June 1943
Dobodura, New Guinea
McGuire didn’t fly for eight days after his crash landing. As a result, he missed the only big fight the 9th got into that June. On the twelfth, the Knights and the 39th Fighter Squadron tangled with the 1st Sentai’s Ki-43s, this time over a remote gold-mining strip at Bena Bena, where some Aussie troops were being resupplied. The Ki-43s bounced the 9th in scattered overcast, dropping down on the P-38s, whose pilots dove clear of their attacks, climbed back above the Japanese, and tore into them. Dick Bong and Sid Woods entered the fight a few minutes later, going after a host of Hayabusas chasing P-38s. Bong shot one down, but was hit several times as Oscars repeatedly jumped him.
The squadron returned to Dobodura without loss and with two kills claimed. Clayton Barnes, who shot a fighter down during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, climbed out of his P-38 to find the nose and canopy streaked with the blood of his victim.
In the pattern, Dick’s battle-damaged P-38 lost all hydraulic pressure. He lowered the gear by hand and settled onto the runway, only to discover a bullet had flattened one tire. He fought to keep the aircraft under control, braking as hard as he dared until finally coming to a stop. Moments later, as he taxied for the flight line, his P-38 ran out of fuel.
During the same battle, Tom Lynch knocked down another Hayabusa, giving the two aces eleven kills apiece. News of the tie came hard on the heels of a nationally syndicated article on the ace race by legendary war reporter Frank Hewlett. Frank, who had started out the war as a UPI correspondent in Manila, had seen action from the Philippines to New Guinea. He traveled around the New Guinea airfields, interviewing all the aces except Lynch, who’d been on leave in Sydney at the time. The article, which ran in mid-June, noted that Dick and Tom were tied with ten kills, Ken Sparks chasing them with nine.
Less than a week after Hewlett’s profile of the New Guinea aces, the news broke that both Lynch and Bong had scored again. The race was still tied at eleven.
The fight on the twelfth left Johnson frustrated and angry. More than anything, he wanted to get into the race, but bad luck and timing seemed to keep denying him a chance to attack the enemy. His P-38 suffered mechanical failure on the twelfth, forcing him to turn over command of his flight to Clayton Barnes. It was his first chance to lead a flight and having to give it up was hard enough to take. That Barnes nailed a Ki-43 while the Oregonian was sitting on the ground with mechanics trying to fix his bird was another blow to a young pilot who never missed a chance to volunteer for a mission.
He’d get an opportunity soon enough.
After Bismarck Sea, the Japanese Army Air Force marshaled its resources for a full-scale reinforcement of New Guinea, recognizing that they could not resupply their troops on the island without defeating the 5th Air Force. The summer of 1943 was to be the season of aerial counterattack against Kenney’s castaways. Since the P-38 proved superior to the Ki-43 Oscar, the latest-generation Japanese Army fighters would form the vanguard of this new offensive, catching the Americans by surprise with their new, high-performance machines.
The Imperial Army called the fastest of the new fighters the Ki-61 Hien, or “Swallow.” Built by Kawasaki, its liquid-cooled engine could pull it through the sky at over 360 miles an hour. Ruggedly built, Japanese tests against a captured P-40 showed it could out-dive, out-turn, and outclimb the American fighter. Could it do the same with the P-38? The summer of ’43 would reveal whether the 5th would be fatally outclassed.
The Japanese hastily assembled two Hien groups, the 68th and 78th Sentais. Composed of a cadre of hard-core veterans from China and newbies fresh from training schools, these two outfits would be the first into New Guinea with the Hien. Together, they should have been able to field over a hundred new fighters, but production delays and mechanical problems with the new in-line engines ensured less than fifty were ready by early spring.
Getting the Hiens to New Guinea posed another major problem. The first batch arrived at Truk Atoll in mid-April, delivered there by an Imperial Navy aircraft carrier. From Truk, the Army pilots would have to navigate across the Central Pacific to Rabaul, refuel there, and continue on to the new airfield complex in northern New Guinea at a place called Wewak.
It was a journey of thousands of miles, and it did not go well from the outset. The first attempts to make it to Rabaul ended in complete failure. Bad weather, poor navigation, and engine failures caused the loss of ten out of thirteen Hiens. Eight pilots ditched at Nuguria Atoll, where the local natives killed seven of them.
