At in the afternoon on September 7th, 1943, Major Gregory Boington sat on a crate at the Aspiritu Santo airfield, nursing a hangover that felt like a nail being driven into his temple.
The heat in the new Hebdes was physical.
It was a heavy wet blanket that smelled of rotting coconuts and high octane aviation fuel.
Buon was 31 years old.
In the fighter pilot game, 31 is ancient.
It is the age where your eyes start to go bad and your reflexes start to slow down.
Most pilots at that age are sitting behind desks in Washington flying typewriters instead of combat aircraft.
Boyington was supposed to be one of them.
He didn’t look like an officer.
He didn’t look like a hero.
He looked like a prize fighter who had lost his last 10 matches.
His face was a map of scar tissue and broken blood vessels.
His nose had been broken so many times it looked like it had been molded out of clay by a blind man.
He smoked constantly.
He drank whatever he could find.
And at this exact moment, he was the most unwanted man in the United States Marine Corps.
The brass hated him.
They hated his attitude.
They hated his history.
And they especially hated the fact that he was currently grounded.
The official reason for his grounding was administrative.
But everyone on the island knew the truth.
Boyington had broken his leg in a bar fight.
He had been wrestling.
A fellow officer, fell and snapped the bone.
To the generals, this was the final straw.
A squadron commander does not break his leg brawling in a mess hall.
It was unprofessional.
It was childish.
So they put him in the cattle pen.
This was the nickname for the replacement pool at Aspiritu Santo.
It was a purgatory for pilots who didn’t have a home.
Boyington sat there and watched the war happened without him.
He watched the F4U Corsair’s roar down the coral runway, their massive propellers chewing the humid air.
He watched the young lieutenants, kids who looked like they should still be delivering newspapers, climb into the cockpits.
They were cleancut.
They followed orders.
They saluted crisply.
and they were dying in droves.
The air war in the Solomons was a meat grinder.
The Japanese pilots flying out of Raba and Cahilly were veterans.
They had been fighting since China.
They flew the Mitsubishi A6M0, a plane that could turn on a dime and dance circles around the heavy American fighters.
The Marine Corps was bleeding pilots.
They were sending boys up with 200 hours of flight time to fight men with 2,000 hours.
The result was a slaughter.
Boington knew he could stop it.
He had flown with the Flying Tigers in China before America even entered the war.
He had shot down six Japanese planes.
He knew how the enemy thought.
He knew that the Japanese pilot was disciplined, rigid, and arrogant.
Boington knew that if you fought by the book, the Japanese would kill you.
But if you fought like a drunk in a parking lot, if you threw sand in their eyes and kicked them in the knee, you could win.
But nobody listened to Gramps.
They saw a washed up drunk with a bad leg.
He was assigned to handle the paperwork for the replacement pool.
He was a glorified secretary.
He spent his days staring at lists of names.
These lists were the leftovers.
When a combat squadron came through a spiritu santo to rest and refit the squadron commander would come to the cattle pen to pick replacement pilots.
It was like a schoolyard pickup game.
They took the best ones first.
They took the guys with the highest gunnery scores, the best formation flying grades, the cleanest records.
What was left behind was the dregs, the misfits.
The cattle pen was full of pilots nobody wanted.
Some of them had crashed their planes on training flights and lost their nerve.
Some of them had punched a superior officer.
Some of them were just weird loners who didn’t fit into the tight brotherhood of a squadron.
There were 26 of them rotting in the tents, playing poker, drinking warm beer, and waiting for the war to end or for someone to send them home.
They were bored, they were angry, and they were exactly what Boington was looking for.
He looked at the list of names again.
He didn’t see rejects.
He saw opportunity.
The good pilots were trained to fly formation and follow the leader.
They were predictable.
The guys in the cattle pen were problem children.
They had chips on their shoulders.
They had something to prove.
A man with something to prove is dangerous.
Boington realized that if he could harness that anger, if he could take that problem energy and pointed at the Japanese, he wouldn’t just have a squadron, he would have a wolf pack.
He limped into the office of General Ralph Mitchell, the commander of marine air in the Solomons.
It was a bold move.
Majors don’t just walk in on generals to demand a command.
But Boington didn’t care about protocol.
He told the general the truth.
The Marines were short on squadrons.
The air cover over Vela was thin.
The bombers were getting chewed up.
Boyington pointed out that he had 26 trained pilots sitting in tents doing nothing but getting drunk and fighting the shore patrol.
He offered a deal.
Give him the leftovers.
Give him the planes nobody else wants.
He would have a combat squadron in 3 weeks.
The general should have laughed him out of the room.
