November–December 1943
New Guinea
When Bong left for home, the entire complexion of the ace race changed. McGuire was still in the hospital recovering from his wounds, so he was out of the picture. Danny Roberts, Jay Robbins, and Gerald Johnson were Neel Kearby’s competition now. This was his chance. His childhood dream of becoming America’s new Eddie Rickenbacker required only one thing: opportunity.
The 348th hit its stride in October, shooting down more than fifty planes, a convincing display of skill that finally put them on Wurtsmith’s first team. With new airfields being built above Lae and in the Ramu Valley around Gusap, the Jugs would soon have a home close enough to Wewak that they would no longer need to stage out of another base to get into the fight.
On November 9, 1943, Danny Roberts died in action when he collided with another P-38 during a battle over Alexishafen. His squadron saw him shoot down another Japanese plane, giving him fourteen confirmed. Danny was an atypical fighter pilot: he didn’t smoke, he didn’t swear. He was low key, just like the 475th Fighter Group’s commander, Charles MacDonald. The loss of their beloved commander tore the heart out of the 433rd Fighter Squadron. It would take weeks for the unit’s morale to recover.
Meanwhile, Japanese reinforcements into New Guinea increased the number of air raids hitting the new fields in the Ramu Valley. It was a hunter’s game, and the P-47 was now the ascendant fighter in the theater, thanks to decisions back in Washington. Replacement P-38s dried up completely in October because General Arnold shifted all of Lockheed’s production to Europe in an effort to stave off the defeat of the daylight bombing campaign. Arnold wrote to Kenney and told him not to expect any P-38s until a few months into 1944. This was a catastrophe to the six Lightning squadrons. While some Lightnings remained in the pipeline between Burbank and Australia, there would be no way to field all six after the crucible of the Rabaul raids.
Kenney decided to convert the Knights and the Cobras to P-47s. Their remaining P-38s would be used to plus up the Headhunters of the 80th Fighter Squadron and the 475th Fighter Group. The P-47 was almost universally detested by the dual-engine pilots forced now to fly what they derisively nicknamed “Republic’s Abortion.” With the 9th and 39th out of the long-range power projection picture, their pilots’ scoring rates declined. The 80th soon caught up and surpassed the Knights as the top-scoring outfit in the theater, a distinction they would cling to for almost a year.
Kearby was tasked with selling the Knights and the 39th Fighter Squadron on the P-47’s virtues. At one point, he quipped, “If you can’t shoot Japanese planes down with one engine, what the hell are you gonna do with two?” They weren’t won over. Neither were some of the P-40 units who received Jugs around the same time—some actually converted back to the Warhawk as soon as possible. Scoring rates declined, mission capabilities diminished, and the range at which the 5th could pound the Japanese with its full force shrank along with the number of P-38s.
As cold as it sounded, the field was clear for a run to first place for the ace so inclined. Neel Kearby had flown fifty-six combat hours in October, many of them to Wewak with his Musketeers. He finished the month with twelve confirmed kills. After four months at such a pace, he went down to Australia, probably on leave. When he came back, he relished the chance to make his push to catch Bong.
It would be an extraordinary month for the 5th: the fighters were flying constant missions now to Cape Gloucester ahead of the Marine invasion slated for December. Wewak remained a major target, and all of the outfits alternated between the New Britain missions and escorts or sweeps to Wewak. In between, intercepting Japanese raids remained a staple of the unit in New Guinea; the Japanese still had plenty of fight, though the quality of their aircrew continued to decline as their losses mounted.
Unbeknownst to Kearby, General Kenney had plans for his high-octane Texan. After his six-kill mission over Wewak, Kenney put Kearby in for the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for bravery in combat. This was not like giving out a Silver Star or Distinguished Flying Cross. Only a handful of aviators earned the MOH, and most had died in action. Rather, a living fighter pilot wearing the Medal of Honor transcended the norm into a national asset. Back home, the medal meant war bond tours, speeches, radio appearances, newsreel clips, and lots of ink. Most went from warrior to morale builder, something they universally detested.
Kenney simply could not have Kearby in combat as the award write-up navigated through channels back in Washington. He decided to pull him out of the 348th and put him in a desk job at V Fighter Command headquarters.
That role would ensure Kearby continued to play a hand in the war from a safe perch. There he would work with General Wurtsmith, who directed the V Fighter Command, assigned squadrons to missions, approved missions requested by the units themselves, and worked closely with V Bomber Command to task enough escort assets for strikes on the Japanese. In other theaters, this was an enormous organizational and logistical effort that demanded large numbers of experienced staff officers. In New Guinea, V Fighter Command ran lean—exceptionally lean. In early November, V FC, as it was called, counted in its ranks only General Wurtsmith, seven lieutenant colonels, twelve majors, and sixteen captains. A scattering of about two dozen lieutenants and two hundred enlisted men rounded out the ranks. These men were responsible for managing fifteen fighter squadrons in five groups, each carrying out anywhere between one and four missions a day.
