February 10, 1945
Superior, Wisconsin
A crowd gathered around the Lutheran church, stomping their feet in the snow or eating box lunches they’d carried with them. Dozens at first. Then hundreds. Newsmen from every wire service and major newspaper mixed through the crowd, while photographers stood off to capture images of the scene. The movie cameras of Pathé, Universal, Paramount, and Movietown stood on tripods, their operators panning across the throngs of people. At one point, with over a thousand people filling the streets around this church, which looked more European fortress than Midwestern house of worship, some of the most eager folks in the crowd tried to rush the giant wooden front doors. But they’d been bolted securely—no entry, no exceptions. The police and fire departments had deployed a maximum effort to try to control the scene, but this was no riot. The mood was curious, celebratory, and eager.
Dick and Marge were to be married here that evening.
Twelve hundred tickets went out for the ceremony. Perhaps three times that many showed up by six when the doors finally opened. Guests flooded inside, filling every inch of the pews and cramming together in the upstairs balconies that ran along the sides of the chapel. In front were the dignitaries—General Arnold’s personal representative surrounded by a galaxy of field-grade officers sitting with politicians and local officials. It was the social event of the year in Superior. Later, a wire service called it the number-two wedding of the year, three places ahead of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart’s nuptials.
The press was held at bay, forced to wait outside while the couple exchanged vows before family, friends, and luminaries. Later in the day, they were allowed into the chapel to photograph a re-creation of the ceremony. There were so many photographers and movie camera crews that the Bongs had to repeat their vows again and again as they cycled through to get their images. Marge would later joke that on February 10, 1945, she married Dick four times.
They honeymooned in Southern California, doing radio shows together and rubbing elbows with the likes of Bing Crosby, Angela Lansbury, and Judy Garland. They visited movie studios and soundstages, where the stars asked Dick for his autograph. He signed short snorters, smiled for cameras, and playfully slipped into the newlywed life with his beautiful young bride. It was an idyllic return from combat.
Back in the Philippines, MacArthur’s troops landed on Luzon. The final hour of liberation was at hand, but the half million Japanese fighting men on the island refused to accept defeat. They fought with savage tenacity. The Filipino people, caught in the middle, died by the tens of thousands. Manila was consumed in house-to-house fighting that saw some of the worst war crimes of World War II perpetrated there by doomed Japanese Marines.
Gerald Johnson took over the 49th Fighter Group. He was promoted to full colonel a few months before his twenty-fifth birthday, making him one of the youngest men to hold that rank in USAF history. Part of him wanted to stay in the air combat game, and he did fly combat after Tommy’s death. Mostly, he led the group on ground-attack missions in support of the GIs struggling to clear the islands. They were thankless, ugly missions, dropping bombs and napalm in precision runs as forward air controllers coached them on targets.
In the weeks after McGuire’s death, Kenney grew introspective and began to look ahead at the postwar world. There’d be a huge downsizing of the armed forces, no doubt. But there were young studs, leaders of great strength and courage whom the Air Force would need in the years ahead. They would help shape it and ultimately lead it. Those men could not be lost here in the final hours of the Second World War.
On April 2, 1945, Gerald shot down a Ki-44 during a mission to Hong Kong. The news traveled up the chain of command and reached Kenney’s desk. He recognized that fighter pilots—the best ones—will always want to fight. They’ll always be aggressive and seek out air combat. But with the war grinding to an inevitable victory against Japan, there were larger things at stake now.
On April 12, Kenney sat down and composed a letter to Whitehead, laying out his thoughts.
Dear Whitey,
You have two lads that I am very anxious to see enjoy long and useful careers in the post-war Air Force. They are Dick Ellis and Jerry Johnson.
… Jerry Johnson has almost quit being a playboy and is now performing a brilliant job commanding the 49th Fighter Group. I do not think there is any necessity of relieving him from the group, but I would like to see it impressed upon him that his group will get more Nips if he teaches the rest of the pilots how to get them instead of trying to catch up with Dick Bong’s score himself. Pass the word along to Freddy Smith [new V FC commander] and tell him he is not expected to go out on all the missions.
Regarding the need for allocating human resources to the air war with Japan, Kenney had arrived at the same conclusion, though for different reasons, a few months after Gerald did. The Oregonian had endeavored never to let the ace race overcome his discipline to the laws of air combat that kept P-38 pilots alive, nor did he ever let his score matter more than his responsibilities as an officer and leader. MacDonald was the same way, and never got “Zero happy” either.
