June 26, 1944
Hollandia, New Guinea
Charles MacDonald floated on his back in the little stream that ran behind the 475th’s camp and reveled in the cool water. It wasn’t even noon and the temperature hung just below eight-six degrees, with so much humidity that the men sweated through their khakis in a matter of minutes. They all smelled foul—though Tommy McGuire’s funk was legendarily awful—and the humidity ensured they all battled heat rashes, jungle rot, crotch rot, and even fungus in their ears. The longer they wore headphones on missions, the more likely they’d return with something sprouting in their earholes.
Showers had yet to be built near enough to the 475th’s camp to make it worthwhile to use them, so the men got clean in the stream. Not that this was always such a great idea. Who knew what lay upstream in a place still dotted with the rotting corpses of their enemy?
Mac long since learned to conceal his emotions from his men. He came across as even-keeled. Few ever saw him truly angry. He’d laugh, but not the all-in sort of belly laughing that Wally Jordan could elicit from Gerald Johnson. But if somebody were to look closer, really look into Mac’s eyes, they would see what he could not conceal. There was a darkness in him, a profound and soul-weary sadness that his iron self-discipline kept off the rest of his face. Was it being separated from his wife and infant son? The baby had been born after he left for New Guinea, so he’d never seen his boy. Or was it the onus of command? Sending boys barely men to their death day after day took a toll on anyone. Or was there some greater life event that left Mac clouded with that darkness? Nobody knew, and nobody asked. Those who didn’t look closely enough or lacked the emotional intelligence to see deeper into their commander chalked it up to aloofness. The professional officer’s reserve while surrounded by men just in for the duration. That sadness didn’t elude everyone. P. J. Dahl saw it. And when he could, he quietly looked after his commander as he had back in Sydney when the partying and women made Mac so uncomfortable.
He scrubbed himself in the stream’s lazy current, an awkward smile on his face. Where Johnson and Bong possessed warm smiles, Mac was cursed with the uncomfortable grin of an introvert. He always looked ill at ease, especially in front of the camera. Still, he was a handsome, trim, and tall man, though his longish hair was prematurely receding. Stress and genes were the curse of many out there in New Guinea.
He finished washing, taking his time to dry off, and put on a freshly laundered set of khakis. In minutes, he was already sweating through the fabric, feeling the funk and film of slime that defined life in the primeval tropics. Boots on now, he traipsed through the half-dried mud back to camp. In New Guinea, it was either pouring rain or had just rained with the spongy ground drying out, or was so dry that sheets of dust blew through the camp, coating everyone. Their sweat was like glue to that powdery dirt. Staying clean was an impossible task, so the interlude between feeling human again and feeling filthy lasted minutes, at most.
He reached the command shack, opened the screen door, and sat down with his deputy group commander, Meryl “Smitty” Smith. Neither was flying this day, though the 432nd Squadron was out escorting the new A-26 Invader strafer bombers the 3rd Attack Group had just received.
The two officers knocked out some admin work, then settled down to wait for the boys to return. Smitty and Mac often played checkers together, and they broke out the board to pass the time. Overhead, the sound of a P-38 filled the air. A lone Lightning usually meant a mechanical abort, so few in the camp paid it any mind that day—at least until it landed.
At the airstrip, the P-38 swung into the pattern and touched down gently, kicking up a swell of dust behind its tricycle landing gear. The ground crews waiting the return of their planes did a double take. The Lightning’s nose was decorated with twenty-eight Japanese kill flags. Everyone knew Bong’s plane, but they also knew the ace had been gone for more than a month. Was he back?
The Lightning reached one of the 475th Squadron’s flight lines, but the ground crew waved him off and wouldn’t let him park. The pilot turned the plane and taxied off, finding a spot elsewhere. Curious onlookers watched as a lanky, tall pilot unfolded himself out of the cockpit. No way was his silhouette mistaken for the fireplug of Bong’s shape.
Who was this guy?
