October 27, 1944
Tacloban Airfield, Leyte, Philippines
Gerald Johnson cut his switches and glanced out of his P-38’s cockpit to watch his props swing to a stop. Mud caked his engine nacelles and smeared the wings in slimy streaks. His windscreen was spackled with the stuff. It had indeed been a dicey landing.
He popped the hatch and unstrapped himself, stretching his legs for the first time in hours as P-38s taxied past him to park on the edge of the runway. He glanced around. No dispersal areas. Some super-genius built this strip along a narrow peninsula, half of which was a swamp, so there was no room for revetments and a proper parking area.
Wrecked Navy planes lay scattered at both ends of the strip, bulldozed out of the way by the engineers frantically working to make the field usable. So far, they’d been able to lay about two thousand feet of pierced steel planking, laid over crushed coral. The other half of the strip was nothing but mud.
Gerald got out on the wing just as his crew chief, Jack Hedgepeth, climbed up to greet him. They’d been together since those first days at Dobodura, and they greeted each other warmly. As they stood on the wing together, GIs and Filipino guerrillas began streaming toward their aircraft. Filthy uniforms, faces streaked with grime, boots soiled with mud, they were a motley-looking bunch. In their midst was the legendary Pappy Gunn, who’d broken off overseeing the construction of a coconut-log control tower to greet the first Army Air Force fighters to the Philippines.
“How’s it going, Jack?” Gerald asked his old friend.
“Got ashore yesterday, sir. Navy’s had a hard way. Six alerts last night. We pretty much live in slit trenches.”
“Not much sleep?”
“Not here, sir,” Jack said, shaking his head.
Down the runway, the other 49th Fighter Group pilots climbed out of their cockpits. The group’s ground crew rushed to refuel the birds and check over the six that ran off the runway. George Walker, Wally Jordan, and Dick Bong emerged from their birds and climbed down into the mud. They were quickly mobbed by enthusiastic GIs.
A jeep appeared, racing up the side of the runway, men giving way to it when they saw the stars glittering from it. Sitting beside the driver was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Behind him, Kenney looked on at his men.
These were his boys: the 49th Fighter Group, the legendary 7th, 8th, and 9th Squadrons. They were the elite, and right now he needed his best pilots protecting this spit of land from enemy air attack.
The original Philippines plan envisioned a careful jump to Southern Mindanao, well covered by the fighter units based at Morotai and Biak. But after the Japanese defensive plan for the Philippines fell into the hands of a guerrilla cell on Cebu, MacArthur chose to be more aggressive in hopes of shortening the war. Instead of Mindanao, his troops invaded Leyte in the middle of the archipelago. The Navy covered the landings, as the island lay beyond P-38 range. Now, after a week of furious air-sea battles that saw the first use of kamikaze aircraft, the Navy couldn’t remain on station defending the Leyte beachhead indefinitely.
George Walker and Gerald handpicked these first pilots onto the half-built strip at Tacloban. Other fields were being prepared elsewhere, but they were nowhere near ready. Tacloban was it, a tiny toehold surrounded by Japanese-held islands and two hundred enemy airfields. Their task: defend the airfield and the cargo ships offloading supplies, and help the troops fighting their way inland whenever possible.
The pilots met in a cluster beside their P-38s, surrounded by rings of guerrillas, engineers, and curious riflemen hoping to catch a glimpse of the great ace of aces, Dick Bong. A few handed him short snorters. He signed them and handed them back as the ground crews explained the situation.
MacArthur’s jeep squeaked to a stop. The two generals dismounted and walked over to greet the Forty-Niners. Wally Jordan looked up to see them coming and nodded at Gerald. He turned and saw the brass smiling happily, making their way through the crowd to shake their hands.
Kenney saw Bong and made a beeline for him. He wanted Dick to stay safe, teach the boys the new gunnery techniques he’d learned, and keep his combat flying to a minimum. Now, he was at ground zero of a first-class chaotic mess. Fifty P-38s against hundreds of Japanese aircraft. It was going to be a bar brawl in the days ahead. Kenney knew a lot of the pilots standing around him would probably die.
Bong saw the look on Kenney’s face and disarmed him. “Generals Whitehead and Wurtsmith gave me permission to come on up with the 49th, sir.”
Colonel Morrissey walked up beside Bong. He’d flown in from Morotai with the outfit and intended to fight, staff responsibilities be damned. This was a crisis, and the best pilots were needed above Leyte.
Kenney nodded at Dick and asked, “Did they tell you if you can fly combat while you’re up here?”
Bong said shyly, “No.” Then added, “Can I?”
Even MacArthur laughed at that. It was the sort of élan the emergency required. Bong would have no issues getting in the air at Tacloban.
