July 1944
Biak, New Guinea
Once Tommy McGuire got over being starstruck at the arrival of his childhood idol, his innate need to needle people and prove his dominance percolated to the surface. The other guys in the 475th had seen this from Tommy before; it was one of the reasons why he remained generally unpopular. Tommy’s needling was made especially sharp by the fact that he had a brilliant mind and keen grasp of a person’s psychological vulnerabilities, and he knew just where to stick the knife. With Lindbergh, he detected a quiet sense of superiority that some of the other pilots missed. He behaved like a member of the Eastern elite, and the comments he’d made in the late-night bull sessions convinced McGuire he needed to be knocked down a notch.
He began ordering Lindbergh around like a servant, asking him to fetch various items. Lindbergh did it, perhaps not wanting to stir up any further feathers. Already, Kenney and MacArthur were having second thoughts about allowing him to go back up to New Guinea. When he was slated to fly an escort mission to the Halmaheras on the twenty-fifth, the high command balked and forbade it. Then the mission was scrubbed by weather. Lindbergh knew his status was very tenuous. The technique he was supposed to be teaching wasn’t anything new: it was laid out in the P-38 tech manuals. As one pilot later said, “Lindbergh didn’t teach us anything a half-page memo couldn’t do.” It was just an excuse to get into combat.
So he suffered McGuire’s harassment and needled him back. Tommy was extremely superstitious about his five-hundred-hour cap. It was a filthy, crushed mess by July 1944, but he still wore it all the time. His ground crew knew to always have it waiting for him when he landed after a mission. One morning, Tommy ordered Lindbergh to fetch it for him. Lindy went off, found one far larger than Tommy’s, and delivered it in silence. Tommy put it on and looked ridiculous. Volley returned.
The next day, Lindy dared McGuire to go back up into the Japanese defenses overlooking Mokmer. They pushed on farther this time, beyond what Lindy thought were American lines until they found themselves in no-man’s land, armed only with their pistols. They found another cave, its entrance studded with machine gun nests. The ground was covered with debris. They stepped inside, going about a hundred feet into the system, noting the many galleries and passages leading off in different directions. At length, as the sun began to set, they came to their senses and withdrew from the area.
Lindbergh flew the escort mission to Halmahera the next morning, the 5th Air Force’s P-38s covering almost four dozen B-25s as they hit various targets. Lindy was well protected by the 475th and two of the leading aces in theater. McGuire scored his twenty-first kill that day, though Lindbergh saw no enemy aircraft. MacDonald now had eleven. The rank and file in the 475th were filled with outstanding pilots, aces, and aces-to-be. If a civilian had to be flying in combat, the 475th was the safest place for him.
The next morning, Lindbergh flew again with the 475th on a fighter sweep to the outlying islands of the Dutch East Indies. The last Japanese barrier between MacArthur and the southern Philippines stretched from Ambon Island north to Halmahera. Perhaps 150 Japanese fighters defended the area, but they were scattered, disorganized, poorly supplied, and totally outmatched by the ascendant 5th Air Force. Essentially, the P-38s were mopping up the last resistance on the edges of New Guinea, even as their infantry counterparts did the same in the jungles and caves below.
MacDonald led two flights in search of Japanese fighters that day. Danny Miller flew on his wing; Lindbergh led the second element with Ed “Fishkiller” Miller covering his six. The formation climbed to eighteen thousand feet, heading west as aircraft of the 9th Fighter Squadron, now equipped with P-38s again, made their way through the heavy overcast as well, bent on escorting a B-24 strike to Ambon Island. Wally Jordan led the Knights that day. Weather reconnaissance aircraft reported broken clouds over Ambon, so MacDonald decided to press on, even as the weather worsened along the way.
They reached Ceram Island in the clear, but stretches of overcast obscured vast sections of the view below them. No enemy planes in sight, though they increased speed to 250 miles an hour just in case there were interceptors lingering in the bulging clouds above them.
They followed Ceram’s south shore to a Japanese airstrip at Amahai, hoping to find some prey. The runway was bare. They were too high to see if there were any planes hiding in the revetments dotting the area around the field, so they continued on, patrolling past three more Japanese strips with the same result.
