The Aviators by Winston Groom
Next day a report came in that thirteen bogies had flown out of the Japanese base at Jefman Island and the 475th went up to intercept, with Lindbergh now leading one of the sections. They flew at treetop level in case the Japanese had radar (by 1944 the Japanese had developed a rough version of the Allied radar) but saw no Japanese planes in the air or on the ground, and no barges to shoot up. All they had to show for their effort were several holes shot in the plane of Lindbergh’s wingman and a plane from another squadron was missing. The only bright aspect was revealed when Lindbergh returned from the nearly seven-hour adventure with 210 gallons of fuel remaining in his tanks, while everyone else was near empty.
All the while he had been flying missions in the P-38s, Lindbergh had been fiddling with ways to get improved fuel consumption. By a combination of adjusting the throttle, the fuel mixture, and the manifold pressure and lowering the revolutions per minute, Lindbergh had managed to increase the plane’s range by an average of nearly three hundred miles—a tremendous improvement.
Some of the crew chiefs took notice of this and soon, at the behest of Colonel MacDonald, Lindbergh was giving lectures to the assembled squadrons of the 475th on how to manage fuel. By raising manifold pressure and lowering rpms, the pilot could save up to one-third of his usual fuel consumption, which broadened the effective range of the P-38 up to eight hundred miles, Lindbergh told them.
Many of the younger pilots were skeptical, complaining that holding manifold pressure that high would foul their spark plugs and scorch their cylinders. But Lindbergh stood his ground: “These are military engines, built to take punishments, so punish them.” He added that “you must make your own decisions. You are the captains of your ships.” In the coming days, pilots and mechanics came over to Lindbergh’s P-38 after he had finished a mission to inspect what they were sure would be damage and fouling, but to their amazement his engine was perfectly normal. Lindbergh’s advice eventually worked its way in to all three squadrons of the Satan’s Angels group, and men who previously were limited to six-hour missions were now soaring over enemy territory for eight to ten hours, far in advance of anything the Japanese expected.12
Charles Lindbergh had all but become a full-fledged member of the 475th Fighter Group. “Lindbergh was indefatigable,” said Colonel MacDonald. “He flew more missions than was normally expected of a combat pilot. He dive-bombed positions, sank barges, and patrolled our landing forces on Noemfoor Island. He was shot at by almost every antiaircraft gun the Nips had in western New Guinea.”13
The camaraderie among the men of fighter-plane or pursuit squadrons had been famous ever since their appearance in the First World War. It was most especially so in the 475th, stuck as it was between the edge of a hostile jungle and the endless sea. There was no Paris, nor the diversions of Paris, to turn to for leave. Lindbergh was a natural leader, and far from being merely the “old boy” that McGuire had initially taken him for, Lindbergh was soon looked up to by the youthful pilots for guidance and, occasionally, consolation. Because of their age they might have been a bit faster on the stick or the trigger, but Lindbergh had many thousands of flying hours to their hundreds, and even the aces soon came to regard his aeronautical engineering wizardry with a respect bordering on awe. They were flying with Charles A. Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, they told each other. That he had come to their squadron was a gift from Providence. Then it all seemed to unravel.
The trouble began when Colonel Robert L. Morrissey, Lindbergh’s contact at U.S. Army Air Forces headquarters, South West Pacific, told him that a rumor had come in from the Australian army that Lindbergh was flying combat in New Guinea, and if that was true “there should be no more of it.” Pressed for more information, Morrissey had none. To Lindbergh, it “look[ed] like politics.” Had Roosevelt or someone in his cabinet found out?
Next morning he took off in a P-38 for headquarters at Nadzab to see the commanding general. Once there, the situation began to brighten. It seemed that Lindbergh’s orders had been misplaced and it was merely a technical snag. While he was waiting for clarification, Lindbergh used the opportunity to visit with his longtime friend Lieutenant Colonel Archie Roosevelt, one of TR’s sons, who was recuperating from a shrapnel wound suffered during the invasion of Biak Island two months earlier. The two old America Firsters got a laugh, he said, as they compared the combat records of “those of us who opposed getting into it,” Lindbergh said, “[which] are far better than those who demanded intervention.”