Tommy McGuire should have been with them that morning. He’d somehow talked Charles MacDonald into letting him go up with the 49th, but en route to Tacloban, he suffered engine failure, which forced him to limp back to Morotai. Even without McGuire, the pilots at Tacloban included some of the best in theater: Johnson, Bong, 7th Fighter Squadron ace Robert DeHaven, and four-kill Oregonian Blev Lewelling. Each man was experienced, capable, and totally reliable. All had flown with George Walker and Gerald since at least early 1944. Morrissey was one of the last of the original Darwin crew. If they were going to be outnumbered by the Japanese, at least the Americans would have the first team in the cockpits.
The 475th was due in next. Mac’s ground crews were en route to Leyte in LSTs (large landing vessels), the pilots and planes waiting for the go order. At the moment, though, there was no place to put them. Engineers working on the strips elsewhere on Leyte around Dulag were running into serious problems, and Tacloban simply couldn’t fit any more planes on it until the second runway was built. That second strip would have to be used as a parking area, at least for the time being.
George Walker and Johnson met with Kenney for several minutes as the ground crews finished refueling their birds. Their general, who had waded ashore with MacArthur a week before, during the first day of the invasion, gave them a quick brief on the situation. The Japanese threw everything they had left against the Leyte invasion force. Battleships, aircraft carriers, kamikazes. The landings triggered the largest naval battle in history. The mopping up was still going on, and while the Japanese fleet was devastated, their air units still had plenty of fight left.
Kenney told them to get into the air and stay there. The Japanese would come to them.
By four that afternoon, the birds were ready to go. The ground crews had taken extra time to scrub the mud off their P-38s. Their guns were loaded with every round that would fit in the ammo bays. Armorers slung five-hundred-pound bombs under the wings. Walker, Johnson, Bong, Morrissey, and seven other pilots took off from the primitive strip, climbed out over Tacloban, and went off in search of trouble. They strafed and bombed Japanese holdouts around Dulag, hoping that would help give the engineers a chance to get the new airfields untracked there. After their runs, they returned to Tacloban, breaking into flights to cover as much airspace as possible. If the past week were any indication, the Japanese would run a few low-level strafing raids against the field just before sunset.
It began to rain over the strip. Sheets of it came down on the men laboring to get it fully operational, adding to their misery. Under the weather, four Japanese Hayabusa skittered along the wave tops, roared over the strip, tracers roping out from their cowlings. Men dove into soggy slit trenches, hid behind jeeps, or fought back with antiaircraft machine guns. The four sped down the length of the field and ran out over the bay.
Walker, Bong, Johnson, and Morrissey caught them as they tried to make their escape. Diving down from fourteen thousand feet, Bong got the first shot at them. As usual, he made his run from dead astern, waiting until he was so close he couldn’t miss. This time, he opened fire, knocked pieces off the fleeing Oscar, then overshot him. The new P-38Ls were thirty miles an hour faster than the older versions. They also could dive faster and steeper than the Lightnings of 1943. The old hands were yet to get a handle on the additional performance.
No matter, Johnson pounced on the Ki-43 and blew it out of the air, pulling up after Bong to protect the ace of aces’ tail. Behind them, Morrissey and Walker went through the formation, knocking down a second Oscar.
Two left. It was Bong’s turn. He rolled back into a gun run, Johnson still on his six. Bong shot the third Ki-43 down just as Gerald caught sight of a D3A Val dive-bomber hugging the waves and trying to escape to the north after an attack on the shipping in the bay. He broke hard and gave chase. Morrissey saw it too after zoom-climbing back up to eight thousand feet. The two veterans had the Val cold. Gerald sped right up behind it, peppering its wings and fuselage with well-aimed shots. Crippled, it headed for the water. Morrissey suddenly slashed past Gerald, guns spewing sheets of flame. His burst killed the tail gunner and added to the plane’s damage. Johnson kept firing. The Val smacked into the water and skidded to a stop, slowly sinking. The pilot struggled to get out.
Johnson saw he was still alive. The pilots had been briefed on how brutal the Japanese were to the Filipino population. Guerrilla reports were filled with horror stories—murder games, mass executions, torture, deliberate starvation. Downed Japanese aircrew were a threat to the local civilian population, and this Val now sinking in Carigara Bay on Leyte’s northern coast was close enough to shore for the pilot to survive.
Johnson climbed and circled, looking down at the Japanese pilot. Two years ago, the boy he was would never have even considered this. Now, after two years of trauma, loss, and the brutal murder of his own friends, the Oregonian showed no mercy. A single strafing pass was all it would take. He hesitated for a moment, considering the power at his fingertips, aware in some vague recess of his mind that he might years hence look back at this like it was a story divided into two parts—everything that came before this necessary action and everything that he would do thereafter. Mercy was an indulgence. Mercy only ensured other people would get killed.
