, wordless. Gerald never thought of the other pilot in the aircraft he shot down. He just saw the plane as an animated object.
“If it is that easy for me, then it is that easy for the Japs. Don’t forget that when you’re up there with us.”
They met Sid Woods, the squadron commander, next. Another Darwin veteran, Sid was a capable pilot, an able administrator, but like everyone else, worn out and malnourished. He introduced himself, laid out his expectations. New guys who didn’t listen to the old hands got killed. Keep your ears open. Stow your ego. You start at the bottom here with the Knights. Before new guys went out on combat missions, the flight leaders would take them up and see what kind of pilots they were as sort of a talent evaluation process. They were desperate for help, but a new guy who couldn’t cut the mustard was a liability. Prove yourself. Earn a slot in a flight. Then earn your keep doing exactly what you’re told.
The adjutant gave them a final bit of advice. “Everything here is trying to kill you. Even the birds are poisonous. Leave the wildlife alone. Stay away from crocs—they’re vicious. Avoid snakes. Don’t touch the centipedes—especially the ones that are almost a foot long. Keep your boots upside down at night so scorpions don’t get in them. When you go swimming, watch out for the blue-and-black–striped snakes. They’re deadly. Oh, and take your antimalarials regularly. If you don’t, you’re sure to get it.”
“I heard that stuff makes you sterile,” Gerald said.
“Better sterile than malaria,” Harvey said, “Trust me, you don’t want to get it.”
As Gerald carried his stuff to his new cot inside a seven-man tent, he wondered if two days before it had belonged to Bill Sells.
That night, the squadron held a fish fry. The day’s catch was cleaned and grilled in a grand cookout that was a welcome reprieve from the crap that passed for food at the chow tent. The cooks busied themselves over fires built in cut-down fifty-five-gallon drums, slinging fish from grill to mess plates with aplomb. The officers and pilots ate together beside the river, the enlisted men around them in clusters not far away. The new guys met the old hands and their flight leaders as food was passed and those not on the morning flight roster drank jungle juice from tin mess cups. At length, the men began to sing. First, the enlisted guys would serenade the officers, then the officers would offer a response. The songs were bawdy and vile. Johnson had never heard anything like them. Jordan thought them hysterical.
After the enlisted guys finished their turn, one of the old hands said, “Bastard King of England.”
“Hey, you Eskimos,” one of the other pilots said to Jerry, Tommy, and Wally, “listen and learn. The Aussies at Darwin taught us this one.”
The pilots began singing lustily.
Oh, the minstrels sing of an English king
Who lived long years ago,
And he ruled his land with an iron hand,
But his mind was weak and low.
He used to hunt the royal stag
Better than this he loved the bliss
Of pulling his royal pud.
Incredulous, the three new guys howled with laughter. Food and drink forgotten.
He was dirty and lousy and full of fleas.
His terrible tool hung to his knees.
God save the bastard king of England.
Wally leaned into Johnson and said in his ear, “Hey, that could be you if he only had one ball.”
“I really regret telling you that now,” Gerald said. Back home, his friends kiddingly referred to him as, “O.B., the Human Mystery” as a result of his missing part.
The song went on and on with verses some of the men created as inside-squadron jokes. When it ended, the enlisted men cheered a thank-you. From darkness up the riverbank, another one began. Somebody played a harmonica. It was a hot evening—a steam bath kind of heat with so much humidity that it sometimes seemed you didn’t walk through it, you swam through it. Around them, jungle creatures called and cackled. In this desperate and bug-filled shithole, these young Americans found ways to mitigate their misery and keep their spirits up.
The last song of the night was a screw-you to the fate they faced.
Beside a jungle waterfall, one bright and sunny day
Beside his battered Warhawk, the young pursuiter lay
His parachute hung from a very high limb
He was not yet quite dead
So listen to the very last words
I’m goin’ to a better land, a better land, I know,
Where whiskey flows from coconut groves,
We’ll never have to work at all, just hang around and sing;
We’ll have a crew of women, O death where is thy sting?
Later that night, long after lights out, the new guys awoke to the approach of Japanese engines for the first time as a night raider arrived to wreck hope of sleep. A few bombs fell, and the base’s antiaircraft defenses pounded away as the Knights huddled in slit trenches, cursing the Japanese for interrupting their sleep.
This wouldn’t be a summer camp.
The next morning, Wally and Gerald showed up for their tryout. Tommy would have to wait; there simply were not enough functional airplanes. Sid Woods gave Clay Tice the job of evaluating them, and he met the two Alaska vets at the flight line and gave them some further advice.
“I’ll tell you the same thing I told Bing Bang Bong when he joined us. I don’t care what your old outfit told you to do. Here, we do things our way, and we expect you to learn it. Don’t be too daring, or too eager. There’s plenty of war here and it is sure to last awhile. Don’t ever forget that we are a team. We work together; we fly together. We survive. Clear?”
Gerald and Wally nodded.
“Good. Let’s see what you can do.”
They headed to their assigned P-38s. Left engines fired up first, right engines a minute after. They taxied to the runway and opened the throttles.
Gerald made it into the air, but Wally’s P-38 suffered mechanical failure. He turned back for the strip just after getting airborne and set the fighter back down without any damage. At least he showed Tice he could handle an emergency.
Gerald played it exactly as he was directed, eager to prove his skills and demonstrate he could be one of the team. It was a good start, but he needed to learn a lot of basic tactics before he could be trusted with anything but a milk run sort of mission.