It was a ludicrous idea.
You don’t build a fighting unit out of castoffs and a crippled commander.
But the general was desperate.
He looked at the casualty reports on his desk.
He needed bodies in cockpits.
He looked at Boington, sweating, smelling of stale tobacco, leaning on a cane, and saw the one thing the cleancut kids didn’t have.
He saw desperation.
The general agreed, but he gave a warning.
They would get no favors.
They would get the oldest planes.
They would get the worst supplies.
And if they failed, Boington would be court marshaled so fast his head would spin.
Boington walked back to the tents and gathered the 26 misfits.
He stood on a crate and looked them over.
They looked like a chain gang, unshaven, shirts untucked, eyes full of suspicion.
They knew Boington’s reputation.
They knew he was a hard drinker and a hard head.
They didn’t know if he could still fly.
Boington didn’t give a speech about patriotism.
He didn’t talk about the flag.
He told them the truth.
He said nobody wanted them.
He said the Marine Corps thought they were garbage.
He said this was their last chance to be fighter pilots before they were shipped home in disgrace to sell war bonds.
He told them they were going to fly the F4U Corsair.
And this was the second part of the problem.
The Corsair was not a friendly airplane.
It was a monster.
It was built around a massive Pratt and Whitney double wasp engine that put out 2,000 horsepower.
It had a nose so long that you couldn’t see the runway when you were taxiing.
You had to zigzag just to see where you were going.
The wings were bent like a gull’s wings because the propeller was so huge 13 ft across that if the wings were straight, the prop would chop into the ground.
The Navy had initially rejected the Corsair for carrier duty because it was too dangerous to land.
It bounced.
It stalled.
If you punched the throttle too hard on takeoff, the torque of the massive engine would flip the plane upside down and kill you before you left the ground.
It was nicknamed the Enson Eliminator because it killed so many young pilots.
It was heavy, fast, and unforgiving.
It didn’t glide.
It fell like a brick.
To fly it, you had to manhandle it.
You didn’t fingertip fly a Corsair.
You wrestled it.
Boington looked at his group of brawlers and misfits and realized the plane was perfect for them.
It was a thug.
It was a barroom brawler of an airplane.
It wasn’t elegant like the Japanese Zero.
The Zero was made of lightweight aluminum and had no armor plating.
It was like a samurai sword, sharp, light, and deadly.
The Corsair was a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
It had 650 caliber machine guns in the wings.
It had armor plate behind the pilot’s seat.
It could dive at 400 mph and not fall apart.
Boyington told his men that they weren’t going to learn to dog fight.
Dog fighting was for the movies.
If you tried to turn with a zero, you died.
The zero could turn inside the Corsair’s radius all day long.
Instead, Boington taught them a new way to fight.
He used a football analogy.
He told them they were the linebackers.
They were going to use their weight and their speed.
They would climb high, dive on the Japanese, fire a short burst, and keep going.
They would slash through the enemy formation like a knife, then use the Corsair’s speed to run away, climb back up, and do it again.
It was hit and run.
It was dirty.
It was effective.
They started training immediately.
They didn’t have their own planes, so they had to beg and borrow weary corsairs from other squadrons that were rotating out.
These planes were tired.
The engines leaked oil.
The hydraulic lines were patched with tape.
The paint was faded by the tropical sun to a chalky white.
But the misfits didn’t care.
It was a plane.
They flew from dawn until dusk.
Boington flew with them.
His broken leg jammed against the rudder pedal.
He screamed at them over the radio.
He bullied them.
He mocked them.
He drove them harder than any drill instructor.
They began to bond, not through affection, but through shared misery and a collective hatred of the establishment that had rejected them.
They needed a name.
At first, they called themselves Boington’s bastards.
It fit.
They were illegitimate.
They had no parents in the military hierarchy.
But when the public information officer heard the name, he turned pale.
He told Boington that he couldn’t put the word bastards in a newspaper headline.
The folks back home wouldn’t stand for it.
It wasn’t wholesome.
Boington laughed.
He sat around with his pilots drinking jungle juice, a homemade alcohol made from fermented fruit and torpedo fuel, and tried to come up with a new name.
They were the outcasts.
The white sheep were the good boys, the ones who followed the rules.
They were the opposite.
They were the black sheep of the family.
The name stuck.
They commissioned a logo, a black shield with a corsair, a gold bar to signify Boington’s rank, and a black sheep looking distinctive.
They were VMF214, the black sheep.
They had no permanent mechanics, no permanent planes, and a commander who was technically a [__] The experts at headquarters gave them two weeks before they were wiped out.