There, Kearby would be riding a desk for his duration in theater; then he’d return to the States to a hero’s welcome and get to work propping up the home front. In the meantime, the 5th Air Force’s masterful public relations officers got busy making Neel a household name. The publicity would give the push to get him the Medal of Honor that much more heat.
On November 13, 1943, after Kearby returned to the 348th to fly an uneventful escort mission to Alexishafen, he was given the news. When he got back to Moresby, he received orders to report to Wurtsmith as his new V Fighter Command chief of staff. He must have been bitterly disappointed by this. His unit was just getting into the groove, and he was looking forward to many more scraps with the Japanese. Now he would replace Lieutenant Colonel Morrissey, who was in desperate need of a Stateside leave having been in theater since March 1942.
The desk awaited. Kearby packed his gear and flew to Port Moresby, reporting for duty the following day. After racking up dozens of hours of combat flying every month, Kearby barely touched a control stick for the next eleven days.
Normally, when pulled up to a fighter or bomber command headquarters, officers elsewhere in the AAF stopped flying combat missions. The 5th was different. Kenney’s first bomber command leader, Gen. Ken Walker, repeatedly ignored orders from Kenney to stop flying combat. He led from the cockpit and couldn’t in good conscience send his crews on missions he himself would not fly. In January 1943, after arguing against a B-17 strike on Rabaul and losing to Kenney’s insistence that it be carried out, he deliberately disobeyed a direct order from his commanding general and flew the mission. He was shot down, fate unknown.
Rumors persisted through the war and beyond that Walker survived a bailout to be captured and executed by the Japanese. Intelligence reports during the war hinted at this, and that must have given Kenney some very tense moments. As one of the top three generals in the 5th Air Force, Walker would have been an intel gold mine for the Japanese, had they captured and interrogated him. That sort of security breach could not be tolerated again, and Kenney tried to clamp down on his senior staff officers flying on missions. For the most part, he succeeded, though rumors abounded that Lieutenant Colonel Morrissey would sometimes sneak back to his old command, the 49th Fighter Group, to fly with his remaining friends there.
That there were aggressive field-grade officers in headquarters who wanted to lead from the front was a blessing and a curse for Kenney. He needed men like that to infuse the 5th with its aggressive spirit. Wurtsmith, Walker, and Morrissey certainly played a key role in developing the culture of the 5th. The trade-off was that they sometimes disobeyed orders and flew missions. Kenney lived with it, though when he heard Walker disobeyed his direct order in January, he reportedly said that if Walker returned, he’d court-martial him, and if Walker didn’t return, he’d put him in for the Medal of Honor. Walker’s family received his posthumous MOH later in 1943.
Kearby must have had some hope that he might still be able to dip a toe in the flying game, given this atmosphere. Still, as he came up the staff officer learning curve, there was no opportunity to sneak back into combat.
That was, until General Wurtsmith went home on leave. “Squeeze,” as Kenney called him, had been in theater since almost the start of the war. He was one of the first outstanding fighter group leaders of the Pacific War, a member of the old Darwin crowd of the 49th Fighter Group. After a year and a half of constant combat, stress, and bad food, he asked Kenney for a break. Kenney granted him a thirty-day leave plus travel to go home to Detroit and see his family.
In his place, Kenney put Neel in charge of V Fighter Command, effective November 25, 1943. In less than three weeks, the Texas ace had gone from leading the 348th Fighter Group to one of the top three command slots in the entire 5th Air Force. He would waste no time in using his new position to his advantage in the race.
When the cat’s away…
That morning, Kearby got hold of a P-38. Along with one other Lightning pilot, he linked up with two friends from the 348th and flew a combat patrol to Arawe, New Britain. Officially, he wrote in his flight records that they were “local” flights. The strange formation of two P-47s and two P-38s reached the coast of New Britain, saw only a single aircraft down low, then came home without getting into a scrap. V Fighter Command reported the mission to 5th Air Force HQ without mention of the pilots involved. Kenney probably had no idea his new acting commander of V FC was out hunting.
Kearby was in charge now, and he intended to use the position to both take a crack at Bong’s score and develop some ideas for future fighter operations. Kearby was a man comfortable with being in charge—he’d always been called “Boss” by his men. He loved to lead and he loved to innovate. If Kenney intended Kearby to be merely a caretaker for Wurtsmith’s command while he was gone, the ace didn’t know it. He immediately set about implementing ideas, crafting strategies, and enlisting some of his favorite leaders into the effort.
Still, he hated being a staff officer and sometimes complained to his ground crew that he never should have accepted the job. Each day before Wurtsmith left, he and the general would sit down for staff meetings that sometimes lasted for hours. If doing paperwork was bad enough, sitting in a plywood room at Port Moresby, talking on multiple phones at once while surrounded by REMFs, was almost unbearable to the ace.
