September 6, 1943
Dobodura, New Guinea
The 9th Squadron’s alert P-38s stretched along the flight line at Dobodura, a new crop of pilots waiting at the alert shack thumbing through the same worn magazines the Darwin vets had read last spring. Now that Duckbutt Watkins had rotated home, several of the new guys split time flying Charlcie Jean, his old P-38. Other Lightnings, still carrying names that meant something to the old hands, stood ready on the flight line. They looked beat-up and war weary, their olive-drab paint scuffed and scratched. Some were checkerboarded with aluminum patches that covered bullet holes picked up during the fierce summer fighting.
Amazingly, despite the constant skirmishes, the Knights had not lost a pilot since July, and Gerald and Wally, now running the squadron with veteran Harry Lidstrom as the deputy commander, intended to keep the streak going.1 This would be tough, as they had no time to ease the new kids into combat. After the lull in June, the pace of operations never slowed down. Now, with the invasion of Lae in full swing and the Japanese trying to bomb the amphibious task force offshore, the 9th pulled double duty: flying offensive missions as well as sitting on alert duty.
Gerald did the best he could to integrate the new guys and keep them alive. He teamed the greenest new guys with the most experienced pilots so they could be mentored and protected. Dick Bong, now one of the longest-serving guys in the squadron, was promoted to captain, and Gerald gave him a flight of his own to command. He also gave him one of the youngest pilots in the squadron to be his wingman. Second Lt. Jim Fagan hailed from upstate New York. He grew up near Lake Ontario in Monroe County, volunteering for the Army Air Force in 1942 at age nineteen. While in primary training in Arizona, he fell in love and married a local woman named Nancy White. She moved with him as he bounced from base to base finishing his training. After only six months together, he received orders sending him overseas.
Fagan arrived to join the Knights at the end of August, to do his time at the alert shack with the rest of the squadron. Whatever precombat jitters he might have had were eased by his assignment. Dick Bong was becoming a legend and inspiration to young pilots heading into combat. They looked up to him; some revered him. To be paired on his wing was like a kid from the minors being mentored by Lou Gehrig.
Mail, as always, was slow to arrive on both ends of the Pacific, but a few letters from home finally caught up to Jim at Dobo. He kept one tucked away like a prized possession. In it, Nancy told him she was pregnant. He spoke of his impending fatherhood to his new squadron mates, who offered hearty congratulations to the new guy. He was a stalwart kid, eager to learn and anxious to contribute.
Word came that morning the Knights were to put a full squadron up over the Lae beachhead. Just before noon, fourteen pilots climbed into the waiting P-38s. Bong offered his flight a few last-minute words of advice, though his element leader, a Utah Mormon named Ray Swift, had already seen plenty of combat and knew the ropes. They’d be Blue Flight on this mission.
Over Lae, a Navy controller reported an inbound strike at sixteen thousand feet. He coached the Knights onto the Japanese planes, following the action on his radarscope. He set them up for an excellent bounce. The Japanese planes, Mitsubishi G4M Betty bombers, flew a tight formation under a protective blanket of over a dozen Zero fighters.
The Americans prepped their P-38s, dropping their tanks and working up to full throttle. The old hands did this far quicker than the new guys, and soon they were diving after the Betties.
Bong drove straight for the enemy, singularly focused as he set up a run on the left side of their formation. Behind him, one of Fagan’s drop tanks failed to release. Imbalanced, still with all the drag those huge fuel nacelles created, he should have climbed above the fight to try to shake it loose.
Instead, he followed what all the old hands told him: a wingman never abandons his leader.
He sped after Bong, his P-38 unable to keep up with him as the ace’s P-38 flashed after the bombers. Just then, the Zero escort hit the squadron, breaking up much of their attack. Zeroes tacked onto fleeing Lightnings, whose pilots steepened their dives in a bid to escape. Others stayed and fought. Soon, a swirling, chaotic battle unfolded around the tight formation of bombers.
Bong ignored the confusion and bored in on his targets, hitting a Betty even as machine gun and cannon fire struck his own P-38. He blew through the formation and came around for another pass. This time, he swung directly behind his target. The tail gunner, armed with a 20mm cannon, unleashed a fusillade at his P-38. Bong narrowed the range, firing controlled bursts that peppered the Betty’s wing and fuselage. Then he dove away, Zeroes streaking around him, chasing P-38s, as their pilots desperately tried to protect the Betties.
His right engine coughed and sputtered. Smoke boiled out of the cowling, streaming behind him like a “kick me” sign to the Zeroes overhead. His speed fell away as the engine lost power. No sign of his flight, or Jim Fagan. Crippled, alone, and vulnerable, he found himself over Huon Gulf, miles from land. He’d seen the sharks feasting on the Japanese on the water during the Bismarck Sea. No way was he going to risk a water landing. Instead, he feathered his right prop and limped for the nearest base, which was the freshly constructed one at Tsili Tsili west of Lae.
