In the summer of 1942, a 30-year-old man sat in a cramped office at Marine Corps headquarters, watching younger pilots receive orders for the Pacific.
His name was Gregory Boyington.
He had combat experience most of them could only dream of.
Months of flying against Japanese fighters over Burma and China with the American volunteer group, the legendary Flying Tigers.
He had seen zeros up close.
He knew their weaknesses.
He knew how they died.
None of it mattered.
The Marine Corps had reinstated him as a major in September, but they did not know what to do with him.
His service record was a mess of contradictions.
Skilled pilot, heavy drinker, chronic debtor, divorced father of three.
He had resigned from the Marines to join the Flying Tigers, chasing the $500 bounty paid for every Japanese plane destroyed.
When the AVG dispanded, he came home with disputed kills, an honorable discharge that Clare Chenalt had nearly made dishonorable, and a reputation that preceded him through every door.
The institution recognized his talent.
What it could not manage was his temperament.
His time with the Flying Tigers had been both triumph and disaster.
He had flown P40 Warhawks against Japanese fighters over Rangon and Kunming, learning tactics from Clare Chenalt himself, the dive and zoom attacks, the refusal to dogfight zeros at low speed, the discipline of altitude advantage.
Official AVG records credited him with two confirmed aerial kills and additional ground victories.
He claimed six.
The discrepancy would follow him for the rest of his life.
Another entry in a service record that defied simple categorization.
What the records did not capture was what he had learned about Japanese pilots, their tactics, their tendencies, their aircraft’s weaknesses.
The Zero was maneuverable and deadly, but it was also fragile, lacking armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.
A well- aimed burst could turn it into a fireball.
Boyington had seen it happen.
He had made it happen.
That knowledge was worth more than any number on a scorecard.
But knowledge did not pay debts.
skill did not erase the drinking incidents, the conflicts with Chenalt, the reputation for being difficult.
When the AVG disbanded in July 1942, Boyington came home to find that the Marine Corps was willing to take him back, but not willing to trust him.
So they assigned him to a training squadron, then to a staff position, then to VMF 122, where he flew patrols over the Russell Islands without firing a shot, then briefly as executive officer of VMF-121 and commander of VMF-12, where he gained experience with the Corsair and proved he could lead men in something other than a bar fight.
Still, no combat assignment came.
Months passed.
The war moved on without him.
He watched pilots a decade younger ship out for the fighting while he fed aircraft and filled out paperwork.
He was, by every measure that mattered to the military bureaucracy, too old at 31, too troubled by his past, and too unpredictable for frontline command.
What they did not understand was that Gregory Boyington had spent his entire life being underestimated by teachers who saw a problem child, by officers who saw a discipline case, by a system that valued conformity over results.
And every time when it mattered most, he had found a way to prove them catastrophically wrong.
By mid 1943, the situation in the Solomon Islands had reached a brutal equilibrium.
American forces had secured Guadal Canal at enormous cost.
But the Japanese fortress at Rabal, over 600 m to the northwest, remained the most heavily defended air base in the Pacific.
Five airfields, hundreds of fighters, thousands of experienced pilots rotating through on their way to other theaters.
Every American advance up the island chain brought them closer to Rabal’s killing radius.
The aircraft carrying this fight forward was the VA F4U Corsair, a machine as demanding as the war itself.
Its inverted gull wings accommodated a propeller so massive it needed extra ground clearance.
Its Prattton Whitney engine produced over 2,000 horsepower, pushing the aircraft past 400 mph, faster than any fighter the Japanese could field.
650 caliber machine guns could shred a zero in seconds.
But the Corsair killed Americans, too.
Its long nose blocked forward visibility during landing approaches.
Pilots could not see the runway until the last moment, forcing them to approach at angles that invited disaster.
At low speeds, the left wing would stall before the right, snapping aircraft into lethal spins from which recovery was nearly impossible.
The landing gear had a tendency to bounce on touchdown, sending aircraft careening off runways or flipping onto their backs.
Pilots nicknamed it the Enen Eliminator and the Bentwing Widowmaker.
The Navy refused to operate it from carriers, judging the risk too high for deck operations.
The Marines flew it anyway.
They flew it from crushed coral air strips hacked out of jungle by seabbes working under fire where a bad landing meant death and a good one meant doing it again tomorrow.
They flew it in tropical heat that turned cockpits into ovens, in rain that reduced visibility to nothing, in conditions that would have grounded operations anywhere else in the world.