The pilot shucked off his helmet, revealing a balding head. He was middle-aged, handsome in a low-key way. He looked around at the planes parked nearby, eyes roaming across the nose art of bombers and fighters alike. They were vulgar to him. Appalling, really, especially one nearby craft named Fertile Myrtle. He judged the naked woman painted on the nose by the ground crew with the eye of a moralist and the rich Eastern elite’s appreciation for art. They were crude and pornographic. He wrote later in his diary how the sight of the aircraft painted like that “nauseated” him.
Not long after landing, he made his way to Charles MacDonald’s headquarters shack, where he knocked on the screen door. Mac and Smitty were locked in their game of checkers, hunched over the board, and lost in thought.
Absently, Mac said, “Come on in.”
The tall man entered, Mac and Smitty stood up, half listening as he introduced himself and shook their hands. The visitor wore no insignia, just a plain set of khakis. Mac mentally brushed him off as yet another civilian visiting the front without a clue to the nature of combat flying.
Mac and Smitty sat back down and returned to their game of checkers. The new guy looked on, a little nonplussed by their reaction. This was anything but what he expected. After all, he was the most famous American.
“I’ve come to learn about two-engine fighter operations. I’ve been sent by General Hutchison,” the visitor said.
Mac groaned inside. He’d seen tech reps and civilian know-it-alls blow through New Guinea before. None had asked questions that even hinted at a basic knowledge of combat flying. Since they were sent by generals on high down to them, they were fools who needed to be suffered. Nobody wanted to talk to them.
The game resumed. Smitty, content with letting his commander handle this stupid intrusion, stayed quiet. The newcomer looked on. Mac gave him side-eye, assessing his rank-less uniform. No wings. Not of the brotherhood.
At length, Mac finally asked, “What did you say your name was, and what phases of our operations are you interested in?”
The visitor said, “Lindbergh. I’m very much interested in comparing range, firepower, and your airplane’s general characteristics with those of single-engine fighters.”
Mac made a move on the checkers board, then considered this response as he waited for Smitty’s turn. These were all things that would be really tough to explain to a non-aviator. Flying was the only way to show him.
“Yes.”
This surprised the quiet CO. He looked up and studied the visitor more closely. Blue eyes, tan face, full lips. “Wait. Not the Charles Lindbergh?” he said at length.
“That’s my name.”
Mac must have nearly fallen out of his chair.
What the hell is Lucky Lindy doing in my shack, and why didn’t anyone from higher up tell me to expect him?
Smitty’s eyes rose from the checkers board, and he gaped. They went from mild annoyance at the intrusion to starstruck. Lindy was nearly every pilot’s childhood hero, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic. His airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, was a symbol of their generation.
A few minutes worth of conversation confirmed his bona fides as one of the brotherhood. Lindbergh had been an Army Air Service fighter pilot long before he was made famous by the Atlantic flight, the kidnapping and murder of his infant son, and the highly controversial German-leaning, anti-Semitic speeches he gave as part of the prewar Isolationist movement that opposed giving aid to England. It was the latter that prompted President Roosevelt to block Lindy’s return to the Army Air Force. He’d resigned his commission as a lieutenant colonel in the reserves back in 1939. As retribution for opposing the president’s Lend-Lease program, he would not be allowed to wear the uniform again.
Lindbergh found other ways to serve. He helped set up bomber factories at places like Willow Run. He performed high-altitude experiments in P-47s. Currently, he served as a tech rep for United Aircraft Corporation, working to make sure the F4U Corsairs were optimally employed in the Pacific. He’d quietly departed the States for the Solomon Islands earlier in the spring, flying ground-attack missions with several Marine units. If the president didn’t want him in the Army Air Force, fine. He’d found another way to serve his country and get into combat.
That said, he didn’t have any business being in New Guinea. He’d leveraged his fame to get the Navy to issue him orders to report to General Whitehead. Once in Australia, he talked his way into New Guinea, where Wurtsmith gave him an hour’s worth of flight training in a P-38 at Nadzab. His excuse coming forward like this was that he wanted to study twin-engine fighter operations, but the fact was, the company he worked for had no such fighter type in production or in the development pipeline.
