November 1944
Leyte, Philippines
The day after Bong and Gerald saved the Navy torpedo bombers, McGuire led his squadron into a fight over Cebu, where the Angels encountered a new type of Japanese Navy interceptor. The Mitsubishi J2M Raiden looked like a downsized version of a P-47 Thunderbolt. Fast, well armed with four 20mm cannon, the J2M incorporated self-sealing fuel tanks and armor plating for the pilot, features not present in most Japanese fighters McGuire had encountered.
Code-named “Jack” by Allied intelligence, the Raiden in the hands of a skilled pilot could be a formidable adversary for a P-38 flier. Fortunately for the Americans, there were very few skilled Japanese pilots left. The day before, Charles MacDonald ran into a formation of these new fighters and flamed two of them over Ormoc Bay. Not only did the battle give Mac his sixteenth and seventeenth kills, he also learned a bit about its performance, passing that information along when he landed back at Leyte.
McGuire and his men tore into the Japanese like sharks in a frenzy. They dropped four Raidens in only a few minutes of fighting. While their planes were improved, the average Japanese fighter pilot was not the measure of his American enemy, and that negated the extra performance the Raiden gave them.
McGuire’s kills gave him another round of publicity. His P-38 now carried twenty-eight kill flags. Bong’s score stood at thirty-six. The rivalry between the two men now became a key angle in the ace race. On his radio program, Walter Winchell spoke of McGuire and his score, to the delight of McGuire’s father and wife. For almost a year and a half, Tommy received only occasional letters from home. At mail calls, he more often than not walked away empty-handed. But in late November, he received a steady stream of fan letters from Stateside civilians who heard Winchell’s broadcast or read of his exploits in the paper.
On November 15, a photographer snapped one of the iconic photos of the ace race. It showed Dick and Tommy leaning on a P-38’s propeller blade, shooting the breeze. Dick appeared a little awkward in the photo, while Tommy managed to look jaunty, relaxed, and haggard at the same time. To a close observer, his gaunt face and sunken cheeks betrayed his underlying combat exhaustion. He was a man who should have been home for a long rest. Nevertheless, dozens of papers back home ran the photo for the next month, extolling the virtues of both men. Dick was called the “trump ace” and McGuire was the contender nipping at his heels.
Despite two wounds and his grim physical state, McGuire flew seventy-one combat hours in November, thirteen of them in B-25s when a P-38 wasn’t available. In comparison, Bong flew about thirty hours in thirteen missions through the month. Johnson flew a little over twenty combat hours. Kenney later wrote that Bong practically needed his permission to get in the cockpit at this point. General Arnold was breathing down his neck, not wanting a repeat of what happened to Kearby and Lynch. Still, Bong always found a way into a fight when he wanted to fly. The new surge in press coverage included much positive ink on the 5th and its desperate fight at Leyte. The 49th continued to get ample coverage, and photos of the leading aces standing under P-38s at Tacloban ran in papers throughout the country. Still, the battle between McGuire and Bong lent a new sense of urgency to the reporting and invigorated the coverage of the air war in the Philippines. Kenney knew he should put an end to it, but he didn’t. He rolled the dice, praying Dick wouldn’t get killed as the young major raced to his personal goal: fifty confirmed. It was not lost on the FEAF commander that fifty had also been Neal Kearby’s goal.
On November 28, 1944, men around Tacloban that day watched Bong’s P-38 taxi to the end of the runway, turn, and start its takeoff run. Everyone knew the bird: the kill board was the largest in the Pacific and could be seen from a distance. As the Lightning left the ground, one engine exploded. The P-38 rolled over and crashed in flames.
For a few frantic minutes, it was thought Dick Bong was at the controls and the ace of aces was dead. The shock sent shivers through the chain of command. In reality, the 49th Fighter Group’s assistant operations officer had borrowed Dick’s plane that morning, and he had been killed instantly in the explosion. It took time to sort that out and cool the rumors that another national hero had been killed in the SWPA. In response, Kenney told Bong to back off the combat flying and focus on teaching the pilots the gunnery techniques he’d learned.
Bong packed up his meager kit and said goodbye to the 49th. He went down to Dulag, where the 431st was stationed now that the drainage issues were under control. Initially, he shared a tent with Tommy McGuire, but the two men did not get along at all in that arrangement. Exactly what happened remained between the two of them, but it is likely that McGuire’s resentment over Bong’s special treatment translated into considerable needling. Bong moved to a different tent only a few nights later.
The idea of the top two American aces sharing living space, an arrangement that however brief had somehow gotten out, drew some of the ace race reporters to Dulag. Lee Van Atta wrote the first major profile of McGuire at the end of November. Like the one he wrote on Bong earlier in the year, though not as long, the profile was Van Atta’s attempt to image-shape McGuire and his personality. He described him as a laughing, outgoing jokester who talked freely of the air combat he’d experienced. No mention was made of his Florida roots; instead, Van Atta gave his home state as New Jersey. His mom and his childhood in Sebring were kept out of the public eye. Instead, Van Atta called him “the Joisey Kid,” as if he had the stereotypical accent of the area, which he did not.