They flew it because it was faster than anything the Japanese had, because its 650 caliber guns could tear a zero apart in a single pass, and because the alternative was losing the Pacific island by island.
The Japanese, for their part, recognized what they were facing.
At a conference at Rabbal in April 1943, Japanese commanders noted with concern the appearance of new American fighters that outperformed everything in their inventory.
They called the Corsair whistling death for the sound it made in a dive, the howl of air rushing through its wing-mounted oil coolers as it fell from the sky at 400 mph.
This was the aircraft and this was the war waiting for Gregory Boyington when he finally talked his way into a command.
The squadron that became VMF214 did not exist in any meaningful sense until late August 1943.
It had been activated, deployed, fought, and effectively disbanded.
Its surviving pilots scattered to other units or sent home.
What remained was a designation, a handful of borrowed corsairs, and a collection of pilots no one else wanted.
Some were veterans with kills to their credit, grounded for disciplinary problems or personality conflicts.
Others were fresh replacements straight from flight school, too green for established squadrons to trust with a combat slot.
All of them had been left behind in the pilot pool at Aspiritu Santo while the war continued without them.
Boyington saw an opportunity.
He and Major Stan Bailey, who would serve as executive officer, lobbyed headquarters relentlessly.
Their pitch was simple.
Give us the castoffs.
Give us four weeks to train and we will give you a combat ready squadron.
headquarters agreed, probably because they had nothing to lose.
If Boyington failed, they would simply scatter the pilots again.
If he succeeded, they would have another squadron in the fight.
He had 27 pilots, 28 days, and a reputation for being exactly the kind of difficult, insordinate, talented problem the Marine Corps had been trying to manage since he first put on the uniform.
The men who gathered under his command were not incompetent.
Some had already proven themselves in combat.
Pilots like John Bolt, who would later become an ace with six kills, and Bill Casease, who would finish with eight.
Others were green replacements who had never fired their guns in anger, whose training had been adequate, but whose combat experience was zero.
What they shared was displacement.
They had all for various reasons been left behind while the war continued elsewhere.
Boyington understood them because he was one of them.
He had been a cast off himself, written off by systems that valued predictability over performance.
He knew what it felt like to be told you did not belong, and he knew how to channel that feeling into something useful.
The men of VMF214 did not initially call themselves the black sheep.
The name Boyington preferred, Boyington’s bastards, was rejected by headquarters as inappropriate for press releases.
They settled on black sheep because that was what they were.
Pilots who did not fit anywhere else, led by a man who would never fit anywhere.
They trained at a pace that would have been reckless if they had time to be careful.
Boyington flew with them constantly, demonstrating tactics he had learned over Burma, correcting mistakes in real time, building the kind of trust that only comes from shared danger.
He did not demand perfection.
He demanded aggression, discipline in the air, and absolute loyalty to the formation.
His own division reflected his philosophy.
Instead of surrounding himself with the squadron’s best pilots, he chose his wingmen from among the inexperienced replacements.
The message was clear.
He would not ask anyone to take a risk he was not taking himself.
By September 12th, 1943, they were declared combat ready.
4 days later, they flew their first mission.
The Black Sheep operated from forward bases so close to Japanese positions that they were sometimes behind enemy lines.
Munda Vela Lavella air strips that changed hands or nearly did while American aircraft were still using them.
The CBS would rebuild runways under fire and Marines would launch from them before the concrete had fully set.
Their primary mission was escort duty, protecting bombers on strikes against Japanese shipping and shore installations.
But Buanton had learned from Chenalt that the best defense was to go looking for trouble.
He led fighter sweeps over Japanese airfields, challenging enemy pilots to come up and fight.
On October 17, 1943, he took 24 Corsaers over Cahili airfield on Boenville.
Below them sat 60 Japanese aircraft.
Buanton circled the field, essentially daring the Japanese to scramble.
When they did, the black sheep dove to meet them.
The squadron claimed 20 kills that day without losing a single pilot.
The mission became part of his Medal of Honor citation.
But the numbers only tell part of the story.
What mattered was the method, the calculated aggression, the willingness to accept risk in exchange for results, the transformation of a collection of misfits into a unit that fought as one.
In their first combat tour, the Black Sheep were credited with 57 confirmed kills and 19 probables.
They also suffered a casualty rate approaching 40%.
One pilot was shot down by friendly fire from Navy PT boats.
Others simply did not come back, their fates unknown until or unless wreckage was found months later.
This was not a television show.
This was not colorful misfits bonding over high jinks and beer.
This was industrialcale violence conducted at 300 mph where mistakes were measured in funerals and survival depended on skills most people would never develop and luck no one could control.
