Summer of 1943
Eagle Farm, Brisbane, Australia
While the Lightnings turned the summer into a scoring fest, Kearby’s men arrived in Brisbane along with their factory-fresh Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. Broad-legged, squat, and enormous, the P-47 looked less like a graceful fighter and more like an aged boxer gone to seed. Around Brisbane, Aussie and American pilots took one look at the Republic and started laughing. Anything that big would be meat on the table for a Zero. It looked like a milk jug on its side with splayed legs. In bars and officers’ clubs, the veterans mocked the new aircraft right to its pilots’ faces.
It didn’t help that when Kearby first showed up in May, ahead of the group’s arrival, he tried to demonstrate one of the first P-47s to reach the theater, only to be unable to get it off the ground after a seven-thousand-foot takeoff run. The bird’s massive Pratt & Whitney R-2800 radial engine could produce unparalleled horsepower, but early versions also contained plenty of bugs.
Kenney and Whitehead were not sure about the new fighter’s value. They wanted more P-38s, or the new P-51 Mustang. Beyond the 475th Fighter Group, though, more P-38 outfits were not in the cards. The Jug was what they would get, and now they had to figure out what it could do for them. Its short range soon became another black mark against it. Just warming up the engine before flight consumed forty-seven gallons of gas. Once in the air, the 5th learned, it possessed the same radius of action as a P-39 with a drop tank—only a few hundred miles. This was no power-projection weapon. At best, on its internal fuel, the 5th figured it could serve as a point defense interceptor, protecting bases from Japanese attack. In the meantime, the innovative geniuses in Australia went to work figuring out how to extend its range.
Unlike everyone else in the 5th, Kearby and his men believed in the P-47 with almost religious zeal. The Texan had trained his men thoroughly—most of his guys had almost two hundred hours in P-47s during their Stateside workup. They were proud of the plane and their role in being the first to fly it in the Pacific, so when they caught flak from other pilots, they bristled and grew defensive. After the P-47 pilots ran into a bunch of Aussie Spitfire pilots at a pub one night, things grew more charged. The Spitfire was one of the extraordinary fighters of World War II, agile, fast, with graceful lines. The British-built aircraft served as the gold-bar standard to the Commonwealth pilots. If the Spitfire was the prom queen, the P-47 was the fat kid trying out for ballet. It couldn’t climb. It couldn’t turn. It was nothing more than a bigger, uglier P-39—a dog of a plane sure to get its pilots killed.
One of the Jug pilots finally had enough of the Aussie attitude toward the new fighter. The next morning, he took a P-47 up over Brisbane, found the Aussie alert shack at their airfield, and dove down on it. If the Jug couldn’t maneuver or climb, the one thing it could do was dive. The pilot pushed it past 550 knots, pulled up at the last second and blew the radio antennae off the Aussie hut.
If his pilots bristled at the criticism, Kearby didn’t endear himself to other pilots outside the 348th either. The 348th was his team; everyone else could go to hell, as far as he cared. He didn’t hold back his opinions, even when they offended his audience. He also didn’t suffer fools. While his men were getting the P-47s ready in Australia, he flew back and forth to New Guinea in an appropriated B-26 bomber. Known as the “widow-maker” for the high number of accidents its hot landing speed caused, the B-26 was not well loved in the 5th Air Force. It was tricky to fly, even for an experienced bomber pilot, especially from the jungle strips around Port Moresby. The 5th was busily getting rid of them from the only frontline group equipped with them.
One day, after forgetting to set the elevator trim for takeoff, he narrowly averted crashing on his way back to Australia. When he landed and popped out of the fuselage hatch, he overheard the other guys aboard talking about the near calamity with other members of the 348th. Kearby walked up, listened to the conversation and said, “Those bomber guys—they’re a bunch of sissies!” After all, if a fighter pilot with less than five hours in twin-engine aircraft could fly the socks off the B-26, anyone could. Right?
It was not a popular opinion, but it was a solid introduction to Neel Kearby’s swagger. He’d been flying since the depths of the Great Depression, starting out when some of the kids he now led were mere tweens. In those prewar years, Kearby racked up thousands of hours in every fighter plane used by the Air Corps. Piloting a bomber, even with virtually no twin-engine time, was cake to him.
