Race of Aces

2

The Buck Rogers Diving Death Ride

May 7, 1942

Hamilton Field, California

Parked on the ramp at Hamilton Field stood a long row of twenty-five brand-new fighters. The world had never seen anything like these sci-fi wonders resting on tricycle landing gears, slightly raked so their tails drooped. It gave the impression that they were preparing to spring into the air. From the side, they looked pencil-thin and made every other American fighter appear positively bloated. Paradoxically, the narrow profile did not mean small aircraft. In fact, the new fighters dwarfed their more conventional stablemates.

While most every fighter design in the world possessed a single fuselage that encompassed engine, cockpit, and tail, the new fighter didn’t have a fuselage at all. Instead, the pilot sat in a cockpit gondola fared directly into the wing, a twelve-cylinder Allison engine on either side of him. Connecting the wing to the tail at the engine nacelles were two long booms, through each of which stretched a top-secret turbo supercharger that gave the fighter remarkable high-altitude performance. Where its stablemates would be limping along just above a stall at twenty-five thousand feet, the new fighter thrived.

This was the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, the most radical fighter plane yet produced by the American aircraft industry. At a time when most American designs lagged behind their European counterparts, the USAAF believed the P-38 would be the great leap forward needed to help win the war. The Lockheed was fast. Straight and level, it could just touch four hundred miles an hour, thanks to the twenty-five hundred horses its engines produced. It possessed good range and could climb at over four thousand feet a minute, making it perfect for intercepting high-altitude bombers.

Though it weighed fourteen thousand pounds and could not outmaneuver single-engine fighters, it possessed heavy firepower with four heavy machine guns and one rapid-fire cannon. It could spew four thousand bullets a minute, with every sixth one an explosive cannon shell. Lockheed packed the guns in the nose, giving the P-38 a cone of concentrated death unlike any other American aircraft.

The three-bladed propellers were driven by purpose-built left and right engines. The left ones rotated left, the right ones rotated right. This was an innovation Lockheed used to ensure the P-38 would be stable and easy to fly, free from strange stall/spin quirks that bedeviled other USAAF fighters.

At the moment, the new Lightnings were especially needed in the Pacific to help stem the Japanese tide of advance. The latest news reports spoke of surrender in the Philippines and a chaotic naval battle in the Coral Sea. The Japanese seemed dominant everywhere, thrashing the Army Air Force at every point of contact. Now, Australia itself seemed threatened with invasion.

The situation in the Pacific was grim. Californians lived in fear that they would soon face Japanese bombs and amphibious armadas offshore. So far, nothing had stopped the enemy. The P-38 became the great hope that finally, American pilots would take to the skies in a plane superior to anything the Japanese possessed.

Needless to say, there was a tremendous sense of urgency to get the Lightning squadrons and their pilots ready for battle.

The P-38 cost a mint—over a hundred thousand dollars—1.7 million in today’s dollars. For the price of one P-38, the federal government could buy three P-40 Warhawks. But this was war, and price tag didn’t matter. Winning did. The Lightning was the Ferrari of the fighter world. Expensive, technically complex, and very, very hot. By early May 1942, the USAAF had taken delivery of about three hundred P-38s, with perhaps a thousand pilots training on them.

Dick Bong joined that elite cadre of aviators at Hamilton Field, where the 49th Fighter Squadron recently had traded in its P-40 Warhawks for the first combat-ready model of the P-38. The AAF tasked the 49th with two roles: protect San Francisco and produce P-38 pilots. Now, waves of freshly minted flyboys blew into Hamilton Field, straight from advanced training schools, eager to master the new machine.

This looked great on paper, but there was a problem with the P-38 program. The new planes kept killing these new pilots. In April, there were twenty fatal P-38 crashes in California and Washington. Forty more would crash in May. Another thirty in June.

At the air base protecting Seattle, a Lightning pilot lost control on takeoff and careened into the mess hall, killing two enlisted men. Another plunged straight into a home in downtown Olympia, killing both the pilot and a housewife. One fell out of the sky to explode inside a hospital.