Mac, still leading the 475th Fighter Group, finished with twenty-seven, outpacing Gerald for third place in the theater. By then, such things didn’t matter anymore. McGuire’s death ended the ace race. If Bong’s record was to be beaten when Kenney’s Air Force joined the battle for Japan’s Home Islands, it would be done by a younger generation of fighter pilots.
That summer, Gerald received news from home that Barbara gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she named Jerry. Gerald’s ground crew repainted his P-38 to celebrate the occasion, complete with a baby painted on the nose in front of stylized red letters reading Jerry.
Gerald continued to lead from the front whenever he could get away from headquarters. At times, he slipped into the old adrenaline junkie ways that Kenney had characterized as his “playboy” side. He slow-rolled a B-25 over the 49th Fighter Group’s airfield at Lingayen, reportedly with both engines feathered—with a USO troupe aboard that had just performed the musical Oklahoma for his fighter group. He nearly ended up in Lingayen Gulf when he couldn’t get one of the engines restarted.
Another time, he had the radio removed from his P-38, crammed actor and comedian Joe E. Brown into the space behind his armored seat, and took him on a dive-bombing mission against Japanese troops fighting in northern Luzon. Joe E. Brown had been a solid supporter of the Army Air Force. His son had been a fighter pilot who had been killed in a Stateside accident, so he traveled throughout the world honoring his son’s memory with his service to other aviators. He and Gerald grew quite close.
Other times, Gerald would get a wild hair and go beat up MacDonald’s airfield. He’d drop down in high-speed zooming passes so low that he once scraped the runway and chopped a quarter inch of propeller blades off. He made it home safely, but such antics were wearing thin after so many needless casualties. He’d grown into a fine leader, but still somewhere inside him burned the boy who always did the wildest tricks on his bike on those steep hills in south Eugene.
He and Mac were pulled out of group command in July 1945 and bumped up to headquarters. Mac went to V Fighter Command, Gerald to the plans section of the 5th Air Force, where he began working on the details of the coming invasion of southern Japan. Though he may not have realized it, he’d flown his last combat mission.
He’d earned every medal an Army Air Force pilot could, shy of the Medal of Honor. He even wore the Soldier’s Medal now, after he and Jim Watkins rescued a drowning sailor in Lingayen Gulf. What mattered to him was what he became known for among his fellow pilots, not the medals and the accolades from the press crew following them through their campaigns. In 265 combat missions, twelve hundred hours of battle time, Gerald Johnson had never lost a wingman. That was the achievement he considered the most important of his combat career.
Shortly after Gerald was pulled up to the 5th Air Force, Kenney sent him back on rest leave. It was too far to go to Australia, so the pilots would go back to a camp at Nadzab. Jock Henebry was there, running an in-theater training school for incoming replacement pilots. Johnson flew in and found the place a skeleton of what it once was. Already, some of the taxiways were being slowly reclaimed by the jungle. What was once the most prized piece of real estate in New Guinea was a backwater now, a testament to the victories secured and the pace of the war.
Even if it was a sign of impending victory, the desolation of the camp made Gerald melancholy. It triggered memories of the frantic alerts of 1943, the moments of puckish happiness he derived from buzzing Jock’s camp in a P-40 before touching down to visit his bomber pilot friends—Dick Ellis, Jock. Those two were still alive, but so many were dead that their losses weighed heavy on him. Others were home in Stateside hospitals, burned or wounded. Missing limbs. Their lives never to be the same. His was a battle-scarred generation, and his friends were among those who’d suffered the most.
In his own pain, Gerald did not think of how these losses affected the families back in the States. He’d sensed from his home leave that he was different from his old friends and neighbors from Eugene. Some fought the good fight, and he respected that. Others he considered shirkers and bitterly turned on them for not giving the same measure as the men he saw in the foxholes of New Guinea. The social fabric back home was being torn asunder by change and loss. It would be a different world when he returned to Oregon.
If Gerald didn’t see this from his place out in the Pacific, the wives did. Marilynn McGuire, Virginia Kearby—their worlds had been destroyed by the ace race. Barbara lived in fear of joining their Gold Star agony every day, through the final hours of the war that defined their generation.
Meanwhile, the country’s favorite couple, Marge and Dick Bong, wrapped up their honeymoon and settled down in the Los Angeles area, where the Army Air Force assigned Dick to be a test pilot with Lockheed’s P-80 Shooting Star jet program. He joined a cadre of hard chargers that included Chuck Yeager, whose jealousy and arrogance toward Dick manifested itself quickly.