They said the Japanese pilots at Cahilly would eat them alive.
They said Boington was leading a suicide pact.
As September ended and the squadron prepared to move north to the forward base at Munda, Boyington looked at his bastards.
They weren’t polished.
They weren’t pretty.
But they were ready to punch the Empire of Japan right in the mouth.
The weapon that would define the Black Sheep was the VA F4U Corsair.
It was a machine that demanded respect or it would kill you before you ever saw the enemy.
To understand why the Black Sheep were different, you have to understand this plane.
In 1943, most American pilots were used to the Wildcat, a stubby, reliable little fighter that looked like a beer keg with wings.
The Corsair was different.
It was a Predator.
It was built around the massive Pratt and Whitney R2800 engine.
This engine was so large that the designers had to stretch the nose of the plane 12 ft just to fit it.
When a pilot sat in the cockpit, he was sitting nearly 15 ft behind the propeller.
The nose was so long that on the ground, it completely blocked the forward view.
A pilot had to taxi in turns, weaving left and right just to see if he was about to hit a truck or a mechanic.
It was like driving a race car while looking out the side window.
But the real danger was the torque.
That massive propeller acted like a giant gyroscope.
If a pilot jammed the throttle forward too fast on takeoff, the engine would twist the entire airframe.
The left wing would dip, the right wing would lift, and the plane would cartwheel into a fireball.
The black sheep had to learn to tame this beast.
Boington taught them that the Corsair wasn’t a defensive weapon.
It was pure offense.
The Japanese Zero was light, nimble, and unarmored.
It weighed about 5,000 lb.
The Corsair weighed 12,000 lb.
It was heavy.
In a turning fight, weight is bad, but in a diving fight, weight is energy.
Boington explained that they were flying a brick with a rocket strapped to it.
If you throw a brick through a window, the glass breaks.
The brick doesn’t care.
That was the strategy.
He drilled them on the boom and zoom tactic.
They would climb to 20,000 ft, waiting in the sun.
When they saw the Japanese zeros below them, they wouldn’t spiral down to meet them.
They would tip the nose over and dive.
Gravity and that massive engine would accelerate the Corsair to 450 mph.
The airframe would shutter.
The controls would stiffen until it felt like pulling on concrete bars.
They would scream down on the enemy, fire a two-second burst from the 650 caliber machine guns, and then use that massive speed to zoom back up into the sky.
The Japanese pilots didn’t know how to handle this.
They were trained in the code of the samurai.
They wanted a duel.
They wanted to loop and roll to show off their superior handling.
When the black sheep refused to turn, the Japanese got frustrated.
They mocked the Americans for running away.
But Boington didn’t care about honor.
He cared about survival.
He told his men to let them laugh.
Let them call you cowards.
A live coward is better than a dead hero.
But Boington brought something else to the squadron that no manual could teach.
He brought psychological warfare.
He was one of the few Americans who understood that the Japanese military culture was rigid.
They respected hierarchy.
They hated humiliation.
Boington decided to use that against them.
He started tuning his radio to the Japanese frequencies.
This was unheard of.
You were supposed to maintain radio silence.
You were supposed to be a ghost.
Boington would get on the radio and taunt them.
He would ask for the Japanese commander at the Cahili airfield by name.
He would insult the emperor.
He would tell them exactly when the black sheep were coming.
He would say, “This is Major Boyington.
I am coming to Cahali at 2 p.m.
Come up and fight.” The intelligence officers back at base were horrified.
They said he was giving away tactical information.
They said he was painting a target on his back.
Boington told them that was the point.
He wanted the Zeros to come up.
He wanted them angry.
An angry fighter pilot makes mistakes.
An angry pilot fixates on the target and forgets to check his .
This bravado transformed the misfits.
They stopped seeing themselves as the rejects of the Marine Corps.
They started seeing themselves as a pirate crew.
They were the bad boys who broke the rules and got away with it.
They painted the names of their girlfriends on the cowlings of their planes.
They wore baseball caps instead of helmets.
They drank the torpedo juice and sang songs about how the generals could go to hell.
They were building a tribe and the center of that tribe was Papy.
He was their father, their brother, and their wildest influence all rolled into one.
In midepptember, the black sheep moved to the forward operating base in the Russell Islands.
It wasn’t really a base.
It was a muddy strip of crushed coral cut out of the jungle.
There were no barracks.
They slept in tents that leaked.
The mud was kneedeep.
The rats were the size of cats.
The food was dehydrated eggs and spam that tasted like tin.
But this misery only tightened the bond.
They were living in the dirt, flying machines that wanted to kill them, fighting an enemy that outnumbered them 10 to one.