He was also offered up to the press for interviews. More than once, he was spotted at V Fighter Command HQ surrounded by the likes of Lee Van Atta, William Boni, and Lorraine Stumm of the London Daily Mirror. Gary Sheahan, the Chicago Tribune’s legendary artist, painted him as he described his air battles, flying with his hands as he recounted his exploits.
He didn’t hide his displeasure at being behind a desk. Other members of the headquarters noted that he never seemed to be around when they needed his signature on a document or had a meeting for him to attend. Instead, since Wurtsmith left, he was off flying. And some of those flights at the end of November may very well have been off the books. There’s considerable evidence to show he tried to cover up what he was doing.
Lee Van Atta wrote a profile of Neel that ran in the Stateside papers at the end of November. The lead began, “If there is one ‘weak link’ in General Douglas MacArthur’s fighter command, it’s the chief of staff. He can never be found anywhere but in combat.”
The day after Lee’s article began running in the States, Neel escaped from headquarters to spend over five hours in the air at the controls of Fiery Ginger, quite possibly on a hunting mission over Wewak that encountered Japanese aircraft, but he scored no kills.
On December 3—officially—he flew two hops in the P-38s at Port Moresby. Unofficially, he put the band back together and went to Wewak with three 348th pilots, Lt. Col. Bob Rowland, Capt. Frank Oksala, and Capt. Meade Brown—his Musketeers. Once again, he felt at home at the controls of Fiery Ginger, his beloved P-47. Over Wewak, the Jug quartet patrolled at twenty-eight thousand feet, hoping to drop down on the Japanese once again in the same fashion that Manfred von Richthofen did on his opponents during the Great War.
This time they ran into plenty of trouble. Captain Brown, flying wing on Kearby, called out bandits low and ahead. About two dozen fighters spread out in flights of four were coming down the coast, heading southeast toward Allied bases at twenty-two thousand feet. They were higher than usual—perhaps in response to the many times the Jugs had played this game.
Despite the odds, Kearby intended to attack. He took his time, positioning his flight upsun from the enemy and behind them. During the setup, though, Rowland somehow lost the rest of the formation.
Kearby was undeterred. He led the remaining Musketeers down in a screaming dive behind and slightly to the right of one flight of four Japanese Hayabusas. At fifteen hundred feet, Fiery Ginger’s guns boomed. The Japanese plane burst into flames and rolled over in a death dive. Still on his initial pass, he banked left, intending to line up on the next Ki-43. Suddenly, four more Japanese fighters ahead and to the left of his target detected him. They broke into hard chandelles, reversed course, and dove straight for the P-47s even as Brown and Oksala blew up two more Ki-43s.
Neel went nose to nose with the four fighters coming at them. He hit the leader with a short burst, seeing hits in the engine and wings. Still in the head-on pass, he tweaked the rudder and walked his fire into the Japanese leader’s wingman. That aircraft took serious hits as well. Still locked in that aerial game of chicken, Kearby thought he had just enough time to get his guns on the tail-end Charlie.
He didn’t. The Ki-43 careened right at him, and only a last-second juke saved both pilots from death in a flaming collision.
Kearby dove away, the Musketeers right with him. One pass, and they were done. Stay disciplined and live to fight another day. That was Kearby’s way of doing business. It was smart, and he used all the advantages he could to negate the odds and inflict damage.
Dean Schedler, one of the former Manila Bulletin reporters who followed MacArthur from Corregidor to Australia, scored the scoop on Kearby’s latest victories. “Japanese fighter pilots are probably sitting around their rice bowls at Wewak angrily discussing ways to stay clear of Fiery Ginger,” Dean wrote in a widely circulated AP article. Headlines like “Fiery Ginger Dusts Off Two More Planes” prefaced Dean’s article, which went into detail on the Japanese kill flags on the side of Kearby’s P-47 he used to fight against tremendous odds and still emerge victorious. One paper printed a photo of Neel with the caption beneath reading “Has Jap Chopsticks Shaking.”
“It isn’t like I like to kill anybody,” Kearby told the reporters, “but I do like to hunt.”
For all his aggressiveness, Neel found comfort in the same psychological barrier to the killing as the other aces in the race. It was the plane he was destroying, not the pilot inside it. He didn’t think of that man, just the machine. That he did most of his firing at long range—fifteen hundred feet—gave him an additional buffer to the reality of what his weapons did to the men he battled.