At last, MacDonald decided to call it a day. He led the two flights north and began to circle back for home.
Suddenly, the radio filled with excited chatter. Wally Jordan and the Knights stumbled across a pair of fixed-geared monoplanes they misidentified as Aichi D3A Val dive-bombers. In fact, they were Imperial Army Ki-51 Sonia light reconnaissance bombers that had taken off earlier on a search mission for two missing aircraft. Leading the pair was the commander of the 73rd Independent Chutai, Capt. Saburo Shimada. Seven P-38s dove on the two hapless Japanese. The plane flown by Shimada evaded every pass the Americans made. The excitement over the radio turned to frustration.
MacDonald led the 475th toward the fight, even as the Ki-51 continued to dodge and juke the 9th’s Lightnings.
“Can’t somebody shoot him down?” a frustrated Knight called.
“Goddamn! I’m out of ammunition.”
“The son of a bitch is making monkeys out of us!”
Mac called to the Knights and asked them their position. They didn’t answer, either too busy or uninterested in having the 475th horn in on their potential kills. Mac deduced they were probably back over Ceram, near Amahai Drome. He went off to get the 475th into the fight.
Mac and the other seven P-38s from the 475th reached Elpaputih Bay near Amahai just in time to see a pair of Flying Knights make another run at the Ki-51s. Jimmie Haislip, a 9th Squadron pilot, nailed one as it ran for the nearby overcast. The other, Shimada’s plane, broke hard for the airstrip. The sky over the nearby airstrip blossomed with antiaircraft bursts as Shimada’s fellow warriors did their best to help him.
The senior Japanese pilot threw the Ki-51 all over the sky, using its incredible agility and slow max speed to simply outfly the P-38 pilots as they made their trademark, 350-mile-an-hour slashing attacks. He finally ducked into a cloud, evading the last of the 9th Squadron attackers. Out of ammo, the Knights broke off the engagement and climbed for home.
MacDonald dove on Shimada’s Ki-51. The Japanese saw him coming and rolled into an incredibly tight left turn just as he got into firing range. Mac banked hard and took a split-second, high-deflection shot at Ki-51, knocking pieces off it. Then he went zooming past, racing for altitude to get into position for another pass.
Danny Miller, sticking three hundred yards behind Mac’s tail, couldn’t get his nose on the Sonia. Shimada dashed out of the way, and Miller pulled up after Mac after a short burst to get some gun camera film of the aircraft. That left Lindbergh and Fishkiller Miller closing on the Japanese plane.
Shimada suddenly went on the attack, holding his tight left turn until his nose was pointed straight at Lindy’s Lightning. The Ki-51 carried two 12.7mm machine guns in its cowling, pitiful firepower compared to the P-38s. Still, the Japanese held his course, guns blazing. Lindbergh opened fire. His 20mm tore pieces off the Sonia. It kept coming. Nose to nose now, they hurtled at each other, eating up the distance in seconds. The Lone Eagle held the trigger down, spraying the Sonia with bullets and shells. Still Shimada held course, even as his engine took hits and began to burn.
It looked to Mac and the other experienced pilots that Shimada intended to ram Lindy. Before they could call out a warning, Lindbergh realized it, too. They were too close. He yanked back on the control yoke. His Lightning leapt skyward. Shimada anticipated and pulled up, too, nose ablaze, Sonia trailing a long column of smoke.
Saburo Shimada missed killing America’s most famous hero by ten feet, maybe less. Lindbergh climbed out of the way as Shimada’s Sonia stalled and went into a spin. He and his rear gunner rode the plane all the way into the bay below. Neither man survived.
A civilian pilot had just killed two uniformed members of a military service engaged in active, legal combat operations against the United States. For a man who seemed obsessed with the illegal and immoral conduct of his fellow soldiers and aviators, Lindbergh had just entered a legal gray area himself. He didn’t give it any thought. More than anything, he wanted a chance to do it again.
Back at Biak, the pilots gathered to talk through what had happened. “The son of a bitch tried to ram me!” Lindbergh exclaimed. The pilots had never heard him swear before.