Eventually, the remaining Hiens from the 68th straggled into Rabaul, while the Army sent the 78th south to Okinawa, Formosa, the Philippines, and then into western New Guinea. The 78th lost twelve of its initial forty-five Hiens during transit. They joined perhaps another twenty from the 68th Sentai at Boram Airdrome, Wewak. Instead of a massive reinforcement of these new planes, the Japanese faced the same dilemma Kenney had the previous fall. They also made the same decision: get the ones in theater into the fight.
Meanwhile, more aircraft flowed into Wewak. Three hundred arrived in June, another two hundred by the end of July. Along with the trickle of Hiens came the Japanese Army’s first twin-engine fighter, the Kawasaki Ki-45 Toryu. Light and agile for a big aircraft, the Imperial Army hoped it would be a match for the P-38. More Oscars joined the reinforcement stream, as did a host of bombers, including the newest and best produced by Japan. The Imperial Army pulled out all the stops after the convoy was destroyed in March. Now, from a relatively small presence before Bismarck Sea, the Japanese Air Force in New Guinea represented a significant threat.
U.S. intelligence estimated the Japanese possessed about 485 planes in the theater that June, with the majority based at Rabaul. The 5th Fighter Command could count 214 fighters on paper, about seventy-five of which were P-38s. The rest were P-40s and P-39s. Help was on the way, but the Japanese did have a small window that summer to take the offensive against Kenney’s aviators.
The end of June and early July were the calm before the storm. Johnson and several other Knights went down to Sydney on leave. Tommy McGuire left the 9th for good at the end of June, transferred to the newly formed 475th Fighter Group, which was then training in Australia. His final words to the Knights were filled with his now familiar tin-can bravado. “You guys better get as many Japs as you want before I get back to New Guinea. The 475th and I are gonna clean this place up when we get over here!”
For a guy whom the 9th never let fly an escort or fight sweep mission, it was ridiculous stuff. When he slung his gear and walked to the Australia-bound C-47, nobody except Wally and Gerald was sorry to see him go.
More changes were afoot for the Knights after Tommy left. A batch of the remaining old-timers who fought at Darwin were sent home in early July, replaced by young and eager pilots fresh from the States. There would be little time to break them in before they faced the most intense period of combat in the New Guinea air war.
For the P-38 pilots, the first hint of the Japanese buildup came on July 21, when the 39th and 80th Fighter Squadrons encountered a group of Hiens flying high cover for some bombers.1 Gun camera film footage from the fight showed what looked to the Americans like a German Messerschmitt 109 interceptor. This was the dreaded scourge of Europe, a fighter both fast and rugged, with a climb rate that even surpassed the P-38’s. In North Africa, the 109 savaged the American Lightning squadrons.
The news sent shock waves through the 5th Air Force. After having their way with the Oscars and Zeroes since December, the Hien represented a potential threat to the ascendancy of the P-38.
On July 23, Johnson was just back from leave, leading a flight over Lae at fifteen thousand feet when the squadron escorted some bombers into the area. Most of the ground below was obscured by a layer of overcast, which also concealed a melee between the 39th Fighter Squadron and the new Japanese fighters. As the battle raged below, the Knights patrolled overhead, unaware there were any enemy fighters in the area. Then an Oscar popped out of the overcast in a steep climb, executed a half loop, and dove back into the scud. Johnson saw it and others twisting in and out of the clouds. He punched his tanks, ordered his troops to follow him, and dove down after the fleeing enemy.
A Lightning broke out of the cloud layer in steep climb, racing for altitude as an Oscar climbed hard after him. Gerald altered course and went after the Japanese fighter. The Oscar pilot saw the Oregonian coming and pulled into a tight half loop, pointing his guns at the onrushing Lightning in a head-on pass.
Johnson fired. The Japanese pilot fired. Tracers laced the sky between both aircraft.
But no bullets found their mark. The Oscar tore past Johnson, flipped upside down and dove away in an inverted half loop known as a split S.
Gerald kept diving, remembering not to maneuver with these far more agile Japanese planes. Ahead and below, a pointed-nosed fighter emerged from some clouds, climbing straight at him. Was it a P-40?