He left the pilot floating dead beside his sinking Val, a halo of blood blooming in the water around him.
The aces returned to Tacloban, landing south to north so they could touch down in the mud and roll onto the pierced steel planking. All eleven birds returned safely. A quick debrief as the sun went down revealed the Forty-Niners shot down six Japanese planes that day. Three of the four Ki-43s went down to Johnson, Bong, and Morrissey. Three more dive-bombers rounded out the scoring. If this was any indication, opportunity was not going to be an issue at Leyte.
It had been an exhausting day, one that started with a four-hour flight from Morotai, some 650 miles away. A sketchy airfield and stressful landings followed by a combat mission in a target-rich environment. The pilots were ready for food and rest. But there was no food, and there was no place to rest. In a torrential rainstorm, they drove jeeps to their encampment near Tacloban City, some four miles from the airstrip. There, they found unassembled tents waiting for them. With minimal lights, they slipped and struggled in the watery mud while setting up the tents. By the time they were finished, the men were soaked. Without a fresh change of clothes, they slogged off to find food—K rations only—then returned to collapse in their cots, still covered in muck.
They fell into the sleep of the dead. Seemingly minutes later, the sound of gunfire jerked them awake. A Japanese night intruder buzzed overhead, dropping bombs as the base’s flak crews hammered away at it. As the bombs fell closer, they dove out of their tents into the nearest slit trenches and foxholes, covering themselves with ponchos as they shivered in the mud.
All night long, the “Washing Machine Charlies” roamed over the strip, denying the men sleep and keeping them in their slit trenches. When dawn broke and the pilots assembled to prepare for the day’s flying, every Forty-Niner looked haggard and worn. The rain refused to let up. Rivers of mud streamed through the camp, and not a man could brag of dry feet. Still, they piled into jeeps and drove to the strip, where Walker gathered them in an alert tent.
Kenney sent word that the Japanese were landing reinforcements on the other side of Leyte, at a small harbor in Ormoc Bay. He needed his strafers to take them out, but they were far out of range, in New Guinea, languishing out of the fight. The Navy managed to launch a small strike that hit the docks but did little damage. It would fall to the Lightning pilots to do the damage.
They waited for the order to go, listening as the rain pounded the roof of their tent. They shivered as they chatted. Around noon, the rain eased up enough to allow some flying. Walker tasked the Knights with hitting Ormoc. Tacloban still needed to be defended, so he held back enough planes to patrol over the field. Bong, Morrissey, Johnson, and Walker would be the alert flight.
The men slogged out to their aircraft, and the mission began. The ’38s all got off without incident, a minor miracle as they kicked up fans of mud and water during their takeoff runs. It reminded Gerald of Adak and his first combat tour. The men dive-bombed supplies in Ormoc, then ran into Japanese fighters. Ray Swift, who’d often flown wing on Gerald after Stanley Johnson was killed, shot down an Oscar. He would not have missed this fight for the world, though by rights he should have been evacuated to a Stateside hospital months ago. He’d fractured his skull in an accident back in New Guinea, but he’d refused treatment so he could keep flying. Now, suffering from blinding headaches and nausea, he was barely combat capable. Yet he still had enough fight left in him to destroy a Japanese fighter. It was that sort of dedication that made Gerald so devoted to his men and the cause. It also filled him with utter contempt for those he considered hiding from combat in cushy Stateside posts.
As the Knights set a course for home, radar picked up an incoming raid. The alert pilots rushed to their planes. Gerald slipped into number eighty-three, Jack on the wing helping him strap into it. A moment later, they taxied to the edge of the runway and launched.
Bong got into the air first, Johnson following with Morrissey and Walker behind. They caught a Ki-43 on the deck, hoping to sneak over the field for a hit-and-run strafing attack. The pilot turned out to be an old hand. He dodged every attack as he edged west. But numbers and the superiority of the American pilots eventually caught up with the Japanese airman. Bong ran him down, losing sight of Gerald in the process, and shot him up and sent him into a shallow dive, trailing smoke and fire. Johnson went after him as the rest of the flight formed up to continue their patrol.
They linked up at a preassigned rally point, Gerald still missing. They couldn’t raise him on the radio. They continued the patrol as a threesome, worried about what had happened to their hot-blooded Oregonian.
Another intruder crossed their path over Masbate Island’s south coast. Bong chandelled up after him and gave chase. The Japanese pilot carried a bomb under the centerline. He tried to jettison it, but something went wrong with the shackles. The bomb tore off, skidded back along the fuselage, and caught on the tail, tearing it completely off. The Hayabusa tumbled and slammed into the water.
It was the second kill of the day for Bong. Johnson was still nowhere in sight, and attempts to reach him over the radio failed. The men grew concerned. Bong checked his watch. They’d been airborne for under an hour. He and his colleagues had plenty of fuel left to continue their patrol.