Pilots love their planes like car guys love their cars. A lot of the needling was the fighter pilot equivalent of the Ford versus Chevy debates that have raged in gearhead circles for generations. But part of it was also based on real-world experience in combat against the Japanese. Deep down, the 348th knew that, and the constant barrage against their beloved aircraft started to erode their confidence. As it did, they grew increasingly defensive and angry. Kenney saw the wedge between his pilots growing and knew something needed to be done. He ordered Kearby to give the P-38 guys a lesson in the Thunderbolt’s performance. The Texan took to the assignment with relish. He’d been a fighter pilot his entire adult life and had more time in them than any pilot in the SWPA. He came of age in the Depression-era Army Air Corps, flying everything from the Art Deco–era P-26 peashooters to P-40s and P-39s. When kids like Bong and Johnson were going to their first junior high school dances, Kearby was training other pilots on fighter combat tactics.
At thirty-two, he should never have been flying combat. The legendary Greg Boyington, the Marine ace portrayed by Robert Conrad in the Baa Baa Black Sheep television series, was dubbed “Pappy” for being the old man in his squadron at thirty-one. The fighter game was seen as a young man’s realm. A pilot like Kearby was seen by the early twenty-somethings outside the 348th as a regular officer relic, suited for a desk job or command above the fighter group level. Kearby was not a desk guy. He was a pilot to his soul, a man who grew up in a wealthy Texas family obsessively reading about the World War I aces. He collected everything he could find about them and built dossiers on the great ones like Rickenbacker and Frank Luke, keeping them in binders in his room as a kid. When he finished college, he wanted only one thing out of life: to fly fighters and be the next American ace of aces. It wasn’t his fault that the next war started after he passed thirty. Stateside posts may have kept him close to his family, but he was a man built to fight.
He sought out Dick Bong and challenged him to a one-on-one duel over Port Moresby. A crowd gathered to watch the scrum. They started with the head-to-head pass, merged, and the game was on. The two extraordinary pilots put on an exhibition of flying skill that dazzled the men on the ground. Both pushed their planes to the limits of the envelopes, roaring in after each other in furious simulated slashing attacks. They juked and shook each other off their tails, went back for more as they battled relentlessly. Neither gave up, and for the rest of their lives the witnesses of that battle would argue over who won. The P-47 guys claimed it was Kearby’s fight. The P-38 guys refused to concede and said Bong had the edge.
Kearby chose Johnson next. The Knights’ commanding officer didn’t have the score Bong did, but he was widely considered to be one of the finest pure pilots in V Fighter Command. Kearby bounced him at twelve thousand feet over Moresby, and the two pilots went at it with every trick they possessed. Kearby learned these young pilots had plenty of game and skills. Johnson and the others learned that as long as the Jug pilot stayed in his plane’s type of fight, it was almost as good as the P-38. It could out-dive the Lightning, it was probably a little faster at high altitude, and it was well suited for the slashing attack tactics the 5th used against the Japanese.
The Knights who watched that fight against Johnson claimed the Oregonian put the professional in his place. The 348th said it was no contest: Kearby ran rings around him. Whoever was right will never be resolved. What followed from that fight, though, was a mutual respect and budding friendship.
In mid-July, Kenney wrote Whitehead and told him to get the 348th into New Guinea. He was concerned about the group’s eroding morale in Australia and thought the pilots were stagnating. Even though they did not possess drop tanks yet, he wanted the Jugs up there, getting some scalps and building morale. Just as the Japanese counteroffensive began that summer, the Jugs showed up at Moresby to begin flying local missions to get the pilots familiar with the weather and terrain.
One day in August, Johnson was out with the Knights and spotted a formation of blunt-nosed fighters below them. It was a perfect setup, and he rolled in at the head of his squadron, thirsting for the fight. At the last second, somebody called out, “They’re Jugs! They’re Jugs!”
Kearby’s men saw the Lightnings dropping on them, and their frantic calls on the radio were finally heard by the Knights. They narrowly averted a tragedy, and Johnson felt bad about the incident. He went to see Kearby and apologized personally, handing him two precious bottles of gin to underscore his sincerity.