Gerald dipped his nose and put his gun sight on the onrushing aircraft. No radiator under the nose, which was the distinctive characteristic of the P-40. Whatever this was, it wasn’t American.
It opened fire on him at about a thousand yards. He triggered his fifties and the 20mm cannon. From long range, the two pilots hammered at each other, even as they closed at over six hundred miles an hour. Gerald missed. So did the mystery pilot, who fired low and under Johnson’s Lightning. But in the final seconds of the head-on pass, Gerald saw some of his bullets strike home. The pointed-nosed aircraft ducked under the P-38 as they passed each other.
No turning back. To do so meant maneuvering with the Japanese. Johnson kept going, leveling out of his dive gradually to keep his speed well above 350 miles an hour. When he looked back, he could see an aircraft burning on a hillside through a hole in the cloud cover.
Get back up high, then turn around, dive back into the fight. That was the P-38’s game, and Johnson was sticking with it. A moment later, a P-38 appeared in the distance, another Oscar on its tail. Gerald banked and went after them, firing at long range. The sudden stream of fiery red tracers passing his Oscar spooked the pilot, who broke off his attack, rolled upside down, and dove away.
The Knights returned from that fight without any losses and several claims. Johnson received a probable credit for the in-line engine fighter. That new fighter elicited a lot of curiosity among the pilots, who looked over intelligence bulletins and recognition silhouettes after the fight to learn more about the Hien. Early in the war, U.S. intel had discovered the Japanese had imported several Messerschmitt 109s from Germany and may actually have put the 109 into production. That aircraft was given the code name the Type III Mike.2
The Knights assumed they encountered those Japanese-built 109s that day. In Europe, the 109 matched or exceeded the P-38’s performance, leading in part to a mediocre kill-to-loss ratio against the Germans. Their seeming arrival in New Guinea concerned the Knights. Nobody in the squadron had served in Europe before coming to the Pacific, so there was no institutional experience against the 109. Would they have to develop new tactics to defeat it? If so, they didn’t have time to work them out. The pace of operations at the end of that July was so intense that Major Woods didn’t even have time to break in the replacement pilots with easy missions. The new guys went straight from Australia into combat around Lae.
Everyone flew on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth. Bombers needed protection, transports to Bena Bena and Wau required escort. Though other units ran into the Japanese, the Knights missed those battles.
On the twenty-sixth, the Knights were lounging around the scramble shack getting to know the new guys as they sat through alert duty. Dick Bong and Gerald sat beside each other in wooden chairs, talking about home and hunting trips with Bob Wood and Stanley Johnson, two of the replacements. The two Johnsons hit it off, especially after Gerald discovered Stanley was married to a woman named Barbara. Same last names, same romantic partner’s names. That was enough, it turned out, to spark a fast friendship between the U of O Duck and the new kid, who’d been a bank teller back in his Montana hometown.
At length, somebody started sharing photos from home. Family snapshots, pictures of their girlfriends went from hand to hand around the shack. Somebody noticed Dick’s kid sister Jerry in one of the photos. She was beautiful and young, which triggered a whole new conversation about dating each other’s sisters after the war. Laughter filled the hut and the new guys relaxed—just a bit.
Capt. James Watkins sat down to join the two Johnsons and Bong. An old hand from the squadron’s Darwin days, he’d been a hard-core devotee of the P-40. The P-38 frankly scared him at first. Between engine failures on takeoff and the threat of losing a fan from mechanical trouble or battle damage once aloft, he spent the spring flying it tentatively. This was unlike him. Five foot six, cocky, and usually quite wild on leave, the twenty-two-year-old grew up in rough-and-tumble rural Mississippi, where he had his nose broken twice, once while boxing and again while playing high school football. He tried college, hated it. All he really wanted to do was fly. About the same time Johnson and Bong enlisted, Watkins went in as well.
After seeing him waddle between scramble shack and his waiting fighter, his parachute pack swinging side to side on his rear end, the Knights nicknamed him “Duckbutt.” He was beloved by the other pilots for his irreverent and blunt sense of humor, which often trended to the profane, and his Southern storytelling abilities.
