Once They Were Eagles (5 page)

On 11 September 1943, Boyington called us together.

“We're leaving tomorrow for our first combat tour.”

Everyone jabbered excitedly for a few moments and then quieted as he spoke again:

“We're going to Cactus (code name for Guadalcanal) and then on up to the Russell Islands. We'll fly 20 planes up. The rest of you will fly up on a SCAT (military transport) plane.”

The remainder of the day was spent gathering final bits of equipment, packing our gear, and storing most of it with the Group Quartermaster. We were taking only a handbag each for a six-weeks combat tour. Transport space into the combat area was so limited that no room was available for luxuries. A couple of pairs of field shoes (boondockers, we called them), half a dozen pairs of socks, a few shirts, trousers, a minimum of toilet articles just about completed our load of personal gear.

We were up at 4:00
A.M.
, loaded into trucks, and hauled some 15 miles across the island to the bomber strip, where we were checked in and weighed in. After an hour's wait, we were trucked out to a brown two-engine Douglas transport plane, the workhorse of the South Pacific, and packed on top of what appeared to be several thousand pounds of aircraft parts, tools, medical supplies, and mail bags. The pile was so high our backs almost touched the ceiling.

Then the pilot and copilot climbed in and crawled over to us to the cockpit. A few minutes later the engines sputtered to life, the plane swung about, and we moved along the taxiway. The overloaded craft staggered off the ground, not lightly and smoothly, like a bird, but sluggishly and laboriously, straining and complaining and groaning, until we were at last airborne. We circled out over the water and then crossed the end of the island, its solid jungles looking like a carpet of broccoli.

Just before noon, Guadalcanal came into view. We could see the wrecked Japanese ships and troop barges on its shores and on the reefs about it. Entire jungle areas were masses of splinters; huge gouges showed in the deep green foliage.

At twelve o'clock we bounced heavily down onto Henderson Field, for which the Marines had paid such a high price. The name honored a Marine aviator who had lost his life at the Battle of Midway.

A truck hauled us over to the transient area past a complicated scene of destruction, rot, flies, and stench. We unloaded and had lunch: Spam and beans. At the Intelligence shack we learned that the pilots were to fly the 20 planes on to the Russell Islands that afternoon; the rest of us would fly up the next morning on the transport plane.

A couple of us borrowed a jeep and took a tour around the island. We saw the Lunga River, the Tenaru, Bloody Ridge—all scenes of gallant, costly Marine victories. We saw that the Army had been there, too. Even though they had come much later than the Marines, they'd had their share of fighting. Over one of the roads a sign read:

They were playing for keeps here.

The next morning we took off shortly after seven o'clock and landed in the beautiful Russell Islands some 30 minutes later. The Russell Islands could have been a Hollywood set for a tropical movie. The water was a clear, cobalt blue. The sand was clean and white. Tall coconut palms waved lazily in warm breezes scented with frangipani and other exotic flowers.

But as our truck began to climb a short hill to our quarters, we saw that this was no time for lazy contemplation and lolling on the beach. Beside the road was a sign: “Marine Air Group 21, where the extermination of Japs is a business, not a pastime.”

Our squadron had been assigned Scramble Alert duty for the day. That meant that the pilots were to stand by, to take off at short notice to intercept any enemy planes that might come our way.

Boyington took advantage of the opportunity to give the pilots some instruction on tactics. He sat on his heels in the shade of the ready room, with the pilots gathered about him like players around their coach, and covered the crushed coral surface of the ground in front of him with diagrams.

“There's one thing you must always keep in mind,” he said. “Carry out your mission. If you're covering bombers, cover them to the target and back. Don't take off some place to attack a couple of Zeros off to one side. I know you all want to shoot down planes. But our first job is the
completion of the mission, whatever it is. Keep in mind that when you do get your opportunity, it'll just be a quick flash and your chance will be gone. Be prepared to take full advantage of it. When you get your chance, attack immediately and let him have it.”

Boyington then went over the differences between the Zeros and our Corsairs.

