March 8, 1944
New Guinea
Late on the night of March 5, General Whitehead wrote Kenney and broke the news that Neel Kearby went missing over Wewak. He informed his commanding general that Dunham and Blair would fly into Port Moresby at first light to personally report what happened. Then a coordinated search effort could begin to find him.
Unfortunately, administrative red tape clogged up the search efforts. While Dunham did go back to the Wewak area in search of the crash site either the next day or day after, the 348th did not participate in a search initially, as the group didn’t realize Kearby’s P-47 was still on their books. Administratively, the 348th thought the search would have been carried out by the 309th Bomb Wing. A flurry of messages between headquarters eventually unfurled this mess, but of course any search was too late anyway.
The pilots and ground crew of the 348th were devastated by the news of Kearby’s loss. Nobody had advocated harder for them or their aircraft. He’d taken care of the 348th from its inception. His leadership and inspiration had left a lasting impression on it. He was larger than life, the “old man” with a devil-may-care grin and a sense of invulnerability that gave new pilots into the theater a boost to their morale.
It was a double-edged sword. Now that he was gone, those who found inspiration in Kearby’s example suddenly questioned their odds of survival. In the days following his loss, many young pilots asked the same question: If the Japanese can get a man like Kearby, how am I going to make it through this?
At 5th Air Force Headquarters, the news of Kearby’s disappearance must have rocked Kenney hard and reminded him of the nightmares he faced when Gen. Ken Walker went down the year before over Rabaul. If captured alive, Neel would have been an absolute gold mine of intelligence to the Japanese. As tough as the Texan was, few men endured the savagery of Japanese torture sessions without breaking and telling what they knew. If he’d been captured, the inner workings of V Fighter Command would be revealed to the Japanese sooner or later.
Beyond the security issue of his loss, Kenney’s personal affection for Kearby filled him with grief. For all the headaches he’d caused him these past few months, Kearby was still Kenney’s kind of man: a pilot to the core who lived to fight the enemy. Losing him was like losing a part of himself—the man he once was over the trenches of the Great War’s Western Front.
Kearby was also a national hero, the wearer of the Medal of Honor. Of all the aviators fighting around the globe, few had the sort of household name recognition Kearby did in early 1944. Explaining his loss to the country was going to be a painful process, one that might attract scrutiny from Washington. The decision was made to wait to release the news of his missing status. In the meantime, searches would try to determine what happened to him, and coordinate a rescue if possible.
On either the sixth or seventh, Dunham led a flight that returned to the Wewak area, sighting small tendrils of smoke coiling over the wrecks of the aircraft the Jug pilots had shot down. Of Fiery Ginger there was no sign. He circled the area, the Japanese conspicuously absent, before giving up and heading for home.
The mood at V Fighter Command remained a mix of shock and grief for several days. Kearby’s fighting spirit had long infused the headquarters with an esprit de corps, a sense that they were different from all other rear-echelon commands. Neel had been well liked at HQ, and his loss came as a terrible personal blow to its men. Out of the entire USAAF, theirs was the only fighter command headquarters where staff officers routinely flew combat missions. Now, a point of pride suddenly looked like it might become a point of scrutiny.
The bleak mood picked up a bit on the seventh, when General Wurtsmith announced Tom Lynch’s promotion to lieutenant colonel. The promotion was richly deserved. Tom’s magnetism and natural leadership abilities made him one of the most popular and respected officers in V Fighter Command. He’d always been like that, from his days as an Eagle Scout back in Pennsylvania to his first days in combat. He was a man others instinctively followed. He wasn’t the outgoing, brash type like Kearby. Instead, Lynch was quiet and unassuming. Each word he spoke carried weight. In the 39th, his men learned to trust his judgment. He was never just about scoring kills; Lynch was a man with his eyes on the bigger picture, and the responsibility of leadership never seemed to test his core.
