You Are Not Forgotten

by Bryan Bender

  Everyone was accounted for as the Hell’s Angels headed for home with three kills. They landed at Torokina and quickly assembled in the ready room to recount the mission for the intelligence officer. The other squadrons had also seen their share of action on the fighter sweep. In all, seventy Zeros faced off against the forty-eight Corsairs, along with at least several enemy Tonys. Boyington’s Black Sheep Squadron also claimed several kills, but what they soon learned shocked them all: Boyington and his wingman, George Ashmun, had not returned from the mission. Boyington and Ashmun had last been seen dropping down to a few thousand feet above the water as Japanese fighters were coming up to meet them.

  There was no shortage of volunteers that afternoon to escort the Dumbos in their search for any sign of the Marines’ most famous fighter ace. By 1:35 p.m., Ryan was back in the air leading seven Hell’s Angels to escort one of the Dumbos to Rabaul in search of the lost pilots. Another volunteer to search for Pappy was Lieutenant Eugene “Vic” Smith of Ohio. The search for the downed pilots went on for hours. At one point Ryan’s division reported what appeared to be a pilot afloat in the channel, but rain squalls made visibility exceedingly poor. Finally, they had to give up, and it was almost dark by the time the full search party “pancaked” back on the Torokina airstrip.

  The loss of ole Pappy cast a pall over the pilots stationed at Torokina. The news that the rabble-rousing ace was missing sent shock waves throughout the Marine Corps. One of his fellow Corsair pilots remarked: “If the Japs had been able to get Gregory Boyington—the man, above all men, who knew what to expect from a Jap in a fight—then what was the chance for the rest of us, who were rank amateurs by comparison?”

  The Hell’s Angels’ first missions, as one among their ranks put it, “brought some reality and experience where guesses and dreams had been.” In their bunks at night back on Torokina, they breathlessly recounted spying the dreaded “meatballs”; the rapid hit-and-run tactics of aerial dogfights; the puffs of ack-ack fire; and the large bursts of white phosphorus from shells the Japanese pilots sometimes released in an effort to break up and confuse their formations. The pilots in the squadron recounted strafing Japanese barges in the surrounding waters or shooting up enemy airfields, Pappy Boyington–style, when they could get low enough. It was all certainly exhilarating. But they also now knew that the storybook life of a fighter pilot was just that—fiction. The real glory, as they quickly grew to appreciate during those first few days in combat, lay in “efficiency and a long life.”

  Though they had been in combat for only a week, the Hell’s Angels were already exacting a heavy price on the Japanese air forces stationed around Rabaul, slowly gaining a ruthless reputation on both sides. On January 9, Ryan and his wingman, Lieutenant Robert See of San Francisco, were circling over a group of eighteen U.S. Navy torpedo bombers high above Rabaul, on the lookout for enemy planes, when they spotted three Zeros below. Making several passes, Ryan and the younger See, who had drawn the squadron’s first enemy blood, riddled the Japanese planes with long bursts of their .50-caliber guns, leaving billowing black smoke in their wake.

  They also waged constant battle with nature and machine. On a bomber escort to Rabaul a few days later, Ryan had to circle for more than an hour on the outskirts of St. George’s Channel and link back up with the bombers upon their return because he discovered his cockpit was missing the CO2 bottles designed to “blow down” the landing gear if the hydraulic power was lost. Indeed, on numerous flights headed to Rabaul, pilots had to turn back to Torokina due to fuel leaks, engine trouble, or jammed guns. There was also the unpredictable weather. One minute there could be nearly infinite visibility, the next so many black clouds they blotted out the sun. On several occasions Ryan and his fellow Hell’s Angels were bedeviled by heavy tropical fronts that scattered them to outlying bases in the Solomons with barely enough fuel to land. They topped off their fuel tanks and hopped their way back to their crowded, muddy tents at Torokina.