They climbed back up to ten thousand feet and pointed their noses toward a Japanese airstrip on Masbate. It didn’t take long for them to spot more enemy fighters. This time, almost twenty Ki-43s stacked from three to seven thousand feet appeared under their right wings. It was a perfect setup—the Americans held the high ground. All they needed to do was swing in behind them and execute a slashing run through their formation. But Morrissey didn’t want to attack without help. He turned back toward Tacloban, hoping to get into radio range and call in the incoming Japanese strike. Hopefully, more Lightnings could be scrambled and the entire raid broken up or shot down.
Meanwhile, Bong and Walker stalked the formation, getting above and behind it to keep tabs on where it was going. Suddenly, one of the trailing Ki-43s began to rock its wings wildly. It was a sure sign these planes didn’t have radios, as that was the traditional flying signal for enemy aircraft. The Hayabusa pilots, wakened to the danger, jettisoned their fuel tanks and bombs, even as Bong and Walker lit into the trailing fighters. Bong hit two of them, then got hit himself as he tried to dive clear of the fight. The left engine’s radiator began trailing coolant. The Allison started to overheat. Bong, still in a dive with Japanese fighters in hot pursuit, feathered the engine and pushed the nose down a bit farther. Walker stayed with him, fighters on his own tail.
Eventually, the diving speed of the P-38 paid dividends. Both men drew far ahead and the Japanese abandoned their chase. They returned ninety minutes after they’d left, Bong with two confirmed and two probables. About forty-five minutes later, Johnson set down at Tacloban, his P-38 unharmed. Where he’d been and what he’d been doing has been lost to history. When he learned of the fight he missed, he was sorely disappointed.
Another night came, and raiders struck the strip throughout it. Once again, the pilots dashed from their tents to the slit trenches to spend hours in mud-filled holes. The next morning, they looked like the walking dead.
At the strip, the engineers worked from 0800 to midnight trying to improve the runway. They’d been able to add several hundred more feet of Marston matting, but the constant rain turned the rest of the field into such a mess that operation accidents were getting out of hand. There were now more pilots than available P-38s, and Walker kept calling for reinforcements. The problem was, the more planes on this narrow strip, the more vulnerable everyone was. Until they got a handle on the marauding Japanese attacks and the runways were elongated, Tacloban would remain the most dangerous place in the Pacific.
As the pilots reached the alert tent to go over the day’s missions, the ground crews worked furiously to prep the available Lightnings. Spare parts had yet to reach the strip, and one of the landing ship tanks filled with the group’s gear was either damaged en route or sunk. The stuff never showed up. Some of the P-38s didn’t have complete oxygen systems now as a result, which limited their patrols to twelve thousand feet or less.
Jack Hedgepeth sat in Johnson’s cockpit, scrubbing the windscreen. He was meticulous with the way he cared for number eighty-three, and he’d long since learned that any stray speck on the canopy could be misidentified by an anxious pilot as an enemy plane. As he cleaned it, the air raid alarm sounded. Men bolted from under the other P-38s aligned along the runway, heading for slit trenches. Engineers bailed off their dozers. Work came to a halt. Jack stayed in the cockpit, looking around for the threat. When he didn’t see anything, he figured it was another false alarm. There’d been almost as many of those as actual attacks since he came ashore on the twenty-sixth.
He went back to cleaning the windscreen. A single Hayabusa sped in from the bay mere feet off the ground. The pilot found a prime target—a full line of unrevetted P-38s just waiting to be strafed. He triggered his two heavy machine guns, and bullets ripped across the flight line. In seconds, the attack was over. The Oscar pilot, still clipping the trees, sped north unhindered by flak or interception.
The ground crew found Jack writhing in Gerald’s cockpit. A stitch of bullets cut across the Lightning’s wing and through the canopy he was cleaning. One leg was shattered. Blood was splattered all over the cockpit. His horrified comrades pulled him clear and lowered him down to a waiting jeep.
He went into shock, and a short time later he bled out.
The news devastated Gerald. Jack was a month away from his twenty-fourth birthday, almost exactly his same age. They’d known each other since Gerald first arrived at Dobodura what seemed like a lifetime ago.
His aircraft was scratched from the day’s missions as a result of the damage and the state of the cockpit. The rest of the Forty-Niners got airborne as soon as they could, if only to keep the Lightnings from being destroyed on the ground.
The attacks didn’t stop. Sometimes the men received a few minutes warning, often none at all. The Japanese Hayabusa pilots became masters of these hit-and-run strafing raids. On the thirtieth, they brought a new and devastating weapon with them.
