0800, October 15, 1943
Dobodura, New Guinea
Captive Red, bandits inbound Turnbull Ninety, heading southwest. Angels unknown. Probably high.”
Gerald’s P-38 streaked for altitude, the rest of his squadron behind. Dobodura was under red alert status, and every squadron available was getting into the air. The Japanese were coming at them in force, determined to avenge the October 12 strike on Rabaul. Exactly how many planes could not be determined by the radar plot alone, but to the controllers, it looked big.
Back at Dobo, the duty pilots of the 475th Fighter Group waited at their alert shacks, ready to go as soon as the intercept controller ordered them aloft. With them that day was a curious figure, new to the group. Slim, balding, and quiet, he wore the oak leaves of a major. Whispers among the pilots suggested he was their new group executive officer. In three months of fighting, the 475th had been like a chainsaw to the enemy, knocking planes down at a rate unseen in the 5th Air Force. If it continued, then one of its squadrons would surely overtake the Knights for highest scoring in New Guinea. That said, most of the command element at group HQ had been in theater for well over a year. They were exhausted, and it was time for a change. This major lounging with them was one of their new replacement leaders.
His name was Charles MacDonald, Kearby’s closest friend and a former squadron commander in the Jug outfit. The other pilots figured he’d come down from group to observe the men and learn a little bit about the outfit. But he wasn’t asking questions or even saying much. He sat with barely a word, a lone field-grade in a group of lieutenants and captains, minding his own business.
The alert phone rang, a pilot calling out, “Full squadron scramble! Oro Bay!”
Before any of the other pilots could react, the new major flung himself out of his chair and sprinted to the nearest P-38. He beat all the other men to their aircraft, and before the assigned pilot could object, Major MacDonald was already strapping into the cockpit.
A moment later, the 475th took off in hot pursuit of the incoming Japanese.
Johnson and the 9th reached the enemy formation first over Oro Bay. They were Imperial Navy aircraft, stripped from their fleet’s carriers to reinforce Rabaul. Below, a flock of Zeroes lumbered a tight vee of aged Val dive-bombers.
Against P-38s, those bombers would stand little chance. Getting to them through the Zeroes would be the biggest challenge. Johnson ordered his men down into the attack. In seconds, flaming planes tumbled out of the sky to splash into Oro Bay around Allied shipping. Bombers ducked and weaved, desperate to avoid the Lightnings as Zeroes challenged the Knights at every turn.
The fight spread out into a multi-altitude brawl as the 475th and other squadrons piled onto the Japanese. Tommy McGuire winged a Val, then hit a Zero, which escaped, though badly damaged. The new major, Charles MacDonald, proved the old adage that the quiet ones are the most dangerous. In short order, he hit two Vals and shot down two others in furious, close-range gunnery runs. The new man was a pro, a veteran of the prewar Air Corps who’d been one of the few fighter pilots to get aloft at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Unknown to any of the men flying with him, this Japanese attack was deeply personal to him. The dive-bombers were trying to go after the ships in Oro Bay—transports and cargo ships covered by destroyers. MacDonald’s brother was a naval officer in the South Pacific who commanded a squadron of tin cans. He’d already become a war hero to their native Pennsylvanians after his ships fought several night surface battles against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands.
The Vals were simply massacred by the P-38s and P-40s. In return, they inflicted no damage on the ships targeted by their bombs. It was a resounding American aerial win.
The men of the 9th and 475th returned to Dobo to find part of Kearby’s Thunderbolt group covering the airfield for them. Second-string duty for the Jugs yet again. On the ground, a wild celebration followed as the men recounted their exploits. When it was all tallied up, the intelligence officers concluded the fighter pilots shot down twenty-six Vals and eighteen Zeroes that day. Gerald flamed two Vals and Zero, plus probable credit for a third dive-bomber. That gave him eight kills, counting the two in the Aleutians. McGuire’s Val put him square on Bong’s tail with ten.
Charles MacDonald’s first combat mission with his new unit left a lasting impression on the men. This major was no staff officer. As quiet as he was on the ground, he was a tiger in the air. That he beat the other pilots to a waiting P-38, then downed a pair of dive-bombers in the fight, demonstrated to all that he was there to fight right alongside them.
As was usually the case, the American claims were too high. The Japanese lost fourteen of fifteen Val dive-bombers along with five Zeroes out of an escort of almost forty. Conversely, the Japanese thought they had sunk several ships and shot down eight American interceptors, but no damage was done to the vessels in Oro Bay. Only one American fighter was lost. The lesson from the postwar recounting of losses was how difficult it was to be certain a plane was destroyed in the middle of a wild, swirling dogfight where a moment’s inattention to the sky around you could result in swift death.