  It wasn’t just the Japanese—and their planes—that took a beating those first few weeks in the war zone. The day after Ryan’s maiden combat mission, on January 4, another one of his fellow captains, Harvey Carter, was lost on a fighter sweep over Rabaul, becoming the squadron’s second casualty after Zombie Blount. Carter, who “wore a mustache and carried himself with the air of an Englishman,” had been commissioned in Saskatchewan, Canada, before joining the squadron in San Diego. He had a reputation as a skilled pilot who as a Navy flight instructor in New Orleans was known for flying loops around a bridge over the Mississippi River. He was last seen flying at about twenty-one thousand feet over the southern edge of Simpson Harbor after his division of four Corsairs was attacked by a dozen Zeros. A Dumbo rescue plane, escorted by sixteen Corsairs, failed to locate him, and he was reported missing in action.

  Then, a week later, Major Harold Jacobs, the squadron’s operations officer and one of the most experienced pilots, clipped another plane while coming in for a landing on Torokina, shearing off nearly the entire tail section of his Corsair. The rest of the aircraft hit the water just off the airstrip “at a terrific rate of speed, exploded, and submerged immediately.”

  Jacobs’s death marked the third Hell’s Angel to be lost in ten days and was a particularly fierce blow to morale. Jacobs was the only one of the three they knew for sure was killed; the fate of the others no one could say with any certainty, though the men were becoming all too familiar with the grim possibilities.

  The loss of their comrades and the constant danger they faced drew Ryan and his fellow pilots into an ever-tighter circle. They needed one another more each day—up in the skies, certainly, to fend off the enemy, but also back on the ground in their bunks as they waged an internal struggle, mostly using the weapons of humor and tall tales of girls back home, to keep at bay the ever-present fear of a violent death. Their fates were weaving together like the innumerable strands of rope that ultimately become one thick and strong cord. Their skipper, Major Overend, tried to put it into words at the time in a letter to the grieving mother of one of his lost pilots.

  “It is impossible to explain to one who does not fly how closely we live and comfort each other,” he wrote. “All of us live very close to death and accept it because we are doing a job we love to do and at the same time we know and can see that we are making great progress toward the day when those we love at home can live in peace and security again.”

  Overend decided to hold a short memorial service for Jacobs, gathering the squadron on the beach just off the airstrip to say a few prayers. It was a rare instance of collective reflection, and he didn’t let it last too long. The skipper didn’t need his men thinking too much about their own mortality.

  By the middle of January the Hell’s Angels had been in combat two weeks, and Ryan was flying combat missions to Rabaul every other day. On January 13, it was another bomber escort, but the fighter formation failed to rendezvous with the bombers and was forced to turn back. The next day, January 14, was a Friday—and Ryan’s twenty-seventh birthday. He marked the milestone at the Torokina camp with the other pilots who also had the day off, including the three pilots he was regularly flying with in his four-plane division.

  There was his wingman, the young Californian Bob See, who could now boast several downed Japanese planes; Roger Brindos, the dark-haired card shark with movie-star good looks from Minnesota whom just about everyone now owed money; and Brindos’s wingman, the quiet and unassuming Bob Marshall from Amite, Louisiana, the small town whose name meant both “friendship” and “young.”

  The twenty-one-year-old See, a lanky kid with a cat-ate-the-canary grin, had graduated in 1939 from Balboa High School in San Francisco’s working-class Mission Terrace district. An only child, he was already proving to be one of the best pilots in the squadron and well on his way to becoming an ace.

  Brindos, whose parents owned a hotel on London Road in Duluth overlooking Lake Superior, had quit Duluth Junior College and enlisted in the Navy a fe
w months after Pearl Harbor. Brindos was the only one of the four who was married. Waiting back in Minnesota was his new bride, Patricia, who had been among the wives who piled into a red convertible for the cross-country journey to bid them all farewell in San Diego at the end of September.

  But Ryan had a special rapport with the red-haired Marshall, even though Ryan was five years older. Like Ryan, Marshall studied engineering—at Louisiana State University—and had been captivated by airplanes ever since he was a kid. He also loved Edgar Allan Poe, naming his Corsair “The Raven” after one his poems. Ryan and Marshall also shared an affinity for motorcycles.

