January 1944
New Guinea
On January 2, 1944, Allied forces hopped up the New Guinea coast and invaded Saidor, where engineers quickly built an air base within P-47 range of Wewak. The move cut off some six thousand Japanese combat troops, who were forced to try to escape the Allied cordon by marching through the Finisterre Mountain Range. Most starved or died of disease during the trek. The Saidor landing was a major Allied success, costing the Allies less than fifty men killed in return.
The 5th Air Force supported the landings by providing fighter cover and bombing secondary Japanese airfields between Saidor and Wewak. The drive toward the Philippines up the New Guinea coast was shifting into high gear at last.
As the troops went ashore at Saidor, Kearby gained a reprieve. Wurtsmith’s travel back to New Guinea had been delayed, and he was not expected back for at least another week. Neel seized the moment and made one more furious push to catch Bong. On January 3, he showed up at Finschhafen with Fiery Ginger, grabbed three pilots not assigned to the squadron’s escort mission for the day, and took off for Wewak.
There were no strikes scheduled against the Japanese base that day, as the 5th was pounding targets elsewhere as part of the Saidor operation. At twenty-five thousand feet, they arrived over Wewak as a Mitsubishi Ki-21 “Sally” light bomber took off from one of the airstrips. Kearby punched his drop tank and dropped on the vulnerable target. He’d learned a lot since October, using the same manifold settings and speed range as he made his diving approach. At fifteen thousand feet, he began a wide corkscrew-like spiral turn as he dove into the warmer air. He discovered in previous attacks this kept his windshield from fogging over as he sped from subzero temperatures back into the tropical heat.
With his musketeers covering him, he dropped down right on the Sally’s tail and blew up both its engines with his eight machine guns. The Sally twisted out of control and crashed just offshore.
The Jugs flew to Gusap and quickly refueled at Gerald Johnson’s airfield there. The Knights, once given the toughest and most combat-intensive missions, were currently relegated to boring standing patrols over the Ramu Valley. They had seen little action since Johnson shot down a Hien over Gusap on December 13.
Kearby wanted more action that day. He took off with three P-47s, bound for Wewak. The fourth plane in his flight stayed behind with mechanical failures. En route, one of the remaining Thunderbolts suffered another mechanical gremlin. The pilot turned for Gusap.
With just his wingman, Kearby pressed on to Wewak at twenty-seven thousand feet. Over But Airdrome, they passed a single Hayabusa, cruising along at about four thousand feet. Kearby went after it, his wingman protecting his tail. Three hundred and fifty miles an hour on his airspeed indicator, he dove dead behind the unsuspecting Japanese pilot. At a thousand feet, he hammered it with a controlled three-second burst. One of the Hayabusa’s fuel tanks exploded as Kearby overshot, climbing and turning to get a look at his quarry.
The Japanese pilot dove for the trees and the fuel-tank fire went out. The Texan would not be denied. He violated a cardinal rule: don’t turn more than ninety degrees in a fight against the Japanese. It bleeds too much speed and they can turn inside any American fighter.
He made a tight 360 and went after the Hayabusa. The pilot was either wounded or so green he froze at the controls. Either way, he took no evasive action as the P-47 climbed up his tail and Kearby laid on the trigger. Six seconds and 450 bullets later, the Hayabusa staggered and caught fire a second time.
Down to a thousand feet just off the Wewak coast, Kearby blew past the crippled plane and pulled into a zoom climb. In the past, he would have let it go, getting back upstairs as fast as he could. This time, he saw the fire go out again and turned around for another pass. As he dove for a killing shot, the Hayabusa pilot lost control of his aircraft, and it careened into the sea.
Kearby returned to Gusap, refueled, continued on to Finschhafen and then back to V Fighter Command Headquarters, which had just moved up to Nadzab. Both kills were confirmed. He was now undisputed number two in theater with nineteen planes. He also knew he was almost out of time.
On the eighth, he sat down and drafted a report for General Whitehead, the deputy commander of the 5th Air Force (his current immediate boss) and detailed an operation against Wewak he hoped to be able to lead. He called for using the 9th Fighter Squadron’s P-47s at Gusap to run four-plane hunting missions over the Japanese base—exactly as he had been doing since October—in order to “partially” deny the airfields there to the enemy. He did not sugarcoat the dangers and advocated using only volunteers who truly believed in the Jug’s capabilities. He mentioned the 348th would be better suited for this special operation, but they were farther away at Finschhafen. Gusap was only a hundred and ninety miles from Wewak.
He ended the report by offering to go to Gusap and “teach” the Knights how to execute this mission personally. It was a naked ploy to try to stay in the race after Wurtsmith returned. Exactly where Kearby would go and what position he would have at V Fighter Command headquarters was an open question. He may return to his deputy commander status, or Kenney may use the opportunity to stash him out someplace where getting into combat would be even more difficult.
The clock was ticking. Before dawn the next morning, he flew to Finschhafen, grabbed three pilots, and sped toward Wewak. They made it halfway before the weather closed in. They turned around, refueled, and went out a second time late that morning. The weather was still bad, with rainsqualls and thunderheads filling the sky around them. By the time they reached Wewak, the weather forced them down to eighteen thousand feet.
They patrolled over the target area, weaving around scattered clouds below the main overcast, seeing nothing but a solitary ship offshore, shrouded in a smoke screen. Suddenly, roughly eighteen Hiens bounced them from three o’clock high. Arrowing down out of the base of the overcast, they caught the Americans completely by surprise. Kearby reacted quickly, turning toward the attackers as his Musketeers followed him. The Japanese didn’t break away. The two formations closed as Kearby opened fire. He hit a Ki-61 that went down before the merge. Seconds later, the Jugs were scattered and fighting for their lives. Two Hiens went after a lone Jug, diving down on the exposed pilot who was trying to extend out of the fight. Kearby turned and went after those two Hiens, trying to save the Jug, which was flown by Capt. Walter Benz. His wingman followed, the Ki-61 pilots broke away. The Texan gave chase, following them into a tight, spiraling climb. He opened fire, hit the Hien, but the Japanese wingman whipped around and charged him, forcing him to abandon his attack and point his guns at the onrushing fighter.
Both Japanese and Americans opened fire. The in-line fighter flew right into Kearby’s bullet pattern, transforming it into a flaming comet. Benz saw it roll over and go straight in, tailing a long plume of red-orange fire and smoke.
Kearby was alone now, not something that ever happened before on these hunting flights. He searched for his wingman, saw a swarm of Hiens instead. He was running out of altitude, and they were above him. He dove, poured the coals on, and ran for his life, pulling out right above the jungle as he pointed Fiery Ginger for Gusap.
The fight was a near-run thing. The Americans all survived, though one Jug force-landed at Gusap with a wing full of cannon- and machine gun holes. Kearby also picked up two more kills, tying him with Bong. Yet, the Japanese weren’t stupid. By now, they caught on to Kearby’s game and were hunting for his high-flying Jugs with their best aircraft, the Ki-61. Had the Americans not seen the attack coming when they did, disaster would have ensued. Neel was living on the ragged edge, sacrificing his earlier tactical caution for a shot at the brass ring.
Now he was only five kills away from being the first to catch Eddie Rickenbacker. He wanted that distinction more than anything. Back in the States, his Medal of Honor nomination was approved. Neel was not only the leading active ace now, he was soon to wear the highest medal for bravery the United States bestows on its warriors.
Wurtsmith landed at Nadzab on January 13, relieving Kearby as commanding officer of the V Fighter Command. Neel returned briefly to his status as chief of staff and deputy commander. When word reached 5th Air Force of Kearby’s MOH, Kenney saw an opportunity to get him out of harm’s way. Initially, the plan was to have President Roosevelt award the medal personally at the White House. It was a perfect way to get him out of combat and home safely.
That same day, Lieutenant Colonel Morrissey returned to V Fighter Command. Wurtsmith made him his deputy commander and chief of staff—Kearby’s position. With a lieutenant colonel junior in rank to him taking his spot as second-in-command, there could be no place for him in V Fighter Command Headquarters. The ace would soon have his Medal of Honor, but now he had no job. His days in theater were numbered, and he knew it. He was sent down to Australia on leave, where he reported to Kenney’s headquarters in Brisbane. When the idea of a White House ceremony was broached, Kearby would have none of it. He refused to leave the combat theater. Years later, Kenney framed the Medal of Honor ceremony that took place as an ad hoc affair on January 20, 1944. It may have been, and Kearby got his wish: he was not sent home. General MacArthur personally decorated the Texas ace with only a few staff officers present.
There remained what to do with a senior officer who hated staff work and only wanted to fly combat. Kenney later wrote he told Kearby he wanted to send him home for a month’s leave. Another attempt to get him out of the combat theater. According to Kenney, Kearby balked and said he wanted to stay until he got his fifty kills. Kenney reportedly told him to cool it, and keep it to “one Nip a week.”
He had two national heroes out of his fighter pilots now that helped create and inspire the aggressive fighting spirit he knew the 5th needed. The papers back home spent much of January and early February running wire stories about how Bong and Kearby were now tied for top ace status. His Medal of Honor award broke back home on the twenty-second. He was photographed and featured in newspapers in every state. Life magazine prepared a major story about him. The Texan with the lopsided, impish grin had become the face of the air war in New Guinea.
