At 700 a.m.
on the morning of January 11th, 1945, Major William Shomo crouched in the cockpit of his Mustang, watching 13 enemy shapes materialize out of the overcast sky above Luzon.
He was 2,000 ft above the jungle canopy, suspended in a layer of gray mist that felt more like a graveyard than a battlefield.
Below him, the Philippines were burning, while above him, the Japanese Empire was proving it was not dead yet.
Shomo squinted through the plexiglass to see a massive Betty bomber, fat and slow, painted in the dark green of the Imperial Navy.
But the bomber was not alone because it was surrounded by a swarm of 12 fighter planes, Tony’s and tojos, buzzing around their queen-like angry wasps protecting a hive.
Shomo looked at the odds and realized it was simple arithmetic that would make any sane man turn his nose toward home.
There were 13 of them and there were only two of him.
Shomo had his wingman, Lieutenant Paul Lipkcom, flying tight on his flank, but that was it.
Two American planes against an entire Japanese squadron was a death sentence.
And to make matters worse, Shomo was not supposed to be there to fight because he was not flying a standard fighter plane.
He was flying a Fod reconnaissance ship, a machine built to run away, not to stand and brawl.
The manual on his knee was very specific about situations like this, stating that when a reconnaissance pilot sees a superior enemy force, he uses his speed to survive.
He does not engage.
He does not attack.
He takes his pictures and he gets the hell out of dodge.
For 3 years, men like Shomo had been the laughingstock of the Army Air Forces.
The real fighter pilots, the ones flying the P38s and the P-47s, had a special name for the reconnaissance boys.
They called them tourists or the Kodak kids.
In the officer clubs back at base, the fighter jocks would slam their beers on the bar and brag about their kills, about the messmmits they blew out of the sky or the zeros they turned into fireballs.
When a recon pilot walked in, the room would go quiet or worse, the jokes would start.
The fighter pilots would ask if the tourists had seen any nice scenery today or if they had taken any pretty snapshots for the scrapbook.
It was a humiliation that dug deep under the skin because the implication was clear.
The fighter pilots were the warriors, the knights of the air who did the killing and the dying, while the recon pilots were just spectators.
They were the guys who watched the war happen from a safe distance and were the ones who carried cameras instead of courage.
Shomo hated that label, and he hated the way the other pilots looked at his plane, tapping the glass windows on the fuselage where the cameras lived, treating his machine like it was a toy instead of a weapon.
He knew the truth that the loudmouth at the bar ignored, which was that flying recon was not safe.
It was a suicide mission with a notepad where you had to fly low, straight into the teeth of the enemy anti-aircraft guns to get the photos the generals needed.
You had to fly steady and level while people shot at you because if you jinked or rolled, the photos would come out blurry and the mission would be a failure.
And the plane itself was part of the problem because Shomo was flying an F-6D.
On the outside, it looked exactly like the legendary P-51 Mustang that was tearing up the skies over Germany and Japan.
It had the same Merlin engine, the same beautiful lines, and the same propeller that could drag the airframe through the sky at 400 mph.
But under the skin, it was a different beast entirely.
The army had ripped out the main fuel tank behind the pilot’s seat to make room for the massive heavy camera equipment.
They installed K17 and Kate 22 cameras, big industrial machines full of glass lenses and steel gears, and cut holes in the fuselage for the lenses to peek out.
This meant the F-6D was heavy, tailheavy, and sluggish compared to a pure fighter.
It flew like a racehorse carrying a bag of cement.
So, when you pulled back on the stick to climb, the weight of the cameras dragged you down.
When you tried to turn tight in a dog fight, the balance was all wrong because the plane was designed to be a flying eye, not a flying gun.
Sure, it still had the 650 caliber machine guns in the wings, but most commanders saw those as defensive weapons that were there to scare people off while you ran away.
They were not meant for hunting.
And although Shomo had spent the last few months proving them wrong by picking off stray targets here and there, the stigma remained, he was just a tourist, just a guy taking pictures of the war while the real men fought it.
On this particular morning, January 11th, Shomo was sick of it.
He was a man who understood death better than most because before the war, back in Pennsylvania, William Shomo had not been a college athlete or a race car driver.
He had been a mortician.
He was an undertaker who spent his days preparing bodies for burial, dealing with the cold reality of the end of life.
The other pilots called him the flying undertaker and the nickname fit because he had a dark, quiet intensity about him.
He didn’t brag at the bar nor use his hands to fly air battles in the mess hall.