The first major test came on September 16th.
The mission was a bomber escort.
This was the job fighter pilots hated.
You had to stay close to the slow, lumbering bombers.
You couldn’t chase the enemy.
You had to sit there and be a target.
But Boington had a plan.
He knew the Japanese would attack the bombers from above.
He told his flight to weave.
He told them to keep their eyes open.
They were flying over Bal, a Japanese island stronghold.
The sky was blue and empty.
Then the radio crackled.
Bandits high.
The sky suddenly filled with black specks.
Zeros.
They dropped out of the sun like hornets.
The Corsair pilots felt the adrenaline dump into their blood.
This was the moment of truth.
This was where the training either worked or you died.
Boyington spotted a Zero diving on a bomber.
He didn’t panic.
He didn’t pull back on the stick to climb.
He pushed the nose down.
The Corsair dropped.
The speed built up instantly.
300 350 400.
The wind roared over the canopy.
The Zero pilot was focused on the bomber.
He didn’t see the dark blue shape hurtling down from above.
Boington lined up the shot.
He waited until the Zero filled his gunight.
He squeezed the trigger.
The 650 caliber machine guns in the wings roared.
The recoil was so powerful it felt like the plane had hit a wall.
Tracers lashed out like fiery whips.
The bullets smashed into the Zero’s wing route.
The Japanese plane didn’t just break, it disintegrated.
The fuel tanks in the Zero were unsealed.
One incendiary bullet was all it took.
The zero turned into a ball of orange fire.
Boington pulled back on the stick.
The G-forces slammed him into his seat.
The blood drained from his head.
His vision grayed out at the edges.
The Corsair groaned under the stress, but the wings held.
He rocketed back up, trading his speed for altitude.
He looked around.
The sky was a chaotic swirl of smoke and planes, but the black sheep weren’t breaking.
They were fighting.
One of the misfits, a kid who had been kicked out of flight school twice for discipline issues, found himself with a zero on his tail.
The Japanese pilot was good.
He was putting rounds into the Corsair’s tail.
The kid didn’t freeze.
He remembered Papy’s barroom advice.
He slammed the throttle forward and dropped his flaps.
It was a crazy maneuver.
The Corsair slowed down instantly like it had hit an air bra.
The Zero, moving too fast, overshot.
The Japanese plane flew right past him.
The kid raised his nose, fired a burst, and blew the Zero out of the sky.
When they landed back at the Russell Islands, the mood had changed.
They weren’t just pilots anymore.
They were killers.
They climbed out of their cockpits, shirts soaked in sweat, hands shaking from the adrenaline.
They looked at the holes in their planes.
They looked at the gun camera footage.
They had shot down 11 enemy planes.
They had lost zero.
The math didn’t make sense to the experts.
The misfits were supposed to be cannon fodder.
Instead, they were aces.
The news spread through the South Pacific.
The black sheep were for real.
But the Japanese weren’t going to take the insult lying down.
Boyington kept taunting them on the radio.
He kept poking the bear.
He knew that eventually the bear would wake up.
The Japanese command at Rabau decided that this noisy American major needed to be silenced.
They moved their best squadrons down to Cahali.
These were the elite, the Imperial Navy’s finest.
Boyington welcomed it.
He gathered his men in the mess tent.
He told them that the easy days were over.
the Japanese were bringing in the varsity team.
He told them that the next few weeks would determine if they were just lucky or if they were legends.
He poured a drink.
He raised a toast to the bastards.
The escalation began in October.
The missions got longer.
The black sheep stopped flying escort and started flying fighter sweeps.
This was the most dangerous game in the air.
A sweep meant you didn’t have bombs to drop.
You didn’t have bombers to protect.
You went up simply to pick a fight.
You flew over the enemy airfield, circled their runway, and dared them to take off.
It was like standing in someone’s front yard and screaming at them to come out and brawl.
On one such mission, Boyington spotted a formation of zeros flying low over the water.
There were 30 of them.
The black sheep had eight planes.
The math was suicide.
4 to1 odds.
A sane commander would have turned for home.
Boington turned his radio on.
He ordered the attack.
This is it, boys.
Pick a partner and go in.
They dove.
The Corsair engines screamed.
The zeros scattered like a flock of birds hit by a stone.
The fight became a swirling melee.
It was chaos.
Up, down, left, right.
The air was filled with tracers and smoke.
Boington got one, then another.
He was fighting on instinct now.
He wasn’t thinking about aerodynamics.
He was feeling the plane through the seat of his pants.
He saw a zero latch onto his wingman.
Boyington rolled the Corsair inverted.