The two men, though a decade apart in age, shared a lot of common attributes. Both looked after their men with complete devotion. They were seen as coaches, with Johnson a bit more of a cheerleader with his eagerness and pep talks at briefings. Both men were there to fly, and flew far more than the required missions. In July, Kearby flew twenty-two missions alone. None resulted in an encounter with the Japanese, but still his men knew that he would lead from the front. Many group commanders stayed on the ground, focusing on the administrative duties required to keep their outfits functional. Kearby hated that stuff, as did Johnson. Their place would always be at the tip of the spear.
A few days after that near–friendly fire incident, Kearby talked his way onto the first two Wewak raids. His Jugs didn’t have the range to get to Wewak from Moresby, so the 348th carried out secondary duties elsewhere while their commander went rogue. No matter what his group was doing—or flying—Kearby refused to be left out of a big show, and that became one of the hallmarks of his combat career. Quite possibly, he leveraged his friendship with Johnson and flew with the Knights on August 17 and 18—in one of their P-38s. Whichever squadron he joined, he’d never flown a P-38 before. On one of the missions, he lost an engine and was forced to turn back. That he didn’t kill himself flying combat in a twin-engine fighter was a testament to his skill and experience as an aviator.
Though Kearby flew nearly every day that August, he missed his group’s first fight with the Japanese. In a span of two days, while the 475th was going into action around Wewak, his Jug pilots shot down one Oscar, losing two pilots and three planes. When stacked against the 475th’s incredible run of well over two dozen kills over Wewak, the aspersions cast on the P-47 seemed to be justified. The unit’s morale took another hit.
Bringing an untested fighter group into action is a difficult enough command challenge, but doing so with a new aircraft of questionable use in theater elevated that challenge to a near crisis after those first losses. What saved the group was the steely confidence of their Texas commander and his squadron leaders, including a quiet New Englander named Maj. Charles H. MacDonald.
Kearby relied on “Mac” not just to lead and fight with his squadron; Mac had become one of his closest friends within the group while in training on the East Coast. Though wildly different—Kearby was brash, often abrasive, and plainspoken, whereas MacDonald was an introvert—they shared commonalities that pulled them together. Both were family men, older than the other pilots and more established in life. Both were prewar regular officers who chose to make the Army Air Corps their life. They were the yin and yang of the 348th, fire and ice. Together, they kept the troops from losing heart, drilling into them the tactics they believed would make the Jug a success and keep them alive.
In the middle of their introduction to combat, tragedy struck Neel’s family. He learned that his older brother had been killed in a Stateside plane crash. Maj. John G. Kearby had always been the scientific mind in the family. He graduated with a master’s degree in physics in 1931 and spent the Depression years prosperously employed while traveling around South America, doing research for American engineering companies. As war approached, he volunteered to serve in the Army Air Force at age thirty-six. He was sent to Wright Field to begin researching high-altitude pressure suits. He was a rising star in engineering circles there and soon set several records. He was the first man to reach sixty thousand feet in a pressure chamber, as he insisted on testing his experimental suit personally. He never talked to his family about his work, as it was all highly classified, but they knew he was doing something revolutionary and very important. Ultimately, his research laid the groundwork for the first American space suits produced a decade later.
On August 4, 1943, John Kearby was returning from a series of high-altitude flight tests with his new suit when his plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. The Kearby family back in Texas was devastated by the news. John was married and had a young daughter. When the news reached New Guinea, it rocked Neel to the core. Yet he could not show his pain to his men, especially when they were losing friends to the Japanese. He was an emotional man, prone to outbursts of anger when provoked, yet always an inspiring figure to his men. He could be magnetic, charming, the personification of a leather-hard Texan willing to lead from the front into whatever odds the enemy threw at them. This resonated with his men, and they admired him. As the rest of the 5th Fighter Command’s pilots treated them and their aircraft with contempt, they had rallied behind Kearby and put their faith in his leadership. Failing them due to his own personal hardships was simply not an option. He pushed the news away. Home was remote, news from it unreal. Until he returned home, he would keep that loss bottled up. In the meantime, he turned to his friendship with MacDonald, and the shared bond ensured he never felt alone.
He threw himself into his work, flying constantly, advocating for the P-47, and keeping his men focused. They went back to basics as Kearby sent officers to each squadron to give additional instructions. They covered intelligence procedures, radio discipline, tactics, and strafing methods for ground attack missions. The classes helped get the group over the sense of alienation, not just from the other fighter groups, but from the very terrain they flew over every day. New Guinea was a different world to kids fresh from the States. Kearby drilled them until they knew every course and reciprocal to enemy bases and friendly ones.
