Once They Were Eagles Read online

  ONCE

  THEY

  WERE

  EAGLES

  The Men of the

  Black Sheep

  Squadron

  FRANK E. WALTON

  THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY

  Copyright © 1986 by Frank E. Walton

  The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Murray State University,

  Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508–4008

  05 04 03 02 01 6 5 4 3 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Walton, Frank E., 1909-

  Once they were eagles.

  Includes index.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Aerial operations, American.

  2. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Pacific Ocean.

  3. World War, 1939–1945—Regimental histories—United States. 4. United States. Marine Fighter Squadron 214—History. I. Title.

  D790.W32 1986 940.54’4973 85-29447

  ISBN 0-8131-1579-5

  ISBN 0-8131-0875-6 (pbk.)

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting

  the requirements of the American National Standard

  for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  To the Black Sheep

  those young eagles who forged a blazing path across the skies

  of the South Pacific, and especially to those Black

  Sheep who did not return to the fold:

  Robert A. Alexander • George M. Ashmun • Harry R. Bartl

  James E. Brubaker • Pierre Carnagey • J. Cameron Dustin

  Robert T. Ewing • Bruce Ffoulkes • Walter R. Harris

  Donald J. Moore • Virgil G. Ray

  They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

  At the going down of the sun and in the morning—

  We will remember them.

  Lawrence Binyon, “For the Fallen”

  Contents

  Map of Black Sheep Combat Area

  Foreword by General Wallace M. Greene, Jr.

  Part One: The Black Sheep Squadron in Combat

  1 Recollection

  2 The Corsair

  3 The Squadron Commander

  4 The Intelligence Officer

  5 The Pilots

  6 Going into Action

  7 “Zeros Spilled out of the Clouds”

  8 Munda

  9 I Got That Old Feelin’

  10 Zeros Snapped at Their Heels

  11 The Squadron Comes of Age

  12 A Change in Tactics

  13 “Your Steeplechase Is Over”

  14 Sydney

  15 New Black Sheep

  16 Trouble at Home Base

  17 Vella Lavella

  18 A Change in Boundaries

  19 Crescendo

  20 Finale

  Part Two: The Black Sheep Forty Years Later

  Frank Walton

  John Bolt

  John Begert

  Ed Harper

  Henry Miller

  Fred Losch

  Fred Avey

  Rufus Chatham

  Ned Corman

  Henry Allen McCartney

  Marion March

  Robert McClurg

  William Heier

  Jim Hill

  Henry Bourgeois

  Alfred Johnson

  Tom Emrich

  Chris Magee

  Rollie Rinabarger

  Gelon Doswell

  Ed Olander

  Harry Johnson

  Bruce Matheson

  Glenn Bowers

  Herb Holden

  Sandy Sims

  Perry Lane

  Burney Tucker

  Al Marker

  James M. Reames

  Don Fisher

  Denmark Groover

  Bill Case

  Gregory Boyington

  Epilogue

  Appendixes

  A. Roster, Boyington’s Black Sheep

  B. Information for Duty Officer

  C. Notice to Pilots

  D. Strafing and Searches

  E. Briefing for Rabaul Fighter Sweep

  F. Request That Black Sheep Squadron Be Kept Intact

  G. Accomplishment Record, Boyington’s Black Sheep

  Index

  Illustrations

  Foreword

  This is the exciting story of eighty-four days in the life of a famous Marine Corps fighting squadron during the battle with the Japanese for control of the South Pacific. It is an account of a group of fifty-one men commanded by a very unusual but talented combat ace, who in a very short time destroyed twenty-eight enemy planes and in turn was finally shot down himself to become a prisoner of war for twenty months and to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  When Frank Walton called me from Honolulu to tell me about this book, I recalled my first conversation with him in Saigon about writing the story of Pappy Boyington and his Black Sheep. Knowing Colonel Walton’s colorful background as deputy commander of the Los Angeles police force, his career as a foreign service officer in Southeast Asia, and his wartime adventures as a marine with Colonel Boyington and VMF 214, I told him that with this background and his skill as a writer he should surely produce a book. This story is the result.

  Greatly interested, I asked Colonel Walton to send me a copy. A few days later a package of manuscript arrived. I opened it expecting to find another well-written story of marines in combat—this time in the air. What I did find was an intensely interesting and superbly written narrative, which I could not let go until I had finished.

  The book is unique in that it not only vividly describes the life-and-death battles fought by the young marine pilots of the Black Sheep Squadron in the skies over the South Pacific, but follows up this story in the second portion of the account with personal interviews, extending over a two-year-period, with squadron survivors giving their recollections of the Great War and telling what has happened to each of them since.

  Walton was air combat intelligence officer for his squadron and bases his story on his personal war diaries of the time, which he illuminates with a vivid memory and a great writing talent. It is a moving account of war and tells of men’s loyalties to one another in the great tradition of the U.S. Marine Corps.