After dinner and an early turn-in, Lindbergh prepared to rejoin his comrades in the 475th in the morning. Instead, he was awakened at midnight by an army colonel with a message that had just arrived from Brisbane requesting him to come immediately to Allied headquarters. It was signed, simply, “MacArthur.”
LINDBERGH TOOK OFF FOR BRISBANE at the crack of dawn next day. First he visited General Kenney, who was friendly but firm. Apparently the problem arose when rumors had filtered back to headquarters that Lindbergh “had somehow managed to get into the forward areas in New Guinea without their knowing about it” (a serious offense in itself) but, worse, that Lindbergh “was flying combat missions with the army squadrons,” which violated every regulation in the book.
If the Japanese caught him, Kenney fulminated, then Lindbergh, as a civilian in combat, “would have [his] head chopped off immediately.” Kenney then began to carp about the navy giving Lindbergh orders to come into the theater without going through MacArthur’s headquarters. Lindbergh responded that he had turned his orders over to the proper authorities when he arrived, and “had been under the impression that all formalities had been satisfactorily met.” Further, he told General Kenney that the last thing he wanted to do was cause trouble.
Kenney was “very decent” about it, Lindbergh said, and told him he would cut orders so that he could remain in New Guinea but asked him to refrain from any more combat flying. Lindbergh replied that he didn’t want to go back to the front and just sit around, that the best way for him to properly evaluate the problems associated with the P-38 would be to test the plane under combat conditions, and that his recommendations might save lives. Wasn’t there some way around the regulations?
Suddenly Kenney “became thoughtful and his eyes twinkled,” Lindbergh said, and “the ice was broken.” Kenney told Lindbergh he would put him on observer status, which allowed flying but no shooting, adding with a wink that “no one back in the States will know whether you use your guns or not.”
Kenney picked up the phone and raised General Sutherland, MacArthur’s chief of staff. He explained the situation and recommended letting Lindbergh continue his assessment of the army’s fighter aircraft at the front. Sutherland’s response was to ask to see Lindbergh personally.
The chief of staff received Charles very warmly, inquiring about their mutual friend Colonel (now General) Truman Smith. At one point Lindbergh mentioned what he was doing vis-à-vis fuel conservation and the fighter planes, and the crusty chief of staff not only perked up but immediately suggested they go in to see General MacArthur, whom Lindbergh had once met when he was the army’s chief of staff in the 1930s.
The general, who “looked younger” than Lindbergh had expected, was riveted to learn about the notion of lengthening the fighter’s range. Lindbergh explained that with adjustments in fuel mixture and manifold pressure the P-38 consumed only fifty gallons of gasoline per hour at cruising speed instead of its usual eighty. This would give the fighter more air time, which would stretch its effective radius three hundred additional miles. It was a stunning revelation.
When Lindbergh told MacArthur that, without any modifications whatever, his fighter planes were capable of an 800-mile radius, the commanding general was astounded. Such a thing would be “a gift from heaven,” MacArthur exclaimed, and highly important to his battle plans. As Colonel MacDonald explained it later, “It meant the bombers could hit targets three hundred miles farther out [than was previously possible] and still have their ‘little friends’ a
When the general asked if Lindbergh would return and instruct all the fighting groups in his fuel-saving techniques, Lindbergh replied, “There was nothing [I] would rather do,” suggesting that he would go back and begin at once.
At last it was settled; Lindbergh was a welcome addition to the South Pacific theater of war. “He [MacArthur] said I could have any kind of plane I wanted, and do any kind of flying I wanted to,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. Then, to Lindbergh’s astonishment, MacArthur took him into his confidence and revealed in detail his entire present and future battle plans, on the maps, against the empire of Japan. In retrospect it seems like a dangerous thing to have done, since Lindbergh, technically a civilian, could have been captured and, if not immediately shot or beheaded, somehow forced to reveal the information. But MacArthur was a world unto himself.