Being a P-38 pilot in May 1942 meant having a very short shelf life. Most, like Dick Bong, had no experience with twin-engine aircraft. Though the plane was stable and easy to fly, the cockpit was complex and poorly laid out. Lockheed’s engineers placed the fuel system’s controls on the cockpit floor to the left of the pilot’s seat. They were hard to reach, and the system was so intricate that it required a virtual master’s degree to understand. Flip the wrong switch in flight, and the engines could be trying to drink from an empty tank. Take the wrong steps when an engine went out on takeoff or landing, and the pilot was almost sure to die. Dive too steeply, and the P-38’s controls locked up in what was later called “compressibility.” The nose would tuck under itself, steepening the dive and making it ever harder for the pilot not to end up in a smoking crater. An experienced test pilot was killed that way during the run-up to production. Despite warnings, a lot of young pilots fresh from their cadet classes plunged straight to their deaths.

To make things even more confusing, Lockheed changed the cockpit layout from model to model. In one variant, the placement of the microphone toggle button was moved. Lockheed swapped it with the cannon’s trigger. Unwary pilots would sometimes hit that button, launching a burst of high-explosive shells when they intended to simply talk to a flight mate.

There was no two-seat trainer version of the P-38 either. Dick would be on his own the minute he climbed into the ’38’s cockpit. To prepare him and the other new guys, the 49th put them through a quick ground school, familiarizing them with controls, instruments, and systems.¹

Dick’s P-38 education began on May 7 when Lt. Harold Lewis gathered all the squadron’s greenhorns to teach them the basics of being a Lightning jock. He was the squadron’s designated training officer, even though he himself had been flying for less than two years. In 1942, the blind led the blind.

Lewis and Dick Bong had similar life stories. Both grew up in small towns—Lewis was a native of Marseilles, Illinois, and went to Northern Illinois Teachers College, getting a math degree before joining the service. Dick attended Superior State Teachers College before dropping out to join the Air Corps. Both were science minded and devoted to aviation.

That day, as Lewis opened the knowledge fire hose on the new guys, Lt. Jim Butler took one of the squadron’s P-38s up for a flight. As he sped down the runway, one engine began to sputter. He limped aloft, but the engine quit and he crashed about a mile from the north end of the field. Miraculously, he survived.

Lewis and the rest of the members of the 49th learned to handle such situations with this dictum: power meant survival. Lose an engine? Push the other one to maximum throttle immediately. It was the only hope of surviving when a fan failed on takeoff.

Except it wasn’t. This was the Air Force standard response to a P-38 engine failure, and it produced nothing but casualties. Firewall the throttle with a fan out, and the P-38 would yaw toward the dead engine and start to roll. The more power applied, the faster this would happen and the quicker the pilot lost control and rolled, inverted, into the ground. Lewis didn’t have the experience to know any better; he was just as much a victim as everyone else struggling to learn this new and complicated aircraft.

Thus, he—a man who had survived the ultimate teachable moment in his crash—taught Dick and the other greenhorns the exact wrong way to survive an engine failure.

It would be months before the AAF bureaucracy unscrewed this one. The proper way to handle such an emergency was for the pilot to throttle back the remaining engine, feather the other one’s props, maintain control, then slowly apply power, compensating for the yaw and roll along the way with the yoke and rudders.

Through the next week, word of other crashes in the 49th’s sister squadrons filtered to Hamilton. Lots of pilots were losing engines either on takeoff or landing. Depressingly few survived. The new design came with another inherent flaw in such situations. Even if the pilots had the time and altitude to bail out, the only way to do it was to slide off the wing and fall between the booms. Rumors abounded that those who did get out were cut in half by the horizontal stabilizer. Since bailing out was not a great option, many P-38 pilots tried to ride their planes into the ground, hoping to regain control long enough to survive a crash landing.

The reason behind the engine failures remained unsolved for months. For the pilots sentenced to fly the Lightning, every takeoff and landing must have been a gut check moment. They went aloft not knowing when the dice would roll snake eyes and their turn would come. That uncertainty weighed on all of them. Yet it didn’t seem to diminish Dick’s enthusiasm to try the new beast out. For a small-town farm kid whose early life experience hardened him to death, the chance of getting to be one of the first pilots of America’s most advanced plane—and seemingly its most dangerous—put him in a thrilling spot right at bleeding edge. So he studied, learned what he could on the ground, and tried hard not to dwell on the deaths of those around him.