By December 1943, Boyington’s personal score had climbed to 25 confirmed kills, one short of the record shared by Eddie Rickenbacher from the First World War and Joe Foss from the early Pacific campaign.
The press had discovered him.
War correspondents loved the story, the old man, the drinking, the castoff squadron, the mounting kill count.
They called him papy because his pilots had started calling him gramps and that was not dramatic enough.
The attention complicated things.
Boyington was not performing for cameras.
He was trying to stay alive and keep his men alive while flying missions that would have seemed suicidal to anyone who had not grown accustomed to the mathematics of attrition.
But the legend was already forming, separate from the man, simpler and cleaner than any human being could be.
January 3rd, 1944.
The Black Sheep’s second combat tour was ending.
One more mission and they would rotate out for rest and replacement.
For Boington, it was also a chance to break the record.
One more kill would put him at 26 ahead of Rickenbacher and tied with Foss.
He should not have been flying.
He was exhausted.
His body carried the accumulated damage of months of combat, the minor injuries that never fully healed, the fatigue that sleep could not touch.
But the mission was a major sweep over Rabal.
48 American fighters against the most heavily defended air base in the Pacific and he would not let someone else lead it.
They launched from Tokina airfield on Boenville at 6:30 in the morning.
By the time they reached Rabal, some aircraft had turned back with mechanical problems.
The formation that remained encountered two large groups of Japanese zeros, probably from the 253rd and 204th Naval Air Groups, experienced pilots flying from their home field.
What happened next is pieced together from afteraction reports and the testimony of surviving pilots.
Boington claimed a zero in the initial engagement.
Other Americans confirmed seeing it go down.
That was 26.
Then in the chaos of the dog fight, his corsair was hit.
The circumstances remain unclear.
No one saw exactly what happened.
One moment he was there, the next he was gone, falling toward Rabal’s harbor in an aircraft that might or might not still be flying.
For 20 months, he was listed as missing in action, presumed dead.
The Japanese submarine I 181 pulled Gregory Boington from the water.
He was wounded.
Shrapnel in his groin, arms, and shoulders, a bullet in his calf, a laceration across his scalp, his left ear nearly severed.
Japanese fighters had strafed him while he floated in his life jacket, though none had connected.
He would spend the next 20 months in captivity.
First at Rabbal, then transported by bomber to truck atal, arriving in the middle of an American air raid, then to Saipan, Ewoima, and finally to Ouna, a secret interrogation camp near Tokyo, where the Japanese held high value prisoners and did not report their names to the Red Cross.
The conditions were brutal.
Beatings were routine.
Medical care was minimal.
His combat wounds were left largely untreated, healing badly or not at all.
He contracted malaria.
He lost nearly 70 lb.
The guards at Ouna were specialists in psychological torture as much as physical.
They kept prisoners isolated, uncertain, stripped of the military identity that had defined their lives.
Yet, Boyington survived.
Later, with the dark humor of a man who had faced death so often, it no longer surprised him.
He would note that his health had actually improved during captivity, at least in one respect.
Enforced sobriety, for the first time in years, had dried him out.
It was a bitter joke, but it was also true.
In April 1945, he was transferred to Omorei, a camp in Tokyo Bay where he would remain until the end of the war.
There, among the hundreds of other prisoners waiting for liberation or death, he met Lewis Zampirini, the Olympic runner whose own survival story would later become famous.
He met Richard O’Ne, the submarine commander who would receive the Medal of Honor for his own actions.
They were all men who had been written off, presumed dead, waiting in the dark for a war they could not influence to finally end.
What they talked about, what kept them sane through months of uncertainty we can only imagine.
Perhaps they told stories of their former lives.
Perhaps they planned futures they might never see.
Perhaps they simply endured one day at a time the way prisoners always have and always will.
Back home, the Marine Corps awarded Boyington the Medal of Honor in March 1944.
They also awarded him the Navy Cross.
Both were given in absentia, honors for a man they believed was already dead.
His mother accepted them on his behalf, not knowing if her son would ever come home to hold them.
Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945.
Within days, American aircraft began supply drops to P camps across the country, photographing the compounds to identify survivors.
One reconnaissance flight returned with an image that became legend.
A sign painted on a barracks roof that read, “Pappy Boington here.” The Black Sheep had scattered after his disappearance.
The squadron disbanded just 5 days after his last mission.
its pilots reassigned to other units.
Now, suddenly, their leader was alive.