After his meeting with MacArthur, Lindbergh went out shopping in Brisbane, marveling that “no one recognizes me here.” He bought a spool of thread, a shaving stick, and shoe polish and visited a zoological park where he saw kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas. Next morning he was airborne for the fighting front in his own personal P-38, courtesy of General Douglas MacArthur.
THE SOUTH PACIFIC IS LITTERED with small islands and the Japanese had crawled all over them like an army of ants, building small airstrips, turning them into stationary, unsinkable aircraft carriers from which to interdict Allied shipping. Many of these would have to be cleared out before MacArthur could make the big move north to fulfill his famous promise to the Philippines—“I shall return.” Thus, fighter command had moved on northward to the small speck of Owi Island, next to the much larger Biak Island, eighty miles off the northern coast of New Guinea, where heavy fighting was still in progress.
From Owi, Lindbergh began his lessons instructing the various fighter squadrons of the South West Pacific in fuel conservation techniques. He continued to fly on combat missions with Colonel MacDonald and the 475th. In the evenings, he would sometimes walk to the top of a coral cliff that was a stone’s throw from the tent serving as officers’ quarters and watch the fighting on nearby Biak. After two months of steady slaughter, the Japanese abandoned the tactic of the banzai charge, which they discovered used up all the men too quickly, and were engaged in a shot-for-shot slugging match with American soldiers.
It turned out to be one of the worst battles of the war. The Japanese had an army of more than eleven thousand on Biak when the United States invaded on May 27, 1944, with approximately thirteen thousand men from the Forty-first Infantry Division. By the end of July the Japanese had been pressed back from their airfield into a long, sharp coral ridge honeycombed with interlocking caves that were perfect for defense. Thus far they had thrown back all of the U.S. infantry attacks and were holding out with about five hundred ragged soldiers, all that remained of the original force.
From his vantage point on Owi, Lindbergh could clearly see the brownish coral ridge where the Japanese were dug in, rising out of the green jungle on Biak Island, and hear the distant boom and crash of artillery and see flashes of explosions. One day from his cliff Lindbergh watched the final assault on the Japanese caves. It was preceded by a tremendous air strike of thousand-pound bombs from eight B-24s, flying low, as there was no antiaircraft fire. Lindbergh could actually see the bombs being released, causing tremendous explosions. Then the artillery began its bombardment in preparation for the infantry attack.
The attack, however, proved unnecessary; the infantry had moved in and occupied the area barely firing a shot. They found Japanese and parts of Japanese, and the ones still alive were too dazed from the bombs to do anything but lie or sit placidly on the ground. Two days later Lindbergh and several other officers went over to the Japanese airfield on Biak, which had become the new base of operations for the 475th Fighter Group, and drove a jeep to the site of the Japanese caves.
They came first to a pass clogged with dead Japanese soldiers and marines, “sprawled about in the gruesome positions only mangled bodies can take,” Lindbergh said. Some were merely fragments of bodies and severed heads and limbs. There were unmistakable signs that the American infantry had been prospecting for gold teeth. All over the ridgeline it was the same, torn and battered human bodies, some single, many heaped in piles. They came across a deep pit crammed with dead bodies and, to Lindbergh’s horror, topped off with garbage from the American soldiers’ encampment, an indignity he found utterly repugnant.
They located an entrance to the caves and descended into the pit on a rickety thirty-foot Japanese ladder. Using his Abercrombie & Fitch flashlight, Lindbergh threw a beam on the dripping walls and the floor, littered with ammunition, food crates, rifles and machine guns, and souring bags of rice; in each of the caves’ many offshoots and tunnels lay dead and stinking bodies and, in some of them, charred bones and skulls where the flamethrowers had done their grisly work. At the entrance to one cave was the headless body of a Japanese soldier in an upright position, roped to a pole, it was said, by his comrades for trying to surrender to the Americans. It was as gruesome a tableau as could be taken in on a single afternoon, and when they could stand it no longer Lindbergh and his companions drove away in their jeep to a nearby spring—close enough that it had probably been used by the Japanese in the caves, he said—where they stripped down and tried to wash away the stench and the recollection of the horrors they had seen.