Miller told him that he saw his cannon shells hit the leading edge of one wing. As they talked it over, Lindbergh concluded he likely killed the pilot during the head-on pass.
That night, the men sat together talking over the day’s events. One of the group’s characters, Capt. Robert “Pappy” Cline, busted out a ukulele and began singing. Others joined in. Soon, even Lindbergh was singing:
Take me off the alert
I don’t want to get hurt
Oh my, I’m too young to die,
I just want to go home.
Lindbergh didn’t really want to go home, however. He wanted more kills and talked a lot about getting another crack at Japanese planes. MacDonald figured the chances of another fight to the west were pretty slim. One evening at the end of July, he was sitting in the group headquarters shack, losing a game of checkers to Lindbergh. The phone rang. Danny Miller, the 475th’s operations officer, reported in that the mission for the following morning would be an escort mission to Amboina. Medium bombers. If the weather was bad, they would go after Ceram instead.
“Okay, Danny, drop on over,” Mac told him before hanging up.
Before he returned to the checkers game, Mac’s eye caught the map adorning one wall of the shack. He looked it over, his mind racing. Six hundred miles north of Biak stretched the Palau Islands. These were in Japanese hands and reportedly heavily defended by fighters and bombers. He’d looked the area over many times over the past month, wanting to send fighters sweeps over Koror or Peleliu. But they were so far away, the ’38s would have too thin a margin to get home safely.
Except now they could fly almost a thousand miles each way, thanks to Lindbergh’s teachings. Mac looked over at Lindy and mentioned that they could get over there with the new techniques.
“We could go to Palau and stay at least an hour.”
Lindbergh brightened. “I’d certainly like to go if you can arrange it!”
Meryl Smith was doing chin-ups on a rafter beam, eavesdropping on the conversation. He cut in, “You might as well forget Palau. We’ve got a mission for tomorrow, remember?”
They talked over the merits of the target for tomorrow. Smith figured there’d be a good chance they’d get intercepted, but Mac disagreed. If they wanted air-to-air action, they’d have to go someplace else.
The next morning, as dawn broke over Biak, the 475th’s duty pilots lounged at the alert shack, waiting for the weather birds to report in over Ambon. Some dozed in chairs, others played checkers or cracked jokes in low voices. The phone buzzed. Mac snatched it up and listened. Weather delay. He passed the news to the pilots.
The delay ratcheted the tension up. The men hated this state of stasis, waiting as the minutes dragged by, never knowing if they’d go or stay. For some, they wondered if these would be among their final hours of life.
Lindbergh acted nervous. He made quick, jerky movements that caught Mac’s attention. The guy was always full of energy, but was there something more to this? The wait was probably getting to him, too.
An hour later, the phone buzzed, jarring a few of the pilots out of fitful sleep. Mac answered. Put it down and told his men the weather didn’t clear. The mission was scrubbed. He dismissed them, and they headed back to the group’s encampment. All except Smitty, Danny Miller, and Lindy.
“Well, what are we going to do?” asked Mac. “Do you want to go to Palau?”
He’d said it half jokingly, but the other three pilots wanted to do it. Mac talked it through. The weather would be bad for at least part of the flight. There were 154 fighters on multiple airfields in the island group. It could get really dicey. That said, Mac occasionally stole a page from his old group commander, Neel Kearby. He later wrote, “Throughout the New Guinea campaign, it had been a favorite pastime for some of us to take a four-ship flight and make a surprise attack on an unsuspecting Jap stronghold.”
As long as they didn’t get greedy, kept their altitude and speed up, they stood a good chance of doing some damage if the Japanese were flying. They still wanted to do it.
At 0927, they lifted off from Mokmer Drome, turned north, and began a slow climb to eight thousand feet. An hour later, they hit a solid wall of storm clouds. Mac turned left and looked for an opening as rain poured down below the clouds in shimmering sheets. The clouds themselves were laden, dark, and ominous. He considered scrubbing the mission.
A thinning in the cloud layer changed his mind. The flight tightened up. Danny flew practically on his wingtip, Lindy right behind, with Smitty pulling tail-end Charlie. Together, they plunged into the overcast. In seconds, they were consumed by milky darkness, their planes lashed with rain. They could barely make out each other’s wings, but they pushed on. Two minutes later, they emerged in a long valley flanked by cumulous clouds that towered thousands of feet above them.