He was freelancing, pure and simple. There were no Japanese fighters left around the Solomon Islands, a fact that disappointed him. Though he’d been an aeronautical engineer for years, under his double-breasted suit beat a fighter pilot’s heart. More than anything, he didn’t want to watch the war from the sidelines without getting a shot at air-to-air combat. It didn’t matter to him that he was a civilian; pure and simple—he came to New Guinea to shoot down Japanese planes.
Mac had no idea how Lindbergh had talked his way into the theater. Instead of going to General Kenney’s HQ, he leveraged his prewar friendship with Whitehead and went to see him to get the green light. Whitehead turned out not to be expecting him, and was away from his HQ anyway, but Lindy still was able to get the support of Wurtsmith and Hutchison to reach Mac’s little command shack at Hollandia. Had Mac known this was how his visitor had played the game, he may not have said what came next.
“If you really want to know what we can do, the best way to find out is to fly with us on some missions.”
Lindy grinned and replied, “That’s just what I want to do.”
Mac asked him, “We’ve arranged for a four-plane anti-boredom flight for tomorrow to Jefman and Samate. Can you go?”
“Yes, indeed.”
As the squadrons returned from their assigned missions that afternoon, the pilots drifted into the shack as word spread Lucky Lindy was in their midst. Tommy McGuire, who’d hero-worshipped Lindbergh ever since he was a young boy, rushed to meet him as well. An impromptu bull session began as the pilots warmed to Lindbergh’s presence. He was of them, an older-generation fighter pilot, to be sure, but he’d flown the modern planes and spoke the language. They spoke candidly of the war as night fell, discussing everything from technical aspects of the P-38 to the fights they’d had with the Japanese.
The men told Lindy they would get him kitted out. He would need a pistol, jungle survival gear, and other equipment. McGuire added, “It helps to take along a few chocolate bars. This target is six hundred miles away and it is a mighty long trip going and coming.”
Lindbergh listened intently, then excused himself to go back to General Hutchison’s headquarters, where he was supposed to bunk down. As soon as he left, Smitty looked at Mac and exclaimed, “My God, he shouldn’t go on a combat mission! When did he fly the Atlantic? Must have been 1927 and he was about twenty-five then. That would make him at least forty-two years old now, and that’s a lot too old for this kind of stuff.”
Mac, who like the other pilots was probably more than a little starstruck, replied, “Well, he doesn’t look that old.”
Then he turned to McGuire and asked, “Tom, will you fly on his wing so in case anything turns up you can take care of him?”
The idea of riding herd on his childhood hero tickled Tommy, who answered, “Sure thing. I’d like to see how the old boy does.”
After dinner, Smitty and Mac drove up to Hutchison’s headquarters shack to talk the mission over. They suggested to Lindy that he stay with the 475th that night since the mission would require a predawn launch. Lindbergh agreed and headed back with them. They settled in at the group’s headquarters shack, chatting amiably about Lindy’s role with United Aircraft Corporation and his time working on the F4U Corsair program. Many of the group’s pilots arrived to join in the skull session, letting their guard down as Lindbergh spoke their language. They thought Lindbergh was in their corner, one of them. He wasn’t. He listened to their tales and was shocked at the way they conducted the war out here in New Guinea. His was a civilian’s vision of a clean and honorable war, where the enemy needed to be killed, but their essential humanity must always be respected.
When the pilots talked about the way the Japanese shot American crews who had taken to their parachutes, some of the 475th’s pilots said they felt no qualms about doing it to the Japanese in return. “The Japs started it. If they want to play that way, we can too,” one of the pilots told Lindy.
The conversation lasted well past midnight. At one point, Lindbergh asked about the three silk Japanese battle flags that hung in the shack. They were war trophies, taken from the bodies of dead Japanese soldiers. Lindbergh didn’t like that. He liked it even less when the men explained the going rates for such booty. A Samurai sword could fetch upward of seven hundred dollars, while the battle flags went for only about thirty.
That chatter soon drifted into a discussion of prisoners of war. Lindbergh was shocked to hear how often American soldiers refused to take prisoners, shooting them instead. The pilots shared gossip that widespread massacres took place in other areas of New Guinea. The pilots talked of some of the Japanese atrocities that prompted such retaliation, which Lindbergh saw only as a weak justification for murder.