He hung upside down in his straps, watching the ocean spin above his head.
He pulled the nose through, diving inverted.
It was a maneuver that shouldn’t have been possible.
He came out of the dive right behind the Zero.
A short burst.
The Zero’s wings sheared off.
By the time the fuel gauges ran low and the black sheep turned for home, the ocean was dotted with burning oil slicks.
They had shot down 12 zeros.
They lost one plane, but the pilot blayed out and was picked up by a rescue boat.
The score was becoming lopsided.
The garbage pilots were racking up numbers that rivaled the legendary squadrons of 1942.
But the success brought its own problems.
The press started to pay attention.
War correspondents started showing up at the mud hole base.
They wanted to interview the black sheep.
They wanted pictures of Boington.
They wanted to know his secret.
Boyington hated it.
He knew that fame was a distraction.
He knew that the moment you started reading your own press clippings, you got careless.
He tried to keep the reporters away from the men.
He told them lies.
He told them stories that were too dirty to print, but he couldn’t stop the momentum.
He was becoming a celebrity and he was getting close to the record.
Eddie Rickenbacher, the World War I ace, had 26 kills.
Joe Fos, the Marine hero of Guadal Canal, had 26 kills.
Boyington had 20.
He was six planes away from history.
The pressure was mounting.
Every time he took off, the ground crews were counting.
Every time he landed, they ran to the plane to ask how many Papy.
This obsession with the number was dangerous.
It made a pilot take risks he shouldn’t take.
It made him chase a damaged plane too far into enemy territory.
Boyington felt it.
He felt the hunger, but he also felt the exhaustion.
He was 31, flying against 20-year-olds.
His body was aching.
The hangover never really went away anymore.
He was running on caffeine, whiskey, and pure will.
And the biggest battle of the Pacific War was looming on the horizon.
Rabal, the fortress, the place where pilots went to die.
Rabal was not just a target.
It was a death sentence.
Located on the northern tip of New Britain, it was the Empire of Japan’s Iron Fist in the South Pacific.
It was a massive natural harbor ringed by active volcanoes that constantly spewed ash into the air, turning the sky a bruised purple.
The Japanese had dug into the volcanic rock like termites.
They had five airfields surrounding the harbor.
They had hundreds of anti-aircraft guns.
They had radar stations that could see an American flight coming from a 100 miles away.
And they had hundreds of fighters.
To fly over Robel was to poke a stick into a hornet’s nest the size of a city.
On the morning of January 3rd, 1944, Gregory Boyington woke up with the number 25 in his head.
That was his kill count.
He was one plane away from tying the all-time American record held by Joe Foss and Eddie Rickenbacher.
He was one plane away from immortality, but he was also exhausted.
He had been flying combat missions for weeks without a break.
His face was gaunt.
His hands had a permanent tremor until he gripped a flight stick.
He wrapped his broken nose in tape to keep the oxygen mask from chafing the raw skin.
He drank black coffee that tasted like engine oil and walked out to the flight line.
The mission was a fighter sweep.
48 American fighters, corsairs and Hellcats were going to sweep over Robel to clear the skies for the bombers.
Boington was leading the fighter division.
He climbed onto the wing of his Corsair.
It wasn’t his personal plane.
In the Black Sheep squadron, nobody really owned a plane because they broke down so often.
You flew whatever engine would start.
He strapped into the cockpit of number 883.
The mechanic gave him a thumbs up.
The massive propeller coughed, caught, and roared to life.
Blue smoke whipped back over the canopy.
They took off from the coral strip at Tokina, climbing through the heavy tropical air.
The formation formed up tight.
The Corsair was a beast at low altitude.
But as they climbed past 15,000 ft, the supercharger kicked in.
The engine note changed from a growl to a wine.
The air got thin and cold.
Condensation froze on the canopy glass.
Boington checked his gun site.
He checked his fuel mixture.
He checked his wingman, Captain George Ashman.
Ashman was a solid pilot, reliable.
He stuck to Boington’s wing like he was towed by a cable.
As they approached Rob, the radio discipline cracked.
The Japanese radar had picked them up.
The sky ahead of them began to fill with black puffs of flack.
The heavy 88 mm shells were bursting at 20,000 ft.
The turbulence from the explosions rocked the corsairs.
Shrapnel pinged off the aluminum skins, but the black sheep ignored the flack.
They were looking for the fighters and then they saw them.
It looked like a swarm of insects rising from a swamp.
60, maybe 70 Japanese zeros were climbing to meet them.
They were coming up in waves.
The odds were bad, but that was normal.
What was different this time was the aggression.