He just watched and he waited with a patience that came from a profession where rushing led to mistakes.
The mission that morning was supposed to be a milk run, which was pilot slang for a job so easy a baby could do it.
Shomo and Lipscom were ordered to fly north from their base in Muro and check the weather over the Tugaro airfield.
The generals were planning a bombing raid and they needed to know if the clouds were too thick for the bombers to see the targets.
It was boring routine work that was exactly the kind of mission the tourists were made for.
They were supposed to fly up, look at the clouds, maybe snap a few photos of the Japanese runway conditions, and fly home in time for lunch.
But as they crossed into enemy territory, the boredom shattered.
Shomo saw the formation off his left wing, drifting under the cloud deck.
The Japanese pilots were flying in a lazy, arrogant formation because they were confident.
And why wouldn’t they be when they had a massive numerical advantage and were flying over their own territory? They probably thought the two lonely American planes in the distance were just doing what Americans always did in that sector, looking and running.
The Japanese leader in the Betty bomber likely had a cigarette going, relaxing in the cockpit, trusting his 12 bodyguards to keep the flies away, Shomo checked his gauges to ensure fuel was good, and engine temperature was green.
He looked over at his wingman, Lieutenant Lipscom, who was holding formation and waiting for orders.
Lipscom was a good pilot, steady and reliable, but he had never seen a furball like this because nobody had.
Standard doctrine screamed that this was suicide.
Engaging a bomber protected by 12 fighters was a mathematical impossibility for two planes, especially when those planes were weighed down with cameras.
The smart move was to push the throttle forward, drop the nose, and use the Mustang speed to vanish into the clouds.
They could report the enemy position to base and let a full squadron of P38s come up and handle the heavy lifting.
That would be the responsible thing to do, the recon thing to do.
But Shomo looked at the Japanese planes again and saw they were sloppy.
The fighters were drifting too far from the bomber and weren’t checking their 6:00.
They were treating the war like it was already won.
Or maybe they just didn’t respect the two specs in the distance.
They saw the camera reports and assumed the Americans were harmless.
They were mocking him just like the guys at the bar and just like the commanders who told him to run.
They were looking at Bill Shomo and seeing a victim.
A cold switch flipped in the Undertaker’s brain.
He wasn’t looking at aircraft anymore.
He was looking at customers.
He reached down and flipped the safety cover off his gun switch.
He turned on the gun sight, watching the glowing reticle hum to life on the glass in front of him.
He pressed the microphone button on his throttle quadrant, his voice flat and calm, void of any fear or hesitation.
He didn’t shout.
He didn’t scream for help.
He just gave a simple instruction to his wingman that violated every rule in the book.
“Stay with me, Lipcom,” Shomo said.
“We’re going down.” He shoved the stick forward and the nose of the F-60 dropped toward the jungle.
The engine roared as the propeller bit into the humid air, picking up speed.
The tourist was done taking pictures, and the cameras in the tail were just dead weight.
Now, Major Bill Shomo was diving into the middle of 13 enemy planes, and he had no intention of coming out the other side without blood on his hands.
The expert said it was impossible, and the manual said it was suicide, but Shomo said it was payday.
The dive was not graceful.
It was violent.
When Shomo slammed the stick forward, the F-60D did not glide.
It fell.
The extra weight of the K17 cameras in the tail felt like a boat anchor dragging the Mustang down, fighting the aerodynamics every inch of the way.
The airframe shuddered as the speed indicator wound past 300, then 350, then 400 mph.
The Merlin engine up front was screaming, the propeller biting into the humid air like a giant drill bit.
Inside the cockpit, the noise was deafening.
It wasn’t the clean hum of a well-tuned machine.
It was the roar of a factory floor going full tilt.
Shomo felt the G-forces press him into his seat, the straps of his harness digging into his shoulders.
The blood drained from his head, his vision tunneling down to a single point, the rear of the Japanese formation.
He was coming in from above and behind, the classic bounce position, but usually a bounce involved a whole squadron of fighters coordinating their attack.
This was just Shomo falling out of the sky in a heavy photo plane about to crash a party he wasn’t invited to.
The Japanese pilots were flying in a loose V formation, protecting the Betty bomber in the center.
They were relaxed.
They were lazy.
They were still flying straight and level, completely unaware that death was closing the distance at 450 mph.
They looked like ducks in a shooting gallery, paddling along without a care in the world.
Shomo picked his first target, which was a Tony, a Kawasaki Kai 61.
