Gregory Boyington shot down

On the morning of 3 January 1944 Major Gregory Boyington, commanding officer of fighter squadron VMF-214 of the United States Marine Corps, known as the “Black Sheep”, went missing over the Japanese base at Rabaul. That day he was leading a combined fighter sweep over Rabaul and – as his pilots saw – shot down a Japanese fighter, which gave him his 26th credited victory and drew him level with the record holders of American air power. Then he vanished in the confusion of the fight. For a long time the Americans believed him dead. In fact, wounded, he had come down in the sea; after several hours in a dinghy he was picked up by a Japanese submarine, and he spent the rest of the war – nearly 20 months – in Japanese prison camps.

Boyington became one of the most famous figures of the American air war in the Pacific: he was awarded the Medal of Honor while he was believed missing, and his squadron was known throughout the United States. That is precisely why his tally of victories – still usually given as 26 or 28 – calls for a few words of explanation.

The Black Sheep over the Solomons

Boyington was no young pilot. In 1943 he was 31, a decade older than most of his men (hence the nickname “Gramps”, later “Pappy”), and he had a turbulent past behind him: in 1941 he had left the Marine Corps to fight as a volunteer with the Flying Tigers in Burma and China, and after breaking his contract he had returned to the Marine Corps as a major. In September 1943 he took command of VMF-214, which he formed largely from unassigned pilots, replacements and men returning from sick leave. The squadron flew the Vought F4U Corsair – a fast, powerful fighter that in the Pacific outclassed the Japanese Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

On their first combat tour (September–October 1943) the Black Sheep operated from the airfield on Vella Lavella, taken in August after the American landing, and fought over southern Bougainville. On 17 October Boyington led 24 fighters over the Japanese airfield at Kahili and, circling above it, goaded the Japanese into taking off; in the ensuing fight the squadron’s pilots claimed 20 kills without loss. The second tour, from the end of November, came at a time when, after the landing on Bougainville, Allied air forces in the Solomons (AirSols) could reach Rabaul itself with fighters. Since October the base had been the target of a massive air offensive by General Kenney’s Fifth Air Force, and in November carrier aircraft struck it as well. From December fighters from the Bougainville airfields flew “fighter sweeps” over Rabaul, intended to draw Japanese fighters into combat and destroy them in the air. At the same time, on 15 December, the Americans landed on New Britain itself, though far from Rabaul, in the western part of the island.

By 27 December 1943 the Marine Corps credited Boyington with 25 victories – 19 with the Marine Corps and six from his Flying Tiger days. He was one short of the record, held since the First World War by Eddie Rickenbacker and equalled in 1943 by another Marine pilot, Joe Foss (26 victories each). The press followed the race day by day, and Boyington himself, tired and under pressure, came back from several missions over Rabaul empty-handed.

The sweep over Rabaul on 3 January

On 3 January 1944 Boyington was tactical leader of a sweep involving about 48 American fighters – according to American accounts, Marine Corsairs from several squadrons (including four VMF-214 pilots and aircraft of VMF-211) and Hellcats of the navy’s VF-33. They took off from the airfields on Bougainville and were over Rabaul at about 8 a.m. Several dozen Zeros of the Japanese navy’s 204th and 253rd Air Groups rose to meet them – some accounts put the number as high as about 70. Boyington dived on the climbing Zeros and shot one down; other pilots saw it, and this one success went into the reports as his 26th victory.

He and his wingman, Captain George Ashmun, then became entangled in a confused fight against superior numbers. Ashmun was killed. Boyington, as he described after the war, kept chasing Japanese fighters until his Corsair was hit and caught fire. He bailed out at very low altitude – by his account the parachute opened just above the water – and came down in St George’s Channel, a few kilometres from the shore. He had been wounded by bullets and splinters. According to his memoirs, Japanese fighters went on strafing him in the water for some fifteen minutes or so, while he hid beneath the surface, freeing himself from his parachute and life jacket. He then drifted for many hours in a dinghy.