He was a short-timer now, a fact that made most men far more aware that they just might make it through this horror show after all. It tended to make them cautious, more fearful. But when Jim Watkins woke up one morning that July, he shoved thoughts of Mississippi out of his head and cast his lot with the P-38 completely. No fear. Instead, he adopted an uncharacteristic live or die, I don’t give a fuck attitude. He asked Sid Woods to extend his tour, and was granted a few extra weeks, serving as the squadron’s executive officer. His swagger, gone since the Knights began flying the Lightning, returned with a vengeance.
The alert phone rang. Somebody answered. The 10th Fighter Sector detected a large incoming Japanese raid over the north coast. Full scramble. The joking about sisters and postwar plans went silent as the pilots grabbed their gear and ran to their aircraft. Crew chiefs strapped them in and clicked the canopies shut. Four at a time in three waves, they hustled into their planes, panting, and rushed into the cloudy afternoon sky.
Twelve P-38s, broken into Red, Blue, and Green flights, sped toward the coast. One pilot aborted with mechanical failure; another got lost in the clouds. The others continued with the intercept: Dick Bong leading Blue Flight with Bob Wood on his wing, and Duckbutt Watkins leading Green, which included the two Johnsons.
They reached Salamaua just before two that afternoon. The three flights spread out line abreast, Red in the middle led by Capt. Larry Smith. The 39th Squadron was nearby, but nobody could see them in the cloudy sky yet. The ground controller diverted the 39th from a transport escort mission to help with the intercept. Apparently, their radar was full of bogeys.
The Knights saw nothing. Smith led them up the coast to Lae. Still no sight of the enemy. Their ground control turned them around, sending them back to Salamaua over the Markham Valley at sixteen thousand feet.
Bong with his eagle eyes spotted the enemy first. Dead ahead, at least twenty of them a few thousand feet below Blue Flight, the controller had set them up for a perfect bounce. The enemy was coming straight at them, seemingly unaware of their presence.
“Bandits! Twelve o’clock low!” Dick called over the radio. Watkins saw them a moment later and called them out as well. The men went to work in their cockpits, prepping their Lightnings for the battle ahead. Heads dipped briefly as they reached down with their left hands to turn on the fuel boost pumps, then reach farther back to switch to internal fuel on the left side, then right side. Heads back up now, scanning the sky as they flipped their gun sight light bulbs on.
Seconds passed. The two sides closed on each other. The P-38 guys kept working furiously in the cockpit. Punch the external tanks—nobody wanted to fight with those gigantic hundred and fifty gallon monsters slung under the wings. Next step: fuel mixture. While cruising, the mixture was set to “auto lean,” this had to be set to “rich” by pushing their controls forward. Then the engine’s RPMs had to be increased. Finally, manifold pressure—or the throttles—were shoved to the stops. War emergency power, technically known as sixty-five inches of manifold pressure, set the Allisons howling.
A belly tank hung up on Smith’s P-38. He tried to shake it loose, but it stubbornly stayed on the shackles. Unable to fight like that, he headed for high altitude to try to get it loose, the rest of his flight covering him.
That left Bong’s four and Watkins’s three P-38s to start the fight. The pilots hunkered down behind their sights, diving to make their initial head-on passes. The aircraft grew closer, resolving into dirty green Oscars and the new in-line fighters, Hiens misidentified as Messerschmitt 109 Mikes. In the chaos, it was hard to tell how many, so the men later estimated ten of each type.
“Bandits, three o’clock high!” somebody called out seconds before the merge.
“Six o’clock high! Six o’clock!”
Gerald and Dick glanced right. Five or six of the new in-line engine fighters were over there above them, swinging wide around their P-38s to try to bounce them from the rear. Even more of those Mikes were already behind them, diving to the attack.
They’d been boxed in. The new Japanese fighters held all the advantages: height, position, surprise.
Watkins knew the situation was a desperate one. Blue Flight, already committed to attack in the Oscars, was about to get hit from the rear. He rolled his wings and banked hard, turning his ’38 one hundred eighty degrees to get his guns on the diving Japanese Mikes. He led Green Flight in a headlong uphill charge.
Go right for the center. No fear.
The three Knights careened right through the diving Japanese formation, guns blazing.