Kearby was the hottest ace in theater. With the press lined up behind him, he grew bolder and did not seek to hide his combat flying later in December. Kenney, while trying to keep Kearby safe, had unintentionally created a monster. Kearby was running V Fighter Command, he was a star back home—even his plane was famous—and he flat-out refused to live the life of a noncombat staff officer. Kenney found himself boxed in by his own PR campaign. He couldn’t demote Kearby. He couldn’t fire him or send him home. Doing any of those would have generated a PR nightmare. Instead, he entreated Kearby to keep the combat flying to a minimum and not to be chasing records.
Kearby griped about it to the reporters hanging around Port Moresby. He told them that General Kenney had rationed him to two combat missions a week, or less. “With an emphasis on less,” Kearby added with some bitterness. The press turned the odd situation into a highlight. “Jap Killer Put on Rations” quipped the New York Daily News. “Flying Colonel Takes Jap Hunting Junkets,” crowed another paper in Nebraska. That Kearby was now being rationed to a pair of missions a week continued to be reported in dozens of papers through much of December. In fact, that month, stories about Kearby appeared back home on eleven out of thirty-one days. Not even MacArthur was getting that level of hype.
Kearby ignored Kenney’s rationing demands. Through December, he flew fifty-six combat hours on nineteen missions. Nothing short of his being wounded and knocked out of combat, or Kenney’s taking the political/PR hit, would get the Texan out of the sky. With his Medal of Honor nomination now under review in Washington, had Kenney relieved him at this point, the award might not have been approved, and surely there would have been a firestorm of bad publicity over it. Kenney decided to let it ride, urging Kearby to be cautious.
Kearby considered his tactics cautious. Picking off a few planes with a single high-speed pass from upsun, then dashing away, seemed almost foolproof. The slower Japanese planes could only react and get out of the way, or turn into his P-47 to try for a head-on pass. Two rifle-caliber machine guns versus the eight fifties in the Jug was a challenge the Texan would always take.
Speaking of challenges…
At the end of November, as Wurtsmith headed home, Maj. Tom Lynch returned from his fall leave to Pennsylvania, where he had married his college sweetheart. His hometown had welcomed him with great fanfare. He was hailed as a hero with sixteen kills to his credit. He was also considered one of the best squadron commanders in the 5th Air Force. Beloved by his men, he repeatedly put their safety and well-being over his own while leading from the front. He was also an exemplary fighter pilot, one of the most experienced combat aviators in the theater.
In early December, he flew to Port Moresby and rejoined the 39th Fighter Squadron at a time when his replacement, Charles King, was getting ready to go home on his Stateside leave. His old job as squadron commander of the legendary Cobras would soon be open again. It was not a stretch to think that he’d relish the chance to lead his men in combat once again.
A normal progression for a fighter leader usually went like this: command a two-plane element, then a flight of four. If successful, the pilot would be pulled into the squadron’s command element, usually as operations officer or deputy CO. Once given command of the squadron, he would be promoted to major if the pilot did a good job. From squadron leadership, they’d be pulled up to group headquarters, usually once again as the operations officer. From there, commanding a fighter group was the next step, followed by an assignment at higher headquarters.
This didn’t happen to Tom Lynch, whose return made him the theater’s leading ace. Exactly why his career path took a strange turn will probably never be known for sure. He spent only a few days back with the 39th, learning to fly the P-47, before Neel Kearby issued Special Order 326/5 transferring Lynch to V Fighter Command headquarters. Usually, such additions to the HQ element included the specific role that officer would perform. In this case, Lynch’s role was described as “A-3 Section, Principal Duty.”
The A-3 Section was the operations department. This was the busiest part of V Fighter Command headquarters, a place where the assigned officers planned the daily missions for all fifteen fighter squadrons. If Kearby had wanted to keep Lynch out of combat, this was an excellent place to put him. Even more unusual, Lynch spent most of December moving back and forth between Port Moresby and Eagle Farm on administrative duties. Whatever operations he was assisting on, they didn’t seem to have much to do with frontline combat. Of course, being in Australia ensured Tom could not borrow an aircraft and go hunt Japanese.1
On December 18, Charles King went home. Capt. Harris Denton, a veteran Cobra who fought with Bong and Lynch in the first P-38 dogfights a year before, took command of the 39th Fighter Squadron. Instead of going home after the typical twelve months in action, Denton extended his tour six months and remained in command until June 1944.
As Lynch rode a desk far from the Wewak scraps, Johnson and the Knights went into action over Gusap on December 10 in their detested new P-47s. Johnson shot down a Hien in the fight, giving him twelve kills, only three behind the Texan. Kearby redoubled his efforts to find the enemy. On the sixteenth, he spent eight hours in the air hunting, to no avail.
Stuck at fifteen kills, he couldn’t catch Lynch and Bong if there were no Japanese to shoot. Over the course of the next two weeks, Kearby flew almost constantly in search of a fight. In nine days, he recorded twelve combat missions. This was pushing it, even for the ace with boundless energy. But he felt it was what he had to if he wanted to stay in this race. After all, Tommy McGuire was back.