His last two kills from January 3rd were confirmed, bringing his official total to 28, the highest of any Marine ace in the war.
On August 29th, 1945, he walked out of Omarie camp.
On October 5th, President Harry Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony.
The award that had been given to a dead man, now received by a living one.
The reunion with surviving black sheep pilots was documented by Life magazine.
The photograph showed them drinking, celebrating, acting exactly like the legends the press had made them.
It was the first time life had ever put someone holding an alcoholic drink on its cover.
What followed the parades was not a triumphant second act.
Gregory Boyington had been fighting since before most Americans knew the war was coming.
He had survived Burma, the Solomons, Rabal, and 20 months of captivity.
But the skills that made him effective in combat, the aggression, the refusal to submit, the ability to function under pressure that would break most people did not translate to peace time.
He struggled with alcohol.
This was not a quirk or a colorful character trait.
It was a destructive force that had shaped his life before the war and would continue to shape it after.
The enforced sobriety of the P camps had, in a bitter irony, been the longest he had gone without drinking since he was a young man.
His military career ended in August 1947 when a medical board reviewed his physical condition, the accumulated damage from combat and captivity, and recommended retirement.
He was promoted to colonel and discharged.
In the civilian world, he held a succession of jobs.
Sales positions, marketing roles, work with companies that hoped his fame would help their bottom line.
A brewery hired him for a while.
A drunk selling beer, another bitter irony in a life full of them.
He refereed professional wrestling matches for extra money, traveling the California circuit and beyond, trading on a name that meant less each year.
He married and divorced multiple times, four marriages in total, leaving behind children who knew their father mainly through newspaper clippings and the stories other people told.
The financial problems that had plagued him before the war continued after it.
Debt had driven him to join the Flying Tigers in 1941.
Debt followed him through the decades that came after.
The Medal of Honor opened doors, but it did not keep them open.
Fame, he discovered, was not a career.
It was a diminishing resource that he spent a little more of each year.
In 1958, he published his autobiography, Baba Black Sheep.
The book was unflinching about his flaws, the drinking, the failed marriages, the inability to find solid ground in peace time.
It was also funny, profane, and impossible to put down.
Written in a voice that sounded exactly like a man who had survived things that would have killed most people and did not particularly care how he had done it.
The book became a bestseller.
Nearly two decades later, it inspired a television series that would introduce his story to a new generation.
Baba Black Sheep, later renamed Black Sheep Squadron, starred Robert Conrad as Boyington and ran from 1976 to 1978.
Boyington served as a consultant, though he barely recognized the sanitized, comedic version of his war that appeared on screen.
The real black sheep had not been lovable rogues.
They had been killers operating in a meat grinder.
But television was television, and the checks cashed.
And by then he had learned not to expect too much from how the world remembered anything.
The questions that historians would later debate exactly how many kills he earned with the Flying Tigers, whether some of his VMF214 claims were overcounted, why the Marine Corps both celebrated and struggled with him, miss the more important truth.
Gregory Boyington transformed a collection of rejected pilots into one of the most effective fighter squadrons in the Pacific War.
His men flew 84 days of combat, claimed 97 confirmed kills, received the presidential unit citation for extraordinary heroism.
Nine of them became aces.
The tactics he developed, the leadership he provided, the aggressive spirit he instilled, these were not diminished by his personal failings.
War does not produce saints.
It produces survivors.
And sometimes those survivors are complicated, contradictory people who do extraordinary things while carrying damage that no metal can repair.
He died on January 11th, 1988 in the 75th year of his life in a hospice in Fresno, California.
Cancer in the end, a quieter death than the war had offered him many times.
His final rest is at Arlington National Cemetery among the thousands of other men and women who served.
The F4U Corsair he flew, though he rarely flew the same one twice, taking whatever aircraft was available so his pilots would not be afraid of their own machines, lives on in museums and air shows, and the memories of those who saw them streak across Pacific skies.
The legend is simpler than the man ever was.
That is how legends work.
But the man was real.
The squadron was real.
The 97 kills and the 40% casualties and the 20 months in a cell that the world had forgotten.
All of it was real.
And when they told him he was too old to fly, too broken to lead, too difficult to trust with command, he proved them wrong over the airfields of Bogenville and the harbor of Rabbal in the only language war understands.
That’s the story of Gregory Papy Boyington and the Black Sheep Squadron.
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If your family has any connection to World War II, a grandparent who served, a relative who flew, a story that deserves to be told, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
These stories matter.
The people who lived them deserve to be remembered.
Until next time.