  Ryan spent much of his birthday tarrying in his tent and taking it easy. He huddled with some of the other pilots for their now almost daily ritual of tuning in to Tokyo Rose, the English-speaking Japanese propaganda broadcaster who constantly harassed the Allies, vowing that MacArthur would be captured in a month. They were eager to hear any news about their lost comrades who might have been captured.

  In the afternoon Ryan and the others reported for the daily intelligence briefing near the airstrip to learn about the next day’s assignment. They were informed they would once again be flying cover for Army Air Corps bombers attacking one of the Japanese airfields near Rabaul. Ryan opened his mission folder to analyze the maps and flight charts that would guide them.

  One location, as its code name, Sordid, suggested, filled him with almost as much contempt as Rabaul. The volcanic island of Buka sat directly to the northwest of the larger Bougainville, across a narrow strait less than a mile wide. He had been able to see it from the right side of his cockpit on his first mission to Rabaul a dozen days earlier. The island, about thirty miles long and eleven miles wide, straddled the northwesterly flight path across the Solomon Sea from Torokina to Rabaul. On both sides of the Buka Passage were concentrations of Japanese troops, along with two airfields and a seaplane base. Buka was also home to native tribes that supported the Japanese—and helped them hunt for downed airmen in the nearby waters and jungles.

  Just before noon the next day, January 15, Ryan strapped into the “birdcage” of his assigned plane, a battle-worn Corsair stamped with the tail number 17448. After proceeding through the preflight checklist, he reached underneath his seat to inventory his survival gear—life raft, signal flares, emergency rations—and then set out once again across the expanse of the Solomon Sea. But yet again, after little more than an hour in the air, the mission was called back—this time due to a heavy weather system cloaking the northern tip of New Britain and the airfields around Rabaul. Frustrated at being denied another chance to do his part, he was eager to press the fight. As the leader of the four-plane division, Ryan took the initiative on the return journey to Torokina and decided to do a low-level reconnaissance of one of the enemy-held airdromes on Buka. He hoped to use the element of surprise to detect any Japanese supply vessels in the area or ground installations that could be attacked. Along with his wingman, Lieutenant See, he descended toward the western entrance to the Buka Passage and soon spotted activity on one of the airfields. See took the lead and made the first pass, unloading his cannons and shooting up the airfield and surrounding structures. Ryan, trailing close behind, unleashed a second round of strafing fire just as a symphony of tracers began to light up the sky. Within seconds, sheets of withering anti-aircraft rounds were exploding all around him. Engulfed by the deafening sound of the shells detonating outside the cockpit, Ryan tightened his grip on the controls, shifted his feet on the rudder pedals, and pulled up in an arc to dodge the incoming fire and get out of the range of the Japanese gun emplacements. Almost immediately he noticed something was wrong. There was a series of abnormal hissing and popping sounds. Ryan examined his cockpit gauges, but they told him what he already sensed. The aircraft had taken fire, and he was in serious trouble. Ryan’s heart pounded as he fought to maintain control. He struggled to fly the plane as far away from the Japanese base as possible. The Torokina strip, he guessed, was at least fifty miles away, and as the seconds ticked by, it became more and more apparent that the plane was too badly damaged to make it back. There was little time to think. In virtually every direction were concentrations of Japanese troops—on Buka and across the narrow passage on Bougainville. Enemy patrol boats were also probably plying the surrounding straits. The brilliant green jungles and crystal blue waters of the Solomon Sea below—the scenery Ryan had thought so beautiful and so forbidding—were growing larger and larger through the Plexiglas of the cockpit as the riddled plane steadily lost altitude. Ryan was going down fast.

  Ryan was trained to slide the canopy open with the yellow lever to his right before ditching in the sea, but when his plane violently splashed into the water, he barely had time to unhook his harness and scramble out before going down with it. All he had with him was what he was wearing, including the Mae West life vest wrapped around his neck and an automatic pistol strapped to his body. The rubber life raft and survival packet beneath the pilot seat were dislodged in the jolting water landing, and there simply wasn’t time to locate them. Before Ryan fully realized what it meant, the aircraft disappeared beneath the waves.

  Although his plane had been badly damaged from taking anti-aircraft fire, Ryan had managed to keep it level and fly southwest of the opening to the Buka Passage, reaching the open sea before going down. He ditched in an area dotted with coral reefs. Some of them, nearly a mile wide, lay just beneath the surface, especially at low tide, and were visible from the air. After slipping into the clear blue water, Ryan located one of the reefs and was relieved to discover that if he stood on his tiptoes with his chin up, he could keep his mouth above the waves. It was now about 2:30 in the afternoon, and the scorching sun beat down on his head. He struggled to keep his wits as his mind sought to grasp what had happened and his survival instincts began to kick in. Without a rubber raft, he had little choice but to wait on the coral outcropping in the hopes that a Dumbo had been dispatched to search for him. He saw in the distance that he was still awfully close to the passage flowing between the islands of Buka and Bougainville. The area was crawling with Japanese and hostile natives. Swimming ashore was out of the question. But in his adrenaline-infused state of mind, Ryan also started to think through what he might do if the rescue plane couldn’t locate him. There was no way of knowing if his wingman had seen where he went down. It had been pretty hairy back there, and Bob See might not have made it. As he tried to keep calm, Ryan’s racing mind was interrupted by distinct ripples in the water just a few yards away. In an instant, blind curiosity turned to a nearly paralyzing fear when he realized what it was: a shark.

  The shark circled, inching closer with each pass. It didn’t appear to be very large. But it also didn’t seem to be afraid of the strange and bigger creature that had violently arrived in its placid undersea domain, with the sound of crashing metal and screeching cables and gallons of leaking fuel and hydraulic fluid. Ryan whirled around trying to keep watch on it and suddenly felt the shark nudge him from behind, knocking him off the reef. He kicked and scrambled to regain his footing, scanning frantically in the water around him. The shark did it again, once more poking his nose into Ryan’s behind. The chilling little game continued for several more rounds—until Ryan’s very unwelcome visitor apparently tired of it and swam off.

  As the minutes slowly ticked by, Ryan tried to calculate his chances of being rescued. Nightfall was approaching, and once the sun set, any rescue effort—if there even was one—would be called off. He didn’t think he could last very long stranded and exposed in shark-infested waters. If he did make it through the night, he might be spotted, but more likely by the dreaded Japanese. He recalled from his flight charts that there were small, mostly deserted islands near the entrance to Buka Passage and off the northwest coast of Bougainville—in the direction of Torokina. He wasn’t sure how far, but he had to try. Ryan made a fateful decision. He started swimming.

  One of the islands, it turned out, was about six miles from w
here he ditched—and he almost made it. Ryan swam for more than four hours, taking brief rests with the aid of his Mae West. But by 7:00 p.m., exhausted, suffering from shock and exposure—and with daylight fading—Ryan was still two miles away. He was also forty-seven miles to the northwest of Cape Torokina. It didn’t look like he was going to make it. But in a stroke of good fortune, he was spotted by a Navy PT boat plying the Bougainville coast for a nighttime patrol in search of Japanese vessels.

  After being picked up by the PT crew, Ryan was returned to the squadron the next morning. His aircraft, of course, was designated a total loss. Under pilot injuries, the single-page report said simply, “Safe.” Ryan was checked out by the docs and then “insisted that he resume his place in the squadron and not lose a day’s flying time,” his skipper reported. Ryan’s only complaint, apparently, was that his toes were sore—from straining to keep his head above water on the reef.

  When he finally got back to his bunk, he recounted his little adventure for his fellow pilots, who were thrilled to see him safe and sound, and eager to hear every detail. They especially relished his retelling of the encounter with the shark. Ryan later lay awake on his cot reflecting silently about what he had been through. He gained a new appreciation for how in the final analysis it was cold and merciless mathematical odds—not flight experience, but luck—that governed their fates. He had been given another chance this time, and he knew what he must do with it. Ryan took out some blank sheets of writing paper. He neatly printed the date on the top right of one of them, “Jan 16, 1943”—he apparently had yet to overcome the habit, which for many usually takes several weeks to break after New Year’s, of writing the calendar year that just came to a close instead of the new one.