It was morning again, and Tacloban hummed with determined activity. Pappy Gunn raced to and fro in a jeep, supervising the progress the engineers were making. Kenney was on the scene too, wanting to see his pilots and assess the situation. He knew he needed to bring more fighters in—heck, not even the entire 49th was up here yet, just the thirty-five men Walker and Johnson handpicked. There still wasn’t anywhere to put more fighters, though somehow the operational losses would need to be made up.
A single Hayabusa swept across Tacloban, bullets tearing up everything in its path. Kenney dove for cover as men scrambled to the nearest slit trench. The Ki-43 dropped two light phosphorus bombs halfway down the runway. One exploded right behind Pappy Gunn’s jeep, blowing him over the hood. Gerald and the other Forty-Niners stood up as the Hayabusa zoomed clear of the field, running for home. They saw Pappy try to stand, take a few steps, then collapse. Men sprinted to the great aviator’s aid, and he was lifted onto a stretcher and carried off to the nearest aid station, critically wounded by shrapnel in his arm. He would survive, but his recovery would be a slow and torturous one, and he never fully regained the use of his arm.
That night, a typhoon struck Leyte. Massive swells rolled across the bay, churned higher by the gale-force winds that ripped down tents and blew equipment all over the field. The waves lashed Tacloban peninsula, swamping the one road from the field to the pilots’ living area. Slit trenches filled with water and collapsed. The surviving tents were simply canvas stretched above a half foot of liquefied mud. Trench foot, dysentery, malaria—they would be hallmarks of life at Tacloban for months to come.
The exhaustion that came from such harsh natural conditions and constant barrages took its toll. When dawn broke after yet another sleepless night, jumpy antiaircraft gunners accidentally shot down a Forty-Niner trying to come in to land. He was killed instantly in the crash. Later that day, the Knights’ commander, Maj. Bob McComsey, was critically wounded during another air attack on Tacloban. Medics quickly rushed him to an aid station and later evacuated him home. George Walker tapped Wally Jordan to return to the 9th and guide it through its most difficult crisis.
Morale sank to new lows. Beyond the mortal danger, the filth, poor rations, and bouts of severe diarrhea were wearing on the men. This was the first time since Guadalcanal that the Americans didn’t have complete air superiority over a beachhead. It was also the last time in history that happened, though that would be of little comfort to the men lucky enough to survive Tacloban’s many traumas.
The 49th needed help. They were down to only a handful of operational P-38s. Part of the group’s 8th Squadron flew in to plus up the beleaguered defenders, along with P-38s of the 35th and 41st Squadrons. Help was coming, but there still wasn’t enough room to park the aircraft. The half-completed second runway was turned into a makeshift parking area, but that didn’t make the birds any less vulnerable.
The following day, fourteen more from the 7th and 8th reached the strip. With them was Tommy McGuire, who’d somehow talked MacDonald into letting him go forward into the fight while the rest of the 475th waited for their airfields around Dulag to be finished by the engineers. The 49th needed replacement aircraft desperately, so the 431st Squadron delivered seventeen P-38s. McGuire led the formation into Tacloban, but as they arrived over the field, the ground controller warned them off, as radar detected an inbound Japanese attack. Though they’d flown over three hours up from Morotai, McGuire’s pilots still retained plenty of fuel. They began patrolling the area. A Ki-44 appeared behind the 431st. The Japanese pilot saw the odds and he ran for some nearby clouds. Tommy turned around and pursued him with his flight, catching the Shoki in a dive. McGuire raked him with a long burst at three hundred yards, but even after a cannon shell exploded through the canopy, the Ki-44 would not go down. He bored in for the kill. At a hundred feet dead astern, he fired again. Two more bursts until at fifty feet, his cannon blew the tail off the Japanese interceptor. McGuire landed at Tacloban with the rest of his squadron, exultant over his twenty-fifth kill—until the Forty-Niners told him Bong now had thirty-three.
All day long, the Lightning pilots patrolled and intercepted incoming Japanese raids. The Forty-Niners battled everything from Val dive-bombers to Zeroes and Dinah reconnaissance bombers. Hayabusas and even ancient Nakajima B5N Kate torpedo bombers, leftovers from Japan’s halcyon days of 1941, filled the air around Tacloban. Altogether, the Americans claimed twenty-five planes that day over Leyte.
November 2, 1944, passed in a nightmarish blur. Pilots from five different squadrons jammed onto one usable runway to take off and land while the Japanese continued their hit-and-run raids. Part of the 475th Fighter Group arrived to add to the confusion, temporarily staying at Tacloban before moving on to the Dulag area’s soggy airfields. A Japanese resupply convoy steamed into Ormoc Bay, covered by almost a hundred Japanese fighters. Fights raged over the convoy and spilled all over Leyte as the Japanese launched multiple raids against Tacloban and the shipping nearby. The chaotic day grew even crazier when two patrolling Knights were bounced by Japanese fighters. One pilot was shot down, though he survived the crash. The other, Lt. Bill Huisman limped back to Tacloban on one engine. Badly damaged, possibly wounded, he arrived over the field just as Dick Bong and a flight of Forty-Niners prepared to take off. They sat at one end of the runway, one behind the other, as Huisman attempted to land on the other end, coming at them.