It was a sleek, dangerous fighter with a liquid cooled engine that made it look a lot like a German Messmitt.
The pilot was flying on the right flank of the formation, drifting slightly away from the others.
He was the straggler, the weak link.
Shomo adjusted his dive, lining up the nose of his Mustang with the tail of the Tony.
The gap closed fast from 500 yd to 400 yd.
Shomo didn’t touch the trigger.
He waited.
He was an undertaker, and undertakers are patient men.
He wanted to be so close he could see the rivets on the enemy’s skin.
At 300 yd, the Japanese pilot finally noticed something was wrong.
Maybe he saw a flash of silver in his mirror.
Or maybe he just felt the displacement of the air as the heavy Mustang came barreling down.
The Tony dipped its left wing, starting a lazy turn to investigate.
It was a mistake because it exposed the plane’s belly.
A wide, flat target that filled Shomo’s gun site.
Shomo squeezed the trigger.
The 650 caliber machine guns in the wings of the Mustang erupted.
The sound was not a bang.
It was a jackhammer tearing up pavement.
The heavy plane shook as the recoil slowed it down in midair.
Tracers poured out of the wings like fiery ropes connecting the Mustang to the Tony.
The bullets didn’t just hit the Japanese plane, they ate it.
The 50 caliber round is a thumb-sized slug of lead and steel moving at nearly 3,000 ft per second.
When it hits aluminum, it doesn’t poke a hole, it rips the metal apart like wet cardboard.
Shomo walked the fire from the tail of the Tony through the cockpit and into the engine.
The Japanese plane shuddered violently.
Pieces of the canopy flew off into the slipstream.
Then the fuel tanks in the wings ignited.
There was no cinematic explosion, just a sudden violent bloom of orange fire that swallowed the aircraft hole.
The Tony rolled over on its back and dropped out of the formation like a dead bird.
Shomo didn’t watch it fall.
He was already pulling back on the stick, using the immense speed of his dive to zoom back up above the formation.
One down, 12 to go.
The element of surprise was gone, but the confusion was just starting.
The other Japanese pilots saw the fireball and the silver flash of the American plane zooming past them, but they didn’t react like a disciplined military unit.
They reacted like a kicked antill.
They broke formation in every direction, scattering in panic.
They had no idea how many Americans were attacking.
They saw one plane, but logic told them there had to be more.
You don’t attack a squadron with one plane.
They were looking for the rest of the American flight, twisting their necks, scanning the clouds, terrified of a ghost squadron that didn’t exist.
Shomo capitalized on the chaos.
He crested the top of his zoom climb, trading his speed back for altitude.
He kicked the rudder pedal, wrestling the heavy nose of the photo plane around.
The cameras in the back groaned under the stress.
This was not what the engineers at North American Aviation had designed them for.
Lenses and mirrors were fragile things meant for straight lines and gentle turns.
Shomo was throwing them around the sky like they were luggage in the back of a pickup truck driving over potholes.
He didn’t care if the cameras broke.
He would fill out the paperwork later.
If he died, the paperwork wouldn’t matter.
He spotted his second victim.
Another Tony had broken left and was trying to climb, exposing its engine exhaust to Shomo.
The Japanese pilot was trying to gain energy, but he was too slow.
Shomo rolled the Mustang over and dove again.
This time, he didn’t have the massive altitude advantage, but he had momentum.
He fell on the second fighter before the pilot could even retract his landing gear.
Not that he had deployed it, but he was moving that slow.
Shomo closed to within 40 yards.
That is pistol range.
That is close enough to see the color of the pilot’s helmet.
He fired a short burst, maybe less than a second.
It was an economy of violence.
He didn’t spray in prey.
He painted the target.
The round sawed through the right wing of the Tony.
The structure failed instantly.
The wing folded up over the fuselage, snapping off with a violence that sent the plane into a flat spin.
The centrifugal force would have pinned the Japanese pilot to the wall of his cockpit.
Unable to bail out, unable to move, spinning down into the jungle below.
Two down by now, Lipscom was in the fight, trying to stay with his leader.
But Lipkcom was struggling to keep up with the tempo.
Shomo wasn’t flying by the book.
He was flying by instinct.
He was bouncing from target to target like a pinball, using the sheer weight of his plane to build speed in the divies that the lighter Japanese fighters couldn’t match.
The Japanese planes were nimble.
They could turn on a dime.
But the Mustang was fast.
It was a muscle car drag racing against go-karts.