On August 6, 1945, Dick was supposed to play golf with Bing Crosby, but the game got postponed. He wasn’t scheduled to fly that day, but since his plans fell through, he went to the Burbank Airport. Marge was home in their little apartment, typing away on a book about her husband. She hadn’t told him what she was doing, wanting to surprise him with it when she finished.
As she typed, the radio played, giving her a bit of background noise. Suddenly, a newscaster cut into the broadcast and announced that America’s ace of aces, Dick Bong, had been killed in a Burbank plane crash.
Marge began to cry. The crying turned to screaming. In despair, she looked around the empty apartment. She was utterly alone. She flew from the place, ran down the hallway, still screaming, to pound on the door of a friend she’d made in the building.
No answer. She kept pounding, beating the door with her fist, unable to comprehend the magnitude of her loss.
What followed passed in a blur. Army Air Force officers filled her apartment. The press mobbed her, camped out around the apartment, forced their way in. Photographs were snapped. Their flashbulbs capturing her pain. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t function. What had happened?
The accident report filled a small filing cabinet. Debate still rages over what happened. In a letter years later, Chuck Yeager coldly told the family that Dick just didn’t measure up and had got himself killed. Some said the engine suffered mechanical failure. Others, that Dick forgot a step in the engine start-up procedure, being inexperienced with the radical new jet. The debate still rages online in aviation circles.
Ultimately, the cause didn’t matter. The results did. As he took off that day, his engine flamed out. He couldn’t get it restarted, and he was too low and slow to turn back to land. He steered the doomed plane away from a residential area, pointed it at an empty lot, and tried to bail out at two hundred feet. His chute failed to open.
America’s ace of aces was dead.
Back in Wisconsin, his parents were visiting friends in Superior when the news broke over the local radio stations. They learned of their son’s death the same terrible way as Marge. No contact team. No media blackouts that defined how the military handled such devastating tragedies in future wars. Just the press leaking the news over the airwaves to a family broken by their words.
Marge lived in a daze for the next forty-eight hours as a mix of grief and outrage swept the nation. Demands for inquiries came from all corners. The Los Angeles Times wanted to know why such irreplaceable men like Dick were dying back home after fighting so hard overseas.
All of it was lost on her. People came and went. Officers whispered empty words of solace. She lived in a fog, barely functional. On the eighth, she found herself aboard a C-54 bound for home. Aboard were her husband’s remains in a flag-draped coffin. She didn’t even know that until they landed in Duluth, though the entire flight she had thought she felt Dick’s presence.
When the plane taxied to a stop, she made her way to the exit door and stepped onto the stairwell the ground crew pushed against the fuselage. She looked out on a sea of people—over a thousand—who stood in shocked grief behind the Bong family to pay their respects to Dick and support his kin.
They stood in silent reverence as an Army Air Force team carried his coffin from the aircraft and slid it into a waiting vehicle. He was taken first to a funeral home, then to Concordia Lutheran Church, the same one in Superior where, six months before, he and Marge were married. Even before Dick and Marge’s family reached the church, the place was filled with average, working-class Americans who came to pay their final respects. Some went straight from their jobs, still in overalls and farm boots so they could stand with their fallen hero and show his family support. For all the grieving, it was a beautiful display of a community circling the wagons in a crisis.
In the Pacific, the news reached Kenney, Mac, and Gerald at about the same time. The news, coming on the heels of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, deeply saddened Kenney. It seemed so senseless to die back home after surviving so many battles with the Japanese.
Gerald took it harder than Mac, who didn’t know Dick as well. He was one of the last of the old Knights, and now Bong’s death left him feeling more isolated and lonely. The melancholy he’d felt back at Nadzab took deeper root within him. He was ready to go home.
Kenney agreed to give them leave. But then, as the Japanese surrendered the following week, going home was put on the back burner. Instead, MacArthur tapped Johnson to be part of the greeting party that formally welcomed the Japanese surrender delegation as it stopped on Ie Shima Island en route to meet with General MacArthur. Johnson stood on the tarmac that day in the middle of the row of American officers waiting for the Japanese as movie cameras rolled. The Japanese, flying in a couple of white Betty bombers hastily painted with green crosses, touched down and taxied to a stop. There, the American hosts led their former enemies to waiting C-54s for the journey to Manila and MacArthur’s headquarters.