As he was just about to touch down, a 35th Fighter Squadron P-38 appeared behind him. The pilot never saw Huisman’s plane. He landed on top of the crippled P-38, severing it in half. Huisman’s plane exploded, debris fanning in all directions as the fuselage and part of the wing careened down the runway.
Gerald was standing with several other pilots outside the alert tent when the collision took place. The 35th Squadron’s P-38 cartwheeled right over their heads, raining debris. They dove for safety as the aircraft blew up beside them. Two ground crewmen rushed to the wreckage and somehow pulled the pilot clear, but it was too late. He was killed instantly in the crash.
At the other end of the runway, Leslie Nelson, a longtime Flying Knight veteran, watched as the remains of Huisman’s P-38 skidded to a stop only a few hundred feet in front of them. He and Huisman had been close friends. Now he saw his brother Knight frantically trying to get out of the cockpit, the wreckage wreathed in fire. The crash must have saturated him with aviation gas, for the moment he got the canopy hatch open, he ignited. Writhing in agony, he fell out of the cockpit and stumbled aimlessly, his entire body afire.
Johnson’s mechanic, Doug Harcleroad, charged across the runway and tackled Huisman with one other man, smothering the flames with his own body. Huisman lay on the ground, his seizing body blackened horribly.
At that moment, Bong saw the runway directly in front of him was clear. He opened the throttles and roared past the dying man, his prop wash blasting all three with rocks and debris. Watching the scene, Nelson felt sick. He refused to follow his flight leader into the air until Harcleroad and the other enlisted man carried Huisman clear of the runway. Then he climbed up and joined Bong over the runway.
In strict military terms, Bong had every reason to get airborne as quickly as he could. The Lightnings were sitting ducks on the ground and every minute they were not in the air made them a strafer’s target. Yet for Nelson and the others who witnessed the moment, Bong’s decision to take off needlessly added to a dying brother’s agony. Most never spoke of it out of respect for Dick, but the scene haunted them the rest of their lives.
Huisman was in critical condition. He was evacuated to a ship just offshore, but he didn’t survive the night. He was buried at sea the next morning.
The days passed in a kaleidoscope of wrenching moments and furious combats over Tacloban and Ormoc Bay, where the Japanese kept running resupply convoys down to their troops defending northern Leyte. The weather grew worse. The other fields around Dulag were near busts. They couldn’t be drained properly, and the runways flooded every time a monsoon swept over the island. Still, Kenney pushed the 475th forward, and for the next week, its planes and pilots streamed into Leyte. They dispersed to the fields around Dulag, but operated mainly from Tacloban due to the condition of the strips. Because of that, Johnson, Bong, Morrissey, Walker, and McGuire flew frequently together. Most of McGuire’s 431st Squadron wouldn’t arrive until November 9, which allowed him to keep flying with his old Forty-Niner brothers. They lived in squalor and endured the nightly attacks even as their own scores rose. They had their moments of success and moments of heartbreak.
On November 3, Bong, Johnson, and McGuire flew with the rest of the Flying Knights over to Ormoc, looking for trouble. Word was another convoy had landed supplies. They saw no ships, but they did discover a ten-mile-long vehicle convoy stretching out of Ormoc, heading toward Carigara Bay.
The squadron rolled in on the column with a vengeance. They caught a line of trucks trapped on the road by swamps on either side. Unable to escape, they were sitting ducks. The Knights raked them mercilessly even as soldiers bailed out of the rigs and tried to find cover. Tommy made a pass, and saw his cannon shells hit a couple of vehicles. They blew up, throwing bodies high in the air.
The Knights came back around, this time flying right on the trees as they strafed. Desperate Japanese fired rifles and light machine guns at them, using wrecked trucks and caissons as firing positions. Hundreds of men lay dead and splayed around the scene. The Knights came back for a third pass, but this time the Japanese got lucky. Small-arms fire crippled Lt. Bob Hamburger’s P-38. It caught fire. He rolled off his run, climbed to altitude, and bailed out. Fortunately, he was rescued by Filipino guerrillas.
That third pass was enough, the airmen decided. Most of the men were nearly out of ammunition, so they called it a day and reformed above the burning column. They’d destroyed thirty trucks and two light tanks. Later intelligence reports credited the Flying Knights with killing or wounding twenty-four hundred men, almost an entire infantry regiment.