The Japanese pilots weren’t waiting for the Americans to dive.
They were climbing straight into the fight.
Engines screaming, guns charging.
Boington didn’t hesitate.
He keyed his mic.
He didn’t give a speech.
He just said, “Let’s go get him.” Boington pushed the nose over.
The Corsair accelerated.
The altimeter unwound like a broken clock.
He picked out a zero on the edge of the formation.
The Japanese pilot saw him coming and broke left.
It was a sharp, violent turn that would have snapped the wings off an American plane.
But the zero was light.
It danced away.
Boington didn’t try to follow the turn.
He knew the physics.
If he turned, he lost speed.
If he lost speed, he died.
Instead, he pulled up into a high yo-yo maneuver.
trading his speed for altitude.
Hanging above the fight for a split second before dropping back down, he came down on a second zero.
This pilot never saw him, Boington fired a short burst from 300 yd, the 50 caliber rounds walked through the Zero’s fuselage like a chainsaw.
The canopy shattered.
The plane pitched forward and spiraled down into the volcanic ash clouds below.
Kill number 26.
He had done it.
He had tied the record, but there was no time to celebrate.
The sky was dissolving into chaos.
The fight broke into a 100 individual duels.
It was a barroom brawl at 400 mph.
Corsaires were slashing through the Japanese formation, firing and running.
Zeros were swarming after them, pecking away with their light 7.7 mm machine guns and their heavy 20 mm cannons.
The air was filled with smoke trails, burning debris, and parachutes.
Boington looked for his wingman.
George Ashman was in trouble.
A zero had latched onto Ashman’s tail and was pouring fire into his fuselage.
Ashman was diving, trying to shake him, but the zero stuck.
Boington cursed.
He banked his corsair hard, pulling gforces that made his vision tunnel.
He dove on the zero, chasing Ashman.
He didn’t care about his own safety.
He had to clear his wingman’s tail.
He closed the distance.
He held the trigger down.
The tracers hammered the zero.
It exploded.
Kill number 27.
Maybe.
He didn’t check.
He pulled up looking for Ashman, but now the trap snapped shut while Boington was focused on saving his friend.
The Japanese had maneuvered behind him.
He had violated his own rule.
He had lost situational awareness.
He heard a sound like hail hitting a tin roof as bullets hammered against his armor plate.
Then came the heavy thud of cannon shells.
The Corsair shuddered violently.
A 20 mm shell smashed into the main fuel tank located right in front of his cockpit.
The world turned orange.
The fuel ignited instantly.
The cockpit filled with flames.
The heat was absolute.
It seared his eyebrows and melted the rubber of his oxygen mask.
Boington couldn’t see the instruments.
He couldn’t see the sky.
He was sitting inside a furnace.
He knew he had seconds before the plane exploded or the fire burned through his flight suit and cooked him alive.
He didn’t think he reacted.
He jammed the canopy release.
The wind roared into the cockpit, feeding the fire with fresh oxygen.
The flames leaped up, wrapping around his head.
He unbuckled his harness.
He rolled the Corsair upside down.
Gravity should have pulled him out, but the slipstream pinned him against the seat.
He was trapped.
He kicked the stick.
He fought the G-forces.
Finally, he fell free.
He tumbled into the cool air.
The silence was shocking.
One second, he was inside a screaming engine of fire.
The next, he was falling through the quiet sky over St.
George’s Channel.
He pulled the rip cord.
The chute cracked open.
The harness jerked him violently, snapping his head back.
He swung there, suspended 2,000 ft above the water.
He looked up.
His corsair was a streak of black smoke plummeting toward the ocean.
But the war wasn’t over just because he had blayed out.
Japanese pilots had a brutal reputation for strafing pilots in parachutes.
It was a war crime, but in the hate-filled skies of the Pacific, it happened.
Boyington hung in his harness, a helpless target.
He saw four zeros circling him.
He braced himself for the bullets.
He waited to die, but for some reason, they didn’t fire.
Maybe they were out of ammo.
Maybe they respected the kill.
They circled him once, dipping their wings, and then turned back toward Rabau.
He hit the water hard.
The impact knocked the wind out of him.
He struggled out of the harness and inflated his small life vest, the Mi West.
He didn’t have a life raft.
It had been destroyed in the fire.
He was bobbing in the middle of the ocean, miles from land with a broken nose, a scalp torn open by shrapnel, and burns on his arms and face.
He was alone.
High above, the rest of the black sheep were frantic.
They had seen the fireball.
They had seen number 883 go down.
They were screaming on the radio, “Pappy is down.
Papy is down.” They circled the area, ignoring the fuel gauges that were dropping toward empty.