Lynch’s promotion served as an excuse to celebrate. The headquarters staff had been so down, a blowout party was exactly what the men needed. That night, they indeed celebrated—even the usually reticent Bong attended. How much alcohol flowed will probably never be known, but both Tom and Dick were not known to drink much. Still, the party was a great success, one that lifted everyone’s spirits and would be talked about for years after.
The next morning, the Flying Circus went searching for kills over Tadji. Lynch had twenty kills, Bong twenty-four. The race to beat Eddie Rickenbacker’s twenty-six riveted readers back home, who knew that Marines Joe Foss and Pappy Boyington had tied the great ace’s record earlier in the year. Pappy went missing in January. Joe Foss was home and out of combat. Now, the race to beat Captain Eddie’s record boiled down to four pilots: Bong, Lynch, and two 8th Air Force pilots flying from England against the Luftwaffe: P-51 ace Don Gentile and P-47 pilot Robert S. Johnson.
Bong and Lynch had the inside edge, since they could fly whenever and wherever they wanted. The only issue they faced was opportunity. There just weren’t many Japanese planes left east of Hollandia.
That day over Tadji, they found the strip as empty as the sky. Lynch led Bong back east down the coast, hoping to run across something with wings. A few minutes later, they approached Aitape, a small Japanese base with a primitive harbor and airstrip. Three small cargo vessels lay at anchor there, a couple of barges chugging along nearby.
It was a strafer pilot’s dream. Three vessels at anchor, their decks clogged with stacks of supplies and drums of fuel—a single flight of the Pappy Gunn–modified B-25s could have destroyed all three in a matter of seconds. Had the two fighter pilots simply continued on with their hunting mission, returned to Nadzab, and reported the shipping, nobody would have thought anything about it.
Lt. Col. Tom Lynch didn’t hesitate. His mission was the destruction of the enemy, be it on the water or in the air. It didn’t matter. He and Dick had the firepower to inflict major damage on those vessels, and that was all that mattered to him.
They would attack.
Lynch gave the signal and rolled into a sweeping dive, Dick following his leader. They picked out the Yashima Maru as their target. Down low, the P-38s indicating over three hundred miles an hour, they raked the vessel with cannon-and machine-gun fire. The fusillade killed the lugger’s captain, wounded three others, and caused fuel drums to explode and pour flaming gas all over the deck. The Lightnings flashed overhead, streaking past their targets, noses pointed toward Nadzab. When the pilots looked back, they saw the Yashima Maru wreathed in flames and starting to sink.
One pass. Haul ass.
They should have kept going, climbing back to patrol altitude as they worked their way home. Long ago, Allied pilots learned never to make a second strafing run on the same target. The first pass—the enemy usually would be surprised and have trouble responding. A second pass gave the enemy ground gunners a do-over, and they invariably would be waiting to exact revenge. The single pass that had for so long been a part of V Fighter Command’s tactics, both for aerial targets and ground ones, seemed to have fallen by the wayside.
Lynch led Bong around in a looping left-hand turn out to sea. He came back around and dove to the whitecaps, his P-38 only twenty feet off the water. Throttles forward, the two Lightnings sped straight for the other two luggers, fangs out, ready to inflict even more punishment.
Aitape had just been reinforced by a fifty-man detachment from a naval garrison force. They arrived at the end of February with two 7.7mm and three 13mm antiaircraft machine guns, which the detachment commander emplaced along shore to cover the harbor. As the P-38s came back for a second pass, they barreled straight toward those guns, giving their crews minimal deflection shots.
The Japanese opened fire. Tracers webbed the sky around the two Americans as they began shooting at the cargo vessels. Bullets skipped across the whitecaps. Others zipped past Bong’s P-38. Then the gunners found the range. Tom’s P-38 shuddered with direct hits. A split second later, Bong’s was hit as well. Rounds thumped into Dick’s right engine, tearing holes in the nacelle and boom. His left wing took further hits, and a line of bullets stitched across his vertical stabilizer.
As he fought to control his stricken fighter, something flew off Lynch’s P-38. Part of the nose exploded, streaming debris. Tom’s right engine burst into flames. He pulled up suddenly, abandoning his run in a bid to gain altitude. Bong saw him arc up and to the left, trailing flame and smoke as he crossed the coastline.
“Dick! Can you see me?” Lynch called over the radio.
“Yeah. You’re on fire, bail out!”
Dick went after his friend, the sky still filled with tracers. His P-38 was hit repeatedly. His right engine started to lose power. Still, he chased after Tom, catching up to him at twenty-five hundred feet, perhaps a mile south of Aitape.
Lynch’s ’38 was doomed. The engine fire was spreading along the right wing. He’d lost power and the zoom climb that got him to twenty-five hundred feet cost him most of his airspeed.
“Bail out, Tom!”
Lynch struggled in the cockpit. Bong saw him jettison the hatch and start to go out the left side, away from the flames. The P-38 fell into a steep dive. He had only seconds left. Still, he couldn’t get out of the cockpit. The Lightning plummeted toward the jungle, Bong following, watching as his friend remained in the cockpit.
The P-38 dropped through a thousand feet, flames engulfing the entire right side of the aircraft now. Part of the canopy suddenly tore away, the P-38 now only a few hundred feet from the trees. Lynch fell free of the aircraft, his chute trailing behind him.
The P-38 exploded directly beneath him. Lynch’s body was blown skyward, flung like a ragdoll over the fireball. Bong saw his best friend’s body pinwheel through the air, losing momentum as his chute streamed uselessly behind him. A second later, Tom Lynch fell into the jungle.
Dick circled the area, desperate to see any sign of life below. The P-38’s wreckage burned and smoked nearby, but of his friend, he saw no trace. He made a final pass, then realized he was in dire straits himself. His right engine was coughing, crippled by the burst of machine gun fire on the second pass.
He limped toward Gusap, sick at heart, hands trembling. The oil pressure in his left engine started to drop. The right engine gave out, and he feathered its prop. Somehow, the Lightning held together long enough to get him to Nadzab, where he set the crippled bird down. Not a minute too soon; the left engine probably had moments left to live, as a bullet had pierced an oil line.
The ground crew rushed to Bong’s P-38 after he landed and used a little tractor to tow it from the runway to the flight line. They found America’s ace of aces stricken and shaky, hardly able to contain his grief. One of his mechanics recalled years later that this was the only time he’d seen Bong “nervous” after a mission. Bong climbed out of the cockpit and went off to report the terrible news as his ground crew counted eighty-seven bullets in his P-38.
Word of Tom Lynch’s death spread through V Fighter Command squadrons like wildfire. It devastated those who had flown with him and found so much to like about the introverted Eagle Scout. It did not take long for rumors to form, and many of those turned the rage and grief on Dick Bong.
It is a strange psychological aspect of life in combat that the enemy cannot be given credit for a win. If a friend dies, often the men in his unit will blame one of their own for his death long before they blame the enemy for it. It is an especially easy thing to do if there is an unpopular officer or NCO who can be assigned the blame. In the 39th, whispers swirled around Bong. Rumor was he had made a mistake. He made a bad call. He got their friend killed. Grief turned to venom, and for some, the years after the war never dimmed that emotion. To their last days, they were convinced Bong somehow got Lynch killed.
The rumor mill was fueled by the lack of documentation surrounding the mission. When an aircraft went down in combat, usually a missing aircrew report (MACR) was filed, detailing as much information on the fate of the plane and its occupants as was known at the time. This usually included witness statements of those who survived the mission. In Lynch’s case, no missing aircrew report was ever filed. Dick reported everything he’d seen, which was synthesized into a V Fighter Command summary of Lynch’s last flight. For those inclined to see conspiracies, this smacked of a cover-up. As if some part of Bong’s role in the mission was being sanitized in order to protect the AAF’s current ace of aces.