As long as Shomo kept his speed up, they couldn’t touch him.
But the tourist problem was starting to show.
The heavy tail of the F-6D was making the recovery from each dive harder and harder.
Every time Shomo pulled out of a dive, the plane wanted to keep going down.
The stick felt heavy, fighting his grip.
The muscles in his right arm were burning.
He was wrestling four tons of aluminum and gasoline that wanted to bury itself in the Philippine mud.
He had to use two hands on the stick to pull out of the second attack.
Gritting his teeth as the G-forces tried to push his stomach into his feet.
He leveled out and looked for the bomber.
The Betty was still there, lumbering along in the center of the mess.
The remaining fighters were starting to get their act together.
They realized there were only two Americans.
The panic was turning into anger.
They were swarming back toward the bomber, trying to form a defensive wall.
They were going to try to box Shomo in, slow him down, and use their superior turning ability to get on his tail and shred him.
Shomo saw a group of three Tojos, Nakajima Kai 44 fighters, lining up to intercept him.
The tojo was a dangerous opponent.
It was fast.
It climbed like a rocket, and it had heavy cannons.
These pilots were clearly the veterans of the group.
They weren’t running.
They were turning into him, daring him to go head-to-head.
It was a game of chicken.
Three planes firing cannons against one plane firing machine guns.
The math was bad.
The manual said to break off.
The manual said Shomo had done enough.
He had shot down two enemy fighters.
He had disrupted the formation.
He had survived.
He could dive away now, hit full throttle, and be back at base in 20 minutes with a hell of a story and two confirmed kills.
No one would blame him.
In fact, they would give him a medal just for surviving.
He could go back to the bar and finally look the fighter jocks in the eye.
But Shomo wasn’t thinking about the bar.
He was looking at that bomber.
The Betty was a massive target, a flying fuel tank.
It was the prize.
And these three toos were standing between him and the queen.
He checked his ammunition.
He had plenty left.
He checked his fuel.
Plenty left.
He checked his fear.
It was gone, replaced by a cold mechanical focus.
He didn’t turn away and he didn’t run.
He pushed the throttle past the stop, engaging the war emergency power.
The engine screamed as the manifold pressure spiked.
The Mustang surged forward.
Black smoke puffing from the exhaust stacks.
Shomo drove his heavy cameraladen plane straight at the three Tojos.
He wasn’t going to dogfight them.
He was going to run them over.
He lined up the lead tojo in his sights, and the Japanese pilot fired first.
Smoke puffed from the Tojo’s wings as 40mm shells zipped past Shomo’s canopy.
They looked like glowing golf balls whizzing through the air.
One hit would tear the Mustang apart.
Shomo didn’t flinch.
He held his line.
He waited for the range to close.
He was playing a game of nerves, betting that the Japanese pilot would flinch first when he saw a P-51 coming at him like a runaway train.
At 200 yd, the Japanese pilot broke.
He yanked his stick left, trying to dodge the collision.
It was the moment Shomo had been waiting for.
The brake exposed the Tojo’s engine.
Shomo clamped down on the trigger.
The 50 cals hammered.
The Tojo flew right into the stream of lead.
The engine block shattered.
The propeller flew off, spinning away into the gray sky.
The fighter stalled instantly, hanging in the air for a split second before dropping like a stone.
Three down.
But now Shomo had a problem.
He had bled off his speed in the head-on pass.
He was slow.
He was low.
And the other two Tojjo were right there banking hard, coming around to get on his tail.
The tourist had just used up his luck.
Now he had to fly.
Shomo was in trouble.
He had just killed his third plane, but the energy fight was turning against him.
Physics was a cruel law and right now it was ruling in favor of the Japanese by pulling hard to kill the lead tojo.
Shomo had bled off his airspeed.
He was sitting at 200 mph in a plane that needed 300 just to stay polite.
And behind him, two angry Tojo were closing in like sharks, smelling blood in the water.
They had the speed, they had the angle, they had the heavy cannons.
The tourist in the photo plane had two choices.
He could shove the nose down and try to run, dragging his heavy cameras through the mud in a desperate race for the tree line.
Or he could do something stupid.
He could try to fight a knife fight in a phone booth while wearing a backpack full of bricks.
Shomo checked his mirror.
The lead Japanese fighter was settling onto his tail.
The pilot lining up for the kill shot.
The enemy prop was spinning a bright yellow circle of death just 500 yd back.
Shomo slammed the throttle to the firewall, but not to run.