Of the ace race, Van Atta’s article read like a sports reporter’s puff piece. He quoted Tommy as saying, “I’d like to make one thing clear at this point—Dick Bong and I are good friends, always have been, always will be. We figured to be too smart to let jealousy get either of us bumped off in grudges matches, or exhibitions of that top ace place.”
Then Lee inadvertently let McGuire take a shot at Bong. “I’d like to be it [top ace], sure. Who wouldn’t? But all of us are still playing the game as squadrons and flights, and I’ll get mine with my squadron or not at all.”
It was a subtle McGuire-esque dig at Bong and his lack of leadership responsibility that Lee either missed or figured folks back home would not understand. McGuire emphasized teamwork. He was proud of his squadron and his leadership of it. He repeated that theme in future interviews, as well, knowing it set him apart from Bong. If he couldn’t be the ace of aces, he considered himself the best squadron leader of the best fighter squadron in the SWPA. And he was right.
Van Atta’s article wrapped up with a total fabrication. To prove just how well Dick and Tommy got along, the last portion of the story details how the two aces worked together over Balikpapan in October. That was actually Gerald Johnson who teamed up with McGuire and worked closely to flame a number of planes. The Oregonian got airbrushed out of the piece to create the mystique of teamwork between rivals. Lee was always a patriotic and courageous reporter. But with this McGuire profile, he slipped from journalist to publicity hack.
As the race reached a fevered peak, so did the air war over Leyte. On December 7, 1944, the Japanese and Americans both ran convoys into Ormoc Bay. The Japanese were simply trying to supply their troops. The Americans came to cut that supply point off, landing the 77th Infantry Division at Ormoc to seal off the port from the Japanese and to get behind their lines in force.
The Japanese threw every available airplane into the air that day, either to defend their own convoy or to attack the American amphibious force. Around the soggy, wreck-strewn fields at Leyte, the pilots of V Fighter Command rose to fight. The air-sea battle raged from dawn ’til dusk. Before the day was out, Bong, McGuire, Johnson, and MacDonald all flew repeated missions.
Johnson scored first. George Walker had sent him to Nadzab for a rest leave at the end of November. Now he was back, refreshed and full of fight. Ten minutes to ten o’clock found Gerald with a patrol of four P-38s from the 49th, covering the U.S. Navy warships in Ormoc Bay. A formation of Japanese twin-engine bombers appeared below them, covered by a flight of three Ki-43s. Johnson spotted the fighters and attacked them first. His first pass knocked one down. He zoom-climbed, then dropped back on the other two, whose pilots tried to evade his charging P-38. Two quick bursts in one pass and both Ki-43s went down in flames. In forty-five seconds, Gerald flamed three fighters, which plunged into the sea only a few hundred feet apart. “Count ’em! One… two… three!” he exclaimed over the radio, before the rest of the flight went tearing after the Japanese bombers. Together, they shot four of nine down. Gerald returned with four confirmed kills, the three Hayabusas and one bomber, giving him twenty-three kills. He’d surpassed Kearby and Jay Robbins to be the third-ranking ace in the theater.
The fighting continued. McGuire led a two-plane patrol over Ormoc an hour later, shooting down an Oscar. After lunch, MacDonald ran into another formation of Mitsubishi Raidens and came home with two more victories.
Then McGuire and Bong flew together on a midafternoon patrol over Ormoc. McGuire led the flight, and Bong took the second element with Maj. Jack Rittmayer as his wingman. As they reached Ormoc, Bong’s sharp eyes made out a Japanese Sally bomber running along some clouds. Without calling it out, he suddenly broke formation, charged after the aircraft, and sent it down in flames.
As he rejoined the formation, a half dozen kamikazes sped toward the U.S. ships McGuire was tasked to protect. Tommy charged after them, chasing them into the curtains of antiaircraft fire the warships threw up at these fanatical attackers. He shot one down, Bong got another, and two others fell to their wingmen. Out of ammunition, they returned to Dulag, where McGuire and his wingman seethed over Bong’s behavior.
Bong had violated the most basic and inviolable law of air combat in the SWPA: teamwork. He’d abandoned his formation, failed to communicate, and went off hunting. This was a serious breach, one that in the past got Americans killed. Teamwork, the integrity of the formations, and fighting together had been drilled into every pilot coming into the SWPA since 1943. It was the hallmark of McGuire’s tactical manual. A month before, an 8th Fighter Squadron pilot had abandoned his flight to go shoot down two Zeroes, and instead of collecting accolades, his actions were written up and V Fighter Command published a combat evaluation report slamming the pilot’s behavior.
