Greg 'Pappy' Boyington in the AVG Flying Tigers (part 3)

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Pappy Boyington, Flying Tiger (part 3)

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Strafing Chiang-Mai

After the fall of Rangoon, the Adam & Eves moved back to Kunming, where they were treated to a visit from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his beautiful wife. Madame addressed the Americans as "my boys" and "angels with or without wings"--words that should have sent those tough young men into fits of laughter. But they were enchanted, most of them. "She absolutely captured our hearts," John Donovan told his family. "We cheered her to the rafters time and again." Radioman Bob Smith wrote in his diary: "We are all proud to fight for China." Gil Bright, late of the Ivy League, was more skeptical: "Madame gushed a bit. She thinks airplanes are just too-o-o romantic. One of the pilots from New England said she was just an old Wellesley girl that was on fire with the cause." Greg Boyington skipped this part of the program altogether. Chennault had taken the precaution of closing the bar in the recreation room, but Boyington had his own supply, and with Percy Bartelt caroused in the hall during the speeches. The two pilots then made a drunken entry, falling over their chairs and loudly applauding the Chinese singer who provided the entertainment.

Afterward, Chennault assigned an honor guard of six Tomahawks to set the Chiangs on the road to Chongqing. They accompanied the "flying palace" as far as Chanyi, with Greg Boyington leading. Alas, his compass was defective, and when he left the Douglas he led his flight south instead of west. The Tomahawks ran out of gas near the Yunnan-Indochina border, and one by one they bellied in. "The Colonel," Bus Keeton noted in his diary, in the understatement of the month, "gave us a talk about the terrain . . . and a little bit on how to navigate in China." In time, Boyington flew one of the Tomahawks to Mengzi, but four had to be written off.

On March 22, Chennault sent ten Tomahawks on a more serious mission, to attack the Japanese army air force in Thailand. By his own account, he picked ten of the best pilots at Kunming. Six Adam & Eves--Bob Neale, Greg Boyington, Charlie Bond, Mac McGarry, Ed Rector, and Bill Bartling--would fly to Chiang Mai and strafe the "Jap Air Force headquarters in Southeast Asia." Four Panda Bears--Jack Newkirk, Whitey Lawlor, Hank Geselbracht, and Buster Keeton--would attack Lamphun to the south.

Their ammunition boxes heavily laden with incendiary rounds, the Tomahawks took off from Wu Chia Ba on Sunday afternoon. Two hours later they touched down at Loiwing, on a runway carved out of a hillside. Though China had paid for its construction, this was Bill Pawley's domain. So unprepared was CAMCO to support combat operations that there was no one at the field to gas and tune the Tomahawks. The AVG flights would have to wait until Monday morning, thus shifting their program by twenty-four hours.

The CAMCO factory was eight miles from the airstrip: a neat little compound of whitewashed buildings with camouflaged metal roofs. There was a nine-hole golf course and a clubhouse outfitted with electric lights, polished floors, fireplace, jukebox, pool table, movie projector, refrigerated beer, and plate-glass windows overlooking the pretty valley in which Bill Pawley had set out for the fourth time to assemble warplanes for China. The guestrooms had thick Chinese rugs and tiled baths. There was even a housemother-cook named Davidson, who told the pilots to call her "Ma."

Monday, March 23, dawned foggy and wet. Their Tomahawks serviced, the pilots sat around for the rest of the day, not wanting to fly to their next staging field--Namsang, an RAF airstrip in the desolate Shan Highlands--until just before dark. At Namsang, they arranged for trucks and lanterns to light the runway in the morning, ate a tense meal at the pilots' mess, and washed up in the officers' billet. Combat literature is filled with omens, and the Chiang Mai mission was no exception. An RAF sergeant supposedly warned the Americans that the water was polluted, so they shouldn't brush their teeth with it, whereupon Newkirk scoffed: "After tomorrow, I don't think it'll make any difference." Certainly the mood was heavy. "Here goes nothing," Bob Neale wrote in his diary, underlining the final word twice.

A barrack-boy shook them awake at 4 a.m., and they were dressing when the duty officer bounded in with the cry: "All right, you curly-headed fellows, it's time!" Joking and gabbing to keep their spirits up, they wolfed breakfast and went to their planes. Takeoff was 5:45 a.m.--black night, broken only by truck headlamps, kerosene lanterns, and the blue flames washing along the cowlings of their Tomahawks.

The Panda Bears set off for Thailand without waiting for the form-up over Namsang. As they gained altitude, daylight came down to greet them, though the ground was still hidden in darkness and the smoke-haze from the fall of Rangoon. They flew on instruments until they reached Chiang Mai at about 7 a.m., by which time they could make out objects on the ground below them. Newkirk tarried long enough to strafe the Chiang Mai railroad station--an astonishing breach of discipline, like poking a stick into a hornet's nest before one's friend came along. Flying on, he found Lamphun but saw only a row of buildings that might have been warehouses or barracks. He laced them with incendiary bullets, then scouted some auxiliary fields. At the third and largest field, the Panda Bears strafed more buildings, after which Newkirk turned north with the apparent intention of joining the Adam & Eves at Chiang Mai. In his combat report, Hank Geselbracht told what happened next:

The next target we dove on were two vehicles on the road south of [Chiang Mai]. Newkirk dove and fired and as he cleared the target I began to fire. I saw a flash of flames beyond the target and looked for Newkirk after my run. I realized he had crashed causing the flash. I pulled up and continued to the north on the way home.