They flew on, weaving in and out of the weather until they finally broke through it. Ahead and below, all they saw were cotton-ball clouds and the brilliant blue of the vast Pacific.
At noon, they sighted the Palau Islands, thanks to Mac’s exceptionally accurate dead reckoning. They climbed to fifteen thousand feet, passing over Peleliu as they made their way from airfield to airfield, hoping to catch some unsuspecting Japanese plane down low. But each airfield appeared empty.
Mac looked down at small boats running between the islands, then glanced east to see a wall of overcast just offshore. He began to have second thoughts about the whole endeavor.
What the hell am I doing here?
The question repeated in his brain like a soundtrack. No P-38s had been to Palau. Only heavy bombers and the Navy had visited the area, so the Japanese shouldn’t be expecting them, he reasoned.
But his mind would not quiet. He had good reasons to second-guess the mission. He’d not gotten approval from V Fighter Command. He had Lindbergh with him. They could run into numbers they couldn’t handle. Bad weather on the return flight could scatter them. The risks were extraordinary. They were out on a very thin limb.
Yet, the scene below seemed serene. They patrolled for twenty minutes, circling around the islands without seeing anything hostile. What felt incredibly risky grew boring. The whole thing looked like a wash instead of a bad call.
Mac did something uncharacteristic of him. He pushed his luck and decided to give the Japanese a wake-up call. He led the flight down in one of Neel Kearby’s classic spiraling shallow dives, building speed up without frosting over the windscreens. At eight thousand feet, the four Lightnings roared over Koror Town, the largest settlement in the Palau group. Three flak bursts blossomed around them.
The wake-up call was thus delivered. Yet nobody came up to play. Mac felt a wave of disappointment. This seemed like it would be fertile hunting ground. Instead, it was just another dry hole. They’d had months of those since Hollandia fell and Wewak was left to die on the vine.
They dove for the deck, gaining speed as they raced over Babelthuap, the biggest of Palau’s islands. The airfield looked empty, so Mac took the flight down the east coast to hunt for shipping. Off to their left, a long swatch of overcast darkened the area. The men kept their eyes on it as they dropped to fifty feet, lest they get bounced by some cagey Zeroes hiding up there.
They raced over a lagoon and mast-hopped over a long sailing yacht. Lindy saw its shocked crew staring up at their Lightnings as he blew over it. Then a decent target materialized. A small coastal convoy materialized ahead of them, chugging north as they sped south. The lead vessel, a lugger of perhaps four hundred tons, drew the entire flight’s fire. They shattered its bridge and set it afire.
On to the next one. Several thousand yards south, Mac could see another cargo carrier. He lined up on it, but noticed movement in the air at the southern edge of the convoy. Several thousand yards away, a pair of Japanese floatplanes cruised over the vessels, probably providing anti-submarine warfare support. MacDonald thought they looked like Rufes, the same float-equipped type of Zero that Gerald Johnson encountered over Kiska two years before.
Smitty saw them too and called, “Bandits! Two o’clock high!”
Mac replied, “Should be easy, but heads up.”
The floatplanes split up, one headed out to sea, diving for the water, while the other turned toward land with Mac chasing him.
In the third position, trailing the lead element by several hundred yards, Lindbergh apparently didn’t hear the radio chatter. He saw MacDonald and Danny Miller drop their external tanks. They splashed into the sea ahead of him even as both P-38s ahead of him suddenly banked right and began to climb.
That’s when he saw one of the floatplanes. MacDonald was charging after it as Lindy punched his tanks, switched to auto rich, increased the engine RPM to twenty-six hundred and gave the Allisons forty-five inches of manifold. The P-38 surged forward.
The Japanese pilot saw them coming and poured the coals on, trying to get to a nearby cloud before the Lightnings closed to firing range. He almost made it. MacDonald caught up to him quickly and pinned his gun sight pipper on the Rufe. The cannon and fifties made short work of the Japanese plane. The wing tanks exploded, sending sheets of flame back over the tail. The aircraft dropped into the sea just short of the beach.