The next morning, Mac gave a final briefing to the flight. They’d go patrol from Mawi Bay to the Japanese airstrips around Jefman Island. With luck, they’d perhaps catch a few Japanese planes in the air. Lindbergh was eager and didn’t tell the Angels that Whitehead’s HQ wanted him to stay away from any aerial encounter with the enemy.
They took off and sped west, climbing with the rising sun on their shoulders. Mac kept a close eye on Lindy, who flew rock-solid formation with the rest of the guys. They found no Japanese planes, just a lot of accurate antiaircraft fire. On the way home, they barge hunted and shot up several vessels.
That night, after the mission, the men sat around with Lindy again, who made no pretense at what he wanted. “I’d certainly like to see some Jap planes in the air, but you fellows seem to have knocked the Jap Air Force out of the sky.”
McGuire started laughing. Opportunity was what all true fighter pilots wanted. It was another data point to the pilots that Lindy was one of them. “Stick with us and you’ll wear diamonds. We have slow periods, but we keep moving up into them, and we should start striking Ceram and Halmahera pretty soon. We’re sure to run into Zeroes there.”
Lindbergh didn’t fly the next day. Instead, he grabbed his .45 and wandered off into the jungle to explore. None of the 475th pilots wanted to join him—they’d run into too many Japanese stragglers to consider that safe. They warned him, but he ignored their advice and headed off to explore.
That night, talk turned to the war and its conduct again. Lindbergh’s sense of moral propriety was again shaken by what he heard. He confided in his diary, “I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, the courage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life.”
As he was getting ready for bed, one of the pilots chose that moment to show him his personal stash of captured booty. When the group had first reached Hollandia, three Japanese stragglers crept into their camp area one night. Accounts differ as to what happened, but according to Lindbergh, the pilots used their sidearms to kill them. They searched the bodies and found a silk Japanese flag, currency, some letters and postcards. They also found some personal photographs. As Lindy looked them over, he was struck by how young the Japanese soldiers in them were. The officer showing him this stuff thought he’d be impressed. Lindbergh may have shown appreciation, but his internal monologue was far different. “I don’t blame them for what they did. What I do blame them for is the attitude with which they kill and their complete lack of respect for the dignity of death.”
In a war where the enemy routinely killed, tortured, and sometimes ritually ate Allied prisoners and New Guinea villagers, Lindbergh’s sense of Stateside propriety underscored the realities of extended combat experience. Those who survived the daily trauma of this vicious jungle fight became desensitized to the fighting. How could there be respect for the dead enemy when Aussies and Americans alike found their people bound, gagged with their own genitals, eyes cut out, and skinned alive? Combat dehumanized everyone. Lindbergh was a visitor. He judged the men through a lens that in a pristine world of Geneva Conventions and honorable treatment was perhaps appropriate. The war in New Guinea was one without mercy, and the truth was, Lindy’s view of conflict probably was out of place in every theater, with every nation. This was a national war for survival, and war made men’s hearts ugly. Instead of understanding, he was repelled and judged his nation’s warriors very badly. Yet he gave no hint of that at the time, as he chatted amicably with the 475th’s members. In truth, he was milking his fame to get the opportunities he wanted in the air.
On July 3, Lindy flew with Mac again on a squadron-level patrol. They found no Japanese planes and took to strafing luggers and barges again—the same sort of thing that got Lynch killed and Bong badly shot up. During the strafing runs, several of the pilots reported critical fuel states and headed for home. Lindy’s wingman also ran low on fuel. He pulled up over the strafing patterns and orbited, waiting for the rest of the planes to finish as he tried to maximize his fuel economy. When Lindbergh realized he was gone, he radioed him and asked how much gas he had left.
“About a hundred and seventy-five gallons.”
Lindbergh did the math. He had plenty left to get home safely, if he managed it well. He told the pilot to set his engine RPMs to sixteen hundred, set his mixture to “auto lean,” and open his manifold pressure. The young aviator did as Lindy suggested and made it home with seventy gallons to spare. When the group checked on Lindy’s tanks, they found he had 260 still in his tanks.