“You're flying one of the sweetest fighters there is,” he said. “But there are certain things a Corsair won't do. Don't try to loop with a Zero because the Zero is a lighter, more maneuverable plane and will loop inside you and he'll end up on your tail. The same goes for turning—don't try to turn with him. But your ship is faster; it will climb away from him in a shallow climb, and you can outdive anything they've got. So what does all this add up to? Just this: get above him; come in on him in a high stern pass; hold your fire till you're within good, close range; let him have it and watch him burn. When they're hit right they burn like celluloid.

“If you miss him, don't stick around to dogfight. Dive out—get the hell out of there—climb away and come back into the fight with some altitude and speed.

“Stay together if you can, particularly your two-plane section. Unless you're completely swamped on all sides, you're in good shape if you keep your section together.

“Depend on your plane; it's built to take a beating and still bring you home. And try to bring them back, men; they're all we have.

“Remember that fighter planes are built to fight. That's our primary general mission. Any time there are enemy planes in the air and we have fighters up, we should tangle with them if we can do so without leaving our own bombers or photo planes unprotected.”

That was the essence of the Boyington system—aggression. He often advocated that our fighters be stripped of their camouflage coating and left their natural silver color; it would make it easier for a fight to begin, he said. With the camouflage on our planes, an enemy formation might not see us, and a chance for a fight would be lost.

As it turned out, the Black Sheep had plenty of opportunities to fight.

That night, we all gathered in our hut to talk over plans, to sing, and to enjoy a general gabfest.

“I think we should have a name for our squadron,” someone suggested.

The idea was instantly accepted and we began to toss around one name after another. We agreed at once that we did
not
want one of the
Walt Disney bugs, bees, and bunnies types of names that were so prevalent. Then someone said:

“How about Boyington's Bastards?”

After all, our squadron had been slapped together from replacement and pool pilots. Our skipper had been told he'd never fly again. We'd had practically no training as a squadron. We'd been assigned ground and administrative echelons, but they'd been left at Espiritu Santo.

The name fit us perfectly.

The next day I told Jack DeChant, the Marine Corps public relations officer in the Island Group Headquarters, about our choice.

“That won't do,” he said. “You'll have to find a more printable name.” The press was considerably more straitlaced in those days than it is now.

When I reported this to the boys, we again got our heads together and came up with the name “Black Sheep.” It told somewhat the same story.

Next, of course, we had to have an emblem, and after further discussion we worked out a heraldry shield with its top formed by the cowl and inverted gull-wings of the Corsair. Diagonally across the shield we put a bar sinister, the heraldry sign for bastard. In the upper left we had a woebegone, lopeared black sheep; in the lower right we put our squadron number—214—and finished off with a circle of stars in the center. Bill Case drew a preliminary draft, and then Pen Johnson, a Marine combat correspondent, produced a beautiful original for us. With a name and an emblem, we began to feel more like a unit.

The first combat flight for the newly named Black Sheep came on 14 September. Munda airstrip had been taken by the Marines, although fighting was still going on around it. The earlier Marine pilots had written a glorious page in aviation history for us to carry on: between 7 December 1941 and that date nearly two years later, Marine airmen had shot down more than half of all the aircraft destroyed in the entire Pacific area—more than the Army, Navy, and New Zealand Air forces combined.

So it was with a mixed feeling of anxiety and satisfaction that Doc Reames and I watched 24 of our Black Sheep (four of them in borrowed planes) take off on this first mission. They were to escort Army B-24s to bomb Kahili, strongest of the five Japanese airfields on Bougainville.

Shortly before noon, our planes began to come back and circle in the landing pattern. Then the boys were in the ready room, and I began
to piece together the story of the flight. The B-24s had dropped most of their bombs in the water off the end of the strip; no enemy aircraft were encountered and very little antiaircraft fire.

The boys were a little disappointed.