At that instant, Lindbergh spotted the other Rufe, fleeing along the water. He radioed MacDonald that he was going after it. Mac told him he and Danny would come around and cover them. Lindy assumed Smith was still behind him, protecting his tail. The truth was, he’d lost sight of his wingman after they strafed the lugger.
Lindy dipped his nose and gave chase to his quarry, eager for another kill. He closed rapidly. The Rufe was almost 150 miles an hour slower than a speeding P-38. It stood little chance. The aircraft filled his gun sight. He held his fire, figuring another few seconds and he’d have a perfect shot.
Movement to his left distracted him. He pulled his eye from the gun sight in time to see the dark shape of a fighter spearing downward. It looked like it was on course to intercept him before he could reach shooting position.
Instinctively, Lindbergh abandoned his run, pulled hard into the incoming fighter in a steep, High-G turn. He snapped out a desperation burst with cannon and machine guns, but the deflection was too high and he missed.
With shock, he realized it was Smitty. How had he gotten over there? He’d assumed the group XO was still behind him. Instead, he’d gone left after the second Rufe the same instant Mac went right to initiate the attack on the first one. Lindy was several seconds behind the fight, his situational awareness bad, causing him to make dangerous mistakes.
Smitty blew past Lindbergh’s plane, boring in on the Rufe. He hit with his first shots. The Japanese plane smacked into the water, kicking up a spray of white froth before rebounding into the air. Smith hit it again and it exploded, pieces plunging straight into the waves.
Lindbergh was now behind Smith, following his lead, totally unaware that a Zero had just begun diving on him. Where it came from was anyone’s guess. Mac saw it first as he came around to cover the other element after scoring his kill.
He keyed his radio and called a warning.
Lindbergh didn’t hear it.
Mac sped to the rescue; Danny tacked onto his tail with a veteran’s skill. The Zero wasn’t closing nearly as fast on Lindbergh as Mac was on it. The Japanese pilot saw him coming and realized he wouldn’t be able to shoot before he came under fire. Discretion was the better part of valor for him, and he pulled his Zero into a near-vertical climb and zoomed into the clouds hovering off the eastern coastline.
Mac and Danny breathed a huge sigh of relief. Another couple of seconds and Lindbergh would have been easy meat.
He ordered the flight to assemble and began a shallow climbing turn so Smitty and Lindbergh could join up. Meanwhile, the three veterans kept a careful eye on the cloud cover, lest the Zero bounce them again.
Right then, a dive-bomber lumbered into view, heading back toward the airfield at Babelthuap after another anti-sub patrol. Mac could see it would pass over the convoy in a matter of seconds. He checked the sky. No Zero. He wanted that dive-bomber. He called to Smith and Lindbergh, telling them to stay high, just under the overcast and cover him and Danny. They sped after the dive-bomber. Mac caught it right in the middle of the convoy, its crew probably tired and totally unaware of the danger. It cost them dearly. Mac turned their aircraft into a wreath of flames. It smacked into the sea, a tail of fire describing its final plunge.
They’d been over Palau for thirty minutes, and the dogfight had consumed considerable fuel. They needed to head home, but as Mac assessed the tactical situation, he decided a straight southern run out of the area was too risky. The sky was clear in that direction. They were down low with at least one Zero in the area. He wanted the protection of the overcast to the east. He led the flight out to sea, intending to put the islands over the horizon before rolling onto a southern course.
The fight had spread them out. Lindbergh and Smith were trailing about a mile behind Mac and Miller, with Smitty off to the Lone Eagle’s left in the tail-end Charlie slot again.
“Zero! Six o’clock! Diving on us!” Lindbergh called over the radio. He saw the fighter in the rearview mirror mounted atop the canopy, and it was dropping fast on Smith. The P-38 didn’t have the speed to run away, so he shoved the throttles forward and tried to climb into the overcast.
He wasn’t going to make it. The Zero pilot had turned the tables on the Americans, using their own slashing tactics against them. Lindbergh broke hard left to try to get a deflection shot on the Zero even as Mac and Danny turned right to circle back and help.