Bong’s actions that day alienated much of the 431st Fighter Squadron. They considered him selfish, only there to score, and obsessed with staying ahead of McGuire. They had a point. The pressure of the ace race was clearly getting to Bong. Later, the squadron historian took savage shots at Dick, writing into the 431st’s official record: “Those pilots not assigned to our squadron… seemed more interested in running up their individual scores than in protecting themselves and their flight members and following our standard operating procedures.” The other pilot referenced in the unit history was Maj. Jack Rittmayer, who had been flying wing with Bong and McGuire through December, though he was also not a member of the 431st.
McGuire ran a very tight ship in the 431st and didn’t think of himself as someone who tolerated pilots breaking any of his tactical rules. One pilot later commented along those lines, that had he gone off hunting like that, he would have been bounced out of the squadron. To Tommy, there was zero margin for error, and the safety of the men always came first.
All this drama was kept out of the public eye. It was soon overwhelmed with a tidal wave of new media coverage of the Wisconsin ace. The next day the press broke the news that Richard Ira Bong, America’s ace of aces with thirty-nine kills, not only just surpassed Britain’s top ace Johnnie Johnson, but had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor as well. Four days later, as rain fell at Tacloban, the men of the 475th and 49th Fighter Groups stood at formation as Gen. Douglas MacArthur gave the award to Dick.
MacArthur was at his rhetorical best as he addressed his weary, wet aviators. “The Congress of the United States has reserved for itself the honor of decorating those amongst all who stand out as the bravest of the brave. It is this high and noble category, Major Bong, that you now enter as I place upon your breast the Medal of Honor. Wear it as the symbol of invincible courage you have displayed in mortal combat. My dear boy, may a merciful God continue to protect you.”
Ten days later, Dick Bong flew one final combat mission with the 431st, shooting down a Japanese fighter over Mindoro Island. He’d reached forty, earned the Medal of Honor, and now stood two kills over Britain’s Johnnie Johnson. He also outscored the U.S. Navy’s ranking ace, David McCampbell, whose kill board included thirty-four Japanese flags. Enough was enough. Kenney grounded him a final time.
Dick would never return to battle, and Kenney was pleased with that, happy his acolyte had survived the ordeal, even as so many of Dick’s onetime rivals hadn’t. The general had helped mold the hero, creating an American legend whose fame was surpassed by that of only one other aviator—Charles Lindbergh.
The night after Dick scored his final kill, Tommy McGuire went to go see Gerald Johnson. The two old friends sat in Johnson’s tent at Tacloban, stewing over how the race had been manipulated by Kenney. Bong’s protected status and the way he flew with the 431st left a bad taste in McGuire’s mouth. It turned out Johnson felt the same way. Bong had changed since the spring of 1943. Though he had rebuilt his friendship with Bong that fall, Johnson watched in dismay as he increasingly focused on his personal goals. The line between duty and ambition was crossed at the cost of mission and teamwork. To these two outstanding fighter leaders, the press hype hailing him as “trump ace” was hard to take.
No doubt, the media frenzy around Bong was partly to blame for all this. The more the reporters pushed and wrote about the rivalry, the more Bong seemed to feel the pressure. It had led to bad decisions, unwarranted risks in the past by others consumed by the race. Here, after all the flying and fighting, it seemed to have finally gotten to Bong as well.
The two aces chatted long into the night. McGuire chain-smoked, talking in machine gun–like bursts. Johnson was smoother, more relaxed, but still rankled by everything that had happened. They made an odd pair, but they’d known each other for so long that the trauma and hardship at Leyte brought them closer together than ever before. Thomas McGuire, always the outsider who defined himself as better than the next man, headed back to his quarters knowing that with Gerald, he possessed an enduring friendship.
In the days that followed, Bong stayed at Tacloban, waiting for final orders home. Kenney visited McGuire at the 431st and ate with the pilots. Afterward, he returned the favor and invited Tommy to eat with him at FEAF Headquarters, where the cook was the former head chef at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco.
Air combat around Leyte dwindled in December from almost daily contact with the enemy to a rare occurrence. With Bong well in the lead with forty kills to his credit, and now headed home, it seemed the race had ended. Tommy was nine back with thirty-one. Johnson had twenty-three, MacDonald twenty-one. It appeared very unlikely that anyone could catch Bong. The Japanese air units in the Philippines had been savaged by the 5th Air Force and the Navy’s carrier air groups. The surviving units were starting to pull out to make their final stand over Japan.
On Christmas Day, McGuire led the 431st on a long-range escort mission, covering B-24 Liberator bombers as they bombed the last major Japanese base in the area, at Clark Field, Luzon. Tommy’s outfit took point over the bomber boxes, with other P-38 units spread out behind, including Charles MacDonald and the rest of the 475th.