They searched the white caps for a yellow raft or a green die marker.
They flew so low their propellers kicked up spray from the waves.
But Boyington didn’t have a raft.
His head was just a small speck in a massive rolling ocean.
The black sheep searched until their tanks were dry.
They risked ditching their own planes to find him, but they saw nothing.
The ocean is big and a man is small.
One by one, the Corsaires turned away.
They had to return to base.
The flight back to Tokina was the longest of their lives.
When they landed, the silence on the airfield was heavy.
The ground crews ran out to the planes, counting the survivors.
They saw the empty spot where Boington should have been.
The pilots climbed out, dragging their parachutes in the dirt.
They were tough men.
They were brawlers.
But some of them sat down on the coral runway and wept.
They debriefed the intelligence officers.
They told them Boington had shot down a plane to tie the record.
They told them he had saved Ashman.
They told them he went down fighting.
The officers typed up the report.
Missing in action, but in the squadron ready room, they knew what that really meant.
Nobody survived landing in the water near Raba.
If the sharks didn’t get you, the Japanese patrols would.
And the Japanese didn’t take prisoners from the air war.
They executed them.
The black sheep had lost their shepherd.
The misfits were orphans again.
They went to Boington’s tent.
They saw his unfinished bottle of whiskey.
They saw his letters.
They didn’t touch anything.
It felt like a shrine.
That night, the drinking was different.
It wasn’t a party.
It was awake.
They told stories about Papy.
They talked about the time he wrestled the general.
They talked about the time he flew a mission in his underwear because his flight suit was wet.
They toasted the man who had taken a group of rejects and turned them into the most feared squadron in the Pacific.
But the war didn’t stop for grief.
The next morning, the schedule was posted.
Another sweep over Rob.
The Black Sheep had to get back in their cockpits.
They had to fly the same planes over the same ocean to fight the same enemy.
But the spark was gone.
Without Papy’s voice on the radio without his insanity leading the charge, the magic began to fade.
The squadron continued to fight, but the soul of the unit had plummeted into the St.
George’s channel.
Back in the United States, the newspapers ran the headline, “Ace of aces missing.” The Marine Corps rushed the paperwork.
They wanted a hero.
They awarded Boington the Navy Cross.
Then realizing he was likely dead, they processed the paperwork for the Medal of Honor.
It would be awarded postumously.
His name was added to the list of martyrs.
The legend was sealed.
Papy Boyington was the drunken saint who died to save his men.
But the story wasn’t over.
In the dark water off Raba, a man was still swimming.
He was bleeding.
He was burned.
He was dehydrated.
But he was Gregory Boyington, and he was too stubborn to die.
A Japanese submarine surfacing to recharge its batteries spotted the debris field.
They saw the lone swimmer.
The sailors stood on the deck with rifles.
Boington raised his hands.
He was pulled out of the water, thrown onto the steel deck, and beaten with rifle butts.
He was a prisoner of the empire.
The black sheep thought he was dead.
The world thought he was a hero.
But Papy was just beginning a new kind of war, a war for survival.
Inside the brutal prison camps of Japan.
5 days after Gregory Boon vanished into the ocean, the black sheep were broken up.
It was a cold administrative decision.
The Marine Corps didn’t believe in sentimentality.
The combat tour was technically over.
The misfits had done their job.
They had flown their missions.
They had cleared the skies.
Without Papy to fight for them without his loudmouth bullying the generals into keeping them together, the squadron was dissolved.
The pilots were scattered to the winds.
Some were sent home.
Some were reassigned to other units to fill gaps.
The Brotherhood that had terrorized the Japanese Air Force for 84 days simply ceased to exist.
They packed their bags, drank the last of the jungle juice, and walked away from the tents in the mud.
Back in the United States, the military machine began the process of canonization.
The Marine Corps needed heroes.
The war in the Pacific was brutal, and the public needed stories of sacrifice to keep buying war bonds.
Boyington was perfect.
He was the ace of aces.
He was the bad boy who made good.
The fact that he was dead made him even better for propaganda.
Dead heroes don’t get drunk at press conferences.
Dead heroes don’t punch superior officers.
They are silent, perfect symbols of patriotism.
In March of 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt awarded the Medal of Honor to Major Gregory Boyington.
It is the highest award for valor the United States can bestow.
The citation read like an action movie script.
It listed his 26 kills.
It listed his leadership against overwhelming odds, but Boington wasn’t there to receive it.
A general accepted the medal on his behalf.
The newspapers ran photos of the ceremony.
They called him a martyr.
They said his spirit would live on forever.