The Zero pilot saw Lindbergh’s move and realized the American turned too soon. It was a critical tactical error. He broke off his attack on Smith, who vanished into the clouds a second later.
Now it was Lindy facing the cagey Japanese aviator. The Zero, still above, still diving, twisted to get behind the Lone Eagle.
“Lindy, break right! Break right!” Mac called. He wanted Lindbergh to come straight at his element so he could scrape the Zero off with a head-on pass. Lindy made a split-second decision. He couldn’t turn any tighter or climb into the Zero’s attack to at least get his guns on him. His premature move ensured the Zero was still too high. If he tried, he’d stall the Lightning. All he could do was follow Mac’s order. He rolled right and dove to the whitecaps, pushing the throttles wide. The engines roared as he increased their RPMs over thirty-five hundred. He was at war emergency power, but his right turn put his tail square in the Japanese pilot’s sights.
The Zero ate up the gap. He had Lindbergh cold, and the old airman knew it. A fleeting thought of his children and Anne, his wife, filled his mind. His last chance was the armor plate behind his seat. He slumped behind it and prayed Mac would get to him in time.
The Japanese pilot opened fire. Tracers whipped past Lindbergh’s fleeing Lightning. The Lone Eagle didn’t see them, but Danny and Mac did. They were finishing their 180, circling right of the two planes as Mac finally gained a shot. It was a terrible one—a full 90-degree deflection. He pulled the gun sight pipper across the Zero, overstressing his P-38. The wing spars groaned. The aircraft buffeted. He wasn’t quite there. The nose seemed to take forever to pull through. At last, he took the shot.
Lindbergh, still hunkered behind the armor plate, eyes locked ahead, felt a moment of pure clarity. The vividness of the scene struck him, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion. His senses were never more alive than at this moment of near certain death.
Mac’s stream of tracers arrowed out and slashed the sky around the Zero. The pilot saw the danger. Danny opened up a second later. The Zero took hits, but the pilot pressed his attack.
Suddenly, Smitty’s Lightning flashed out of the clouds, shooting as he dove on the Zero. The Mitsubishi belched smoke and rolled into a dive turn toward Palau.
Fuel critical now, the Americans let him go. Shakily, Mac called to Lindbergh, “Did you catch any of that stuff?”
He held his breath waiting for an answer.
“Can’t see any holes,” came the reply. “My instruments all read okay.”
They turned south and ran straight into another Japanese plane. This one, at their ten o’clock high, crossed right over them as they fled on the deck. They were relieved it did not attack. Their fuel state was critical, even with Lindbergh’s technique.
They returned safely to Mokmer Drome just after 1600. They’d been flying and fighting for six hours. Exhausted, sore from sitting on their chute packs and life rafts for so long, they limped off to get some food while MacDonald reported the flight up to V Fighter Command. It didn’t take long for it to generate a firestorm. Colonel Morrissey called Mac and told him that Wurtsmith wanted to see him in person the next morning at headquarters.
The following day, the young general unloaded on MacDonald. Nobody had approved a mission over Palau. When 5th Air Force got word of the mission, a political dustup ensued. Bomber command had been asking for P-38 escort to Palau for weeks, only to be told the Lightnings didn’t have the legs to get there. Now MacDonald had made a liar out of his commanding officer.
This may have blown over, but the real reason for the storm was Lindbergh. Taking Lindbergh six hours through a storm front to a Japanese base defended by thirty times their number was an unacceptable risk to a command already jittery over the Lone Eagle’s presence in combat. It almost got him killed, which would have demolished countless careers. Surely the press back home would have called for Kenney’s head. Whitehead and Wurtsmith, Hutchison, and even Morrissey could very well have been relieved and destroyed by such a mess as well. General Arnold would have been swift with his wrath—that much was for sure—especially after what happened to Kearby and Lynch.
For all Lindy’s skills as an aviator, he didn’t measure up as a fighter pilot that day. His situational awareness was lacking. He made mistakes. He missed radio calls, and very nearly shot down his own wingman. Despite the three kills they’d scored, Wurtsmith and the 5th Air Force considered the entire escapade a terrible error in judgment by a senior fighter leader, who’d only been promoted to full colonel two months before.
