Late spring 1944
Sydney, Australia
The men of the 475th earned their reputation as Kenney’s warrior elites. The unit’s three squadrons were filled with hard-charging pilots with racks of kill flags on their P-38s. The leadership cadre was tight-knit, capable, and loyal to the men. The 475th was perhaps the best-run and -led unit in the 5th Fighter Command that spring, thanks in large part to Col. Charles MacDonald.
Mac arrived shrouded in mystery the previous October. He made a statement that first day when he snagged a P-38, scrambled with the alert squadron, and shot down a couple of Japanese dive-bombers. He was a colonel who led from the front. Where many other group commanders let their admin duties keep them on the ground, MacDonald struck a balance. He flew the boring missions; he flew the most dangerous ones. He set the example, but did it without fanfare. Where Johnson was a gregarious and outgoing leader, MacDonald was the quiet professional. His economy of words gave each word heft. When he spoke, his men listened.
He kept a professional officer’s distance between himself and his pilots. It meant few got to know the man behind his rank. What the rest of the 475th did know about MacDonald was that he always was in their corner. Do your job to the best of your ability, and the colonel would be your biggest supporter.
He handled disciplinary issues with the same low-key approach. Once, when it became clear that a pilot’s frequent aborts during missions had nothing to do with mechanical issues, he swiftly removed him and sent him to the rear. There would be no place for cowards in the 475th. The morale and culture he’d helped create within its ranks demanded nothing less than giving the last full measure for their brotherhood.
He was fair. He never asked his men to do anything he would not. He listened to them, advocated for them when necessary, and gave them the benefit of the doubt. They responded with loyalty and their last full measure.
In the air, he proved himself a tiger every time they encountered the enemy. By May, his aircraft, Putt Putt Maru, carried ten Japanese kill flags. He was a fighting leader who’d shown he was among the best at the craft.
That spring, he revealed another side of himself to some of his pilots. The group had been flying and fighting for months without much respite. With the 9th and 39th still flying Jugs, the burden of the long-range missions fell to Mac and his men. Their brief leaves to Sydney provided their only real escape from the meat grinder.
Charles MacDonald went to Sydney far less often than his pilots did. The work of keeping the group running demanded his presence, plus his own devotion was part of the example he set. But even a leader like Mac needed a break now and then. That spring, he flew to Sydney with a group of his pilots, who set up shop in the 475th’s flat and commenced to party.
There was nothing like fighter pilot parties—frat keggers were kindergarten tame in comparison. The only rival to the legendary levels these parties achieved could be found where the infantry partied. And though soldier benders may not be possible to top, the fighter pilots sure tried.
MacDonald attended the first parties but behaved strangely aloof at the same time. He was older, that was one difference. At twenty-seven, he was an established professional Army Air Force officer with a wife and family back home. He was more settled, but there was something more than that. Perhaps he didn’t want to be seen out of control and drunk by his men. In his mind, that might have lessened his leadership authority. Perhaps he never was much of a partier. That fit the rest of his character. He wasn’t one who ever wanted attention drawn his way. He shirked the spotlight, wanted nothing to do with the press. And in that flat at the start of the week’s revelry, he simply took a seat and nursed a drink, watching his men uncoil like overstressed springs.
Acquiring liquor in wartime Australia remained a tricky proposition that required cultivating contacts among Sydney’s black marketeers. The Americans used a particularly odious character, who would arrive at the flat with their liquor order and charge them ridiculously inflated prices for the hooch. The men pooled their money to keep the liquor flowing, so they tolerated the fleecing for months. Each successive group of pilots to come down would be armed with their black marketeers’ contact information, so they could get all they needed and bring some back to New Guinea.
After a couple of deliveries, the pilots around MacDonald grew angry and restless. The booze they’d ordered had been watered down, even as the price for it was jacked higher. When their contact showed up at the flat again, they confronted him. A loud, drunken argument ensued. The black marketeer never stood a chance. Several pilots picked him up, carried him down the hall, and tossed him into the building’s elevator shaft.
