January 3rd, 1944.
I think I am 12,000 ft above Rabol Harbor, New Britain.
Gregory Boon pulled his F4U Corsair into a steep dive below him.
40 Japanese Zeros climbed to meet the American fighters.
The morning sun glinted off their silver wings.
Boington’s radio crackled.
Zeros everywhere.
Too many to count.
He didn’t care.
He needed one more kill.
26 would tie Eddie Rickenbacher’s record from World War I.
26 would make him the top Marine ace of all time.
He dove.
The Corsair screamed toward the climbing zeros.
Tracers stre his canopy.
Red, orange, white.
The smell of gunm smoke filled the cockpit.
Boyington lined up a Zero in his gunsite, squeezed the trigger.
Six 50 caliber machine guns roared.
The Zero’s engine exploded.
Flames, black smoke.
The plane spun into the ocean.
26.
Boyington pulled up hard.
His vision tunnneled from the G-forces.
He looked for his wingman, Captain George Ashman, gone, lost in the chaos of 40 fighters twisting through the sky.
Another Zero Dove on him from above.
Cannon fire tore through his Corsair’s wing.
Metal shredded.
Hydraulic fluid sprayed across the windscreen.
The engine coughed, sputtered.
Boyington’s plane was dying.
He tried to climb.
The stick went heavy in his hands.
Zero swarmed around him like hornets.
More cannon fire.
The canopy shattered.
Something hot ripped through his shoulder.
Blood.
The engine seized.
Silence.
Just the whistle of wind through bullet holes and the roar of zeros circling for the kill.
Boington pushed the canopy release.
Nothing jammed.
He kicked it, punched it.
The plane was falling 10,000 ft.
9,000 8,000.
The canopy blew off.
Or maybe the plane exploded.
Boyington never knew which.
He tumbled through the air, pulled the rip cord, his parachute snapped open.
Below him, Captain Ashman’s Corsair hit the water at 400 mph.
No parachute.
Boington splashed into Rabal Harbor.
Cold salt water burned his wounds.
He inflated his May West life vest and started swimming away from the burning oil on the water, away from the wreckage.
Above him, American fighters circled once, twice, then turned for home.
fuel running low.
They thought he was dead.
Boyington floated, bleeding, alone, surrounded by sharkinfested water.
Then he saw the submarine.
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The submarine surfaced 200 yards away.
Japanese, the Imperial Navy submarine I81.
Sailors pulled Boington from the water.
He would spend the next 20 months as a prisoner of war.
beaten, starved, never officially registered with the Red Cross.
The Japanese didn’t want anyone to know they had captured the famous Major Boington.
Back in the United States, the Marine Corps listed him as missing in action, presumed dead.
His mother accepted his Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt in March 1944.
The medal sat in Washington, waiting for a dead man.
But Boington wasn’t supposed to be flying combat missions at all.
Just 18 months earlier, he’d been broke, disgraced, and parking cars for 75 cents an hour in Seattle.
Gregory Boyington was born in Idaho in 1912.
He graduated from the University of Washington in 1934 with a degree in aeronautical engineering.
He joined the Marines as a pilot in 1936.
He was good in the air, one of the best.
But on the ground, he was a disaster.
He drank, he gambled, he owed money to everyone.
By 1941, his debts exceeded his Marine Corps salary.
He was desperate.
When Clare Chan came recruiting pilots for China, Boington saw an escape, better pay, combat, a chance to get out of debt.
He resigned from the Marines and joined the American volunteer group, the Flying Tigers.
He flew P40 Warhawks in Burma.
He shot down Japanese bombers, but his drinking and brawling got him in trouble with Chanel.
When the Flying Tigers disbanded in 1942, Boyington wasn’t offered a position with the Army Air Force.
He paid his own way home.
He arrived in Seattle in July 1942 with nothing, no money, no job.
The Marines told him to go home and wait for orders, but orders never came.
He wasn’t on anyone’s payroll.
His savings ran out in a week.
Gregory Boyington, former Marine pilot, college graduate, combat veteran, took a job parking cars at 75 cents an hour.
The same job he’d worked in college.
It was all he could get.
He parked cars for two months.
Then the Marines finally called.
They needed pilots desperately.
They didn’t care about his debts or his drinking.
They needed men who could fly.
By September 1943, Boyington was back in the Pacific.
This time as a major.
He was assigned to command Marine Fighter Squadron 214, VMF 214, the Black Sheep Squadron.
The Black Sheep weren’t misfits or criminals.
They were replacement pilots.
Young, inexperienced, orphans from other squadrons.
Nobody wanted them.
Boyington took them.
At 31 years old, he was a decade older than most of his pilots.
They called him Gramps at first.
Then Papy Boyington turned them into killers.
He flew the F4U Corsair.
The Japanese called it whistling death.
It was faster than the Zero, more powerful.
In Boington’s hands, it was unstoppable.
From September 12th, 1943 to January 3rd, 1944, VMF214 destroyed 97 confirmed enemy aircraft.
Boington personally shot down 24, then 25, then 26.
On October 17th, he led 24 fighters over Cahili airfield where 60 Japanese planes sat on the ground.
Boyington radioed a challenge.
Send up your planes.
fight us.
The Japanese launched every plane they had.
In the dog fight that followed, the Black Sheep shot down 20 enemy fighters without losing a single American plane.
Boington got three.
The newspapers loved it.
War correspondents followed him everywhere.
He was famous.
The hard-rinking, brawling pilot who tied Eddie Rickenbacher’s record.
America needed heroes.
Boyington gave them one.
But on January 3rd, 1944, his luck ran out over Rabal, surrounded by zeros.
His plane shot to pieces, his wingman killed, Boington went into the water and disappeared.
When the war ended in August 1945, American planes dropped supplies to prisoner of war camps across Japan.
During one lowaltitude flight, a pilot photographed a message painted on a barrack roof.
Papy Boyington here.
The Black Sheep Squadron couldn’t believe it.
Papy had come back from the grave.
On August 29th, 1945, Boyington walked out of Amorei prison camp near Tokyo.
He’d been beaten, starved, left to die from malaria and untreated wounds.
He weighed 110 lbs, but he was alive.
Back in the United States, the Marine Corps confirmed two more kills from his final mission over Rabol.
his total 28, the highest scoring Marine ace in history.
On October 5th, 1945, President Harry Truman presented Lieutenant Colonel Boyington with the Medal of Honor he’d been awarded while presumed dead.
Boyington retired from the Marines at June 1947.
He wrote a best-selling memoir called Ba Black Sheep in 1958.
A television series based on his life aired in the 1970s.
He became a celebrity all over again, but the demons never left.
Alcoholism, broken marriages, financial problems.
The same struggles that had destroyed his career before the war came back after it.
Gregory Papy Boyington died on January 11th, 1988 at age 75.
He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.
On January 3rd, 1944, circumstance told Gregory Boyington he was finished.
His plane was destroyed.
His wingman was dead.
He was surrounded by enemy fighters over enemy water.
He should have died.
Instead, he became a prisoner of war.
He survived.
He came home.
He accepted his Medal of Honor.
And for the rest of his life, people remembered him as the broke, disgraced pilot who parked cars and then shot down 28 enemy planes.
That is the war case.
This war case is closed.
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