Once again, Bill Boni got the story, and the Sunday editions of newspapers throughout the United States regaled their readers with the stunning success in New Guinea. The aces feasted, and the theater-wide count for the day was given at over a hundred Japanese planes.
Kearby missed it all as his men flew second-string missions, covering Dobo and other bases including Tsili Tsili. There was no trouble to be had. Either way, Johnson was a kill behind him, McGuire a kill ahead. He was thirsting for action and wanted a good mission.
Through mid-October, Kenney was determined to keep the pressure on the Japanese. If he couldn’t hit Rabaul because the weather turned bad, he planned to hammer targets in New Guinea. On the night of the fifteenth, as it looked like the weather wouldn’t cooperate for another Rabaul raid, three main B-25 attacks were laid on against Madang, Alexishafen, and Wewak. Of the three, the Wewak attack was most likely to be intercepted, so Wurtsmith tasked four P-38 squadrons to provide escort.
Kearby saw the orders for the 348th that night and must have been disappointed. Instead of going to Wewak, Wurtsmith ordered the Texan’s 340th and 342nd Squadrons to cover the B-25s to Alexishafen. His other squadron was to fly escort for transports—another second-string day for them.
Kearby could have led the escort to Alexishafen, but that was usually a pretty quiet place. Instead, he decided to go to Wewak again. This time, he pulled three other pilots from the 340th and 342nd, including the Maj. Hervey Carpenter, the commander of the 340th. The next morning, the four-plane hunting flight took off at 0750, an hour before the escort mission to Alexishafen began.
The four Jugs set down an hour later at Lae to refuel, then got on their way after forty minutes. The timing was very important. The P-38s and B-25s heading to Wewak reached the target area at 1055. About fifteen enemy aircraft tried to intercept. The Lightnings shot down five of the Japanese planes before the fight ended at 1120 and the Americans withdrew for home.
Five minutes later, Kearby’s flight reached Wewak, cruising with their drop tanks at twenty-three thousand feet. Neel was a master tactician, and as a group commander he must certainly have known the details of the Wewak raid in advance. It seems likely that he timed his arrival over the Japanese base just after the main strike turned for home. On the eleventh, the Japanese planes he shot down were coming back to land. After intercepting the Americans on the sixteenth, the Japanese would be scattered and streaming back to rearm and refuel. It was a perfect moment to drop down on them from above.
For twenty minutes, the Jugs patrolled around Boram Drome, sighting one single-engine fighter down too low to make a worthwhile target. When no others appeared, it looked like the patrol would be a bust. Then the Texan sighted a better target: a single Ki-43 cruising along at eighteen thousand feet. He led the flight down, the other three pilots covering him as he made a surprise attack from dead astern. At the last minute, the Japanese pilot awoke to the danger and broke hard right in a climbing turn to face the onslaught.
He was too late. At fifteen hundred feet, Kearby opened fire, and his long-range marksmanship was dead-on. The burst destroyed the Oscar’s engine, and the aircraft fell away on fire. A moment later, the pilot bailed out, his chute opening above him.
Without any other targets, the Americans returned to Lae, refueled, and got back to Port Moresby that afternoon after six hours and fifteen minutes in the air. When they arrived home at Thunderbolt Valley, the rest of the group was celebrating the end of their biggest day ever. It turned out, while Kearby and Major Carpenter were over Wewak, their commands were intercepted en route to Alexishafen. The Japanese threw almost twenty planes at the Jugs at medium altitude. The men claimed thirteen destroyed and five more probables, virtually wiping out the intercepting force. It was a tremendous statement, one that resonated up the chain of command and led to a more aggressive employment of the P-47. The aircraft’s capabilities had been validated. The 348th would soon be given bigger and better missions.
Exactly why Kearby chose Major Carpenter for his Wewak hunt will probably never be known. He had pulled the 340th’s commander away from his squadron on what turned out to be its biggest day in combat to date. Either Kearby was trying to rotate his Wewak flights between his squadron commanders to get them familiar with the area, or he chose to fly with the best pilots in the group. Whatever the case, Neel Kearby’s single-minded determination to run his score up was pushing the boundaries between personal glory and command responsibilities. He was taking risks. He was flying missions away from his group, cherry-picking the time and place to go hunt on his own. Yet, he possessed an electric charisma that smoothed all this over. His men saw him as larger than life, a hero in waiting Stateside before they came over, a defining one now that they’d seen combat. With his enormous energy, he was able to multitask, flying constant combat missions while taking care of all the myriad issues a fighter group commander at the front faced on the ground. There was no denying the man was a special kind of type A leader, but after the eleventh of October, his urge to repeat that six-kill performance dominated everything else. He would continue to hunt at Wewak, taking bigger and bigger risks to catch the high scores he had set his eyes on when he first arrived in theater.