In the summer of 1942, a 30-year-old man sat in a cramped office at Marine Corps headquarters, watching younger pilots receive orders for the Pacific.
His name was Gregory Boyington.
He had combat experience most of them could only dream of.
Months of flying against Japanese fighters over Burma and China with the American volunteer group, the legendary Flying Tigers.
He had seen zeros up close.
He knew their weaknesses.
He knew how they died.
None of it mattered.
The Marine Corps had reinstated him as a major in September, but they did not know what to do with him.
His service record was a mess of contradictions.
Skilled pilot, heavy drinker, chronic debtor, divorced father of three.
He had resigned from the Marines to join the Flying Tigers, chasing the $500 bounty paid for every Japanese plane destroyed.
When the AVG dispanded, he came home with disputed kills, an honorable discharge that Clare Chenalt had nearly made dishonorable, and a reputation that preceded him through every door.
The institution recognized his talent.
What it could not manage was his temperament.
His time with the Flying Tigers had been both triumph and disaster.
He had flown P40 Warhawks against Japanese fighters over Rangon and Kunming, learning tactics from Clare Chenalt himself, the dive and zoom attacks, the refusal to dogfight zeros at low speed, the discipline of altitude advantage.
Official AVG records credited him with two confirmed aerial kills and additional ground victories.
He claimed six.
The discrepancy would follow him for the rest of his life.
Another entry in a service record that defied simple categorization.
What the records did not capture was what he had learned about Japanese pilots, their tactics, their tendencies, their aircraft’s weaknesses.
The Zero was maneuverable and deadly, but it was also fragile, lacking armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.
A well- aimed burst could turn it into a fireball.
Boyington had seen it happen.
He had made it happen.
That knowledge was worth more than any number on a scorecard.
But knowledge did not pay debts.
skill did not erase the drinking incidents, the conflicts with Chenalt, the reputation for being difficult.
When the AVG disbanded in July 1942, Boyington came home to find that the Marine Corps was willing to take him back, but not willing to trust him.
So they assigned him to a training squadron, then to a staff position, then to VMF 122, where he flew patrols over the Russell Islands without firing a shot, then briefly as executive officer of VMF-121 and commander of VMF-12, where he gained experience with the Corsair and proved he could lead men in something other than a bar fight.
Still, no combat assignment came.
Months passed.
The war moved on without him.
He watched pilots a decade younger ship out for the fighting while he fed aircraft and filled out paperwork.
He was, by every measure that mattered to the military bureaucracy, too old at 31, too troubled by his past, and too unpredictable for frontline command.
What they did not understand was that Gregory Boyington had spent his entire life being underestimated by teachers who saw a problem child, by officers who saw a discipline case, by a system that valued conformity over results.
And every time when it mattered most, he had found a way to prove them catastrophically wrong.
By mid 1943, the situation in the Solomon Islands had reached a brutal equilibrium.
American forces had secured Guadal Canal at enormous cost.
But the Japanese fortress at Rabal, over 600 m to the northwest, remained the most heavily defended air base in the Pacific.
Five airfields, hundreds of fighters, thousands of experienced pilots rotating through on their way to other theaters.
Every American advance up the island chain brought them closer to Rabal’s killing radius.
The aircraft carrying this fight forward was the VA F4U Corsair, a machine as demanding as the war itself.
Its inverted gull wings accommodated a propeller so massive it needed extra ground clearance.
Its Prattton Whitney engine produced over 2,000 horsepower, pushing the aircraft past 400 mph, faster than any fighter the Japanese could field.
650 caliber machine guns could shred a zero in seconds.
But the Corsair killed Americans, too.
Its long nose blocked forward visibility during landing approaches.
Pilots could not see the runway until the last moment, forcing them to approach at angles that invited disaster.
At low speeds, the left wing would stall before the right, snapping aircraft into lethal spins from which recovery was nearly impossible.
The landing gear had a tendency to bounce on touchdown, sending aircraft careening off runways or flipping onto their backs.
Pilots nicknamed it the Enen Eliminator and the Bentwing Widowmaker.
The Navy refused to operate it from carriers, judging the risk too high for deck operations.
The Marines flew it anyway.
They flew it from crushed coral air strips hacked out of jungle by seabbes working under fire where a bad landing meant death and a good one meant doing it again tomorrow.
They flew it in tropical heat that turned cockpits into ovens, in rain that reduced visibility to nothing, in conditions that would have grounded operations anywhere else in the world.
They flew it because it was faster than anything the Japanese had, because its 650 caliber guns could tear a zero apart in a single pass, and because the alternative was losing the Pacific island by island.