He hauled back on the stick and kicked the left rudder pedal hard.
The Mustang groaned.
The heavy K17 cameras in the tail acted like a pendulum, swinging the weight violently.
The plane didn’t just turn, it snapped.
Shomo forced the F-6D into a rolling scissors, a desperate corkcrewing maneuver designed to force the enemy to fly past him.
It was a move for lightweight dog fighters, not for reconnaissance mules.
The airframe shuddered so hard the instrument panel blurred.
Rivet screamed against the aluminum skin.
But the Japanese pilot wasn’t expecting the tourist to fight.
He was coming in too fast, greedy for the kill.
When Shomo slammed on the brakes by pulling hygiene turns, the Tojo pilot couldn’t slow down.
He overshot.
The Japanese fighter slid right past Shomo’s canopy.
So close Shomo could see the oil stains on the enemy fuselage.
The hunter became the prey in the blink of an eye.
Shomo reversed his turn, slamming the stick to the right.
The heavy nose of the Mustang swung around.
He didn’t wait for a perfect picture.
He simply put the nose of his plane where the Tojo was going to be and held down the trigger.
He walked the tracers right into the enemy cockpit.
The 50 caliber rounds smashed through the thin canopy glass and turned the pilot into a memory.
The Tojo pitched up violently, a dead man’s hands freezing on the controls before stalling and falling away into the overcast.
For down, the second Tojo saw his wingman die and panicked.
He broke hard to the right, diving for the clouds.
He thought he could lose the heavy American plane in the mist.
He was wrong.
Shomo was already moving.
He pushed the nose over, letting gravity help his engine.
The Mustang picked up speed like a freight train on a downhill grade.
The heavy cameras that hurt him in the climb were now helping him in the dive.
Mass carries momentum.
Shomo fell on the fleeing fighter like a hawk hitting a pigeon.
He caught the enemy plane just as it touched the wisps of the cloud layer.
The Japanese pilot jinked left, then right, trying to shake the aim.
Shomo didn’t chase the wiggles.
He aimed for the center of mass.
He fired a long, disciplined burst.
The armor-piercing incendiary rounds chewed through the tail section of the tojo.
The elevator controls snapped.
The Japanese plane lost its ability to fly level.
It nosed over and went straight into the jungle canopy at 300 mph.
There was no fire, just a cloud of green debris and brown dirt as the plane disintegrated into the trees.
Five down.
Shomo pulled up gasping for air.
The cockpit smelled of hot oil, cordite, and sweat.
His flight suit was soaked.
His arms were trembling from the physical effort of wrestling the heavy stick.
He checked his clock.
Less than 3 minutes had passed since the first shot.
He had killed five aircraft.
He was an ace in a day in 3 minutes.
Most pilots flew whole wars without seeing five enemy planes.
Shomo had just destroyed a squadron’s worth of hardware before breakfast, but the sky wasn’t empty yet.
The prize was still out there.
Shomo scanned the horizon.
The Betty bomber was making a run for it.
While Shomo had been brawling with the bodyguards, the Queen bee had been diving toward the deck, trying to blend in with the dark green of the jungle.
The pilot was good.
He was flying 50 ft off the treetops, hugging the terrain, banking around hills to stay hidden.
He was running for the safety of the anti-aircraft guns at the next Japanese airfield.
Shomo spotted the dark green shadow moving against the trees.
He banked the Mustang and pushed the throttle again.
The engine temperature gauge was climbing into the red.
The manifold pressure was off the charts.
He was abusing the machine, asking the Packard built Merlin to give him everything it had and then some.
The engine roared in protest, but it delivered.
Shomo closed the gap.
The bomber was a different beast than the fighters.
It had teeth in the back.
As Shomo approached from the rear, the tail gunner in the Betty opened up.
A 20 mm cannon started pumping shells at him.
These weren’t machine gun bullets.
These were explosive shells.
If one hit the engine, Shoma was walking home.
If one hit the cockpit, Shomo was going home in a box.
Shomo saw the muzzle flashes from the bomber’s tail.
He saw the tracers drifting toward him.
He didn’t weave.
Weaving scrubbed off speed, and he needed speed to catch the whale.
He made tiny microscopic adjustments with the rudder just enough to spoil the gunner’s aim.
The shells whipped past his wings, snapping the air with supersonic cracks.
He needed to silence that gun.
Shomo waited until he was 400 yd out.
He squeezed the trigger.
Not a long burst, just a tap.