MacDonald peered out the flat’s door, turned to P. J. Dahl, who was watching nearby, and said, “Well, I don’t think we’ll be seeing that guy again.”
Mac returned to his chair, nursed his drink, and observed as the festivities reignited. Later, the men began bringing women back to the flat. The party really kicked off then. One pilot brought Mac a gift, two gorgeous Australian women, who promptly sat on his lap.
In the live-for-the-moment bubble the pilots existed in, the normal morals they abided by back in the States did not apply. Infidelity was rife as they clutched onto slivers of life against the backdrop of the death they faced to the north. When you don’t know if you will be alive in a week, or a month, the rules of living tend to evolve.
MacDonald would have none of it. As the women sat on his lap, he looked uncomfortable. He fended off their hands, politely refusing to engage. P. J. Dahl saw this and felt a rush of sympathy for his commander. Here was a married man with the chance to live out whatever fantasies he wished. But what he wished was to remain a loyal husband.
He pulled Mac away and asked him if he wanted to go get something to eat. They fled the flat in search of a steak dinner. When it was over, Mac checked into a hotel for the rest of the week.
A man with a moral code that could not be broken, not even by the threat of death or freedom from consequence—that was a rare thing. It was also one of the reasons why the 475th came to love their enigmatic leader so much. He was their rock in a fluid world of violence and chaos.
Back in New Guinea, the 475th was undergoing some serious changes. Losses had been heavy, with fourteen pilots killed or missing in the first four months of 1944. The replacements sent to the group were considered extremely raw. Lots of potential, but they would need a lot of mentoring if they were going to survive.
Tommy McGuire, who was still the operations officer in the 431st Squadron, took it upon himself to write a combat tactics manual for the new guys. He threw himself into the job, and when done, the treatise found its way to MacDonald’s desk. It was an impressive, astute piece of work that clearly outlined the best way to use the P-38 against the lighter, more nimble Japanese fighters. MacDonald was so impressed, he sent it up to V Fighter Command, where it was reproduced and distributed throughout New Guinea and Australia.
It was a small win for Tommy in an otherwise dismal year. As operations officer, he drafted the flight schedules that were then tweaked and approved by the squadron commander. He tried to make sure the missions were flown equally and the men received days off. But sooner or later, most everyone would get cheesed off at their name on the duty roster. McGuire made a point of flying as often as he could, usually taking the longest and most uncomfortable missions in part because he did not want to be accused of cherry-picking milk runs. Also, while a dark horse in the ace race, he still wanted his shot at the title.
The Japanese refused to cooperate with that. The group was seeing less and less of the enemy as spring began. The air battles over Wewak, Rabaul, and Hollandia took a steady toll on the 5th, no doubt, but they were far more devastating to the Japanese. Now their air units in New Guinea were on their last legs, making fewer appearances. Tommy McGuire simply ran out of opportunities. No matter how much he flew—and sometimes he flew sixty hours a month or more—he rarely saw an enemy aircraft.
At times, his frustration boiled over. He’d actually flown on the April 3, 1944, mission to Hollandia where Bong scored his twenty-fifth kill. He never engaged the enemy that day. He was up again on April 12, on the same raid as Bong, and missed that fight as well. Being in the air while Bong was racking his score and he didn’t even have a chance to shoot at anything was bad enough. But the favored treatment Bong and Lynch and Kearby had all appeared to receive from the high command outraged him. After Bong broke Rickenbacker’s record, he vented to some of the other pilots in the 431st. To Tommy, the race was rigged.
Perhaps Tommy’s outburst was fueled by his physical health. He flew two more missions after the twelfth with a persistent headache and aching lower back. He grew sensitive to light, and a rash broke out across the trunk of his body. By the fifteenth, he was too sick to fly. A raging fever set in. Pain-racked and sometimes delirious, the medical staff diagnosed him with typhus. He missed the rest of the month, including the mission on April 16, which would forever be known as “Black Thursday.” Bad weather set in over Allied bases that day, after a maximum-effort strike was launched against Hollandia. Forty-six planes went down, most out of fuel when their crews couldn’t find a friendly field in the torrential rain. The 475th lost six pilots that day, two of whom were from McGuire’s squadron. It is quite possible that a bone-breakingly painful bacterial infection saved McGuire’s life.
He recovered surprisingly quickly, just in time to move with the rest of the 475th and 49th Fighter Groups up to Hollandia, which MacArthur’s 41st Infantry Division captured on April 21. The invasion there totally redefined the war in New Guinea while supercharging the drive on the Philippines. It was a huge leap west along the New Guinea coast, striking deep into the Japanese rear areas with such surprise that most of the enemy force at Hollandia fled into the jungle as the American troops came ashore.
There were five airfields around Hollandia, which the 41st Division quickly captured. Engineers set to work bulldozing hundreds of wrecked Japanese aircraft out of the way so the fields could be put back into operational service. MacArthur wanted to end the New Guinea campaign as soon as possible. Another great leap westward was in store, but to pull it off, he needed his best ’38 squadrons as far forward as possible.
The Knights and the rest of the 49th Fighter Group made the jump to Hollandia in early May. MacDonald led the 475th in at about the same time. The two rival groups were colocated for the first time here in this former Japanese base.
They found the place a horror show. Some of the Forty-Niners discovered a brothel where Southeast Asian “comfort women” were raped daily by Japanese troops. The brothel was a bacchanal of misery. Broken condoms, blood and gore, filth. The place was burned to the ground. But what happened to the comfort women? Most were found beyond a garbage dump, butchered and stacked in a Dantean display of depravity.
In 1942, a group of American female nurses had elected to stay behind on Corregidor Island in Manila Bay after the rest of the Allied army on Luzon surrendered at Bataan. Most of those nurses ended up at Santo Tomas Internment Camp, but some simply vanished. At Hollandia, the Americans discovered what happened to at least two of them. They’d been forced into sexual slavery by Japanese officers, who took the women with them to whatever duty station they were assigned. These American female officers became their playthings. For two years, their lives were a nightmare of rape and abuse. They were forcibly addicted to narcotics, which made them more pliant. Nineteen of those women were taken to Hollandia. Two were found alive near the brothel. Al Blum, a photoreconnaissance Lightning pilot, wrote of them in his diary, noting they were “half crazy from drugs and dope.” And, no doubt, trauma.
Near one of the airfields, Americans discovered the Japanese had massacred a group of Korean construction workers. Their bodies were dumped into trenches not far from where the orgy of violence against the comfort women took place. When the Americans found them, their corpses were bloated from the tropical heat, covered in flies and other insects. The stench was indescribable. The pilots who went to look at the sight were sickened and shocked. Their war was largely antiseptic and removed from the killing. At Hollandia, they were surrounded by the worst sights and smells imaginable.
While the pilots moved into tents amid the wreckage and horrors, Allied intelligence teams searched the Japanese planes and the dead for any bits of information. They discovered the landings there destroyed the last remaining Japanese fighter units in the area. The 68th, 78th, and 33rd Sentais were among the outfits totally destroyed, their surviving pilots and ground crew put to flight to face starvation—and cannibalism—in the jungle. The destruction of Japanese airpower in the Southwest Pacific was nearly complete.
The intel teams also discovered the body of a Japanese major. When his swollen corpse was searched, a photograph was found that would soon become one of the iconic images of the war. It depicted a group of Japanese soldiers and aviators watching as an officer raised his Samurai sword to decapitate a bound, blindfolded Australian commando named Leonard Siffleet. It was one of the only depictions ever found of the fate accorded to thousands of Allied servicemen who fell into Japanese hands during the Pacific War. The photo was published in Life magazine and in newspapers around the world as evidence of the savagery that defined the Japanese conduct of the war.