The Japanese, for their part, recognized what they were facing.
At a conference at Rabbal in April 1943, Japanese commanders noted with concern the appearance of new American fighters that outperformed everything in their inventory.
They called the Corsair whistling death for the sound it made in a dive, the howl of air rushing through its wing-mounted oil coolers as it fell from the sky at 400 mph.
This was the aircraft and this was the war waiting for Gregory Boyington when he finally talked his way into a command.
The squadron that became VMF214 did not exist in any meaningful sense until late August 1943.
It had been activated, deployed, fought, and effectively disbanded.
Its surviving pilots scattered to other units or sent home.
What remained was a designation, a handful of borrowed corsairs, and a collection of pilots no one else wanted.
Some were veterans with kills to their credit, grounded for disciplinary problems or personality conflicts.
Others were fresh replacements straight from flight school, too green for established squadrons to trust with a combat slot.
All of them had been left behind in the pilot pool at Aspiritu Santo while the war continued without them.
Boyington saw an opportunity.
He and Major Stan Bailey, who would serve as executive officer, lobbyed headquarters relentlessly.
Their pitch was simple.
Give us the castoffs.
Give us four weeks to train and we will give you a combat ready squadron.
headquarters agreed, probably because they had nothing to lose.
If Boyington failed, they would simply scatter the pilots again.
If he succeeded, they would have another squadron in the fight.
He had 27 pilots, 28 days, and a reputation for being exactly the kind of difficult, insordinate, talented problem the Marine Corps had been trying to manage since he first put on the uniform.
The men who gathered under his command were not incompetent.
Some had already proven themselves in combat.
Pilots like John Bolt, who would later become an ace with six kills, and Bill Casease, who would finish with eight.
Others were green replacements who had never fired their guns in anger, whose training had been adequate, but whose combat experience was zero.
What they shared was displacement.
They had all for various reasons been left behind while the war continued elsewhere.
Boyington understood them because he was one of them.
He had been a cast off himself, written off by systems that valued predictability over performance.
He knew what it felt like to be told you did not belong, and he knew how to channel that feeling into something useful.
The men of VMF214 did not initially call themselves the black sheep.
The name Boyington preferred, Boyington’s bastards, was rejected by headquarters as inappropriate for press releases.
They settled on black sheep because that was what they were.
Pilots who did not fit anywhere else, led by a man who would never fit anywhere.
They trained at a pace that would have been reckless if they had time to be careful.
Boyington flew with them constantly, demonstrating tactics he had learned over Burma, correcting mistakes in real time, building the kind of trust that only comes from shared danger.
He did not demand perfection.
He demanded aggression, discipline in the air, and absolute loyalty to the formation.
His own division reflected his philosophy.
Instead of surrounding himself with the squadron’s best pilots, he chose his wingmen from among the inexperienced replacements.
The message was clear.
He would not ask anyone to take a risk he was not taking himself.
By September 12th, 1943, they were declared combat ready.
4 days later, they flew their first mission.
The Black Sheep operated from forward bases so close to Japanese positions that they were sometimes behind enemy lines.
Munda Vela Lavella air strips that changed hands or nearly did while American aircraft were still using them.
The CBS would rebuild runways under fire and Marines would launch from them before the concrete had fully set.
Their primary mission was escort duty, protecting bombers on strikes against Japanese shipping and shore installations.
But Buanton had learned from Chenalt that the best defense was to go looking for trouble.
He led fighter sweeps over Japanese airfields, challenging enemy pilots to come up and fight.
On October 17, 1943, he took 24 Corsaers over Cahili airfield on Boenville.
Below them sat 60 Japanese aircraft.
Buanton circled the field, essentially daring the Japanese to scramble.
When they did, the black sheep dove to meet them.
The squadron claimed 20 kills that day without losing a single pilot.
The mission became part of his Medal of Honor citation.
But the numbers only tell part of the story.
What mattered was the method, the calculated aggression, the willingness to accept risk in exchange for results, the transformation of a collection of misfits into a unit that fought as one.
In their first combat tour, the Black Sheep were credited with 57 confirmed kills and 19 probables.
They also suffered a casualty rate approaching 40%.
One pilot was shot down by friendly fire from Navy PT boats.
Others simply did not come back, their fates unknown until or unless wreckage was found months later.
This was not a television show.
This was not colorful misfits bonding over high jinks and beer.
This was industrialcale violence conducted at 300 mph where mistakes were measured in funerals and survival depended on skills most people would never develop and luck no one could control.