Richard Ira Bong’s turn to roll the dice arrived on the morning of May 13. Lucky thirteen. He arrived at the flight line, ducked under the boom of his assigned P-38, and climbed the ladder the ground crew placed at the trailing edge of the wing. He stepped onto the seat, then slid down into it as the plane’s crew chief knelt beside him on the wing to help strap him in and close the canopy hatch. He ran through the checklist given to him, fired up the engines, and headed out to the runway.

Now for the gut-check moment. Dick steered the Lightning out onto the runway and opened the throttles. No turning back now. The engines purred. For a huge aircraft, the P-38 proved to be surprisingly quiet. The engines sounded buttery and subdued. The superchargers and their ductwork acted as mufflers, giving the P-38 one of the most distinctive audio signatures of World War II.

Dick held his breath for a moment, focusing on the takeoff checklist. He knew the scale of the power and danger he held at his fingertips. He intended to master it.

He swung onto the runway and opened the throttles. The engines held. As he passed a hundred miles an hour, he felt the P-38 wanting to get airborne. A little more speed. Plenty of runway ahead. The ’38’s nose rotated just a bit and Dick eased back on the control wheel. The Lightning left the runway and streaked over the bay. This moment changed Dick Bong’s life. The aircraft made sense to him. It was an unlikely but perfect match between his ordered mind and a dangerously complex aircraft.

He stayed close to Hamilton that day, making touch-and-go landings and getting the feel of the aircraft. The Bay Area was filled with air traffic, air lanes, no-fly zones, and specified areas for Navy and Army trainers. The map he’d been given of the Bay Area was overlaid with color-coded squares and triangles denoting each aerial training range or off-limits zone. It was confusing at first glance, but each pilot needed to thoroughly understand it, as it was dangerous to wander into certain areas where the antiaircraft gunners might actually open fire on passing planes.² He respected that and stayed in his lane, swooping up and down over Hamilton, tires kissing the runway before flitting off into the air again, engines wide open. In those moments, gear retracted, climbing so fast it felt like the world’s most epic elevator ride, Dick felt pure elation.

He loved every minute of it, and when the day finally ended, he returned to the Bachelor Officers Quarters uncharacteristically exhilarated. He was born to fly the P-38, as if he had Lockheed coded into his DNA.

He flew almost every day afterward, sometimes several flights. As he gained hours, he made huge leaps forward with what he could do with the aircraft. Of course, it was not enough just to get competent flying the aircraft and landing it. These were weapons of war, and the men of the 49th Fighter Squadron had only a few weeks to learn how to fight with the P-38 as well.

The fact was, the 49th did not have time to learn to do both. Nobody knew how best to employ the P-38, the tactics to use, or even the role it would play once deployed overseas. Instead of working through those questions, the pilots took turns dogfighting each other. In those mock battles, to everyone’s surprise, Dick Bong shined.

His fellow pilots found him almost invisible on the ground. Like he was in San Francisco, Dick seemed more an observer than a participant. Never aloof or haughty, he just didn’t participate much. When he did join a conversation, the guys discovered Bong possessed a good sense of humor and could be self-effacing. They liked him, but nobody really felt they got to know him. If pressed, they would have judged him to be the furthest from the “fighter-jock” persona in the squadron—the antithesis of the ego-driven, aggressive, and arrogant type A character whose swagger on the ground matched his skills in the air. Bong had no swagger.

Yet, that farm-boy persona vanished in the cockpit. The straight arrow became the wild man: unpredictable, intuitive, liberated. Bong retracted the landing gear and some switch inside him flipped. No longer the introvert, he became ferociously aggressive, pushing his Lightning just a little further out to the edge of its envelope than others dared to do. The metamorphosis stunned his flight mates, who figured they’d make easy meat of the shy kid. Instead, he feasted on them.