Behind them, it was too late for Bong and his flight to break off their attack. They tore through the Japanese ahead of them in a slashing pass. Bong fired on a Hien. He missed, kept going, shooting his way through the Japanese formation. Then he was clear, looking to extend out and come back around for another run.
Bob Wood stayed on his wing through that first pass, watching Dick take shots as the enemy planes sped around them. Seconds into the fight, his left engine cut out. He looked over to see torn metal petaled around a gaping hole in the cowling, smoke pouring out of it.
Bong edged ahead as Wood’s speed fell off. One engine, surrounded by Oscars and Hiens eager to get on his tail, was no way for anyone to fight, let alone a pilot a week into his first combat tour. He took quick head-on shots at five different Oscars as he dove out through the fight, his left propeller windmilling. When Bong pulled out to go around for more, Bob stayed in his dive until, down on the deck, he looked back, saw no pursuers and feathered the prop. He limped home to discover he’d skipped a step in the complicated cockpit ballet required to get the ’38 ready to fight. In all probability, he forgot to switch the mixture, or increase the RPMs. When he went to war emergency power, he caused the left engine to backfire, blowing the intake manifold off and probably throwing a rod. The engine was a total write-off. It was a rookie mistake that many made, thanks to the P-38’s complexity.
Without his wingman, Bong cleared the fight and turned back for another pass. By the time he did, the sky was filled with diving, turning planes, tracers coursing between them. So many things were happening at once so quickly that no human could keep track of it all. An Oscar appeared in front of him, turning to make a head-on pass. Bong put his guns on him and waited to get close before triggering them. The fifties and 20mm ripped into the lightweight fighter. It exploded in flames, tearing past him while he searched for another target.
He hit a Hien from behind and saw pieces fall away from it as his bullets did damage. A moment later, he bored in on another one, firing until it began to burn and dropped out of the fight. In another head-on pass, he went nose to nose with an Oscar, blowing off its canopy with cannon strikes. More hits caused part of the engine cowling to disintegrate, sending pieces streaming backward. He took one more shot at a Hien, missed, and broke for home low on fuel and ammo.
As Bong fought on alone, Watkins and the two Johnsons climbed right through the diving Hiens trying to close the trap on the Knights. It was a wild fight, with the Americans heavily outnumbered, clearing each other’s tails as the more maneuverable Hiens got behind them.
Early in the action, Stanley Johnson stayed with Gerald despite some radical maneuvers that would have shaken loose most other green pilots. But he too made a rookie mistake prepping his ’38 for combat. Seconds after the initial pass, he lost his left supercharger. Then his right one failed a moment later. His Allisons lost power as their manifold pressures dropped to twenty-nine inches. Crippled, he had no choice but to abandon Gerald and climb for some clouds a few thousand feet above the fight. He ducked into them and turned for home.
Watkins and Gerald fought on, a team of two relentless tigers who tied up the second group of Hiens long enough to keep them off Bong’s flight. Watkins shot a Japanese fighter off Gerald’s tail. The Oregonian returned the favor a moment later. They climbed and dived, weaving through the Japanese as they made their passes and kept each other alive. It was brilliant teamwork, and Watkins flamed three more fighters. Then he lost Gerald in the swirling fight.
The Oregonian had turned into an attacking Hien. Nose to nose, the two fighters sped toward each other, the Japanese pilot matching Gerald’s determination and aggressiveness. The American opened fire first; Gerald’s bullets stitched holes in the Hien’s cowling and wings. The Japanese returned fire, sending tracers over Johnson’s P-38 high and to the left. In an eyeblink, the two planes sped to point-blank range until Johnson’s cannon did its deadly work, blowing the Hien’s wing off. The doomed Japanese fighter spun crazily, out of control—and straight for Gerald, who tried to juke out of the way. He pulled up, but the Hien either exploded or spun right into his tail boom, catching the bottom of the vertical fin. Gerald heard a thump. The ’38 shuddered violently. He held his climb, trying to figure out what just happened and whether his Lightning could still be controlled.
About this time, the 39th Fighter Squadron entered the fight from the east. The sudden arrival of more Lightnings turned the tide decisively against the now scattered Japanese. Those who could, disengaged, but not all got away. Tom Lynch, now commanding the Cobras, hit an Oscar and claimed it probably destroyed. One of his other pilots, Charles Sullivan, knocked one more Japanese plane down, becoming an ace and ending the scoring for the day.
