March 5, 1944
Saidor, New Guinea
Kearby awoke in his primitive surroundings in a foul mood. He was having nothing but problems with the engineers, the strip wasn’t fully operational, and the food was terrible. He’d been exiled from the ace race at a time when it was the most competitive. To add insult to injury, he’d learned the night before that Whitehead’s Flying Circus had run into enemy planes over Tadji on the day he took over the advanced echelon at this hellhole. Bong and Lynch both scored. The farm boy claimed two bombers, while the Pennsylvanian hit four, claimed two. Not only did Bong pull ahead again, Lynch was catching up to Kearby.
He looked around his spartan quarters. Muddy floor, mosquito netting draped around his cot, boots overturned beneath him to keep scorpions out. Still, as he got dressed, he banged them together and waited to see if anything would come tumbling out before pulling them on.
Bong had twenty-four. Lynch nineteen, maybe more if the intel guys decided to upgrade his probables over Tadji to confirmed. For Kearby, it all felt like it was slipping away. Never mind the Distinguished Service Cross, the DFCs, and the Air Medals sitting in a small box engraved with his beloved fighter group’s number. The medals weren’t enough. Even the Medal of Honor wasn’t enough. It was in that box, too, a reminder of his unfettered hunting days in October.
He remembered his first days as an Air Corps cadet back in 1937. He was fresh from his college graduation, frat parties, and the life of a hardworking son of a well-to-do Southern family. All he wanted to do was fly. His career almost ended before it began. Throughout training he kept suffering bouts of tonsillitis that sidelined him for days on end. Sheer force of will pushed him forward.
That internal drive became one of his greatest assets. He was relentless, determined, and singular in focus when a goal lay in his crosshairs. He’d been an outstanding fighter pilot, working his way up through the prewar ranks among careerists who enjoyed the trappings and comfort of their status as officers. He didn’t care about those things. The airplanes. Flying. Tactics. Learning from the men who came before him—those things mattered. He had few hobbies, and the job always came first.
He looked over at his desk. Beside the 348th box rested a photo of his wife Virginia—the original Fiery Ginger—and their three boys. On the other side was a photo of his parents.
He could have stayed with them, training a new generation of warriors from the safety of some Stateside base. But that wasn’t him. He coached and mentored those in his unit, preparing them for combat because he would be at the tip of their formation. No warrior would ever want to be left behind. For all his upper-class heritage, inside Kearby beat a warrior’s heart.
His parents would never understand. He knew that. He could have given Rowland the 348th in August and gone home without any blemish to his honor after his brother had died. After the deaths of the five Sullivan brothers aboard the USS Juneau in 1942, the military made a point of pulling the sole surviving sons out of combat so families were not devastated.
Kearby had opted to stay, to lead his men, fight his own war on the side. Long ago, that private war came to dominate his life, defining the risks he took in battle and the way he functioned as a field grade. Nobody but Neel will ever know what truly lay inside his warrior’s heart, but whatever it was burned with such fire that he kept evading his commander’s intent to go hunting with his favored Musketeers.
The acclaim and publicity seemed not to matter to him. His pilots and ground crew practically worshipped him, though some in the other outfits in the 5th found him abrasive and arrogant. That was the P-38 versus P-47 controversy talking, though. Kearby would always be the biggest advocate of the Thunderbolt, which made him unpopular among those who only wanted to fly Lightnings. He may not have been liked by everyone, but among his fellow warriors, he was respected.
Perhaps what fueled his ambition wasn’t fame or glory but a more elemental need: the need to prove he was the best of the best. As good as Bong and Lynch and Johnson were, he believed he was better. After all, he had spent his childhood dreaming of becoming an ace and his entire adult life in uniform, training for this opportunity here in the Pacific. Now he had proven beyond a doubt he was one of the great aces of the USAAF. He could make a pass on an enemy formation and knock down multiple planes—something only the very best could do. His tactics worked. His shooting unerring.
Yet he stood at the cusp of realizing all he wanted to achieve, only to be sidelined. The score was what would matter in the years ahead. No matter how good he was, if he didn’t have the kill flags on the side of the cockpit, the best of the best would always be a disputed title. To be considered number one, the kill board on Fiery Ginger’s fuselage would have to have no peer.
He finished getting dressed, took a final look around to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. Sitting next to a bottle of perfume he’d purchased for Virginia lay his Ray-Bans. He considered grabbing them. They’d been with him through many fights and countless flights. Today’s battles would be administrative and on the ground, not in the clouds where he belonged. He turned and exited the tent, his sunglasses left behind beside the box that held his Medal of Honor.