As they studied on the ground in their spare time, they flew backwater missions, covering the P-38 bases when they were out on long-range flights and escorting transports to new airfields being constructed in the Ramu Valley. Kearby barraged General Wurtsmith for a chance to show the 5th what his men could achieve. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
On September 4, 1943, the invasion of Lae began. Aussie troops carried in American landing craft poured ashore along a stretch of beach at Hopi Point. Kenney turned to Wurtsmith’s fighter pilots to keep the amphibious fleet safe from air attack. All day long, the 5th’s Lightnings and P-40s patrolled over the Navy’s ships steaming off the invasion beaches.
That afternoon, a Japanese raid swept in from New Britain. Radar spotted it, and the word went out to the 348th to get planes aloft. Twenty Jugs waddled into the air, with Kearby leading one flight of four. They sped northwest for the action, but many of the P-47s fell out along the way due to mechanical issues. The new birds continued to threaten the lives of those who dared to fly them.
By the time the remaining Jugs reached the scene, the P-38 squadrons had broken up the attack and downed several planes. The fighting scattered the Japanese, and their formations broke down. Now, clusters of a few bombers and fighters sped this way and that, ducking for home or making runs on the Allied ships.
Kearby spotted a bomber down low, escorted by a greenish-gray fighter on either wing. He was high above them, in a perfect position to bounce. He called the bandits in over the radio, then rolled into a diving pass on the fleeing Japanese. The Jug fell out of the sky like a chunk of concrete, its speed passing four hundred miles an hour within only a few thousand feet.
In all his childhood research on the Great War aces, Kearby read that some of the best could knock down multiple planes in a single pass. It was hard enough for most pilots to hit one; getting two or more was an incredible feat. He decided to see just how good he was after all the years of training and simulated dogfights.
He wanted the bomber and one of the fighters. He lined up with his gun sight’s pipper between the two as his P-47 dropped down on them. The Japanese seemed totally unaware of his presence. Or perhaps they saw the snub-nosed P-47 and thought it was a friendly aircraft. Either way, they flew on serenely.
Three hundred yards out, Neel Kearby unleashed the P-47’s secret weapon: the same firepower as Pappy Gunn’s strafer B-25s. Eight .50-caliber machine guns ripped into the closest fighter, filling the air around it with hundreds of bullets traveling twenty-seven hundred feet a second. Kearby held the trigger down, eased back on the stick and watched his fire slide from the fighter to the bomber it was escorting. The fifties ripped into its wings and fuselage, setting its internal fuel afire. As he pulled up and over the formation, the bomber, wreathed in flames, fell into the sea. The Japanese fighter spun in after it, seen by Kearby’s wingman.
Neel looked back just in time to see the bomber impact with the water. His flight followed him up in a zoom climb to regain position before coming around for another pass. The lone remaining Japanese fighter, probably a Mitsubishi A6M Zero, ducked and weaved, maneuvering violently to avoid the new American fighters. The Japanese countered every pass Kearby made with a sudden chandelle.1 Unable to follow the trick, the Americans remained disciplined, using speed and altitude as the Zero tried to turn avoidance into advantage. Each chandelle ended with a steep, diving turn to get on the tail of a P-47. Each time, the Zero pilot found himself slow and too far behind the Jugs to get a shot at them. They stalemated each other, and both sides disengaged.
When Kenney heard the news of Kearby’s two-in-one-pass day, he cut orders awarding the Texan a Distinguished Flying Cross. About the same time he heard the news of his own award, his family back home learned that the Army Air Force posthumously awarded his brother the same medal for his high-altitude test flights.
Kearby’s victories provided a solid morale boost to the 348th. He proved they could be effective in battle—the Jug just needed to be employed properly. The major hamstringing of the P-47’s use in New Guinea remained its short range, not its combat attributes. Fortunately, not long after Kearby’s kills, two hundred belly tanks, produced by the Ford Motor Company of Australia, arrived at Thunderbolt Valley, the 348th’s home at Moresby. With these range-extenders, they could take the fight to the enemy. Kearby’s boys were ready for the big time.