He needed to check his range.
The tracers fell short, dipping under the bomber.
He pulled the nose up a fraction of an inch.
He squeezed again.
This time, the stream of fire hit the tail turret.
The glass shattered.
The 20mm cannon stopped firing.
The tail gunner was gone.
Shomo kept his foot on the gas.
He walked the fire up the fuselage of the bomber.
He saw pieces of metal flying off the green skin.
He saw the fabric of the rudder shredding, but the Betty was a tough old bird.
It kept flying.
Shom was now too close to miss, but he was also too close to pull out safely if the bomber exploded.
He didn’t care.
He drifted his aim to the right, targeting the starboard engine.
He held the trigger down.
The six guns in his wings roared, vibrating the entire airframe.
He poured hundreds of rounds into the engine.
The engine didn’t just fail, it detonated.
A white hot magnesium fire erupted from the cowling.
The propeller sheared off and cartwheeled into the jungle.
The fire spread instantly to the wing tank.
The entire right side of the bomber turned into a torch.
The wing structure melted in seconds.
The heavy wing folded up and the bomber rolled violently into the dead engine.
It hit the trees with the force of a bomb.
A massive fireball mushroomed up from the jungle floor.
Greasy black smoke boiling into the sky.
The shock wave rattled Shomo’s canopy as he flew over the wreckage.
The queen was dead.
Six down.
Shomo banked hard, checking his six.
He expected the sky to be empty.
He expected the fight to be over.
But there was one last samurai left.
A single Tony fighter had been hiding in the clouds, waiting for Shomo to fixate on the bomber.
It was a classic ambush tactic.
Wait for the enemy to get greedy, then hit him while he’s watching the explosion.
The Japanese pilot came diving out of the sun.
Guns blazing.
Bullets sparked off Shomo’s wing, punching holes in the aluminum skin.
Shomo didn’t think.
He reacted.
He hauled the Mustang into a tight left turn, pulling so many G’s that his vision grayed out at the edges.
The heavy cameras in the tail groaned again, threatening to snap the fuselage in half.
The Tony pilot tried to turn with him, but he was moving too fast from his dive.
He overshot the turn, sliding to the outside.
It was a fatal error.
Shomo chopped his throttle, dropping his flaps.
The Mustang slowed down instantly, acting like a barn door in the wind.
The Japanese fighter flew right past him, unable to slow down in time.
Shomo retracted the flaps, slammed the throttle forward, and tucked in behind the enemy.
He was tired.
His hand was cramping on the stick.
His eyes burned from the sweat dripping into them.
But he wasn’t going to let this one go.
This was the last of the protection detail.
This was the last witness.
The Japanese pilot realized his mistake.
He tried to dive, tried to twist, tried to do anything to shake the demon on his tail, but Shomo was locked on.
He closed to 50 yards.
He could see the pilot’s head turning, looking back in terror.
Shomo pressed the trigger.
Click.
Nothing happened.
His heart stopped.
He had fired thousands of rounds in 6 minutes.
Had he run dry? Had he emptied the magazines.
He was 50 yards from the enemy, perfectly lined up, and his guns were dead.
He cycled the gun switch.
He checked the circuit breakers.
Everything looked green.
It was a jam or a stoppage.
Or maybe he really was out of ammo.
He cursed.
He slammed his hand against the instrument panel in frustration.
The vibration must have jarred something loose.
Or maybe the feed motors just needed a wakeup call.
He squeezed the trigger again, holding his breath.
The guns roared to life.
It was just a hesitation, a hiccup in the feed mechanism.
The tracers lashed out, hungry for the final meal.
They struck the Tony dead center in the fuselage.
The cockpit disintegrated.
The plane pitched down violently, tumbling end over end until it slammed into a rice patty below.
Seven down.
Shomo pulled the Mustang up into the vertical, climbing away from the burning jungle.
He scanned the sky.
He looked left.
He looked right.
He looked high.
He looked low.
Nothing.
The sky was empty.
The buzzing swarm of 13 planes was gone.
In the span of 6 minutes, the tourist had wiped an entire Japanese formation off the map.
Lieutenant Lipscom was somewhere below, finishing off three stragglers that had tried to run.
But for Shomo, the work was done.
He leveled off at 4,000 ft.
He throttled back the engine, letting the Merlin cool down.
The roar of the wind seemed quieter now.
He looked down at the jungle.
Seven pillars of black smoke were rising from the green canopy, marking the graves of seven men who had made the mistake of laughing at a camera plane.