For the pilots at Hollandia, these discoveries stripped away whatever shreds of mercy remained toward the Japanese. As one pilot in the 49th Fighter Group later recalled, “There was about as much humanity in a bunch of Japanese as a swarm of fire ants.” Hollandia reminded the men why they were fighting. With grim determination, they carried the war to the enemy with even more resolve.
In early May, MacDonald went to see McGuire. The 431st’s commander was set to rotate home on leave after more than a year of service in theater. Though the pilots in the squadron still took issue with McGuire’s personality on the ground, everyone respected him as an administrator and combat pilot. He may have been obsessed with his personal score, but he never let that obsession trump his real purpose in New Guinea: fighting as part of a team as he helped to run it.
MacDonald didn’t like McGuire much personally either. The two could not have been more different characters. Yet, when it came time to select a new squadron leader, he decided McGuire was up to the task. He’d seen enough of McGuire to know the young pilot possessed one of the sharpest minds he’d encountered. Tommy was always two steps ahead of everyone else’s thinking process. He sometimes finished people’s thoughts because he grew impatient waiting for them to catch up to him. In the air, this translated to an aviator who could think ahead of his aircraft, and think ahead of the fight as it unfolded. He could anticipate where others could only react. He multitasked in such moments, leading and fighting while staying aware of the swirling chaos around him. It made him a tactical genius, something reflected in the manual he’d submitted to MacDonald earlier in the spring. Those things counted a lot more than McGuire’s obnoxious personality on the ground. Command was not based on a popularity contest but on who could best do the job of taking it to the enemy and keeping his guys alive. More than one 431st pilot said, “In the air, I would have followed McGuire anywhere. On the ground, I couldn’t get away from him fast enough.”
On May 3, MacDonald made it official and gave the 431st to the former castaway from the Flying Knights. He was promoted to major shortly after that. Twenty-three years old now, he was a field grade with his own squadron. He set about running it with ruthless efficiency and a rigid devotion to regulations. He was hard on the men, pushing them as intensely as he pushed himself. In fact, some in the squadron later recalled his asshole quotient increased after he took command, making him less popular than ever.
It didn’t matter. He worked furiously to help the green replacement pilots get up to speed. He personally flew with many of them to assess their skills. If he didn’t like what he saw, he told them. This was a butcher’s war, and there was no place for weakness in McGuire’s squadron. As McGuire got the feel for his new leadership role, MacDonald was there to mentor him, offer counsel, and guide him along. Though they mixed like oil and water, MacDonald knew Tom was a pure tiger in the air.
McGuire never fit in as a peer and was always most comfortable when in a position of superiority to those around him. It was part of the fuel that drove him to be the best at whatever he was doing—be it playing clarinet or shooting down Japanese. Now, as the senior officer in the 431st, he didn’t have to. He was the man who rode herd on the rest of the team, who used the natural barrier of rank to keep distance between himself and the other pilots. It was as much a defense against rejection as it was military propriety. It was also his way of insulating himself from the grief when somebody didn’t return. For a man with such an extraordinarily prickly personality, he remained deeply emotional. The responsibility for their well-being weighed heavily on him. At times as operations officer, when pilots failed to return, he took it personally, as if he had sent them to their deaths by selecting them for the day’s flight roster. The squadron’s first sergeant talked to him about it, seeing at times it was eating away at McGuire. When he pointed out that somebody would be filling in those duty rosters whether he did it or not, McGuire nodded and agreed. Then he added, “But it doesn’t make it any easier.”
The rank and position of authority gave him the distance he needed to keep functioning. He’d never be one of the guys—he was always the kid looking in at the warmth of friendship and bonds with a mix of puzzled resentment and envy. Now, he didn’t even need to try. His place was at the top.