At the end of the month, Kenney ordered Gerald to lead the first contingent of Americans into Japan proper. He was to establish a forward operating post at Atsugi Air Base outside Tokyo and prepare for the arrival of both MacArthur and the 11th Airborne Division.
His C-54 touched down with fewer than two dozen Americans aboard, unsure how the Japanese would respond to their presence. To his surprise, he found them compliant and respectful. His former enemies had accepted defeat. For a young man who’d given so much of his life for the war effort, there was no better way to end the war than at the van of the occupation force sent into Japan.
Still, it was time to go home. Kenney wanted him to go back, get a good rest leave in Eugene, then be ready to start his Army Air Force education. He’d attended an abbreviated wartime Command and Staff college course. It was time to groom him for a star. Orders were being processed. He’d be going home any day to finally see Barbara and meet his infant son.
In the meantime, he flew throughout Japan, locating Allied prisoner-of-war camps and securing resources to get supplies and transportation to those desperately ill and mistreated men. He saw the devastation of the firebombing raids and wrote to Barbara of them:
I have been to Tokyo… there is block after block of nothing but ashes and skeletons of buildings.
One night after such a flight, he sat down to calculate how many points he’d accumulated. The military created a point system designed to ensure those who spent the most time in combat went home first. Things like medals, wounds, and time in service all contributed to each veteran’s score.
Gerald was the second-ranking ace still in theater. He wore the Distinguished Service Cross with oak leaf cluster (meaning he was awarded it a second time), the Silver Star, the Soldier’s Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross with five oak leaf clusters, and the Air Medal with ten. Altogether, his combat career was reflected in twenty-one medals and campaign ribbons. It all added up to 222 points. Most combat vets had between fifty and a hundred; Gerald’s score was more than enough to send him to the front of the line for transport home.
On October 1, Gerald popped into the personnel department at 5th Air Force headquarters to see if his orders had been cut. They were being prepared, and he was told he’d have leave the minute he got to San Francisco. He couldn’t wait for a reunion with Barbara—perhaps again at the St. Francis.
He wrote to her excitedly to share the news with her. In another letter, he wrote of their pending reunion:
Seems like these growing up years we have spent many miles apart have been very valuable. We know that no matter what the separation is—time or distance or both—we shall always return to each other.
A few days later, just as his orders and slot at a Stateside school were nailed down, Gerald flew a B-25 from Japan to MacArthur’s headquarters on a courier run to deliver some top secret documents. In Manila, he picked up two officers who wanted to get a quick look at Japan before going home.
On the way back to Atsugi Air Base, Gerald’s B-25 ran into an unreported storm. It grew increasingly worse as they made their way to the coast of Honshu. Sunset came and went as they pressed on through hurricane-force winds and driving rain. Turbulence buffeted the aircraft. Johnson and his copilot Jim Nolan fought to keep the B-25 in the air while trying to navigate to Atsugi in zero visibility. Communications failed. They couldn’t talk to Atsugi control directly, but a C-46 airborne that evening relayed messages. Gerald and Jim couldn’t find any landmarks in the darkness. They dropped down on the deck hoping to figure out where they were. Sheets of rain lashed the aircraft, streaking the cockpit windows with water and further distorting their minimal view. They nearly ran into a mountainside at one point. Gerald pulled them up and over it at the last possible second, clipping a tree that tore three feet from one wingtip.
The C-46, low on fuel, landed at Atsugi. Gerald lost all communications with the outside world. Finally, with twenty minutes of fuel remaining, he ordered everyone to bail out. He would run the Mitchell over the coastline and make sure the crew would drop right over a beach.
That’s when their two passengers announced they had not brought parachutes along.
The crew scoured the bomber. No extra chutes. Six men, four packs. The nightmare couldn’t get any worse. The crew suggested drawing straws. Gerald would have none of it. “I’m in command of this aircraft.” He told them. He gave his parachute to Lt. Col. Robert Underwood. Jim Nolan gave his chute to their other passenger, Lt. Herbert Schaeffler. Gerald told them he would run along over the beach until they were all out safe, then he and Nolan would come around and put the B-25 down in a belly landing.
The four men jumped into the terrible night. Their chutes opened, and even with the wind, they landed safely, though scattered by a few miles. That night and the next morning, they were picked up by local Japanese authorities.
The B-25 vanished into the storm. Gerald Johnson and Jim Nolan were never seen again.