To the Cobras and others, it looked very shady. The gossip further damaged Dick’s reputation within V Fighter Command and more thoroughly isolated him from his peers.
Was there a cover-up? The Japanese sources agree with Bong’s story. They credited Leading Seaman Amano with Lynch’s P-38. He was one of the recent arrivals at Aitape, serving under the detachment commander, Warrant Officer Hideo Ezawa. Ezawa’s machine gunners had plenty of ammunition—seven thousand rounds—and they used it liberally as the P-38s came back for a second pass.
The mistake the Americans made was that second pass. But Lynch was leading the Circus that day, so Bong had no say in it. Like everyone else who ever flew with Tom Lynch, Dick trusted his friend’s judgment instinctively.
The 5th’s official summary of the mission includes details of the second pass. Later, Bong spoke of Lynch’s last moments to Lee Van Atta in a serialized collection of articles detailing Dick’s life and combat career. Either he didn’t mention during the interview that they’d gone back for a second pass, or that detail was edited out of the final article. That was the only real cover-up.
The 5th Air Force kept silent on this double loss for a week. At Whitehead’s forward HQ, the staff received intelligence that Kearby did not survive his crash around March 9. Yet it was not until Thursday March 16 that 5th Air Force HQ released near-simultaneous statements reporting that Kearby and Lynch were both missing in action.
The day before the official announcement, Virginia Kearby answered the door at the family home in San Antonio to find a Western Union deliveryman holding a telegram from the War Department. She signed for it, stepped inside, and read the words, “Missing in Action.”
It seemed unreal to her. Even more unreal when five days later, the mailman brought her a letter Neel had written, explaining how he’d now joined a bomb wing and was eager to go back into action with it. His mood and tone sounded different than the previous letter touching on the horrors he’d seen at Saidor. He seemed happy, eager, and back to his normal self.
Now he was missing?
Simultaneously, Neel’s parents received the same news at their home in Arlington, a Dallas suburb. His mother never understood her son’s obsession with hunting Japanese planes. She couldn’t fathom why he insisted on staying in combat after all he’d already done. He’d more than met the threshold for duty fulfilled. Everything else to her seemed needless risk. Later, she wrote to General Kenney and confessed she would never grasp what drove Neel be a part of the ace race. In her pain-wracked world, the ambition to be the best cost her family their sole remaining son.
Around the state, the papers reported Neel’s death and interviewed his family. Virginia refused to accept her larger-than-life husband was gone, telling an interviewer, “Until Neel is reported dead, I’ll not give up hope.”
In Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, the dreaded yellow telegram from the War Department arrived at the Lynch household almost at the same time the Kearbys received theirs. Within minutes, the news traveled all over town, and people rushed to offer their assistance. The police chief arrived with the family’s parish priest. Neighbors poured into the house. Cars lined the street out front, and people stood in shock, talking in hushed voices in the yard, on the porch, and in the house. They were there because the Lynches were beloved members of the community. Their son was the greatest hero to emerge from Catasauqua during the war. When he’d returned home the previous fall, he was feted and welcomed with much acclaim and joy.
At lunch, Tom’s sister Catherine walked home from the high school, unaware of what was going on. As she reached the house, seeing all the people consoling each other set off alarm bells. She rushed through the back into the kitchen, only to find a neighbor doing the dishes. She looked up from the sink and told Catherine to talk to her mother at once.
She found her mom in the living room, surrounded by townsfolk. Her dad was sitting next to the radio, listening intently above the commotion around him.
“They told us we lost your brother,” Alice Lynch said to her daughter, “but we don’t believe it.”
For days after, Tom Lynch’s dad refused to leave his seat next to the family radio. Searching, praying to hear a newscaster report that his son had been found alive and well. The days passed, and no such report was heard. In the stress and grief, not knowing what happened, Tom’s dad suffered a stroke. Though no bullets struck the Lynch home in quiet Pennsylvania, father and son were equal casualties of war.