Combat at Rangoon

His first combat was the next afternoon. The Panda Bears got three planes into the air, flown by Jack Newkirk, Gil Bright, and Moose Moss. Climbing away from Mingaladon, Newkirk picked up four Tomahawks from the newly arrived Adam & Eves. Then his radio went dead, so he signaled the other flight leader to take charge, while he flew off to the northward. Bright and Moss likewise went off on their own.

That left the interception to Red Probst, a plump young man from Maxwell Field who joined the AVG so he wouldn't have to fly against the German air force. This was Probst's first day at Mingaladon; he had never been in combat; and his AVG career had been one damn-fool adventure after another. Followed by Cokey Hoffman, Greg Boyington, and Bob Prescott, he climbed toward the incoming swarm of Major Makino's Nates.

Boyington assumed that he was being led into combat by one of the veteran Panda Bears, until he saw that Probst was attacking from below and into the sun. Prescott, flying on Boyington's wing, was untroubled by this unorthodox approach. "You don't see anything except your leader when you fly in formation," he said years later. When he did spot the radial-engined fighters overhead, Prescott took them for Buffaloes:

They were diving, looping, and just going nuts. I thought, "Silly bastards. . . . Hell, let's get these people out of here and we'll fight this war. Then I looked again. . . . Hell, that's no Buffalo--that's a Jap. He's diving at us! . . . I was on Greg's left wing, and this Jap was diving over my left shoulder. I couldn't leave the formation, but nobody said I couldn't move over and get on Greg's right wing, so he'd shoot Greg first.

Red Probst had quit the scene. "The enemy jumped us while [we were] climbing up to attack," he rather lamely explained. "When they came within range I led my flight into a dive." He neglected to communicate his change of heart to Cokey Hoffman, who was his wingman if anyone was. In his AVG identification photo, Hoffman had the look of an Apache warrior, dark and scowling. On December 20 outside Kunming, he had earned a commendation for the way he had raked the Japanese bombers at close range. He was no less aggressive when it came to Major Makino's Nates, and watchers on the ground thought that he collided with one of them. "Out of the whirling center of the battle," wrote the British reporter O'Dowd Gallagher, "came one in a spin. . . . A wing came off as it sped to the ground. The rest of the plane left it far behind. It raised a great cloud of dust as it hit the ground. I saw it bounce. Many seconds afterward the severed wing came switching down like a piece of paper and also raised dust as it lit in a paddy field." Hoffman's Tomahawk crashed near the railroad tracks, upside down, with his mutilated body half out of the cockpit. Forty-four years old, husband and father, he had spent more than half his life in the U.S. Navy, including thirteen years as an enlisted pilot.

By this time, Bob Prescott had succeeded in repositioning himself. "Once I moved over, Greg saw him," he recalled. "He rolled over with a split-S and said foosh and went down." Prescott followed, but in his excitement pushed the stick forward without first rolling onto his back, so that inertia pulled him out of his seat instead of pushing him into it. The safety belt nearly cut him in half.

They said we could outdive these guys, but you never believe this stuff. I look around, and there he was, right on my tail. . . . At the last minute, I [pulled out]. And I forgot to take the throttle off. So by the time I pulled up, I was back up 13,000 feet. I looked over, and there's a P-40 diving down and a Jap shooting at him, going boom boom boom. I gotta go over and help him. You know, you can turn those sticks with your finger, but with all the strength I had, I couldn't turn that airplane around.

Boyington likewise climbed back to altitude and began making turns with a Nate--like everything else the Adam & Eves had done this morning, a flat violation of Chennault's teachings. As a college wrestler, Boyington had learned to tighten his neck muscles to keep the blood from leaving his head, and at Kyedaw he had used the same trick to overcome gravity while dogfighting his squadron mates. But stiffening his neck muscles did him no good against the nimble Japanese; instead, he lost so much vision that he couldn't see where his incendiaries were going. "I had pulled myself plumb woozy," he wrote in later years. "All the time I was pulling this terrific `g' load, tracers were getting closer to my plane, until finally I was looking back down someone's gun barrels. `Frig this racket,' I thought, and dove away."

Prescott too was driven to the deck again. He decided that fate had not intended him to be a fighter pilot, and that the path of wisdom would be to get out of the way. So he skulked around until he heard "free beer!"--the current recall signal--in his earphones. Then he flew back to Mingaladon, intending to take his leader aside, apologize, and promise to quit the AVG if Boyington kept the debacle a secret.

So I just sat in the radio shack and waited, and Greg didn't come back and he didn't come back, and I thought, "Oh-oh, that Jap got him. . . ." Well, thank God, he finally did land. Boy, I ran across that field. He whipped the airplane around and threw dust all over me. . . . I jumped up on his wing and pulled his canopy, and he looked at me with a big grin, and he said, "We sure screwed that one, didn't we?"

There was a less farcical encounter on January 29, when 20 Nakajima Ki-27 "Nate" fighters came over to challenge the Allied defenders. Ten planes got into the air, including Greg Boyington. As he remembered the day, he hit his first Nate "just right," setting it afire, then heard someone scream over the radio: "This is for Cokey [Hoffman], you son of a bitch!" That would have Charlie Bond, shooting down another Nate. Boyington certainly head the radio call, which Bond mentions in his diary, though in somewhat different language. But he was never credited with that Ki-27.

On February 6, however, Boyington was credited with two Japanese fighters shot down, according to the commendation letter written later by Chennault.

In this hectic week, Robert Sandell was killed when the tail came off his Tomahawk. Chennault asked Bob Neale to take command of the Adam & Eves, and Neale tried to pass the job along to Greg Boyington, on the theory that the ex-marine could "out-fly or out-fight" anyone in the AVG. Boyington declined, probably because he knew that the Old Man would not accept him. Neale took the job and appointed Boyington vice squadron leader, a decision he would regret.

There now came a quiet time at Mingaladon. The Adam & Eves played golf at the Rangoon Country Club--four caddies to a pilot. They swam at the Kokine Swimming Club "and acted like rich kids." They bought sapphires. They caroused through Rangoon, brawling with the RAF and each other in disagreements that were potentially lethal, since everyone went armed. One donnybrook began when the Silver Grill's proprietor tried to evict the Americans, whereupon they shot out his chandeliers, causing a panic among the prostitutes and their clients on the second floor. Another time, the Adam & Eves drank so hard and late at the brass-railed bar of the Strand (the bar stayed open though the hotel was closed) that seven pilots missed roll-call next morning. One of the latecomers was Robert H. Smith, who finally showed up too drunk to fly. (Not to be confused with R. T. Smith of the Hell's Angels, this man was shorter and usually distinguished with the nickname of Snuffy, after the comic-strip character.) Greg Boyington was another casualty of the battle of the Strand. Still drunk when he reported for duty, he got into an argument with Bob Neale, who never afterward placed any confidence in him.

Other files about Boyington: