The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (68 page)

The general, who “looked younger” than Lindbergh had expected, was riveted to learn about the notion of lengthening the fighter’s range. Lindbergh explained that with adjustments in fuel mixture and manifold pressure the P-38 consumed only fifty gallons of gasoline per hour at cruising speed instead of its usual eighty. This would give the fighter more air time, which would stretch its effective radius three hundred additional miles. It was a stunning revelation.

When Lindbergh told MacArthur that, without any modifications whatever, his fighter planes were capable of an 800-mile radius, the commanding general was astounded. Such a thing would be “a gift from heaven,” MacArthur exclaimed, and highly important to his battle plans. As Colonel MacDonald explained it later, “It meant the bombers could hit targets three hundred miles farther out [than was previously possible] and still have their ‘little friends’ along. This was the greatest advantage. Lindbergh had, in effect, redesigned an airplane.”

When the general asked if Lindbergh would return and instruct all the fighting groups in his fuel-saving techniques, Lindbergh replied, “There was nothing [I] would rather do,” suggesting that he would go back and begin at once.

At last it was settled; Lindbergh was a welcome addition to the South Pacific theater of war. “He [MacArthur] said I could have any kind of plane I wanted, and do any kind of flying I wanted to,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal. Then, to Lindbergh’s astonishment, MacArthur took him into his confidence and revealed in detail his entire present and future battle plans, on the maps, against the empire of Japan. In retrospect it seems like a dangerous thing to have done, since Lindbergh, technically a civilian, could have been captured and, if not immediately shot or beheaded, somehow forced to reveal the information. But MacArthur was a world unto himself.

After his meeting with MacArthur, Lindbergh went out shopping in Brisbane, marveling that “no one recognizes me here.” He bought a spool of thread, a shaving stick, and shoe polish and visited a zoological park where he saw kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas. Next morning he was airborne for the fighting front in his own personal P-38, courtesy of General Douglas MacArthur.

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with small islands and the Japanese had crawled all over them like an army of ants, building small airstrips, turning them into stationary, unsinkable aircraft carriers from which to interdict Allied shipping. Many of these would have to be cleared out before MacArthur could make the big move north to fulfill his famous promise to the Philippines—“I shall return.” Thus, fighter command had moved on northward to the small speck of Owi Island, next to the much larger Biak Island, eighty miles off the northern coast of New Guinea, where heavy fighting was still in progress.

From Owi, Lindbergh began his lessons instructing the various fighter squadrons of the South West Pacific in fuel conservation techniques. He continued to fly on combat missions with Colonel MacDonald and the 475th. In the evenings, he would sometimes walk to the top of a coral cliff that was a stone’s throw from the tent serving as officers’ quarters and watch the fighting on nearby Biak. After two months of steady slaughter, the Japanese abandoned the tactic of the banzai charge, which they discovered used up all the men too quickly, and were engaged in a shot-for-shot slugging match with American soldiers.

It turned out to be one of the worst battles of the war. The Japanese had an army of more than eleven thousand on Biak when the United States invaded on May 27, 1944, with approximately thirteen thousand men from the Forty-first Infantry Division. By the end of July the Japanese had been pressed back from their airfield into a long, sharp coral ridge honeycombed with interlocking caves that were perfect for defense. Thus far they had thrown back all of the U.S. infantry attacks and were holding out with about five hundred ragged soldiers, all that remained of the original force.

From his vantage point on Owi, Lindbergh could clearly see the brownish coral ridge where the Japanese were dug in, rising out of the green jungle on Biak Island, and hear the distant boom and crash of artillery and see flashes of explosions. One day from his cliff Lindbergh watched the final assault on the Japanese caves. It was preceded by a tremendous air strike of thousand-pound bombs from eight B-24s, flying low, as there was no antiaircraft fire. Lindbergh could actually see the bombs being released, causing tremendous explosions. Then the artillery began its bombardment in preparation for the infantry attack.

The attack, however, proved unnecessary; the infantry had moved in and occupied the area barely firing a shot. They found Japanese and parts of Japanese, and the ones still alive were too dazed from the bombs to do anything but lie or sit placidly on the ground. Two days later Lindbergh and several other officers went over to the Japanese airfield on Biak, which had become the new base of operations for the 475th Fighter Group, and drove a jeep to the site of the Japanese caves.

