June 2, 1943
Dobodura, New Guinea
Tommy McGuire stared over his cards at Gerald Johnson, trying to read the Oregonian’s face. Johnson stared back, his expression blank. McGuire was the poker master, Gerald the recent devotee. Back in flight school, Gerald looked down his nose at those around him who gambled, considering it an unsavory vice. But time in the service loosened his churchgoing moral compass, and now he played poker with relish.
“Raise you,” McGuire said, tossing a wad of currency onto the hood of the jeep between them. The other three players folded. Now, Gerald and Tommy kept at it, raising each other until at least eight hundred dollars in Allied currency lay between them.
The stakes earned whistles from onlookers. They were playing in the shade of an acacia tree beside the squadron’s thatched-roof scramble shack. Like the 39th Squadron’s, it was open on the sides with netting to keep the bugs out. Inside, Dick Bong and a few others lazed in chairs, playing bridge.
“I’ll see and raise you,” Gerald said, slapping a sheaf of ten-pound Australian notes atop McGuire’s wad.
The two pilots studied each other. Johnson was perhaps Tommy’s only real friend in the unit beyond Wally Jordan. But that friendship did not dim the competitive fire that burned in both young men. In fact, it stoked it in Tommy.
Tommy finally said, “Okay, Johnny, I call. Whaddya got?”
Gerald grinned sheepishly and laid his cards down, “King high.”
McGuire erupted, “Goddamn! All I got is queen high!”
The three pilots who folded sat in stunned silence, regarding the cards Gerald and Tommy laid atop the hood. They looked like somebody just shot their dogs.
Eight hundred dollars?
The pilots watching the game burst out laughing at the sight. Both bluffing? They laughed harder when one of the other players swore loudly and announced, “I had a pair! I had a goddamned pair!”
He flipped his cards over, revealing two jacks. The howls of laughter increased.
Gerald leaned forward, and with both arms swept the cash off the hood. He savored the moment. Beating Tommy at his own game was an achievement.
Gerald dealt a new hand as somebody inside the scramble shack started winding up the squadron’s portable Victrola. A moment later, a scratched-up Victor 78 was laid on the player. The pilot dropped the needle, and the tiny sounds of Xavier Cugat’s Waldorf-Astoria Orchestra filled the air with a Latin rhythm.
Music from a tuxedo-wearing big band known for playing the hotel of the rich and famous seemed utterly incongruous out in the jungle of New Guinea. It was absurd in a world turned upside down sort of way. The men loved it, and some of the jokers in the group milked it by doing a hip-swaying dance while singing along, “Shake shake… shake those maracas…”
The men burst out with cheers and catcalls, egging the dancers on. Though trained to kill and veterans of hard fighting, at their heart, they were still just kids. In normal times, they’d have been doing these sorts of shenanigans in their college frat houses instead of beside a dirt strip an ocean away from home.
Dinah Shore’s seductive voice began to sing,
With tender passion, a secret I’ll impart
The Rhumba Cardi means
The rhumba of the heart.
The squadron possessed only a few 78s. They’d all heard “Rhumba Cardi” so many times as to be sick of it. In later years, for those who survived, hearing the song again would trigger them instantly, taking them back to the sweltering heat, the flies and mosquitoes, and the brotherhood of the scramble shack that they would never experience again.
Since the middle of May, the Japanese seemed to have vanished from New Guinea’s skies. The alerts and scrambles flown almost invariably resulted in no sightings of Japanese aircraft. Johnson was particularly frustrated, especially after his day off, when the 9th got into a wild fight over Oro Bay, the only big one of the month. In a fury, he volunteered for and flew three missions the next day, yet didn’t sight the Japanese.
For the past few weeks, boredom became their biggest enemy. Swaying hips to “Rhumba Cardi,” five-card draw, and bridge games were the only weapons against the jungle torpor. Mail from home arrived in fits and starts, but that was a mixed blessing. All too often, the news conveyed in those little envelopes left the men stressed out or brokenhearted.
The phone rang. Its buzzing froze the games and sent a bolt of adrenaline through the men. The poker players scooped up cards and cash and cleared the hood. The jeep was ready for action even as one of the pilots grabbed the phone receiver, listened, and shouted, “Full squadron scramble! Go! Go! Go!”
Dick Bong rose and grabbed his gear, heading to the jeep used for the poker game. Johnson and Tommy jumped in with him, along with an enlisted-man driver and a second lieutenant, an Oklahoma native named Paul Yeager. The squadron’s birds stood nearby in a long line, sixteen in all. They had twenty-two total, but five were down for maintenance. The other bird was held in reserve.
Some of the men sprinted to the nearest end of the P-38 line. The others rode jeeps the short distance to their mounts to get to them as quickly as possible. Even as they leapt from the jeeps and raced to the ladders behind the cockpits, the crew chiefs were already firing up the engines.
In minutes, they were airborne, streaking through ten thousand feet, throttles open, Dick leading one of the four flights. Wally Jordan, Tommy McGuire, and Gerald Johnson all joined him in what would become the first of many combat missions these men flew together.