Before the P-38s could clear the area, two Hayabusas suddenly sped through their formation, spewing tracers. Bob Bates was hit in the surprise attack. As the Knights scattered to evade the Ki-43s, they heard him call, “I’m on fire! I’m on fire!” His burning P-38 arrowed into the jungle below. The rest of the squadron ran for home and landed back at Tacloban, two P-38s and their pilots a heavy price to pay for the day’s fighting.
When they landed, Tommy McGuire was more sore than usual. After a few hours in a P-38, the guys would get “pilot’s ass”—a result of never being able to find a spot where the life raft’s air valve didn’t stick the pilots in the rear. Sometimes, after ultra-long-range missions, the men would be so sore they’d have to be helped out of the cockpit.
This felt different to Tommy. When he started to stand up and get out of the cockpit, he realized he had been sitting in a pool of blood. During one his strafing runs, a rifle-caliber bullet punctured the side of the cockpit and grazed both his buttocks cheeks. The wound was superficial, but still very painful. He hobbled around for days, limping and ignoring the pain. He told no one of his wound, fearing he’d be pulled off flight status at a time when the hunting was so good. He had twenty-five kills, now ten back from Bong. This was his chance to catch up. So he continued to fly, sitting on his bullet-wounded behind, gutting through the pain. Only a few people ever found out about it, and he never received a Purple Heart for this wound.
The next morning, the Japanese hit Tacloban with nearly forty planes. Racing over the strip on the deck as the first rays of dawn stretched over the horizon, the enemy planes carpeted the field with white phosphorus and shrapnel bombs. In one pass lasting only a couple of minutes, they killed or wounded thirty-four men, destroyed two P-38s, and damaged thirty-nine other aircraft.
The persistent dawn and dusk strikes forced the ground crews to change the way they prepped their planes for missions. The mechanics began preflighting the P-38s at 0300 to avoid being caught on the flight line by surprise strafers. They’d stop work at sunset to await the evening raid, then get back to work in the darkness, using minimal light as they labored over the birds.
And so it went, flying and fighting through endless nights filled with tracers and searchlights, the sound of enemy engines overhead and the misery of the slit trenches. They slept little. Ate less. More men, more pilots came in, but the trickle of reinforcements could not keep pace with the losses. At times, the 475th could field less than twenty of their assigned seventy-five P-38s. In the first two weeks at Tacloban, the men endured sixty-nine red alert warnings and thirty-six attacks carried out by nearly two hundred Japanese planes. After the monsoons washed the road out, the men used DUKW amphibious trucks to cross the bay from their living area to the runway. Even this became an ordeal, as marauding Oscars would often make strafing runs at them.
When they weren’t attacking the airstrip, the Japanese went after the ships unloading around it. They set cargo ships afire and strafed barges and landing craft running between the vessels and the beach. During nearly every raid, the P-38 pilots did their best to intercept and inflict damage on the Japanese, but no matter how many aircraft they shot down, the enemy returned the next day. Scores mounted. The pilots who managed to survive continued to wear themselves out.
In early November, the first reporters who reached Leyte began covering the air action and the aces. When the 49th Fighter Group scored its five hundredth kill, the unit’s identity was revealed to the public back home. Headlines and stories filled the papers on the exploits of the 49th, focusing on its great aces, including Bong and often Tommy McGuire. The press was finally starting to take notice of Tommy, though only in the context of his position behind Bong. Reporters often thought he was part of the 49th since he was frequently flying with Johnson and Bong. After the truck convoy mission, an AP war correspondent named Richard Bergholz found McGuire on the runway at Tacloban and interviewed him on the spot. Tommy loved to talk and made an excellent interview subject as a result. He also knew the exact right things to say to the media. Yet Bong remained the darling of the press and of the public affairs wonks at headquarters.
On November 10, 1944, a Japanese strike tore up a thousand feet’s worth of pierced steel planking at Tacloban. The strip was now almost four thousand feet long, thanks to the tireless efforts of the engineers, so the P-38 pilots could still use it with caution. That was a good thing, too, as Charles MacDonald discovered his squadrons dispersed around Dulag could barely operate in the bad weather. The hardstands and taxiways the engineers built around the strips there filled with water, and the P-38s mired in the flooding couldn’t get off the ground. Mac told his squadron leaders to do their best to get the planes off those strips and back to Tacloban.
Meanwhile, everyone who could fly did. That morning, McGuire flew a borrowed P-38 on a mission over Ormoc Bay, where he got in a fight with a Ki-43 Hayabusa. After his stint as the squadron armament and engineering officer, Tommy was very particular about his guns and would often personally boresight them. With a loaner Lightning, he didn’t want to take any chances with long-range or high-deflection shots. He got behind the Oscar, closed to can’t-miss, point-blank range, and blew it up with a long trigger pull. The Oscar’s fireball threw debris all over the sky, and Tommy was too close to do anything but fly through the flaming pieces. A chunk of Hayabusa smashed through his canopy hatch and struck him in the head. The blow knocked him unconscious for a few seconds. When he awoke, blood covered his head and face.