As he led the 431st, he wanted two things out of the experience. Most importantly, he wanted the squadron to continue to build on its success. Personally, he thirsted to beat Bong’s record. He had arrived in theater in 1943, when Dick was already a triple ace. He’d had a rocky journey since then, but he made the most of every opportunity. He knew he was the better leader, better administrator, and better combat pilot. He wanted the world to know it. Those things may have been true, but Bong was the better hero for home front consumption. Kenney knew it. Whitehead knew it. Tommy McGuire, the kid from the broken home who never found a way to connect, did not.
Two days after leading the 431st to Hollandia, McGuire’s squadron escorted a B-24 raid against Biak Island. Biak was a volcanic spit of land jutting out of Cenderawasih Bay on the western end of New Guinea. The Japanese had built an airfield complex there, and MacArthur planned to seize it as the last major jump in the New Guinea campaign. Take Biak, and Kenney’s pilots could support the Navy’s Central Pacific drive with long-range bombing strikes against Japanese bases in the Palau Islands. More important, Biak would give Kenney a springboard to the southern Philippines. But first, it had to be captured, a task that fell to the 41st Infantry Division.
The Japanese defended Biak with over twelve thousand men and dozens of Zero fighters the Imperial Navy redeployed to the theater after the post-Hollandia collapse of the Japanese Army Air Force. The Army’s units were shredded at Wewak and dying on the vine, or scattered and disorganized on primitive strips in westernmost New Guinea. They would offer only feeble resistance in the final months of the campaign.
As McGuire led the 431st to Biak at high altitude, the squadron encountered four Japanese fighters. The ace led his men down in a slashing attack, taking deflection shots at one Oscar before climbing away and returning for another run. Five months he’d been waiting for this opportunity, and he was not going to blow it. As he reentered the fight, he got behind one of the Japanese fighters and closed the range. Minimal deflection, perfect setup. He pulled the trigger on his control yoke and felt the vibration of his cannon and four machine guns. The Japanese fighter burst into flames, spewing oil, which splattered onto McGuire’s windscreen and obscured his view. The fighter fell into the sea, witnessed by other men in the fight.
Two days later, during another escort mission, this time to a Japanese base at Manokwari, McGuire’s men tangled with four Japanese interceptors they identified as Nakajima Ki-44 Shokis. This was a late-generation radial engine Army Air Force fighter designed as a fast-climbing bomber destroyer. Till then, the Japanese had deployed them only in the Dutch East Indies and the China-Burma-India theater. They were faster than even the latest Ki-43 models and could dive almost as quickly as the P-38.
Numbers and pilot quality made all the difference that day, though it could have been an ugly disaster since the Ki-44s got the drop on the Americans for a change. Patrolling high above the P-38 top cover, they dove to the attack from McGuire’s three o’clock. At eighteen thousand feet, the Americans were used to seeing the Japanese below them, not above. The sudden attack surprised McGuire, and for a moment he didn’t react or issue any orders.
But the Japanese had made a fatal mistake. Instead of hitting the 431st first, diving through the squadron and continuing after the bombers, their leader went straight after the B-24s. They blew past the 431st right in front of them, which put their tails to McGuire’s men. A split second later, McGuire recovered from his surprise and the squadron skinned tanks and dove after the Japanese.
Tommy caught up to the Japanese, picked out a Ki-44, and hosed it down. His first burst flayed its wings and fuselage, sending up hit sparks across its aluminum skin. A moment later, the aircraft exploded right in front of Tommy. The blast sent the pilot flailing upward—McGuire saw him clearly as he sailed upward over the roiling explosion. As he fell, he deployed a parachute. Tommy had never seen a Japanese pilot hit the silk. The man drifted down into Cenderawasih Bay.
The rest of the Japanese pressed after the bombers. That day, the Flying Knights were flying close cover for the B-24s. They caught the remaining Ki-44s and destroyed three of them. The others fled.
In two days of combat, McGuire ran his score to eighteen kills, which tied him with Jay Robbins as leading active ace in New Guinea. MacArthur’s press corps ignored him. The people back home had no idea there was another contender for the crown.