  WALLACE M. GREENE, JR.

  General, U.S. Marine Corps (Retired)

  23rd Commandant

  Preface

  In 1976, a television show appeared entitled Baa, Baa Black Sheep, allegedly based on the World War II exploits of the famed VMF 214—the Black Sheep Squadron of Marine fighter pilots. It was a hoked-up, phony, typical Hollywood-type production depicting the Black Sheep as a bunch of brawling bums who were fugitives from courts-martial. Even the squadron commander, ace flyer Gregory “Pappy” Boyington himself, who was billed as “technical adviser” for the series, claimed that he’d recruited the squadron pilots by giving them the choice of standing trial for various unspecified misdeeds or joining him in the Black Sheep Squadron.

  Not only was nothing
further from the facts (no Black Sheep pilot had ever been charged with a court-martial offense), but such false allegations had a detrimental effect on the professional careers of a number of the former Black Sheep. These lawyers, college professors, businessmen, government officials, artists, and engineers did not appreciate the label of bums and misfits. Nor, certainly, did the widows, mothers, fathers, and children of those Black Sheep who had given their lives in the service of their country.

  As intelligence officer of the original Black Sheep Squadron, I knew how false the picture was. I had retired in Hawaii—after 27 years of service with the Marine Corps, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the State Department’s foreign service—when I was approached by some former Black Sheep to try to arrange a reunion.

  After all those years, locating men from 23 states was a formidable job, but the search was a labor of love. I started with the 33-year-old addresses listed in my War Diaries. Leads from these gave me more addresses.

  I found that some had not lived to return to the States. Bill Crocker had been lost on a mission out of Green Island on 25 March 1944. Bill Hobbs had been lost over New Ireland on 30 March 1944.

  Paul Mullen had returned to the States and then gone out to Japan, where he’d been lost in a midair collision in Kikuma on 12 February 1946. Stan Bailey had gone on to command the new VMF 214 on a carrier assignment; he’d then returned to Hawaii, where he’d been lost on a night flying mission on 5 April 1948.

  Bob Bragdon and John Brown had died of natural causes after the war.

  Including the 11 we’d lost during our two combat tours, a total of 17 had gone to the Valhalla for fighter pilots, leaving 34 survivors from the original 51 Black Sheep. It took two years, several hundred letters and long distance telephone calls, and the resources of Marine Corps headquarters, hometown newspapers, local police, and in some cases the FBI to locate them all. Would they be interested in coming to Hawaii for a reunion? Many of them were and 17 did, 15 with their wives.

  It was an exhilarating experience for all of us. We held a luau; we dredged the words of old songs from our collective memories; we met with the young pilots from the squadron stationed at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station and marveled at the fact that even the helmets fighter pilots now wear cost $20,000! The Black Sheep pilots’ helmets had cost something like a dollar and a half.

  The reunion whetted our appetites to try for a repeat performance, and that opportunity came in the 1980 invitation to participate in the “induction” of a Corsair into the Smithsonian Institution. Greg Tucker, lawyer son of Black Sheep Burney Tucker, worked out the details with the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian. I supplied the addresses of all the surviving Black Sheep. Eighteen of us attended the ceremony.

  That was when I decided to tell the story of these young eagles who flew and fought in the South Pacific some 40 years ago, and of what happened to them in the decades that followed.

  ONE

  The Black Sheep Squadron in Combat

  Born of the sun they travelled a short while toward the sun

  And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

  Stephen Spender, “I Think Continually of Those”

  ONCE

  THEY

  WERE

  EAGLES

  1 | Recollection

  It is five minutes of five on a black tropical morning. The darkness is relieved at infrequent intervals by brief flashes of lightning, which momentarily bathe our air-field in blue-white light. Even at this hour the air is warm, moist. A smell of decaying vegetation drifts out of the thick jungle that presses in against the airstrip. All around me are deep shadows of the high dirt revetments along the taxiways lined by tall coconut palms. I can hear the cough and rumble of the engines on our fighting planes; I can see the spitting blue flames of their exhausts.

  Last night at ten o’clock I had briefed the whole flight. The target is Rabaul—last Japanese South Pacific stronghold.

  Breakfast was at 0415: hamburger, onions, fruit juice, toast, coffee. At 0430 we were in the trucks and on our way down to the strip, the beam from our headlights getting scant welcome from the jungle hovering over the winding road. Down a steep hill, a turn to the left, and we were rolling along the coral taxiway.

  Already the mechanics had some of the planes idling over in the revetments, waiting for the Black Sheep pilots to bring them to life as the blazing “whistling death” of the skies. One by one we dropped off each pilot at the plane assigned him: Pappy, Blot, Oli, Mat, Quill, Rope, Notebook, Long Tom …

  Conversation was sparse; just a quiet “good luck.”