Over Tsili Tsili, he went straight in for the runway, his left engine starting to cough now from the strain of getting the bird home. Bong tried to drop his gear. Nothing happened. The Japanese gunners had knocked out his hydraulic system. He lowered the gear manually at the last possible minute. Just as his wheels hit the runway, his left engine seized. The P-38 slewed and sped off the runway and slid into a bomb crater, where it came to rest with its nose in the mud.
A few tense moments passed as Bong remained hunkered in the cockpit, calming himself down. After seeing so many others die in P-38 crashes, he was under no illusions as to how close he’d come this time to burning alive in the cockpit, or ending up with the sharks in the Huon Gulf. At length, he popped the canopy hatch and emerged to greet the crash crews rushing to his battered bird.
It took three days for Bong’s plane to be fixed. When he flew back to Dobodura on the ninth, Gerald and Wally were waiting for him. They asked him if he’d seen what happened to the new guy, Jim Fagan.
Bong was thunderstruck. From the moment he’d engaged the bombers, he lost track of Fagan. Only Ray Swift had seen Jim during the fight as he lagged behind Dick, one tank still under a wing. Johnson spent three days leading search-and-rescue efforts, combing the Huon Gulf for signs of their lost man. They returned without sighting anything on the water.
Fagan had simply vanished.
Dick felt responsible for his death, and he took it exceptionally hard. After a year of flying and fighting in theater, Bong was at the edge of his endurance. He was worn out, and even the leave in August hadn’t brought him all the way back. It was the same with all the high-time pilots in theater. The months of bad food, jungle diseases, and constant tension and fear affected everyone at a different rate. The commonality was how everything they experienced was cumulative and began to weigh on them. The farther the pilots flew past their outer edge of endurance, the more mistakes they made. At least one squadron leader in the 5th recognized he’d reached the point of no return. He couldn’t think as quickly or clearly; his reactions started to slow. He realized he was a danger in the air to the men whose lives were entrusted to his judgment and skill. He pulled himself out of combat and asked to be reassigned elsewhere.
Dick withdrew even further, his introversion masking his grief to his fellow pilots. He talked to Gerald and Wally, asking to be allowed to fly solo so he didn’t have to carry the responsibility of another life on his shoulders—and in his conscience. Johnson reminded him the Knights fought and won as a team. There’d be hard days, but nobody in his squadron was going to freelance. That did nothing to restore Dick’s frame of mind.
Others who served with Dick sometimes talked about how cold-blooded he was. Losses seemed to leave him unaffected. It gave rise to very nasty talk that he didn’t care about anyone but himself. They saw the stoic farm kid, not the man who internalized everything. Gerald, who was closer to Dick than probably anyone else that September, could see beyond the expressionless face in the alert shack. Johnson’s own emotional nature gave him considerable emotional intelligence. He sensed his friend was not going to pull out of this at Dobo. He gave him a week before pulling him off flight status. A few days later, Gerald sent Bong back to Australia to get away from the fighting and bring back a fresh P-38 from Eagle Farm.
This time down in Australia looked nothing like his trip in August. After losing a wingman and nearly getting killed while crash-landing, other pilots would have drunk themselves into a stupor and stayed that way for the duration of their time in Australia. Alcohol was at once a coping tool, a social lubricant, and a way to blot out memories. For some, it was the only way they could sleep after coming out of combat. Dick was a lightweight—two whiskey and Cokes would leave him lit. Truth was, he hated its effects and didn’t like the taste. Without Wally to corrupt him, he eschewed the party scene, preferring solitude instead. He stopped writing home. He didn’t go out much at all, even spending his birthday on the twenty-fourth lying in bed at his temporary quarters in Brisbane. There, deep within himself, he imagined a summer home he wanted to build for his family. In his orderly mind, the house took shape. Each room he detailed with furniture and fireplaces. He wanted a game room for the kids he would raise someday, complete with pool and Ping-Pong tables. He even envisioned a bowling alley running along the side of the game room. Of course, the place would have a hangar and a small grass strip, so he could fly whenever he wished. He wanted the latest audio tech, too: a combination radio and record player, which would never, ever play “Rhumba Cardi.”
How much would it cost? He guessed eight or ten thousand dollars. He’d squirreled away two grand. He suspected he could swing it when he got home.
For a lonely young aviator fresh off his twenty-third birthday, such flights of fantasy were the only way he knew to handle what was happening to him. He never opened up. There were no military counselors to help him handle the grief. This was something he did alone.
In the end, he did what he knew. He fell back on his farm years and the way he coped with the loss of his sister. He pushed the grief and sense of responsibility down as deep as he could. Jim Fagan’s daughter would grow up without a dad. He owned that now, it was a part of his combat life, and he would carry the guilt silently. Now, all he wanted to do was get home. It had been two years since he’d last seen the farm when he first left for training. He was the old hand, the short-timer just trying to survive to see his family again. In that context, the ace race mattered not at all.
He did not go home. Instead, he returned to the Knights at the end of September, at most only half healed. Maybe later, if he got home, he could work through it all. For now, the only path to Wisconsin lay through more dogfights with the Japanese.