 

At one o'clock in the afternoon of 16 September 1943, Pappy Boyington taxied to the end of the white coral runway, gunned his engine, and sped out over the blue waters of the bay off the Russell Islands. Twenty-three other Black Sheep followed in smooth order. The 24 planes got off the ground in just seven minutes.

This was to be a strike on Ballale, a strategically located island in the bay off southern Bougainville. Its airfield was operational, and the whole island was solid with antiaircraft positions. Black Sheep pilots were to act as high cover for Marine torpedo and dive bombers. They made their rendezvous with the bombers on schedule over Munda at 1:50
P.M.

The formation moved northward under a fleecy layer of clouds, the bombers at 13,000 feet and the Black Sheep at 21,000. Between them were a layer of New Zealand Warhawks at 15,000 and a layer of Navy Hellcats at 19,000 as intermediate cover.

As twenty-four-year-old John Begert reported, “Zeros spilled out of the clouds” onto them when the bombers started their dives on the target. Some 40 to 50 Zeros attacked the Black Sheep and started a fight that spread all over the sky for 200 square miles and lasted 30 minutes. It was a mad scramble, with 16 of the 24 Black Sheep seeing action for the first time.

Twenty-two-year-old Bob Alexander, one of the newcomers to combat, was flying wing on Major Bailey. The two Corsairs dived
toward a circling hive of 20 Zeros, selected one, and came down on him in a quarter pass. The Zero rolled onto its back and dived. The two Black Sheep followed it down to 10,000 feet.

At this point Alexander saw a flight of three Zeros preparing to dive on them. He pulled up to keep them off his division leader's tail. Bailey stayed with his Zero, continuing to fire till it went into the clouds, smoking.

Bailey followed it into the clouds, went on instruments, circled, and pulled out into the clear. He saw a Zero coming down on him, firing, so he ducked back into the clouds. When he came out, the same thing happened again, and then three times more. Bailey decided this was not his day, so he stayed in the clouds and headed for home on instruments.

Coming out into the clear, he saw a pilot floating down in his chute with a Zero making passes at him, attempting to machine-gun him as he dangled there.

Bailey dived at the Zero. It pulled up in a tight loop and got on his tail. The Major dived out, circled back and then heard the thud of bullets on his plane. Three Zeros were on his tail. Convinced anew that this was not his day, Bailey dived out and nursed his bullet-scarred plane home.

Alexander, meanwhile, had attacked the three Zeros that had been preparing to dive on him and Bailey. They scattered, and Alexander was left momentarily alone in the sky.

He spotted two Zeros about a thousand feet below him. The wingman was trailing about a hundred feet to the right, slightly stepped down. Alexander dived on them, and leveled off, making a direct stern approach on the wingman. He closed till he could spot the red roundel, then opened fire at 150 yards. He saw his bullets sieve the cockpit, tail, and mid-fuselage. Bits of metal and fabric flew off, and the Zero began to smoke.

Alexander continued to fire as he closed and then pulled up and passed over the Zero's right wing within 50 feet of the enemy. Looking into the cockpit, he saw flames come up from under the instrument panel and immediately fill the whole cockpit.

“It looked just like they do it in the movies,” Bob told me.

Alexander cut across in front of the flaming Zero and sighted in on the leader, who rolled over and dived down. Alexander spotted four Zeros above him with the leader peeling off for an overhead pass at him, so he nosed his Corsair over and dived out.

Seeing that his tail was clear, he began to climb again toward a 16-plane
melee above him—only to find that they were all Zeros, circling and slow-rolling among themselves. Realizing this was no place for a lone Corsair without altitude advantage, Alexander dived and headed for home.

Bill Case was leading a division of four Corsairs when he spotted seven Zeros attacking a flight below them. His division rolled over and dived on the Zeros. Their leader saw them coming and pulled up. All four Black Sheep got in short bursts, pulled up, rolled over, and went down on the Zeros in an overhead.

Case picked out one and corkscrewed down with him for two turns and then pulled out. By this time Case had lost his second section, but his wingman, Rollie Rinabarger, was still with him.