Shomo reached for his radio button.
His hand was shaking uncontrollably now, the adrenaline crash hitting him like a sledgehammer.
He keyed the mic to call his wingman.
Lipscom, he said, his voice cracking just a little.
You okay? When Lipcom’s breathless voice came back, confirming he was good and had killed three of them.
Shomo simply told him, good work.
Let’s go home.
I think we got the pictures we needed.
He banked the F-60 toward the south toward Muro.
The cameras in the tail were still there, heavy and useless.
He hadn’t taken a single photograph, but the gun camera film.
That was going to be a different story.
That was going to be the blockbuster of the century.
The tourist was coming home and he was bringing the receipts.
The flight back to Muro was a blur of exhaustion and adrenaline.
Major Bill Shomo sat in the cockpit of his F-60D, his hands trembling on the stick, his flight suit soaked through with sweat.
The noise of the engine was a constant drone, but his mind was still replaying the scream of the wind and the chatter of the machine guns.
He checked his mirrors constantly, half expecting a ghost squadron of Japanese fighters to dive out of the clouds and finish what he had started.
But the sky remained empty.
The only thing following him was the smoke trail from his own exhaust and the realization of what he had just done.
When the wheels of his Mustang touched the pierced steel planking of the runway at Hillfield, it was just another landing to the ground crews.
They were used to seeing planes come back.
They were used to seeing pilots climb out, tired and hungry, complaining about the food or the weather.
They didn’t know that the plane taxiing toward the revetment was carrying a history book in its gun camera.
Shomo shut down the engine.
The propeller spun to a halt, ticking as the hot metal cooled.
The silence that followed was heavy.
It was the kind of silence you find in a church or a morg.
Shomo unbuckled his harness, the straps heavy on his bruised shoulders.
He slid the canopy back and climbed out onto the wing.
His legs felt like jelly.
The ground crew chief ran up, ready to ask about the reconnaissance photos, ready to ask if the tourist had seen any nice clouds today.
Then the chief stopped.
He looked at the wings of the Mustang.
The gunports were burned black.
The red fabric patches that were taped over the muzzles before a mission used to keep dirt out were blown to shreds.
The metal around the barrels was stained with powder residue, and there were holes in the skin of the plane, jagged tears, where Japanese bullets had tried to find the pilot.
The chief looked up at Shomo, eyes wide, and asked if Shomo had run into trouble.
Shomo just nodded and held up seven fingers.
The chief frowned, confused.
He thought the major meant he had seen seven enemy planes.
Or maybe he had fired seven bursts.
It didn’t register.
Nobody shot down seven planes.
Not in one mission, not in one day, not in a single pass.
Aces like Richard Bong and Thomas Magguy, the gods of the Pacific theater.
They chipped away at the score one or two planes at a time over months of grinding combat.
To claim seven in a single sorty was impossible.
It was a fisherman’s tale.
It was a lie.
The skepticism followed Shomo into the debriefing room.
The intelligence officer sat behind his desk, pencil poised over a clipboard, ready to write down the standard report.
When Shomo told him the numbers, one bomber, six fighters, seven confirmed kills in less than six minutes, the officer stopped writing.
He looked at Shomo.
He looked at Lieutenant Lipscom.
He looked at the clock on the wall.
The math didn’t add up.
The timeline was too compressed.
It sounded like the hallucinations of a man who had cracked under pressure.
The officer warned Shomo about inflating the count.
He reminded him that claiming kills without proof was a serious offense.
It stole glory from other men.
It messed up the strategic picture.
He treated Shomo like a school boy who was making up stories to impress the varsity team.
The tourist label was still there hanging in the air like stale cigarette smoke.
They believed Shomo had been in a fight.
Sure, the holes in his plane proved that.
But seven, that was a joke.
Shomo didn’t argue.
He didn’t pound the table or scream about his honor.
He was an undertaker.
He dealt in bodies, not words.
He simply told the intelligence officer to develop the film.
Every time Shomo had pulled the trigger, a small movie camera in the wing of his Mustang had started rolling.
It was synchronized with the guns.
It saw what the bullets saw.
It was the only witness that mattered.
The development lab was a small hot tent that smelled of chemicals and fixer fluid.
The technicians worked in the dark, spooling the long strips of celluloid film through the developer baths.
Shomo waited outside.
The intelligence officer waited with him, arms crossed, tapping his foot, ready to write the disciplinary report for the pilot who lied about his score.