Ground control told the men to climb to twenty thousand feet and head for the coast to intercept a possible incoming enemy aircraft. The Knights looped around the field, noses pointed skyward as the speedy Lightnings clawed for altitude.
As they reached twenty thousand feet, Yeager’s P-38 lagged behind. The other pilots looked back at him to see Yeager’s head down in the cockpit as he tried to diagnose the problem. One engine lost power, and he fell out of formation, shaking his head and signaling he needed to return to base.
The rest of the squadron pressed on as Paul Yeager traded altitude for speed and doubled back for Dobo. He was just passing ten thousand feet when his troubled engine burst into flames. Paul jettisoned his hatch, unbuckled, and jumped clear of the burning aircraft.
Yeager’s chute drifted down toward a series of lakes and swamps about eight miles southeast of the airfield. He missed the lakes, only to crash down into a tree at the edge of an escarpment. With a jerk, he came to a violent halt about six feet from the jungle floor.
As Yeager dangled in his harness, the rest of the squadron reached Cape Ward Hunt and loitered around, waiting for a Japanese raid that never arrived. When the Knights returned, the pilots spotted Yeager’s torn chute draped over a treetop, reported its location, and swung into the pattern. Not long afterward, a Piper Cub went out searching for Yeager and quickly found his parachute as well, only a few miles as the crow flies to the edge of the airstrip.
But those few miles between this tiny American outpost in the middle of New Guinea and Paul Yeager could be deadly; an almost impenetrable jungle, teeming with swamps, canyons, cliffs, and lakes dominated by very aggressive crocodiles. Yaeger may as well have dropped onto a different planet.
Woods decided to go out personally, taking his ops officer with him to see if they could find Yeager ahead of the main search party, which was just starting to assemble.
Woods and the ops officer took the most direct route, paddling across the Embi Lakes in a small life raft. On the east bank, they hacked a trail through the undergrowth until, toward dusk, they came to the opposite side of Yeager’s ravine. They saw his chute, cupped their mouths, and shouted over the expanse below them, hoping to see if he was still alive.
The Oklahoman was indeed still alive. It took him three hours to carefully cut himself out of his chute harness. When he did, he fell the final six feet to the jungle floor, dislocating a shoulder, tearing his shirt, and ripping his pants off. As darkness approached, he covered himself in dead leaves, then wrapped the remains of his shirt around his head as defense against the clouds of voracious mosquitoes.
He heard Woods’s voice and answered weakly. It was too late to negotiate the ravine’s cliffs, so both rescuee and rescuers settled down for a long night in the jungle.
At dawn, Woods and the ops officer made their way to Yeager, reaching him by 0800. He was pretty banged up, unable to walk on his own. They carried him to a clearing at the top of the ravine just as some Aussie troops, also hunting for Yeager, showed up. Together, they built a lean-to as the Knights used the Piper Cub to drop food and blankets to them. They hunkered down in the lean-to as a tropical storm deluged the area.
Meanwhile the search party from Dobodura set out, taking rubber rafts and following the same route Woods used to get in. The lake was filled with crocodiles, so Dick Bong provided top cover for the rescue. Buzzing back and forth over the team in his P-38, he could see the black forms of submerged crocs pursuing the raft. Several times, according to squadron legend, he rolled into a strafing run and raked the lake’s surface with cannon and machine gun fire, hoping to kill or scare off the crocodiles.
Yeager’s plight was a reminder to Dick that their own aircraft were often more dangerous than the Japanese. In this corner of the world, mechanical failure could drop them not into San Francisco Bay but into the middle of a primeval world utterly foreign to them. Worse, that world surrounded the tiny little bubble of military civilization at Dobodura. They were living in an outpost at the edge of the known world, and everything beyond the airstrip was hostile, dangerous geography.
What would happen if somebody went down twenty miles from Dobo instead of eight? Or fifty? Or over Lae?
Dick and the others tried not to dwell on that.
He finished his croc patrol and headed home. The Cub buzzed back and forth, and an A-20 from the 3rd Attack Group flew over and dropped additional supplies. Then the rainstorm shut down flying for the day. The men at the top of the ravine were on their own again, shivering in their leaking lean-to.
Sometime on the morning of June 5, the rescue team got everyone out of the jungle and back to Dobo. Paul Yeager was flown to a rear-area hospital to recover from his ordeal.
The squadron was down both another pilot and another precious P-38, with no sign of the Japanese for days. The constant mechanical failures, the stress of sitting around waiting to go into battle, never knowing when the scramble shack phone would ring, had a cumulative effect on the men. They were wearing out, and the three-month leave cycle to Sydney that Kenney implemented earlier in the year was just not enough of a break to let them fully recover.
Perhaps this is why their squadron commander, Sid Woods, personally went after Yeager. Beyond the flight line lay an alien world that offered minimal survival chances should the pilots fall into it. Woods wanted to demonstrate to his men that whatever the odds, he would do everything he could to rescue them. It was an incredible display of leadership, and one of the reasons why morale never collapsed even in the worst hours the squadron experienced.