That night, Lindbergh talked of his fuel-management strategies to the other pilots. At first, Mac thought the idea was crazy. Leaning out the fuel mixture while keeping the RPMs low and the throttles advanced seemed like a perfect way to foul spark plugs and damage the engine’s valves. Isn’t this how so many Stateside accidents were caused?
Two days later, MacDonald went to see Lindbergh’s plane. The group’s mechanics had stripped the engines to see how much damage his fuel strategy inflicted. To everyone’s astonishment, the plugs were clean and the valves remained in perfect condition.
That sold MacDonald completely. He became an evangelist of Lindy’s technique, realizing that it could extend their range so significantly that it could have strategic implications on the drive to the Philippines.1
Before Lindbergh could fly another mission, word reached Kenney and MacArthur in Australia that Lindbergh had sneaked into combat in New Guinea. Reports drifted into their HQs that he was out hunting with the 475th. Kenney ordered this stopped at once. Colonel Morrissey, the deputy commander of V Fighter Command, flew at once from Nadzab to Hollandia to talk the situation over with General Hutchison. Then he called over to the 475th and told Lindbergh to cease flying combat missions immediately.
He flew back to Nadzab, where a few days later Lindbergh received a message from MacArthur ordering him to his headquarters in Australia. When he got to Brisbane, Kenney met him and was in a mood. He was blunt with Lindy and made no bones about the Navy’s order sending him to report to Whitehead’s HQ. It was pure subterfuge, and Kenney knew it. He told Lindy that nobody at his headquarters or MacArthur’s even knew he was there until reports filtered back that he was flying combat missions with the 475th.
There was an aspect to international law that Lindbergh, the moral purist on such things, had not considered. As a civilian flying combat, he had no legal status as a combatant. The closest comparison would have been if he’d picked up a rifle in the Philippines and fought as a guerrilla. The Japanese handled such situations with particular brutality. Kenney made it clear: Lindbergh would be beheaded if he fell into enemy hands, a victim of the dehumanizing barbarity he’d recoiled at since he arrived in theater.
Lindbergh sweet-talked Kenney, telling him he’d not meant to cause anyone any trouble. He thought his paperwork was in order. The contrition cooled Kenney down, who then relented and said he could go back to New Guinea, provided he didn’t fly any more combat missions. Lindy had no desire to go up there just to sit around and told the general as much. Kenney always had a weak spot for those who wanted to get into the fight. He sympathized because he was one of them. But he knew his place and his value to the enemy if he went down and was captured, so aside from very rare occasions, Kenney kept himself to where he belonged—running MacArthur’s air war. Yet, he still had moments where all he wanted was to strap on a leather helmet and go after the enemy, as he had in his youth.
So he put in a good word to MacArthur’s chief of staff, Gen. Richard Sutherland, and arranged a meeting. Lindbergh played his trump card with the general, telling him he could extend the range of the P-38s in New Guinea to almost two thousand miles. He saw no reason why the P-38s couldn’t operate 750 miles from base, fight at full power, then return home with fuel to spare.
Sutherland immediately saw the potential in this, and he took Lindbergh to meet MacArthur. As Lindbergh laid out what he could do, offering to return to New Guinea to show all the Lightning squadrons this technique, MacArthur grew excited: “It would be a gift from heaven if that could be done.”
Lindy got his ticket back to combat. In later years, accounts of Lindbergh’s time in New Guinea focus on the value his fuel-economy techniques provided to Kenney’s Air Force. They often assume that’s why he went to the SWPA in the first place. In reality, it was pure chance that he discovered the 475th didn’t use the P-38 to the edge of its endurance out of fear of damaging engines, which were in short supply. He returned to New Guinea to teach the other squadrons his technique, as he promised MacArthur. He flew some milk runs with the outfits, who were very conservative with their distinguished guest. But what he really wanted was a chance to get a kill. On July 20, 1944, with Colonel Morrissey as his shadow, Lindy returned to the 475th Fighter Group.