Bus Keeton also saw the explosion, and like Geselbracht did not at first understand its cause. "As I pulled up to the right," he wrote in his diary, "I noticed a large flame of fire burst up on a field to the right of me. The fire spread along the field for a 100 or 150 yards. Thinking Jack and Gesel had set fire to some oil dumps and not seeing anything to shoot at I proceeded to follow Lawlor."

Newkirk was one of the immortals, the "Scarsdale Jack" of so many upbeat dispatches from Rangoon. He died in a fireball that skittered and bounced and smeared itself along the ground--a napalm canister with a man inside. Then the Allison engine broke loose and rolled 300 yards farther. Whitey Lawlor identified the vehicle that Newkirk had been firing on, and that probably shot him down, as a Japanese armored car.

The Adam & Eves had meanwhile reached Chiang Mai. Charlie Bond recognized a towering mountain that he seen on a December patrol, so he took the lead. If he remembered correctly, the airfield was a mile or so southeast of this landmark:

I nosed downward in a gentle left turn and hoped I was right. At about six thousand feet, and as the haze thinned, I saw the field and the outlines of the hangars. I flipped on my gun switch, and another thousand feet lower I fired my guns in a short burst to check them and let the other guys know this was it--the main Japanese Air Force of Southeast Asia!

The plan called for Ed Rector and Mac McGarry to stay high as top cover, with the option of attacking the field if the sky stayed clear. Bond led the others onto the field:

I made my first strafing run firing everything into the [Japanese fighters]. At the end I remained low and turned sharply to the left. . . . After turning 270 degrees I was in a position to strafe another line of parked aircraft. These were sitting practically wingtip to wingtip. Hell, I hadn't seen this many aircraft in years. Seemed like the whole Japanese Air Force had tried to crowd into this one little field.

He made four runs with tracer bullets streaking the air beside him and flak exploding overhead. Once he was so low that he thought he might decapitate the Japanese pilots scrambling into their cockpits. (They were shouting "Mawase, mawase!" --Turn, turn!--to the mechanics trying to start engines by spinning the propellers.) On his last go-round, Bond concentrated on a larger plane that "seemed to shake itself to pieces" under his machine guns.

Greg Boyington made two passes. "The aircraft on the field were parked mainly in two long lines," he wrote in his combat report. "All enemy planes were turning up and the pilots and crews were running about." After his first pass, he saw three transports burning in one great bonfire, the flames shooting a thousand feet into the air; after his second, he counted ten fires on the ground.

A soured Tiger

Later, he was stationed with the 3rd Squadron Hell's Angels at Loiwing. April 1 brought a series of false alarms. During one of these scrambles, Boyington's engine cut out, causing his Tomahawk to jump a twenty-foot ditch and hit the ground with such force that the seatbelt broke. Boyington slammed into the instrument panel, cutting his forehead and laming both knees.

Between alerts, the Hell's Angels worked out the details of their strafe, which they planned as a repeat of the Chiang Mai affair. This mission too was canceled because of the weather. The pilots had a blow-out night instead, and on Thursday they went one better and had a wedding.

The principals were Fred Hodges and a young woman named Helen Anderson. Boyington recalled that she had fled Rangoon on an AVG convoy with her Indian father; in fact, her father was English and her mother Burman. Anderson was about twenty, a small woman with a splendid body, an oval face, high forehead and cheekbones, long hair drawn back, and a smile calculated to break a pilot's heart, especially a skinny specimen like Fearless Fred. The pilots held a meeting in which they incorporated Loiwing and elected "Doc" Walsh of the CAMCO staff as mayor, reasoning that this gave him the power to marry people. The American Club was converted into a chapel. Boyington attended in his bathrobe because his knees were too swollen for him to put on pants. Duke Hedman played the piano--badly, as was his custom, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. As Boyington told the story, the pilots substituted a genuine minister at the last moment, transforming charade into sacrament, but a version written closer to the time had the wedding solemnized a day or two later by a British army chaplain. Whatever the sequence of events, they left Anderson confused as to whether she was married or not.

Sent back to Kunming after he lamed his knees a second time (he fell off a cliff in the dark, thinking it was a bomb shelter) Boyington flew "slow time" in Tomahawks whose engines had been replaced at the CAMCO factory in Loiwing. Evenings he got drunk and played around with Olga Greenlaw. Of his few friends, Ralph Gunvordahl had quit in January, Percy Bartelt in March. Now Boyington too threw in the towel, flying to India on a CNAC Douglas, then by BOAC flying boat to Karachi, where he tried to get onward transportation from the U.S. Army. He was refused--apparently the first to be caught by Chennault's request that AVG "deserters" not be allowed on military aircraft. Boyington finally took passage on a passenger liner. His shipmates, he said, included several hundred CAF cadets and some of the missionaries who had come out with him on Boschfontein.

Back in the U.S., Boyington rejoined the marines and formed the Black Sheep Squadron, VMF 214, a maverick outfit with many similarities to the AVG, with Pappy Boyington in the role of Chennault. He was credited with destroying twenty-two more Japanese planes before he was himself shot down. He was awarded the Medal of Honor, but to the chagrin of the Marine Corps (as Boyington told the story) he emerged from prison camp in 1945 and mortified the corps by drinking his way through the ensuing publicity tour. Boyington felt that he had been treated shabbily by the AVG, and his revenge took the form of an achingly funny novel called Tonya, whose title character bore many similarities to Olga Greenlaw.