Kenney could not afford to lose him in combat now. With the MOH awarded and no staff position, this was the perfect time to send him home, but Kenney couldn’t quite bring himself to order it. Part of it was probably his natural sympathy toward an aggressive fighter pilot. He was once himself an aggressive combat aviator. He knew that inner fire well. Sending Neel home would have broken the man’s heart. He would have felt like Kenney had denied him his life’s ambition. The general likely intuited this. They liked each other. He couldn’t do that to the man.
Later historians concluded that Kenney wanted Kearby to run his score up and stay in the fight to become the undisputed ace of aces, but if that was the case, the assignment he received made hunting much more difficult. In all probability, Kenney needed a fiery leader, a colonel who could get things done out close to the front. Close to the front, but not over it. He decided to give Neel what he wanted—a command in theater—but hoped the new assignment would minimize his combat flying.
Meanwhile, Johnson and the Flying Knights returned to battle again after almost a month of boring holes over the Ramu Valley. While still committed to those missions, Johnson was able to get at least one sweep or escort mission every few days for his men. On the eighteenth, while they were flying a full squadron fighter sweep over Wewak at twenty thousand feet, a lone Oscar bounced them from behind. The Japanese pilot dove through the trailing flight of four P-47s, took shots at the tail-end Charlie, then tried to escape. Essentially, the Japanese tried to use Kearby’s tactics against Johnson’s squadron.
The Oregonian saw the Hayabusa diving away and rolled after it. The Japanese pilot stayed committed to the dive, which proved a fatal mistake. Johnson easily caught up to it and closed to point-blank range. The aircraft exploded almost the instant he triggered his guns, leaving a fan of aviation gas trailing in the doomed aircraft’s wake. It was Johnson’s thirteenth kill and was witnessed by two full squadrons from the 49th Fighter Group.
Two days after Kearby received his Medal of Honor, Maj. Tom Lynch climbed out of a fabric-covered Beech Staggerwing biplane in New Guinea. He’d been using the old airliner as his personal transport as he traveled between bases in Australia and Port Moresby. That morning, he walked into V Fighter Command Headquarters for the first time in weeks. There, he met with Col. Bob Murtha, the A-3 operations chief.
Lynch asked him a particularly odd question, so odd that Bob later sent a radio message to General Wurtsmith about it. Lynch wanted to find some extra P-38 pilots who could be pulled out of the 512th Photographic Reconnaissance Wing (Provisional)—the eyes of the 5th Air Force—and loaned out for some unspecified task.
There was no shortage of P-38 pilots in January 1944, nor were there shortages of veteran P-38 pilots stuck in P-47 squadrons willing to chew off their own hand to get back in a Lightning’s cockpit. Why inquire about Lightning drivers in the 5th’s photographic reconnaissance outfit?
To be fair, the 512th included an element that had flown photo recon versions of the P-38 called the F-4 and F-5, so it was a plausible request. Murtha called the commander of the recon wing, who told him that none of his guys had any P-38 experience. That was a skillful answer that parsed details—he did have Lightning pilots, just none of them had flown the fighter variant. Clearly, the 512th’s commander didn’t want to part with any of his men.
Murtha reported this back to Wurtsmith, who was at Lae that afternoon. The tone of his message suggested he thought the idea was crazy, and he recommended dropping it. Murtha must have been confused by his subordinate’s inquiry.
Just what Lynch was doing wasn’t clear until a few days later, when General Whitehead approached Kenney with an idea first floated by Neel Kearby when he was still the acting head of V Fighter Command. The Texan had advocated culling the line squadrons for the best and most aggressive aces and forming them into an elite killer group that could take the fight to the enemy unencumbered by any routine missions. It would have been the first (and only) special operations fighter unit in USAF history.
The idea probably stemmed from his World War I knowledge. Through the 1920s and ’30s, the American aviation literature and war movies were filled with lurid depictions of Manfred von Richthofen and his Flying Circus of elite aces. Dubbed the circus for their mobility and use of large tents, the Red Baron and his legion visited terror on Allied aviators wherever they were sent. Kearby, taking a page from the Germans, wanted to do the same thing. No doubt, he also wanted to be its commander.
Denuding the fighter squadrons of all their most experienced aces made no sense to the senior leaders in 5th Air Force. Those men were the backbone of V Fighter Command’s aggressive spirit. They were keeping the new guys alive and mentoring them as Sid Woods had done with Johnson, and Marion Kirby had done with McGuire. Concentrating those men in one group would degrade the capabilities of the other units significantly. The idea seemed to have never been taken seriously.