Over at Nadzab, as Kearby was getting to work at Saidor, Bong and Lynch took off on a two-plane hunting flight to Wewak. The pickings had been slim there for a while now. Since August, the Japanese Army Air Force units in New Guinea lost over seven hundred aircraft. There just weren’t many left, though reinforcements continued to trickle in. During February, one of the last of the elite fighter units reached the theater. Down to less than three dozen Ki-43 Hayabusas, the 77th Sentai had fought against the Flying Tigers in Burma in 1942 and in the defense of the Dutch East Indies the following year. Led by a kernel of excellent, high-time fighter pilots whose careers predated Pearl Harbor, the 77th began flying missions out of Wewak on the twenty-seventh of February.
Over Dagua Drome, the two Lightning pilots encountered a patrol from the 77th. With altitude and surprise, the P-38s held all the cards. They dropped down on the Japanese planes. Lynch shot one Hayabusa down and damaged another, while Bong knocked pieces off two more. The 77th learned a hard lesson that morning: when flown with tactical discipline, the P-38 was the most dangerous opponent its pilots had ever faced.
Word of the fight probably reached Saidor in the early afternoon, after Bong and Lynch returned to Nadzab to report their encounter. This was too much for Kearby. He went looking for pilots and found Capt. Bill Dunham and Sam Blair ready to go with him. There was no fourth Musketeer available, but Kearby didn’t care. Blair was a tiger with six kills to his credit, and Dunham was one of his oldest friends in the 348th. The two had first met when Kearby commanded a squadron in defense of the Panama Canal Zone back in 1941–42. When the Texan moved on to take the 348th, he pulled Dunham into the Thunderbolt outfit with him. A former University of Idaho student, Dunham was a fighter pilot’s pilot. Aggressive, capable, a crack shot, he’d flown on Kearby’s wing during many of the Musketeer flights in October. The fuselage under his cockpit was adorned with seven Japanese kill flags.
The three aces took off at 1600, climbing west to their typical attack altitude above twenty thousand feet. They would have two and a half hours until sunset, just enough time to slip over Wewak, patrol for a few minutes, and get home to land in twilight.
They reached Wewak an hour later, running up the coast at twenty-two thousand feet, all eyes in the Jugs scanning the sky around them. Kearby called out the first contact, a Ki-61 Hien down low approaching Dagua Airdrome. As they watched, the Japanese fighter dropped its landing gear and alighted on the runway. No point in going after it now. They continued on into the setting sun.
About five minutes later, better quarry appeared. Three bombers flitted south toward Dagua, coming in from the seaward side right on the water. It would mean trading twenty-two thousand feet of altitude for a crack at them, but Kearby decided to risk it.
They let down, spiraling at fifteen thousand feet to keep the temperature change from fogging their windscreens. The aces kept their eyes on those bombers as they reached Dagua and entered the pattern in preparation for landing. This was going to be a tougher show now. Even if they reached the bombers, they would be in the airdrome’s flak envelope. Dagua was heavily defended by antiaircraft guns, a fact Kearby knew all too well from previous hunting missions.
Sun at their back, the Jugs caught the bombers at five hundred feet on the north side of Dagua as they ran east, parallel to the field. They closed fast, clocking their established 350 miles an hour with Kearby in the lead, Dunham perhaps a thousand feet behind him, covered by Blair bringing up the rear. They were committed now, the bombers aware of their presence.
From his vantage behind the other two, Blair glanced right just in time to see a formation of Hayabusas over Dagua at a thousand feet. He counted four. They turned and dove after the streaking Americans. At the same time, eight Ki-61 Hiens were taking off from the strip. The first one was just getting airborne, the pilot sucking up the landing gear as he banked hard left to take a desperate, high-deflection shot at the Jugs as they sped by.
Too late to break away, Kearby stayed on his target, picking out the lead bomber and uncharacteristically holding his fire as he raced right up the plane’s tail. At two hundred feet, sheets of flame erupted from his wings as he cut loose with his fifties. The bomber staggered. Kearby switched targets, taking a snap shot at the bomber on the right side of the formation before zooming over them in a climbing left turn. He sped up and out to sea, away from the flak now coming up from Dagua.
He also put the diving Hayabusas directly behind him as he climbed, bleeding speed in a tightening turn.