When the film was ready, they threaded it into the projector.
The room went dark.
The light flickered on the screen, and then the room went silent.
The footage was black and white, grainy, and shaking with the vibration of the guns, but it was clear enough.
It showed the truth in brutal high-speed detail.
It showed the Tony fighter filling the frame, then dissolving into a fireball.
It showed the pieces flying off the second plane.
It showed the Tojo stalling and dropping.
It showed the massive Betty bomber, the tracers walking up the fuselage, the engine exploding, the wing folding, the crash into the jungle.
It showed the final Tony, the one that almost got away, jerking violently as the bullets found the cockpit.
One after another, seven distinct kills.
The footage didn’t lie.
It didn’t brag.
It just showed the mechanical destruction of seven machines and seven men.
When the reel ended and the film flapped against the projector, nobody said a word.
The intelligence officer sat there in the dark, his mouth slightly open.
The mockery was gone, the doubt was gone.
The tourist myth died right there in that dark tent.
The man standing next to the projector wasn’t a sightseer.
He was the deadliest pilot in the Pacific.
News of the Milkrun massacre traveled up the chain of command faster than a P-51 in a dive.
It went from the squadron commander to the group commander, then to the generals.
It reached the desk of General Douglas MacArthur.
The brass realized they had a problem.
They had a pilot who was too good, too lucky, and now too valuable to lose.
If Shomo went back up the next day and caught a stray bullet, it would be a PR disaster.
You don’t let a man who just set an all-time world record get killed in a skirmish.
The next week, 12 days after the mission, Major William Shomo was grounded.
He was pulled from the flight line.
His war was over.
He was sent back to the United States, not in a box, but on a tour.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest award the nation could give.
The citation read like a screenplay detailing the odds, the decision to attack, and the unparalleled execution of the dog fight.
But the medal wasn’t the real legacy.
The legacy was the record.
In the history of aerial warfare, from the canvas biplanes of World War I to the supersonic jets of today, no one has ever broken Bill Shomo’s record.
Other pilots have shot down more planes in total.
Other pilots have had longer careers, but no one, not the Red Baron, not the Luftwafa aces on the Eastern Front, not the jet jockeyies in Vietnam, has ever become an ace in a single mission faster than the Flying Undertaker.
Seven kills, 6 minutes.
It stands as a monument to what happens when a man is underestimated.
It stands as a warning to anyone who looks at a harmless opponent and assumes they are safe.
Shomo lived a quiet life after the war.
He didn’t write books about himself.
He didn’t go on talk shows to relive the glory days.
He worked for the Air Force, then for the aerospace industry, helping to build the next generation of machines.
He treated his six minutes of fame the same way he treated his work as a mortician before the war, with dignity, with precision, and with a quiet respect for the reality of death.
He knew that those seven pillars of smoke in the jungle weren’t just points on a scoreboard.
They were men, and he had done his job.
The F-6D Mustang he flew that day was eventually scrapped, turned back into aluminum ingots to build cars or soda cans.
The cameras that weighed it down were lost to history.
But the story remains.
It is a story we rescue from the dusty archives because it reminds us of a simple truth.
It’s not the plane that makes the ace.
It’s not the equipment or the manual or the reputation.
It’s the pilot.
It’s the decision to turn into the fight when every instinct screams to run away.
Bill Shomo proved that you can put a warrior in a camera plane.
weigh him down with glass and gears and call him a tourist.
But if you push him into a corner, if you mock him and ignore him, you might just find out that the camera plane has teeth and the undertaker is always waiting for new customers.
If this story of the tourist who became a legend got your blood pumping, do me a favor, hit that like button.
It tells the algorithm that these stories matter.
It tells the system that real heroism shouldn’t be buried under cat videos and dance trends.
And if you haven’t subscribed yet, join us.
We are building a community of people who respect history, who want to know the gritty, unfiltered truth about the men and women who fought for the world we live in.
We are digging through the files every week to find the Bill Shomos of history, the quiet professionals who did the impossible when no one was watching.
Drop a comment below.
Tell us if you had ever heard of Bill Shomo before today.
Tell us what you think about the tourist label and tell us where you’re watching from.
From the garages in Ohio to the pubs in London to the stations in the outback, we see you.
Thanks for watching and remember, history isn’t just dates and names.
It’s the sound of a Merlin engine screaming at full throttle.
It’s the smell of cordite.
It’s the courage of one man facing 13.
We’ll see you in the next