But 4,000 m away in a wooden barracks outside of Tokyo, the martyr was starving to death.
Boyington wasn’t dead.
He was a prisoner in the Amorei prison camp.
His reality wasn’t medals and speeches.
It was lice, dysentery, and rifle butts.
The Japanese guards knew he was a pilot.
They hated pilots.
The civilians in Tokyo were being bombed by American B29s and the guards took out their anger on the airmen.
Boington was a special target.
He was an older officer.
He was stubborn.
He refused to bow fast enough.
So they beat him.
They broke his nose again.
They knocked out teeth.
They forced him to stand at attention for hours in the freezing rain.
He weighed 190 lb when he was shot down.
Within 6 months, he weighed 110 lb.
He was a skeleton wrapped in translucent skin, but he didn’t break.
The misfit attitude that had made him a nightmare for the Marine Corps brass kept him alive in the camps.
He was too contrary to die.
He spent his time memorizing the names of the guards so he could hunt them down after the war.
He kept his mind sharp by replaying old dog fights in his head, move by move, correcting his mistakes.
For 20 months, the world thought Papy Boington was a ghost.
Then in August of 1945, the sun rose twice.
The atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Empire of Japan surrendered.
The guards at Amorei disappeared overnight.
They dropped their rifles and ran into the countryside, terrified of the American retribution.
American planes began dropping 50-gallon drums of food and supplies into the prison yard.
When the rescue team arrived, they found a man who looked like a Holocaust survivor.
But when they asked his name, he grinned with a mouth full of missing teeth and said, “Boington.
” The news went out over the teletype.
Papy was alive.
It was a shock.
The Marine Corps didn’t know what to do.
They had already declared him dead.
They had already given away his medal.
They had already turned him into a saint.
Now the drunk was coming home.
He arrived in San Francisco to a hero’s welcome.
Thousands of people lined the streets.
Life magazine threw him a party.
The other black sheep, the survivors who had made it through the war rushed to see him.
It was the first time the misfits had been together since that dark day at Tokina.
They hugged the skinny battered man who had led them into hell.
They poured him a drink and for the first time in 2 years, the black sheep were whole again.
The vindication was absolute.
The experts who had called them garbage, who had laughed at their old planes and their lack of discipline, now had to look at the numbers.
The statistics were impossible to argue with.
In just 12 weeks of combat, the Black Sheep had destroyed 94 confirmed enemy aircraft.
They had another 35 listed as probables.
They had damaged 50 more.
They had destroyed 15 transport ships and ground targets.
And the most shocking number was the cost.
They had achieved this slaughter while losing only 12 pilots.
The kill ratio was astronomical.
The unwanted pilots had performed better than the elite squadrons from themmies.
They had produced nine fighter aces in 3 months.
It was one of the most lethal performances in the history of aerial warfare.
The method of the barroom brawl had worked.
Boyington had proven that in the air aggression beats procedure every single time.
Boyington lived the rest of his life the way he flew fast and hard.
He wrote a book called Ba Black Sheep that became a bestseller.
He struggled with the bottle.
He struggled with money.
He was never a perfect man.
He was never the polished officer the Marine Corps wanted him to be.
But he never apologized for it.
He knew who he was.
He was a fighter pilot and he was the leader of the bastards.
He died in 1988.
He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
It is a place of order.
Rows of white headstones perfectly aligned, perfectly spacing.
It is the most disciplined place on earth.
But if you walk to his grave, section 7A, grave 150, you get the feeling that he is still smirk smiling at the uniformity.
He is lying there among generals and admirals, the ultimate black sheep in the ultimate formation.
Today, if you go to an air show, you might see a restored F4U Corsair.
It is a magnificent machine.
The dark blue paint shines in the sun.
The massive propeller looks like a sculpture.
People take pictures of it.
They admire the engineering, but a plane is just metal and wire until a man climbs into it.
The Corsair didn’t become a legend because of the Pratt and Whitney engine.
It became a legend because men like the black sheep strapped themselves into it and flew it into the teeth of the enemy.
They remind us of a simple truth about war.
You don’t win by having the best manners.
You don’t win by having the cleanest uniforms.
You win by having the will to fight when everyone else says you should quit.
You win by taking the garbage and turning it into gold.
The black sheep were the outcasts.
They were the guys who didn’t fit in.
And because they didn’t fit in, they didn’t know how to lose.
We tell this story to ensure that Gregory, Papy, Boyington, and his misfits don’t disappear into silence.
We tell it because in a world that loves safe, predictable heroes, we need to remember the wild ones.
We need to remember the ones who broke the rules to save the day.
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