In the morning the 475th, with Lindbergh leading a section, flew cover for a wave of four B-25s in a strike on the Japanese base at Halmahera Island, about five hundred miles farther northwest. Some of the squadron ran into enemy airplanes and shot several of them down. McGuire’s kill temporarily made him the theater’s leading ace. As an added attraction they had to fly over an erupting volcano that filled their cockpits with sulphurous fumes and in places visibility dropped to zero because of the volcanic ash.
Friday, July 28, seemed to shape up as another routine day. After breakfast, Lindbergh and the other pilots arrived at the airstrip on Biak at dawn and took off shortly afterward; their destination: Japanese airstrips on the large island of Ceram in the Moluccas, reported to have strong fighter forces.
A storm nearly forced the group commander to call off the mission. They had climbed to 18,000 feet but still could not top it out. They nevertheless pressed on, a flight of eighteen twin-engine P-38s. As they approached the Japanese airstrips the weather cleared, but when they dropped down to 10,000 feet no enemy planes could be seen on the runways. The Japanese were very good at hiding planes or flying them away if necessary when American fighters appeared.
They continued on to secondary targets but nothing seemed worth shooting at. They then turned east to return toward Biak when suddenly the radios came alive with the sounds of a dogfight.
“There he is now. Go in and get him!”
“Can’t somebody shoot him down?”
“Goddamn, I’m out of ammunition!”
Neither Lindbergh nor any others of the 475th were able to see the action and Colonel MacDonald radioed asking the location of the fight. Two Mitsubishi Sonias, two-man fighter reconnaissance planes, it seemed, were returning from an air rescue mission for one of their downed pilots when they came to the attention of American pilots of the 49th Fighter Group (code word “Captive” squadron), who were flying above, and a melee ensued. One of the Mitsubishis was piloted by the veteran pilot Captain Saburo Shimada, and the other by the highly experienced Sergeant Saneyoshi Yokogi. For all of their vaunted prowess, the American aviators were finding themselves outflown by the skillful Japanese fliers.14
“The son of a bitch is making monkeys out of us!” blared the radio.
“I’m out of ammunition, too.”15
Two of the 49th’s pilots at last engaged one of the Mitsubishis and a lengthy burst from behind put Sergeant Yokogi on a long, smoking death glide into the sea. That left Captain Shimada, who for nearly thirty min
Meanwhile, MacDonald’s group was “frantically searching for the fight.” As they banked around a great pulsing thunderhead immediately ahead they saw the puffs of flak and smoke of 20 millimeter cannon fire that revealed the aerial battle. MacDonald led the dive, releasing his drop tanks and firing a short burst that spattered the Zero but did not seem to hurt it. Shimada was trapped, and knew it, but he decided to fight it out anyway. He jerked his plane left in a violent banking dive that caught MacDonald’s fliers off guard. Two of the 475th thought they had him dead to rights, but just as they were about to press the triggers, by ferocious maneuvering Shimada masterfully vanished from their gun sights. Then along came Lindbergh.
The Japanese plane was just coming out of its wrenching turn, its mottled green camouflage contrasting with the bright red Rising Sun insignia, when Shimada came face-to-face with the Lone Eagle, flying at him head-on at a combined speed of 500 miles per hour. Colonel MacDonald could only watch as the wing edges of the Zero lit up “like so many acetylene torches” as Shimada fired at Lindbergh. Lindbergh himself “instinctively sighted on the Mitsubishi’s radial engine and pressed the buttons.” His P-38 shuddered at the recoil for at least six seconds as the two planes closed in on a no-win collision course. Bits of Shimada’s propeller flew off, he was hit badly, but he appeared determined to simply slam his plane into Lindbergh’s.