He returned to Tacloban, landed safely, and sat in the cockpit as his crew chief, Sgt. Frank Kish, climbed onto the wing. Seeing the hole in the canopy hatch and the plexiglass splattered with blood, Kish exclaimed, “Christ! Are you all right, Major?”
McGuire was dazed but not seriously hurt. In fact, he was feeling better than he had in a long time. He’d just tied Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record. He’d idolized Captain Eddie as a kid. He wanted to savor the moment. He tried to make a joke of his wound, telling Kish he’d almost brought the Oscar home with him. Kish suggested he go see a doctor. He knew that McGuire simply had bound his earlier wound with tape. This one looked more serious. McGuire blew him off, telling him, “Let’s keep this quiet, too. I don’t want to lay around while the hunting is so good.”
That afternoon, Bong shot down another plane. Every time McGuire thought he’d closed the gap between them, the Wisconsinite would match him, kill for kill. It was maddening, and McGuire started to fixate on the race.
The truth was, McGuire was anything but healthy after twenty-two months of near-continuous combat flying. Of all the aces, he was the only one who did not go home on leave. MacDonald told him to expect leave at the end of the year, but he’d heard that before. Since the summer, his letters home to Marilynn were peppered with references to possible leave. He desperately needed it, his body covered in jungle sores and rashes. The medics gave him creams that tinted his skin purple but offered little relief. He was gaunt, emaciated from months of bad food, jungle living, and bouts with typhus and malaria, along with the constant stress of combat flying. His body was shot through from the constant adrenaline rushes. His cheeks grew sunken. He walked with a limp, and he smelled terrible from the mix of ointments, sweat, and oozing rashes. He kept going on sheer force of will, displaying great personal courage on the ground at times to motivate his men.
After all the strafing runs the Japanese executed on the P-38s, the ground crews grew understandably reluctant to be out under the birds, working on them during alerts. Since they were usually under an alert, morale began to slide. McGuire made a point of going out to the flight line with the men each morning. As they worked, he watched the sky, his Colt .45 in hand and ready to fire a warning shot should a Japanese marauder appear above the trees. That he risked himself by standing out in the open like that engendered enormous loyalty among his squadron’s mechanics and crew chiefs. No officer needed to do that, let alone their squadron leader.
The next day, November 11, Bong stole a march on McGuire. Gerald, Dick, and Morrissey were flying back from an escort mission when they stumbled on a flight of U.S. Navy torpedo bombers. Somehow, the TBM Avengers lost their own fighter cover while attacking yet another Japanese resupply convoy in Ormoc Bay. As they lumbered along, seven Japanese Zeroes tried to jump them.
The Lightnings dove to the rescue. Bong made quick work of two Zeroes. Gerald got two more. Morrissey damaged a fifth. The other two broke and ran. The torpedo bomber pilots returned to their carriers to report how they were saved. Somehow, the Navy got word to Tacloban that they’d like to host the pilots who protected their aircrew. For one glorious night, Gerald and Dick took a small boat out into the bay and messed with the Navy aboard a destroyer. They felt like riflemen pulled from muddy trenches and drawn into a formal meal. Their khaki uniforms were dirty and threadbare compared to the clean-cut sailors and officers they met. They looked more like pirates, less like a freshly minted lieutenant colonel and America’s ace of aces.
Seven of their friends were dead. More than forty P-38s had been lost since the twenty-seventh, nine in air-to-air combat. They were bone weary and stared at the white tablecloth in the officers’ wardroom as if it were a vestige from a past life. At dinner, they feasted on china plates with actual silverware. They’d spent weeks eating off mess tins or straight out of ration cans.
For a brief moment, they felt human again.
All too soon, it was back to the muddy hellhole of Tacloban, where showers had yet to be built and the men bathed out of their GI standard-issue helmets. Gerald returned to his tent and wrote a note to Barbara. What started as an elliptical reference to the fighting he’d been doing turned, the longer he held the pen, into a passionate love letter.
Your letters are priceless, and your spirit and humor give me new energy and stronger faith. I belong only to you, Darling, beyond all eternity—and you know how long that is.
Whatever I am, I Belong to You,
Just a Fighter Pilot in Love,
Gerald
He folded the letter and slid it into an envelope, even as a Japanese night raider rumbled overhead to deny all a chance to sleep. Cursing, the men of the 49th slipped out of their cots and trudged to the sludge-filled slit trenches, the vision of that spotless tablecloth still on Gerald’s mind.