They came first to a pass clogged with dead Japanese soldiers and marines, “sprawled about in the gruesome positions only mangled bodies can take,” Lindbergh said. Some were merely fragments of bodies and severed heads and limbs. There were unmistakable signs that the American infantry had been prospecting for gold teeth. All over the ridgeline it was the same, torn and battered human bodies, some single, many heaped in piles. They came across a deep pit crammed with dead bodies and, to Lindbergh’s horror, topped off with garbage from the American soldiers’ encampment, an indignity he found utterly repugnant.

They located an entrance to the caves and descended into the pit on a rickety thirty-foot Japanese ladder. Using his Abercrombie & Fitch flashlight, Lindbergh threw a beam on the dripping walls and the floor, littered with ammunition, food crates, rifles and machine guns, and souring bags of rice; in each of the caves’ many offshoots and tunnels lay dead and stinking bodies and, in some of them, charred bones and skulls where the flamethrowers had done their grisly work. At the entrance to one cave was the headless body of a Japanese soldier in an upright position, roped to a pole, it was said, by his comrades for trying to surrender to the Americans. It was as gruesome a tableau as could be taken in on a single afternoon, and when they could stand it no longer Lindbergh and his companions drove away in their jeep to a nearby spring—close enough that it had probably been used by the Japanese in the caves, he said—where they stripped down and tried to wash away the stench and the recollection of the horrors they had seen.

In the morning the 475th, with Lindbergh leading a section, flew cover for a wave of four B-25s in a strike on the Japanese base at Halmahera Island, about five hundred miles farther northwest. Some of the squadron ran into enemy airplanes and shot several of them down. McGuire’s kill temporarily made him the theater’s leading ace. As an added attraction they had to fly over an erupting volcano that filled their cockpits with sulphurous fumes and in places visibility dropped to zero because of the volcanic ash.

Friday, July 28, seemed to shape up as another routine day. After breakfast, Lindbergh and the other pilots arrived at the airstrip on Biak at dawn and took off shortly afterward; their destination: Japanese airstrips on the large island of Ceram in the Moluccas, reported to have strong fighter forces.

A storm nearly forced the group commander to call off the mission. They had climbed to 18,000 feet but still could not top it out. They nevertheless pressed on, a flight of eighteen twin-engine P-38s. As they approached the Japanese airstrips the weather cleared, but when they dropped down to 10,000 feet no enemy planes could be seen on the runways. The Japanese were very good at hiding planes or flying them away if necessary when American fighters appeared.

They continued on to secondary targets but nothing seemed worth shooting at. They then turned east to return toward Biak when suddenly the radios came alive with the sounds of a dogfight.

“There he is now. Go in and get him!”

“Can’t somebody shoot him down?”

“Goddamn, I’m out of ammunition!”

Neither Lindbergh nor any others of the 475th were able to see the action and Colonel MacDonald radioed asking the location of the fight. Two Mitsubishi Sonias, two-man fighter reconnaissance planes, it seemed, were returning from an air rescue mission for one of their downed pilots when they came to the attention of American pilots of the 49th Fighter Group (code word “Captive” squadron), who were flying above, and a melee ensued. One of the Mitsubishis was piloted by the veteran pilot Captain Saburo Shimada, and the other by the highly experienced Sergeant Saneyoshi Yokogi. For all of their vaunted prowess, the American aviators were finding themselves outflown by the skillful Japanese fliers.
¹⁴

“The son of a bitch is making monkeys out of us!” blared the radio.

“I’m out of ammunition, too.”
¹⁵

Two of the 49th’s pilots at last engaged one of the Mitsubishis and a lengthy burst from behind put Sergeant Yokogi on a long, smoking death glide into the sea. That left Captain Shimada, who for nearly thirty minutes had successfully fought off the entire Captive Squadron, had run several of them out of ammunition, and during this aerial dogfight had drawn them back toward the Japanese base and its antiaircraft guns at Amahi aerodrome.