The outfit had just made the jump to Owi Island, next to Biak. The 41st Infantry Division had gone ashore there at the end of May, hoping to capture the airfield complex in a matter of days. Instead, a long and bloody fight ensued in the volcanic ridges overlooking the strip. The GIs faced fierce resistance from the Japanese, who dug out natural volcanic caves and honeycombed the hills with underground passages and concealed fighting positions. The 41st took shocking casualties in frontal assaults against these positions. When another division arrived to help turn the tide, they suffered tremendously as well. The men went without food and water resupply, and some were trapped and surrounded by Japanese troops, who infiltrated around them through the catacombs below. It was one of the most savage, close-quarters battles fought in the Southwest Pacific, rivaled perhaps only by Iwo Jima. In the end, of the twelve thousand Americans thrown into the fight, almost five hundred were killed in action, another twenty-four hundred were wounded, and thirty-five hundred more went down with scrub typhus.
But the airfields were cleared. Even as the fighting still raged in the hills around Mokmer Airdrome, both the 49th and the 475th moved up to use Biak as a forward base against the last Japanese outposts before the southern Philippines.
Lindbergh wanted to see the enemy up close. At Biak, he got the chance. He convinced McGuire, MacDonald, Smitty, and Maj. Claude Stubbs, the group’s supply officer, to investigate the Japanese positions in the cliffs above their airstrip. The pilots were not in favor of this, but Lindbergh had a hold on them. If he was up for it, they’d go too.
They drove a jeep to the base of a steep hillside, dismounted, and began walking. Japanese corpses littered the area. Blown apart by artillery, or ripped asunder by bullets, they lay sprawled in death poses, covered in flies and maggots. The smell was indescribable. In places, Lindbergh could see where GIs had pulled gold teeth from the corpses.
They crested a hill and made their way to a network of caves. As they walked, they came across a bomb crater filled with perhaps a half dozen Japanese dead. American troops had dumped their garbage on top of the corpses. Lindbergh stood at the crater’s lip, looking down at the dead men covered in trash, and felt a profound sense of moral outrage. Later, he wrote in his diary, “I’ve never felt more ashamed of my people.”
They continued on, passing open graves where American troops had dumped Japanese bodies. Finally, they reached the entrance to the cave Lindbergh wanted to explore. At the mouth, they found a shattered artillery piece concealed by logs. A headless Japanese soldier had been lashed to a pole, decapitated by his own people when he tried to surrender. Lindbergh made no mention in his diary of that spectacle.
They crept inside the cave. More bodies. These men had died by American flamethrower attack, their corpses black and charred. Mac and the other men of the 475th wanted no part of this exploration. They’d seen enough of death and horrors; to be a tourist in such a hellish place made zero sense to them. None of them had even brought flashlights on this escapade, thinking it ludicrous to go inside.
Lindbergh was not to be dissuaded. As they stood in the cave, a spearpoint of light illuminating them from its entrance, the aviator produced a flashlight. He’d planned to go investigate deep into the system all along. Now he explained how he wanted to see the way the Japanese connected the tunnels with aboveground firing positions.
They pressed into the system, stepping over bleached bones, body fragments and broken equipment. Scattered rations, shoes, rifles, and ammunition lay everywhere. The threat of booby traps was on everyone’s mind. Still, Lindbergh persisted. Finally, MacDonald had had enough. He turned and left the cave. McGuire went with him, but Lindbergh discovered another tunnel, which he set off to explore with Smitty in tow.
Inside it, they found a makeshift hospital. A Japanese soldier, dead on a stretcher, attracted Lindbergh’s notice. He recorded the rumors surrounding this area in his diary that night, “This is the cave where the Japs reportedly tried to surrender and were told by our troops to ‘get the hell back in and fight it out.’”
It almost seemed that Lindbergh had picked this cave and took this journey to gather evidence of war crimes against American soldiers, with the men of the 475th his unwitting escorts. He had little interest in Japanese atrocities or their conduct, but he heaped scorn and moral outrage on his fellow Americans. Again and again, he wrote how he was “nauseated” by their behavior.
By the time he was finished with his exploration, night had fallen. The men drove back to the airfield, only to nearly be shot by the sentries defending it, who later told them there were still Japanese troops in those caves. Mac, the reek of rotting flesh thick on him, smiled bitterly. “They’re all dead. Believe me.”
After passing the checkpoint, the men headed for the nearest stream to scrub off the stench of the dead.