The Japanese struck just shy of the target area. Around thirty interceptors pounced on the 431st from above and behind. They dove through the American formation, shooting up several P-38s. McGuire, totally defensive, broke hard left in an impossibly tight turn to scrape a Zero off the tail-end Charlie in his flight. McGuire scored hits on the Zero, but more came spearing through their formation. Lightnings started to go down in flames. The attack had been a masterstroke, but the Japanese weren’t finished. Instead of trying to escape, they used their speed to get above and in front of the 431st before rolling into a slashing, head-on attack. They’d taken a page out of the 5th Air Force’s own tactics.
They came back through the 431st, tracers crisscrossing the sky. Lightnings broke and dove for safety. Others pulled around after the fleeing Japanese, who were still full of fight. A wild scrum unfolded over the B-24s that would last almost an hour. Three 431st Squadron P-38s went down in flames. Several others took hits. McGuire shot down three Japanese fighters while rushing to the aid of his men. Then his guns jammed while he maneuvered in a High-G turn. Instead of breaking off and heading for home, McGuire made feinting attacks on Japanese fighters trying to break through to the B-24 formations. More Japanese fighters piled into the fight. As MacDonald and the rest of the 475th reached the area, the furious air battle stretched for miles in all directions. MacDonald destroyed three planes before his guns jammed as well. All three squadrons of the 49th Fighter Group charged into the fray as more Japanese planes dropped aerial phosphorus bombs from far overhead, hoping to at least disrupt the bomber formations. Flights and elements fought micro duels all the way down to seven thousand feet as the two P-38 groups grappled with about sixty interceptors.
An hour later, over forty Japanese planes filled smoking craters beneath the great air battle. Back at Leyte, McGuire was not in a celebrating mood. The Japanese held all the advantages at the start of the fight, and they inflicted a lot of damage on his men. Later, one of the downed pilots returned to the outfit after being rescued by Filipino guerrillas. Two others were killed in action.
They had been killed on Christmas Day. It would be a terrible blow to their families back home, made worse by the pall their losses would put on the holiday season for years after the mission. The media circus that followed the mission didn’t touch on those losses. Rather, the reporters learned that MacDonald had scored the 475th Fighter Group’s five hundredth kill. The group was hard on the heels of the Forty-Niners, and the press built up the rivalry between the groups. In the days after the mission, Charles MacDonald received more publicity back home than at any other time of the war as a result of that milestone. He barely talked to the reporters, who were left to write their stories without much input from the hero of the hour.
Meanwhile, Christmas night saw the ground crews pouring over the remaining P-38s, trying to get them ready for the morning’s mission, a return to Clark. Come dawn, they could only field ten Lightnings.
McGuire led them into the air, linked up with the rest of the 475th and 49th, and covered another B-24 strike to Luzon. As the Americans approached the target area, antiaircraft bursts filled the sky around them. Suddenly, a flight of Zeroes dove out of some nearby clouds, barreling past the 431st and making for the right side of the bomber formation. McGuire dropped his fuel tanks and led his flight down in hot pursuit. It looked like the lead Zero would reach the bombers before the Lightnings could catch up. In desperation, McGuire snapped out a long-range burst—twelve hundred feet with forty-five degrees of deflection. To the astonishment of the rest of his flight, McGuire’s bullets sent impact flares all around the fuselage and cockpit.
It stayed on its attack course, but Tommy had inflicted enough damage to catch up to him. He snaked his P-38 right behind the Zero, closed to less than a hundred feet, and blew it out of the air.
No time for celebrating. McGuire bent around in a tight turn and went after another fighter chasing the bomber stream. He hit it with two high-deflection bursts, and it went down in flames. Ed Weaver, who was flying in McGuire’s flight that day, later noted he’d never seen such aerial marksmanship before. Ed had done a tour in North Africa as a P-40 pilot in 1942–43 before coming out to the Pacific for a second combat tour. He’d seen a lot of action, but McGuire was a force of his own that day. Weaver tried to stay with Tommy as the great ace threw his P-38 into a series of violent maneuvers to get after three more Zeroes cutting past them. McGuire was just too quick, too capable of handling the g load. Weaver blacked out and lost him.
McGuire nailed a third Zero with another high-degree deflection shot, then chased another one down to fifteen hundred feet. Alone and low was no place for the ace to be, but he hit the Zero repeatedly, again with high-deflection shots. High above the one-versus-one duel, another 431st Squadron pilot, Lt. Chris Herman, saw McGuire score a killing blow right into the Zero’s wing root. A fuel tank exploded, and the enemy plane plummeted to the ground.
Back over Dulag, the 431st’s ground echelon watched as McGuire returned and executed four victory rolls before swinging into the pattern and touching down.
Thirty-eight kills. It seemed the race may not have been over after all. One more mission like today’s, and he’d be the new ace of aces at last.