That was, until somebody developed a modified version of it. Whitehead’s spin on Kearby’s idea was to find a small cadre of P-38 pilots and pull them into V Fighter Command as a special mission unit that he dubbed “the Flying Circus Squadron.” The trick was to do this without degrading the efficiency of the line outfits who were all fully committed to the fight against the Japanese in both New Guinea and New Britain. In all probability, he sent Lynch to go overturn rocks in search of some P-38 pilots who could form the core of the squadron. The recon wing was a natural place to look.
In January, General Arnold had informed Kenney while he was briefly back in Washington that the first shipment of the latest model of P-38s would soon be sailing for Australia. Over fifty would arrive in the first batch, with more to follow in February and March. These new P-38s included more mature technology, with hydraulic boost controls, making them easier to fly and more maneuverable. They also had significantly longer range with the addition of more gas tanks. Overall, they were significantly better Lightnings than what the 5th possessed. Due to their additional fuel capacity, the 5th’s leadership called them the “Long-Range P-38s.”
These were desperately needed. The P-47 was still loathed by units outside the 348th. That loathing was made worse in January when modifications Neel Kearby suggested to extend the Jug’s range turned out to cause fires through the supercharger when hit with gunfire. Kenney ignored those tests and ordered the modifications to be fielded, noting the “kids” would soon be putting fuel in the extra tanks when they found out how far they needed to fly. This sent a message to the pilots who interpreted it, right or wrong, as Kenney’s willingness to send them to fiery deaths to get a little extra range out of an aircraft they already didn’t like. Whitehead noted the precipitous drop in morale among the P-47 pilots outside the 348th as a result.
A new P-38 with longer legs could not have arrived at V Fighter Command at a better time. MacArthur was planning to make a huge jump around Wewak to land troops deep in the enemy’s rear at Hollandia, which was currently serving as a massive staging base for the Japanese Army Air Force. To make this leap, the hundreds of planes at Hollandia would need to be destroyed. Problem: from the current airfields, the older P-38s couldn’t get there and stay overhead very long. The new Lightnings could with plenty of time to loiter and fight.
It is quite possible that Whitehead wanted the Flying Circus Squadron to be equipped with the new P-38s, with, as he and Kenney called them, “picked crews.” The new unit would function exactly like the 1st Provisional Squadron did during the October 12, 1943, Rabaul raid: as a force multiplier against very important and heavily defended targets.
On February 12, 1944, Kenney wrote to Whitehead:
The news about the formation of the “Circus Squadron” is just right. Go ahead with the setup as you have planned it. I am particularly glad Lynch has gotten back in the swing and believe that placing him in the Circus outfit is an excellent thing. If he once gets started I honestly believe he will give Bong and Kearby a little competition.
Seven days earlier, Dick Bong arrived at Nadzab with orders assigning him to V Fighter Command HQ’s operations section. He’d been sitting for a few days at a replacement depot in Australia waiting for orders, unsure if he would be sent back to the Knights again or not. He was the 5th’s other great national hero now, but he was also a man who wanted nothing to do with command, or responsibility for the lives of others while in battle. He’d met Stanley Johnson’s widow while home on leave, and the meeting had not gone well. It was a dreadful reminder of the final weeks of his tour.
The Circus Squadron seemed a natural place for him. He’d be given opportunity to hunt without the overhead of normal duties a captain would carry out. He wouldn’t need to be a flight leader. His talents could be maximized, and he could continue his push to beat Eddie Rickenbacker.
Meanwhile, Kearby returned to New Guinea, anxious to score, but without a formal assignment. He couldn’t stay at V Fighter Command. He was a full colonel and outranked the executive officer who replaced him, so that situation was not tenable. He managed to sneak away one day in early February for two missions over Wewak. On the first, he and the Musketeers saw nothing. On the second, they ran into weather and turned back.
On February 14, 1944, Kearby transferred from V Fighter Command and joined a new advanced field headquarters called the 308th Bomb Wing. It wasn’t a bomber outfit at all; rather, the 308th served as a flexible headquarters element designed to operate as far forward as possible while being tasked with special missions. Units were assigned or withdrawn as needed. For now, the 308th would spearhead the air operations for MacArthur’s invasion of Manus plus the upcoming Hollandia operation. Kearby would be out of the fight for a while, though he remained the darling of the press back home. Instead, he was saddled with administrative and PR duties. The latter included showing John Wayne around Saidor when the actor showed up in theater as part of a USO ensemble meant to bolster morale.
It wasn’t combat flying. While he enjoyed having his picture taken around Fiery Ginger by Life magazine photographers and meeting famous actors, he was there to get his fifty and lead men in battle. Every day he missed his 348th Fighter Group, regretting not holding out to retain command of it the previous November. Looking ahead, a normal combat tour lasted a year. Neel reached the theater in May. No matter how much he resisted, Kenney would almost certainly use that opportunity to get him home. He had to find a way back into the air.