From their little bubble in the jungle, the pilots trudged between their living tents and the scramble shack every morning after a gas-producing breakfast of dehydrated eggs, tasteless pancakes, and militarized butter designed to not melt in the tropics that the men called “Marfak” after a popular type of axle grease used back home on automobiles. Each day, the pilots scheduled to fly settled down to wait, listening to “Rhumba Cardi” ad nauseam until even the hip-swaying dancers among the men failed to elicit any laughs.
For the next week, as the mechanics worked themselves to the point of collapse to get the birds combat ready, the pilots scrambled almost every day to intercept not Japanese bombers but wayward Allied planes. It frustrated everyone. Each takeoff was perilous. Each flight a hazard and every landing a gut-check moment for these young Americans. To have to undertake them without any payoff or purpose made it feel like they were flailing in futility.
Three days after a C-47 carried Yeager to a rear-area hospital, the scramble shack phone rang again. The men sprang into action, racing to the waiting P-38s. Dick, Gerald, and Tommy all rolled down the runway together, along with the squadron’s thirteen other operational P-38s. Radar reported an unidentified plot over Cape Ward Hunt.
The field at Dobo was wide enough for the Lightnings to take off four abreast. It took steel nerves to pull this off knowing that if any one of the pilots made a mistake, or suffered an engine failure, the chances of a collision and a fiery death were high.
It was just before noon, a perfect day to fly, with not a cloud above—“ceiling unlimited” in pilot lingo. Tommy got off the runway and retracted his landing gear. Usually, the wheels would spin until the tires made contact with the inside of the landing gear well. When that happened, there’d be a sharp squeak as the tire ground to a stop against metal. Sometimes the pilot could even get a whiff of burned rubber in the cockpit and see a bit of smoke.
Tommy saw a puff of smoke and smelled something burning. It wasn’t rubber. He sniffed, checked the gauges, and looked around the aircraft. Everything appeared normal; all his engine instruments were in the green. He wasn’t leaking anything and the Allisons purred along without issue.
Tommy tucked into formation. Sixteen P-38s streaked out over the northern New Guinea coast, their pilots hoping for something to justify all this effort.
Nothing. Not even a wayward Allied bomber appeared. The sky was as empty as it was blue. Sid Woods ordered them home.
As they returned to Dobo and swung into the pattern, Sid Woods’s voice suddenly came over the radio, “McGuire! Your right engine is smoking. Land immediately.”
Tommy looked out over his right shoulder. A thin stream of smoke trailed from the engine cowl back over the boom like a gray-black tail. He checked the gauges. Everything was still in the green.
What the hell was going on?
He didn’t wait around to find out. As the rest of the squadron watched, he prepped for landing. He lowered the flaps and hit the switch to extend his landing gear. Nothing happened. He tried again. The gear wouldn’t come down. He closed the valve switch and tried the emergency system, which was a small hand pump. He pumped the landing gear doors open, but the nose door wouldn’t lock. It shimmied in the slipstream, vibrating the aircraft.
He shook the wings, hoping to drop the gear and get it locked in place. The left gear extended and locked. The nose wheel didn’t. Neither did the right gear. Below him, hydraulic fluid began leaking onto the cockpit floor. He tried pumping again, but he lost all pressure in the hydraulic system.
The rest of the squadron landed as Tommy struggled with this mechanical failure. He burned fuel and regarded the dirt runway. He had one gear down and locked. He couldn’t get it back up for a wheels-up belly landing. He’d have to set the P-38 down on one wheel and try to keep it from spinning out into a ground loop, or cartwheeling across the runway until his ’38 was nothing but a flaming debris field.
Finally, down to the dregs of his fuel supply, he lined up on final. Nose up, flaps full down, he slowed to the edge of a stall and floated down onto the strip. The left wheel impacted on the runway. Tommy fought to keep the right wing up for as long as he could. Then the gear collapsed and tore away. The P-38 crunched onto the strip, skidding along and shuddering violently. The props bent back like flower petals in a storm, their impact with the ground so sudden that both Allisons were destroyed.
He slid to a stop, crash trucks racing for him, a line of pilots and ground crew watching from around the flight line. No fire, no more smoke. As the crash crews arrived, he slid off the wing to look over his P-38. The vertical fins were destroyed below the boom. The undercarriage was toast. The engines and props destroyed. The aircraft’s belly was ripped up. The plane was a total washout.
He caught a ride back to the squadron area as a truck dragged his P-38 to the boneyard to be stripped for parts to keep the remaining birds in the air.
One week, two precious Lightnings destroyed, two pilots nearly killed by their own mounts. Zero contact with the Japanese.
The Knights gathered the next morning at the scramble shack, chain-smoking cigarettes in relative silence as they settled down to play cards or read the same magazines they’d been reading for months. When somebody cranked up the Victrola and Dinah Shore’s lilt wafted from the scratchy 78, nobody got up to dance.