The Americans did not know what had become of him: nobody in the air had seen him go down. As he had not returned to base he was listed as missing, and the searches found nothing. The news that “Pappy” was missing went round the American press.

Captivity

After about eight hours in the water Boyington was spotted and taken aboard by the Japanese submarine I-181 under Lieutenant Commander Kiyoshi Taoka, returning from a supply run to New Guinea. The submarine put into Rabaul the same day. I-181 herself survived less than two weeks: she sailed on another supply run on 13 January and was lost in the middle of the month.

At Rabaul Boyington was interrogated. The Japanese did not report him as a prisoner to the International Committee of the Red Cross, so throughout this time his family and his superiors did not know he was alive. After a few weeks he was taken to the base at Truk (Chuuk) in the Carolines, where on 17–18 February 1944 he lived through the great American carrier strike, Operation Hailstone. He was then sent to Japan, to the navy’s secret interrogation camp at Ōfuna, where unregistered prisoners were held, and later to the Ōmori camp on Tokyo Bay. His fellow prisoners included the former Olympian and airman Louis Zamperini and the submarine commander Richard O’Kane. Boyington later recalled that the enforced sobriety of captivity had paradoxically improved his health; at the same time he described beatings, hunger and hard labour.

26 or 28 victories?

The popular formula that on 3 January Boyington “shot down the last three of his 26 aircraft” simplifies matters in two respects. First, only one kill was confirmed on the spot that day – the one the other pilots saw, which gave him his 26th victory. Only after returning from captivity did Boyington report that he had destroyed two more aircraft later in the fight (some accounts speak of three or four aircraft downed that day in all). The Marine Corps accepted his account and in 1945 credited him with 28 victories in total – 22 with the Marine Corps and six with the Flying Tigers – which made him the highest-scoring ace in Marine Corps history. The figure of 26 was his score at the moment he was shot down, repeated by the press in 1944.

Second, the six from Burma are themselves disputed. According to the records of the American Volunteer Group, on the basis of which bonuses were paid for destroyed aircraft, Boyington was credited there with two kills in the air and one and a half aircraft destroyed on the ground; he himself claimed to have shot down six, and that is the figure the Marine Corps accepted. Historians of the Flying Tigers and Boyington’s biographer Bruce Gamble regard it as inflated. The Japanese figures are uncertain too: in its surviving reports the 253rd Air Group recorded the loss of one Zero on 3 January, while the losses of the 204th Air Group are not known. The post-war claims of the Japanese pilot Masajirō Kawato that it was he who had shot Boyington down have also proved doubtful.

Decorations and return

In March 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt awarded Boyington the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the squadron from 12 September 1943 to 3 January 1944. It was awarded in the belief that the airman was dead, and the medal waited in Washington. On 29 August 1945, after Japan’s surrender, Boyington was freed from the Ōmori camp; on 12 September he landed in California, where 21 former pilots of the squadron were there to greet him. On 4 October 1945 the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alexander Vandegrift, presented him with the Navy Cross for the fight over Rabaul on 3 January, and the next day President Harry Truman decorated him with the Medal of Honor at the White House.

Significance

Boyington’s loss did not change the course of the fighting for Rabaul. The fighter sweeps from Bougainville continued throughout January and February 1944 and, together with the bombing, wore down Japanese naval air power in the area; in February the Japanese withdrew their last fighter units from Rabaul, and the fortress, bypassed by the Allied offensive, ceased to be a threat. Having lost its commanding officer, VMF-214 soon finished its combat tour.

For Americans, though, Boyington’s story became one of the legends of the Pacific war: the maverick who took over a squadron of “misfits”, made it one of the most successful fighter units, was killed in action – or so it was believed – and came back from captivity after the war. His fate also illustrates a less familiar side of the war with Japan: prisoners deliberately left unregistered so that their existence could be concealed and they could be interrogated at will. In the 1970s the legend returned in the television series Baa Baa Black Sheep, which the squadron’s veterans themselves criticised as largely fictional.