Meanwhile, MacDonald’s group was “frantically searching for the fight.” As they banked around a great pulsing thunderhead immediately ahead they saw the puffs of flak and smoke of 20 millimeter cannon fire that revealed the aerial battle. MacDonald led the dive, releasing his drop tanks and firing a short burst that spattered the Zero but did not seem to hurt it. Shimada was trapped, and knew it, but he decided to fight it out anyway. He jerked his plane left in a violent banking dive that caught MacDonald’s fliers off guard. Two of the 475th thought they had him dead to rights, but just as they were about to press the triggers, by ferocious maneuvering Shimada masterfully vanished from their gun sights. Then along came Lindbergh.

The Japanese plane was just coming out of its wrenching turn, its mottled green camouflage contrasting with the bright red Rising Sun insignia, when Shimada came face-to-face with the Lone Eagle, flying at him head-on at a combined speed of 500 miles per hour. Colonel MacDonald could only watch as the wing edges of the Zero lit up “like so many acetylene torches” as Shimada fired at Lindbergh. Lindbergh himself “instinctively sighted on the Mitsubishi’s radial engine and pressed the buttons.” His P-38 shuddered at the recoil for at least six seconds as the two planes closed in on a no-win collision course. Bits of Shimada’s propeller flew off, he was hit badly, but he appeared determined to simply slam his plane into Lindbergh’s.

At almost the last possible moment Lindbergh yanked up on the stick with all his might. Shimada also pulled up, “trying for a crash,” but Lindbergh averted him by a matter of feet—maybe even inches. He was close enough to be shuddered by the air shock as he shot past the Zero, which, as had its erstwhile companion, rolled into a long, smoking death spiral and splattered into the ocean below.

Lindbergh’s wingman Lieutenant Joseph E. “Fishkiller” Miller (so named for erroneously dropping bombs into the ocean, causing thousands of stunned fish to surface) had also taken a run at the stricken Japanese plane but, as he declared afterward, “I was there. The old man got a Sonia fair and square … I blew some pieces off the wing, but it was Mr. Lindbergh’s victory.” Congratulations were in order when Lindbergh and the 475th returned to base.

A few days later Lindbergh almost flew his final mission when the 475th, using his fuel economy measures, ventured all the way north to the Palau Islands, looking for a fight. They found one that quickly turned into a melee, leaving Lindbergh with a Zero on his tail, a situation “that could not have been worse,” according to Colonel MacDonald. The Japanese plane was faster and appeared larger and larger in Lindbergh’s rearview mirror, as he hunched low in his seat, trying to squeeze all of himself behind the armor plating in back of it, waiting for the bullets to slam home. Colonel MacDonald watched in horror as the Zero’s tracers flickered out, embracing Lindbergh’s P-38, and yelled out, “Break right! Break right!” Lindbergh responded by putting his plane in a ferociously tight right turn that brought the dogfight directly in the line of sight of MacDonald’s section, which saved the Lone Eagle’s bacon by shooting the Zero to pieces.

Word of Lindbergh’s close encounter spread. When they returned Colonel MacDonald was summoned to higher headquarters where he was reprimanded and grounded for two months. Everyone assumed it was because he had allowed the Lone Eagle to get in harm’s way, but that wasn’t it. It seems that bomber command had been requesting fighter cover over Palau from the 475th (a mission that the fighter pilots loathed as boring), and MacDonald had been turning them down on grounds that the distance was too great. Now they had flagrantly disproved their own argument by flying all the way up there and back—using Lindbergh’s fuel-saving techniques—to engage in dogfights. General Kenney, however, modified MacDonald’s punishment by granting him the same two months as leave to go back to the States to his wife and newborn son, whom the colonel had never seen.

For Lindbergh, there were dogfights yet to come, some ending in tragedy but most with the Americans wildly victorious. He had become especially fast friends with twenty-three-year-old Tommy McGuire (the two were also roommates) who would remain the second leading Pacific war ace. Five months later McGuire was killed during a dogfight over the Philippines, but he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for distinguished valor in his flying career.

In early August 1944, Lindbergh concluded his tour of the Second World War in the Pacific with fifty combat missions to his credit, a Zero kill, and enough information to draw informed conclusions about the contrast between single-engine versus twin-engine fighter planes. In the process he had immeasurably helped MacArthur’s slow crawl northward from New Guinea to the Philippines by giving his fighters—and thus his bombers—some three hundred more miles of range in a watery wasteland where three hundred miles could be an eternity.