  With their helmets, goggles, throat microphones, yellow Mae West life jackets, jungle survival backpacks, parachutes, and rubber boat packs, they resembled strange monsters as they waddled to their planes, scrambled up on the wings, and were helped into the cockpits.

  Now I sit, with Flight Surgeon Jim Reames, high on the bank beside the tent that serves as office and ready room.

  It is five minutes of five, and our slumbering moths have come to life. They hesitate as though testing their wings and then roll haltingly out of their cocoonlike stalls and onto the taxiway. They fall into a long, wavering, awkward line and lumber out onto the strip. Only their small red and green wingtip lights, their taillights, and their exhaust flames are visible as they reach the end of the runway and prepare to take off.

  With his brakes set, Pappy revs up his engine in a rising crescendo for a final check and then lets it return to idling speed. Swinging the tail around to square with the runway, he waits for the “go” signal from the control tower. Down the strip, in front of him, the small yellow lights that outline its edges converge in the distance. Beyond that—nothing. Everything else is black in this darkest hour before dawn.

  So each pilot sits, alone with his thoughts in the sultry tropical morning on the lonely South Pacific island of Vella Lavella, waiting for the signal that will send him spinning down the runway on his 15,000-pound blue steed.

  Then it comes—just a flick of a switch, and a green light stares at him saying, in its impersonal way: “You’re next.” The engine takes a deeper tone; the plane moves down the runway faster and faster and then hurtles along, barely skimming the hard-packed coral. The streamlined, gull-winged craft lifts free and gives a final blaaat as it climbs away, only the blinking lights and exhaust flames marking its path.

  One after the other, Pappy’s Black Sheep roar past us, and I mentally tick them off. They flash by, climb, and circle away in the darkness. The last one is gone and the roar fades to a drone, then to a hum. Then the morning is still. Doc and I sit quietly, wondering how many of these kids are going to come back. Last night they were happy; joking. This morning they were tense, grouchy, like football players before the big game.

  But this is a deadly game.

  And I wonder what motivated them, volunteers all, to come out to this remote part of the world and put their lives on the line. We realize that it is right to fight and even to die 10,000 miles from home in order to protect our homes and our families. Nevertheless, I sit saddened, knowing that not all of our eagles will always make it back to the nest.

  This is the loneliest time of the day for Doc and me. We sit quietly in the dark. Doc has looked over each pilot to make sure he is fit to fly. I’ve briefed them as completely as possible. Now each is strapped in the cockpit of his seven-ton plane, surrounded by instruments, dials, switches, maps, notes—and the darkness. Below him are the lukewarm waters of the Solomon Sea. Ahead, enemy fighters are waiting to challenge him in deadly duel for the airspace.

  Each pilot must rely on his own skill and initiative to handle this complex array of problems. He must draw from somewhere out of his background—his education, training, experience, and briefing—the right flash of thought to meet each situation instantly as it presents itself. Even so, instead of winging back and bouncing once more on our runway, his plane might join others that have spun down and crashed in the water o
r the tangled jungles.

  “Well, I’ve got to get to these reports,” I mumble, and Doc and I get up and walk into our tent. I light the gasoline lantern and we sit down at the rough table. The hiss of the lantern and the scratch of my pen are the only sounds as I busy myself with the paperwork. Though often condemned, it is really the bottom line of our activity. From such reports, information is gleaned that leads to changes in tactics, ordnance, training, equipment, conditioning, organization. Here are facts on the actual combat performance of aircraft and the men who fly them. Range, speed, fuel consumption, power settings, ammunition effectiveness, performance characteristics, physiological effects of flying are all shown here—and these, added to similar reports from other squadrons, present a picture to the men who build our planes and equipment, train our pilots, and run our war.

  Those who study our reports find them impersonal; they’re looking for facts. But to Doc and me, sitting in the dim little tent, they are part of our hearts as we write how Alex got his or how Junior bailed out or how Harpo almost spun in when he had an attack of vertigo or how Don just never came back.

  As the time draws near for our Black Sheep to return, Doc and I listen for the sound of engines. After many false alarms we’re finally sure, and we go back to our perch to watch the planes come in. It is daylight now, and I check them off as they break up their formations and swing into the traffic circle. We can always tell whether they’ve been in action. If not, they maintain their tight formation, break up smoothly, and land with precision. But when they straggle in and bounce their landings, then we know they’ve been into some shooting.

  The time drags slowly between the landing of the first plane and the arrival of the truck at our ready tent with the first load of pilots. The boys are noisy, full of horseplay. They’re talking excitedly, waving their arms as they hang up their chutes and backpacks.

  They crowd around my desk to give me the word on the mission. The field telephone begins to ring; Operations wants to know what’s happened on the flight: how many planes? any losses? important observations? sightings?