By December 1943, Boyington’s personal score had climbed to 25 confirmed kills, one short of the record shared by Eddie Rickenbacher from the First World War and Joe Foss from the early Pacific campaign.
The press had discovered him.
War correspondents loved the story, the old man, the drinking, the castoff squadron, the mounting kill count.
They called him papy because his pilots had started calling him gramps and that was not dramatic enough.
The attention complicated things.
Boyington was not performing for cameras.
He was trying to stay alive and keep his men alive while flying missions that would have seemed suicidal to anyone who had not grown accustomed to the mathematics of attrition.
But the legend was already forming, separate from the man, simpler and cleaner than any human being could be.
January 3rd, 1944.
The Black Sheep’s second combat tour was ending.
One more mission and they would rotate out for rest and replacement.
For Boington, it was also a chance to break the record.
One more kill would put him at 26 ahead of Rickenbacher and tied with Foss.
He should not have been flying.
He was exhausted.
His body carried the accumulated damage of months of combat, the minor injuries that never fully healed, the fatigue that sleep could not touch.
But the mission was a major sweep over Rabal.
48 American fighters against the most heavily defended air base in the Pacific and he would not let someone else lead it.
They launched from Tokina airfield on Boenville at 6:30 in the morning.
By the time they reached Rabal, some aircraft had turned back with mechanical problems.
The formation that remained encountered two large groups of Japanese zeros, probably from the 253rd and 204th Naval Air Groups, experienced pilots flying from their home field.
What happened next is pieced together from afteraction reports and the testimony of surviving pilots.
Boington claimed a zero in the initial engagement.
Other Americans confirmed seeing it go down.
That was 26.
Then in the chaos of the dog fight, his corsair was hit.
The circumstances remain unclear.
No one saw exactly what happened.
One moment he was there, the next he was gone, falling toward Rabal’s harbor in an aircraft that might or might not still be flying.
For 20 months, he was listed as missing in action, presumed dead.
The Japanese submarine I 181 pulled Gregory Boington from the water.
He was wounded.
Shrapnel in his groin, arms, and shoulders, a bullet in his calf, a laceration across his scalp, his left ear nearly severed.
Japanese fighters had strafed him while he floated in his life jacket, though none had connected.
He would spend the next 20 months in captivity.
First at Rabbal, then transported by bomber to truck atal, arriving in the middle of an American air raid, then to Saipan, Ewoima, and finally to Ouna, a secret interrogation camp near Tokyo, where the Japanese held high value prisoners and did not report their names to the Red Cross.
The conditions were brutal.
Beatings were routine.
Medical care was minimal.
His combat wounds were left largely untreated, healing badly or not at all.
He contracted malaria.
He lost nearly 70 lb.
The guards at Ouna were specialists in psychological torture as much as physical.
They kept prisoners isolated, uncertain, stripped of the military identity that had defined their lives.
Yet, Boyington survived.
Later, with the dark humor of a man who had faced death so often, it no longer surprised him.
He would note that his health had actually improved during captivity, at least in one respect.
Enforced sobriety, for the first time in years, had dried him out.
It was a bitter joke, but it was also true.
In April 1945, he was transferred to Omorei, a camp in Tokyo Bay where he would remain until the end of the war.
There, among the hundreds of other prisoners waiting for liberation or death, he met Lewis Zampirini, the Olympic runner whose own survival story would later become famous.
He met Richard O’Ne, the submarine commander who would receive the Medal of Honor for his own actions.
They were all men who had been written off, presumed dead, waiting in the dark for a war they could not influence to finally end.
What they talked about, what kept them sane through months of uncertainty we can only imagine.
Perhaps they told stories of their former lives.
Perhaps they planned futures they might never see.
Perhaps they simply endured one day at a time the way prisoners always have and always will.
Back home, the Marine Corps awarded Boyington the Medal of Honor in March 1944.
They also awarded him the Navy Cross.
Both were given in absentia, honors for a man they believed was already dead.
His mother accepted them on his behalf, not knowing if her son would ever come home to hold them.
Japan surrendered on August 15th, 1945.
Within days, American aircraft began supply drops to P camps across the country, photographing the compounds to identify survivors.
One reconnaissance flight returned with an image that became legend.
A sign painted on a barracks roof that read, “Pappy Boington here.” The Black Sheep had scattered after his disappearance.
The squadron disbanded just 5 days after his last mission.
its pilots reassigned to other units.
Now, suddenly, their leader was alive.
His last two kills from January 3rd were confirmed, bringing his official total to 28, the highest of any Marine ace in the war.