On the ground, Gerald also understood the resentment his rank caused the established second lieutenants. He worked hard to be personable, outgoing, and funny. He wanted to win them over.
A few days later, Tommy McGuire went up with a Darwin vet flight leader to get his checkout. He’d already earned a reputation among the old hands as a braggart. In the day room and the alert shack, he talked a mile a minute, sometimes carrying on conversations with two or three people simultaneously. That was how his mind worked—he simply had a faster processor than anyone else, and any lull in a conversation would bring boredom. Above all else, McGuire hated inaction and boredom. He fidgeted and paced. He talked so fast, pilots never saw him take a breath. It drove the guys nuts and disrupted the chemistry in the day room. When everyone else was relaxed and doing their own thing, having somebody unable to sit still drew attention, and annoyance.
In the air that first flight with the Knights, Tommy slipped into his assigned slot while the flight leader explained the basics of how the 9th flew in combat. Part of the evaluation process included seeing just how well a new guy could hold formation. In combat, they flew loose to give each other room to maneuver. A wide finger four they found to be the best. But on these first in-country training hops, the measure of a good pilot could be judged by how close he stayed on his leader.
The flight lead told everyone to tighten it up. The three pilots on his wing did what he asked. Tommy did it a little slower, and didn’t get as close. When the flight leader started a left turn, McGuire drifted and ended up out of position.
The flight leader called out, “Come on, McGuire, close it up. Didn’t you guys fly formation in Alaska?”
Stung by somebody criticizing his flying, McGuire lost his temper.
He nudged his throttles forward. Just a bit. The P-38 slid back into position. Then kept closing on the flight leader.
McGuire had already been simmering for days at the idea he’d have to undergo more training and prove himself—wasn’t that what Alaska had been for? He hadn’t yet shed the conceit that his experience there was nothing in the jungle, where the nature of the war was not only entirely different but was operating at an intensity level the new guys just didn’t understand yet.
His P-38 pulled almost even with the flight leader. Tweaking the rudder and twisting the yoke left just a bit, Tommy’s bird drifted toward the other Lightning. Yoke back to neutral now, he was mere feet from the lead’s right boom.
Not close enough.
He gave the throttles another nudge and eased his P-38 even closer. The flight leader was looking left at the other element, talking to them about their positions, so he didn’t notice what Tommy was doing until he heard a dull thud, then felt a vibration run through his rudder pedals.
His head swung right. McGuire’s wingtip appeared to be right against his vertical fin and rudder.
“What the hell is going on, McGuire! Did you just hit me?” the lead asked over the radio, voice full of astonished fury.
“I don’t think so, sir. Must have been turbulence,” came McGuire’s smart-ass reply.
“You’re too close, you son of a bitch. Back off!!”
“Just trying to fly a tight formation, sir.”1
Back at the field, his flight lead reamed him out and threatened to ground him if he ever did something that idiotic again.
The Darwin vets had seen men die needlessly in stupid antics. Victory rolls claimed some. Others were just tearing around on the deck and hit something. They carried the pain of seeing friends get killed because of the stupidity or mistakes of others. The vets had watched pilots with over-bloated egos kill themselves trying to showboat. Worse, those egomaniacs often killed men around them too.
This was no game, and there was no margin for stupidity or an inability to accept criticism without a wounded-ego swipe back. The 9th was short of planes. It was short of pilots. The ones on hand were battle weary, sick with a dizzying variety of tropical illnesses. Some who finished their tours went home to the States to discover their bodies were filled with parasites. Some had diseases the Stateside doctors had never seen. Combining this with the strain of constant combat, night bombings, attacking scores of Japanese planes with a paltry few P-38s, meant fuses were short, nerves raw.
McGuire decided to play a game in retaliation for a rebuke. It was one thing to joke around on the ground, but to endanger another man’s life because of a wounded ego? It demonstrated astonishingly bad judgment, and it destroyed McGuire’s reputation in the 9th before he even had a chance to show he could be a productive member of the team.
In the weeks that followed, Johnson, McGuire, and Wally Jordan finished their training work with the squadron, and they were eased into operations. Not sure if he was going to get sent home as a result of his “observer” status, Gerald volunteered to fly every mission Sid Woods and his flight leader would let him. In May, he flew sometimes two and three missions a day, always wanting more.
On the ground, all three men made a point of listening to the veterans as they talked tactics and capabilities. The old hands remained skeptical of the P-38 to some degree, and many times arguments broke out between the P-40 believers and the Lightning advocates. Some considered the P-38 about even to the latest, clipped-wing variant of the Zero to show up in the theater.
It was here that Gerald Johnson, Tommy McGuire, and Richard Bong got to know each other for the first time. Bong was still as quiet as ever, but he seemed to have loosened up a bit more with the Knights than he had with the 39th. His introversion was more accepted and not seen as antisocial. He and Johnson developed the makings of a friendship. When McGuire peppered Dick with technical and tactical questions, he was happy to answer.
The other pilots took to collectively calling the three new guys from Alaska “the Eskimos,” while Gerald became “Johnnie Eager” for all his volunteering. Tommy became that guy who always talked himself up, who always had to one-up other guys. Fighter pilots were a naturally competitive lot, but the way Tommy went about it rubbed people the wrong way. In subsequent flights, he showed talent and natural ability in the cockpit, but no amount of talking was going to get him out from under the cloud he’d created for himself. He needed a reset, but the squadron’s veterans did not forgive or forget. They left him on the bench more often than not. For a man with as brittle and prickly an ego as Tommy’s, the situation could not have been more devastating. He just didn’t know how to fix it.