Wurtsmith sent Mac back to the 475th, and for a day it looked like he would suffer no consequences beyond the reprimand he received at HQ. Lindbergh felt genuinely guilty for the mess, writing in his diary that he was just as responsible for the mission as MacDonald was. He probably felt that way because he’d made it clear he wanted a real fight and a chance to get more planes to his credit. The entire mission was set up to give Lindy that opportunity. He decided that if MacDonald suffered any consequences, he’d go to bat for him, probably intending to use his prestige and friendship with Whitehead to smooth things over.
Morrissey called the 475th HQ on August 3 to tell MacDonald he’d been grounded for sixty days. Though he wasn’t quite due to go on leave, rather than have him sit in place doing nothing, V Fighter Command decided to send him home. Mac was far too good a combat leader and fighter pilot to destroy over this. At the time, he was the best group commander in theater. Yet, something had to be done. Later, the whole thing was characterized by Kenney and others as a tongue-in-cheek sort of punishment. MacDonald was happy to go home and see his son for the first time. The truth was, the Palau flight stained his career permanently. Whether Lindbergh tried to help MacDonald or not is unknown, but if he did try, it didn’t help. Mac would never be promoted again. He packed up, said goodbye to his men, and headed for home.
Lindy stayed. After Mac left, Lindbergh moved out of his tent and bunked with McGuire over in the 431st’s area. He and McGuire had developed a mutual respect. Neither gave any quarter when it came to practical jokes, but they respected the fact that each gave as good as he got. Besides, Tommy continued to let him fly combat missions because nobody issued an order stopping them. For the next several days, Lindy led White Flight in the 431st on several long-range escort missions, including one where the Japanese intercepted the raid. Several P-38s were lost, and Lindbergh experienced close calls on a number of occasions.
Finally, Kenney personally flew to Biak and ordered Lindbergh out of combat on August 13. Lindbergh protested repeatedly, and kept protesting as he was sent back down from Biak to Nadzab and finally to Australia. Kenney met with him in Brisbane and tried to reason with him, explaining the kind of chaos and harm that would be done to the country and to careers should he be captured by the Japanese and publicly executed. Lindbergh would have none of it. He wanted to fly combat so badly that though he was supposed to head for home, he flew to Guadalcanal and caught a ride up to the Marines fighting in the Central Pacific. He ended up flying ground-attack missions in Corsairs with them until mid-September. At least there he was a legitimate representative of his corporation.
Before he left Australia, Kenney and MacArthur implored Lindbergh to not reveal the extent of his combat missions in New Guinea. Both were afraid of the political fallout. Despite the fact that President Roosevelt detested him, Lindbergh remained a hero to countless Americans. His loss would have been a bitter blow to morale. If Washington had learned that he was freelancing with two of the leading pilots in the ace race, it would have caused both generals considerable trouble.
Lindbergh honored their request. He returned to the States satisfied that he’d done his share of fighting. He’d flown fifty missions with the Marines and the 5th Air Force, changed the way the P-38 was employed in the Southwest Pacific—and damaged a good officer’s career.
The rest of the summer passed with the ace race in stasis. The last Japanese were swept from New Guinea’s skies. Encounters became exceptionally rare, even as the P-38s ranged farther and farther from their bases. McGuire’s score was stuck at twenty-one, seven back from Bong. Jay Robbins was his only real challenger for leading active ace in the theater after Mac left. On August 17, 1944, Jay shot down a Ki-43 over the Dutch East Indies. That tied him with McGuire.
The Japanese were caught in a hammer-and-anvil war against Kenney’s Air Force and the Navy’s carrier task groups running wild in the Central Pacific. In eight months of fighting, the Japanese lost thousands of aircraft and aircrew. They lacked the industrial base for their production to make up the losses, and the training schools could not keep pace with the human cost of the Pacific War, either. The Japanese were simply bleeding out. Now they husbanded their last reserves to make one final stand in the Philippines. They would meet the Americans with the full force of the Imperial Navy, more than half a million combat troops and fifteen hundred aircraft.
MacArthur was coming—of that they had no doubt.