On August 29th, 1945, he walked out of Omarie camp.
On October 5th, President Harry Truman presented him with the Medal of Honor at a White House ceremony.
The award that had been given to a dead man, now received by a living one.
The reunion with surviving black sheep pilots was documented by Life magazine.
The photograph showed them drinking, celebrating, acting exactly like the legends the press had made them.
It was the first time life had ever put someone holding an alcoholic drink on its cover.
What followed the parades was not a triumphant second act.
Gregory Boyington had been fighting since before most Americans knew the war was coming.
He had survived Burma, the Solomons, Rabal, and 20 months of captivity.
But the skills that made him effective in combat, the aggression, the refusal to submit, the ability to function under pressure that would break most people did not translate to peace time.
He struggled with alcohol.
This was not a quirk or a colorful character trait.
It was a destructive force that had shaped his life before the war and would continue to shape it after.
The enforced sobriety of the P camps had, in a bitter irony, been the longest he had gone without drinking since he was a young man.
His military career ended in August 1947 when a medical board reviewed his physical condition, the accumulated damage from combat and captivity, and recommended retirement.
He was promoted to colonel and discharged.
In the civilian world, he held a succession of jobs.
Sales positions, marketing roles, work with companies that hoped his fame would help their bottom line.
A brewery hired him for a while.
A drunk selling beer, another bitter irony in a life full of them.
He refereed professional wrestling matches for extra money, traveling the California circuit and beyond, trading on a name that meant less each year.
He married and divorced multiple times, four marriages in total, leaving behind children who knew their father mainly through newspaper clippings and the stories other people told.
The financial problems that had plagued him before the war continued after it.
Debt had driven him to join the Flying Tigers in 1941.
Debt followed him through the decades that came after.
The Medal of Honor opened doors, but it did not keep them open.
Fame, he discovered, was not a career.
It was a diminishing resource that he spent a little more of each year.
In 1958, he published his autobiography, Baba Black Sheep.
The book was unflinching about his flaws, the drinking, the failed marriages, the inability to find solid ground in peace time.
It was also funny, profane, and impossible to put down.
Written in a voice that sounded exactly like a man who had survived things that would have killed most people and did not particularly care how he had done it.
The book became a bestseller.
Nearly two decades later, it inspired a television series that would introduce his story to a new generation.
Baba Black Sheep, later renamed Black Sheep Squadron, starred Robert Conrad as Boyington and ran from 1976 to 1978.
Boyington served as a consultant, though he barely recognized the sanitized, comedic version of his war that appeared on screen.
The real black sheep had not been lovable rogues.
They had been killers operating in a meat grinder.
But television was television, and the checks cashed.
And by then he had learned not to expect too much from how the world remembered anything.
The questions that historians would later debate exactly how many kills he earned with the Flying Tigers, whether some of his VMF214 claims were overcounted, why the Marine Corps both celebrated and struggled with him, miss the more important truth.
Gregory Boyington transformed a collection of rejected pilots into one of the most effective fighter squadrons in the Pacific War.
His men flew 84 days of combat, claimed 97 confirmed kills, received the presidential unit citation for extraordinary heroism.
Nine of them became aces.
The tactics he developed, the leadership he provided, the aggressive spirit he instilled, these were not diminished by his personal failings.
War does not produce saints.
It produces survivors.
And sometimes those survivors are complicated, contradictory people who do extraordinary things while carrying damage that no metal can repair.
He died on January 11th, 1988 in the 75th year of his life in a hospice in Fresno, California.
Cancer in the end, a quieter death than the war had offered him many times.
His final rest is at Arlington National Cemetery among the thousands of other men and women who served.
The F4U Corsair he flew, though he rarely flew the same one twice, taking whatever aircraft was available so his pilots would not be afraid of their own machines, lives on in museums and air shows, and the memories of those who saw them streak across Pacific skies.
The legend is simpler than the man ever was.
That is how legends work.
But the man was real.
The squadron was real.
The 97 kills and the 40% casualties and the 20 months in a cell that the world had forgotten.
All of it was real.
And when they told him he was too old to fly, too broken to lead, too difficult to trust with command, he proved them wrong over the airfields of Bogenville and the harbor of Rabbal in the only language war understands.
That’s the story of Gregory Papy Boyington and the Black Sheep Squadron.
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If your family has any connection to World War II, a grandparent who served, a relative who flew, a story that deserves to be told, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
These stories matter.
The people who lived them deserve to be remembered.
Until next time.