Back at Dobodura, the Knights straggled home. Red flight returned without getting into the fight. Stanley Johnson and Bob Wood limped in to land. Bong set his bird on the runway and taxied to the flight line, where he was greeted by Elwood Barden, his crew chief. Excitedly, they looked over number seventy together. The P-38 didn’t have a scratch on it. Bong lit up at this, smiling broadly. Frequently, he brought Barden a battle-damaged bird after a scrap. When his crew chief asked how many for the day, Bong held up four fingers almost as an aside. He was far more excited to get through the fight without any holes in their Lightning than he was with the four kills, though he wasn’t beyond noticing that they made him the top-scoring USAAF ace in any theater. He was the number one Army pilot in the world. Only a few Marines, led by Joe Foss, had higher scores thanks to the 1942–1943 Guadalcanal campaign.
Last to return was Johnson, whose P-38 flew like a wounded duck. He came straight in, using almost full rudder on the side opposite the damaged boom to keep the Lightning on the approach. He sideslipped and crabbed the aircraft onto the runway. At the flight line, he killed the engines and shut the aircraft down, gathering himself as his ground crew surveyed the damage. Bathed in sweat, heart still pounding, and the adrenaline flushed from his system, he began to tremble.
Jack Hedgepeth, Johnson’s crew chief, climbed onto the wing to assist him out of the cockpit. Gerald popped the canopy hatch and felt Jack’s hands unstrapping him from his shoulder harness. Hedgepeth, a tall, skinny NCO, lifted Johnson up and helped him out onto the wing, where the Oregonian shucked off his helmet and stood regarding the damage to his left boom.
Wires dangled down from torn aluminum. Holes peppered the boom. Most of the lower half of the vertical fin was gone. It was remarkable that the aircraft held together.
Lockheed tough.
Johnson scurried down the ladder and ran off to get a camera. He returned to snap pictures of the damage with his crew chief standing beside it. Smiling and laughing, he seemed to take the dance with death in stride.
By now, the local war correspondents in New Guinea were keeping close tabs on the 39th and 9th Fighter Squadrons. The 9th was now the top-scoring squadron in the entire Army Air Force, and the Knights were developing a following back home, thanks to all the newspaper accounts of their exploits. On this day, Vern Haughland, an Associated Press reporter, happened to be present when the men gathered for their debriefing. Haughland was another gritty veteran correspondent, a man who survived bailing out of a B-26 Marauder the previous summer. He had spent forty-three days wandering through the New Guinea jungle before finally reaching safety. After a long hospital stay, Vern was awarded the Silver Star by MacArthur, becoming the first civilian to be decorated with that medal. The Knights spoke candidly to him as they waited their turn to give their statements to John Spence, the squadron intel officer.
Bong and Watkins were the day’s stars, of course. Bong now had fifteen planes to his credit. Watkins was the newest Knight ace with five. Yet it was the black-haired kid from Oregon who drew the reporter’s attention. Vern chatted with Johnson, who described the fight in detail to him.
“I caught an in-line engine fighter in my fire—saw it practically explode in the cone of my guns. It caught fire and exploded. I was going to hit it, but pulled up just in time… I looked back, and what was left of the Jap plane looked just like the leaves of autumn falling.”
Vern filed his story that night. The next day, newspapers across the country recounted the Markham Valley fight, noting Bong’s new status and the two rising stars in Watkins and Johnson. Overnight, Kenney had two more national heroes, and the ace race was the talk of the town from Oregon to Pennsylvania.
Duckbutt Watkins slung his chute over a shoulder and, after giving his debriefing statement, headed for a waiting jeep. Funny, after a year in combat, he found his groove by giving up hope. Not caring if you lived or died turned out to be an act of psychological liberation. It unchained him, allowed him to trust his P-38 and the tactics the squadron developed. It stuffed thoughts of home and Charlcie Jean, his girlfriend, into a locker deep in his heart.3
Don’t think about them. Don’t plan on returning. Surrender to the moment, to this battle completely, and victories will come.
Watkins had found his groove.