Despite the intensity and uncharacteristic accuracy of the antiaircraft fire, Dunham and Blair pressed into the bomber formation, taking the one on the leader’s left. Dunham sent it down in flames, and pulled up and to the left, looking for Kearby. Seconds later, Blair reached the final bomber, knocking it down as a Ki-61 took a snap shot at him. Seconds later, two of the Hayabusas overhead latched onto his tail.
The Americans were in real trouble. The men in the Hayabusas were some of the 77th Sentai’s best pilots.
One pass, haul ass. It was axiomatic, embedded in the fighter tactic DNA of 5th Air Force pilots. It had served Kearby well, allowing him to repeatedly beat the odds with his speeding, slashing attacks and sudden escapes.
They should have stayed low and run for home. They were already going east when they first attacked the bombers, but Kearby wasn’t sure he got his. He wanted that kill, so he violated the core precept of his own teachings and came back around, low and slow, for a second pass.
The Hayabusas were on him in a flash. Far more maneuverable, with the speed advantage now, one took a beam shot at Kearby as the Texan broke hard right in an aileron roll, searching for any way out. The Hayabusa slid behind his tail, closing for a kill shot.
Dunham came around in a 180-degree turn, saw Kearby climbing toward him with the Oscar trailing. His old friend was in trouble. Dunham raced to his rescue. He pitched his nose down and made a furious front-quarter pass, all guns blazing. The Hayabusa’s canopy shattered and fell away. Dunham kept shooting until the merge. Blair saw the Oscar explode and crash as Dunham blew past.
Blair skidded and dodged as the two Hayabusas pressed their attack on him. But he didn’t break the cardinal rule, hadn’t started a second pass, so his speed was high and the Oscars couldn’t catch him. To avoid the flak, he banked left and sped out to sea in a long looping turn that set him up for a headlong rush back to the coast on the west side of Dagua. Low clouds hung over a valley there, and he ducked into it, hoping the hills and overcast would mask him from the dozen or so Japanese fighters boiling around Dagua.
Just then, a radial engine fighter went straight into the jungle off the end of the runway, exploding into a roiling fireball as it impacted the ground.
Blair reached the valley. A moment later, Dunham swung down into it as well. Together, they poured the coals on, hugged the trees, and ran south for five minutes, calling to Kearby over and over.
Neel was hit. Either in the beam attack or when the Hayabusa got behind him, his P-47 was riddled with machine gun bullets. He streaked over Dagua, flak filling the sky around him, another Hayabusa in hot pursuit.
The plane was finished. Crippled. He may have been wounded. There was no way he’d make it home. He jettisoned the canopy and bailed out. Fiery Ginger plunged into the jungle six hundred yards off the west side of Dagua.
But Neel was alive. His chute opened despite the low altitude of his jump. He swung hard and plummeted into a huge tree. The chute caught in the branches, and he found himself trapped, dangling beneath it.
The Hayabusa saw him and banked for the tree. Kearby looked up and saw it coming, nose afire as the Japanese pilot triggered his guns. His aim was true. A rash of 12.7mm bullets shredded the tree, tearing away branches and leaves. Bullets riddled Neel’s body. One round probably hit his left cheek and blew out the back of his head, killing him instantly.
Two hours later, several Japanese pilots found his body, hanging limp in his chute harness. They ordered a New Guinea native to climb the tree and cut him down. The native did as ordered, noting the bullet strikes on the tree and the many wounds to Kearby’s body. After he fell to the jungle floor, the Japanese stripped everything off him, including his boots, watch, clothes, jacket, and dog tags. They left his naked body unburied, sprawled facedown at the base of the tree, his parachute still entangled in its branches like a canopy for his anonymous grave.
Dunham and Blair returned to Saidor heartsick. They’d gone back briefly to search for Kearby but could not raise him on the radio and had to head for home. They were running out of fuel and daylight. They landed at sunset and jumped out of their planes to talk over what had happened. Neither was sure what had occurred, just that a fifth plane had gone into the jungle toward the end of the fight. Dunham, almost frantic, tried to get into another P-47 to go find Neel. It was dark now. There would be no point to search for him at night and only serve to risk another P-47. It didn’t matter. Bill’s friend was out there somewhere, and he could think only of going to his rescue. Blair and some of the ground crew physically restrained him from getting in the cockpit.
That night, as the moon rose and the jungle animals called around them, Kearby’s ground crew refused to give up on their beloved colonel. They waited for hours as a gibbous moon lit the runway, ignoring the fact that his Jug’s fuel would have given out long before. It didn’t matter. They stood watch in the moonlight, straining to hear the reassuring growl of Kearby’s R-2800.
The sky remained silent.