The American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews The Museum of Flight Seattle, Washington

Leonard K. Davis

Interviewed by: Eugene A. Valencia

Interview Date: January 8, 1966

2

Abstract:

Fighter ace Leonard K. “Duke” Davis is interviewed by Eugene A. Valencia about his military service with the United States Marine Corps during World War II. Davis describes his wartime experiences as a fighter pilot and his time with Marine Fighting Squadron 121 (VMF-121) in the Pacific Theater. Topics discussed include Davis’s combat missions, military life and conditions in Guadalcanal, and anecdotes about fellow pilots and other personnel.

Biography:

Leonard K. “Duke” Davis was born June 16, 1913 in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1935 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. After the United States entered World War II, Davis was assigned to Marine Fighting Squadron 121 (VMF-121) and deployed to Guadalcanal. He was wounded in action in November 1942, and after his recovery, he joined Marine Fighting Squadron 111 (VMF-111). Davis remained in the military after the war, serving in command posts with the 1st Marine Air Wing in China and at Naval Air Station Glenview in Illinois. He retired as a colonel and passed away in 1971.

Biographical information courtesy of: Boyce, Ward J., ed., American fighter aces album. Mesa, Ariz: American Fighter Aces Association, 1996.

Restrictions:

Permission to publish material from the American Fighter Aces Association Oral Interviews must be obtained from The Museum of Flight Archives.

Transcript:

Transcribed by Pioneer Transcription Services

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Index:

Deployment to New Caledonia and Guadalcanal ...... 4

Flight training requirements and flight tactics ...... 5

Conditions on Guadalcanal, part one ...... 6

Enduring bombardments and shellfire ...... 7

Gas attack, false alarm ...... 9

First aerial victories...... 9

Jack Cram’s torpedo mission ...... 10

P-400 squadrons ...... 11

Jack Conger’s bailout ...... 12

Remembering Harold W. “Indian Joe” Bauer ...... 13

Shot up by a Zero aircraft ...... 14

Thoughts on Japanese aircraft ...... 15

Fighter ace characteristics ...... 16

Stories about a pessimistic officer ...... 17

Conditions on Guadalcanal, part two ...... 17

Rest camp in Tontouta and breaking up VMF-121 ...... 19

Ordnance procedures ...... 21

Logistics of alcohol shares ...... 22

Stories about fellow pilots and other personnel ...... 23

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Leonard K. Davis

[START OF INTERVIEW]

0:00:01

[Deployment to New Caledonia and Guadalcanal]

EUGENE A. VALENCIA: Duke, what was the complement of your squadron or when you left Ewa?

LEONARD K. DAVIS: Well, we didn't leave Ewa. We left from Miramar, old Camp Kearny at that time. We had 40 pilots and I've forgotten—several hundred enlisted men. And we left loaded at San Diego. The, uh—some aircraft on the Kitty Hawk. And we were on one of the old Matson Liners and went—it was the Malolo, which had been called the Morolo because of its seagoing characteristic. And there were a lot of troops aboard, of course. It was extremely crowded. For instance, the swimming pool that had been—was filled with eight tiered bunks in the thing and we stopped—I've forgot now. We may have stopped at Hawaii on the way. We stopped at Samoa. And then we went onto Tontouta, which is where we off-loaded. In Tontouta in New Caledonia.

00:01:10

LKD: Stayed there for a while, and that's where we really picked up the complement of aircraft that we were to use going into Guadalcanal. They came in on a carrier. I believe it was the Long Island. And we launched from anchor by catapult and flew to the airfield at Tontouta, the big one, and fixed up our airplanes, made the last minute checks to get ready to fly them into Guadalcanal. Actually, what happened, after we fixed them up we were put aboard a carrier and launched from a place called Indispensable Reef, which I later thought—I wondered if it had any connotations or not—which was several hundred miles from Guadalcanal and then flew in. One of the—I got in an argument with one of the shipboard officers as to taking off with the guns loaded, and I went to the skipper and I said, “I'm going to take off with my guns loaded.” And he said, “If you don't, I'll court-martial you.” I said, “Will you please tell your ordinance officer that? I'm having trouble with him.”

Anyway, we launched and went into Guadalcanal, which we had been trying to get radio frequencies and recognition signals and things like that, which were practically nonexistent. We had a rumor that we were to fly over—I think it was part of Tulagi or Florida—and then approached Guadalcanal on that course, which we did and were not shot at. And then landed there at Guadalcanal.

00:03:03

EAV: How many pilots did you have? 5

LKD: Well, we had 40, but we only had, if I remember—I think we started with 21 aircraft and one was lost on the catapult launch due to a broken bridle. It went into the water, and it got a very interesting series of shots. The pilot, who had never made a catapult before—most of the pilots thought a catapult was a thing that the ancient Romans used to reduce castles and were suddenly faced with getting flung into the air from a short carrier at anchor with no wind. So that posed quite a problem. But this boy landed, and before the splashes had settled he was out at the end of the wing running. And some very alert Navy photographer got some beautiful shots. They appeared in a Newsweek thing sometime later.

EAV: I understand it was very interesting, concerning the condition of your aircraft on receipt.

LKD: Well, they were sent to us from another squadron that I believe at that time was at Ewa. And we received them in the most wonderful shape that I have ever seen any aircraft drawn in. Every gun worked, every mechanical part of the airplane was in perfect condition.

EAV: Which is unusual.

00:04:32

LKD: Very unusual. But the guy that sent them out said these are going where it's either the quick or the dead and they were to be the best aircraft that were sent out and it worked.

EAV: Who was that, Duke?

LKD: Colonel Sam Moore. Luther Samuel Moore.

[Flight training requirements and flight tactics]

EAV: How many hours in type did your pilots have?

LKD: Well, we had set an initial requirement after the things got type. If I remember correctly, it was to be 40 hours in type, which would be the F4F after they got out from training. As things developed and the pace accelerated, that was reduced to 25 hours. When we finally went overseas, in order to get the complement of 40 pilots—there were two pilots, I believe, with between eight or ten hours in type, which didn't seem to make a damn bit of difference to those kids. They did a wonderful job.

EAV: They sure did. Joe Foss—I was going to ask you about tactics. Joe Foss, one of the greatest, has called you—and I've heard him say this many times—the greatest tactician fighter- wise in anybody's service. I understand you listened and also conferred with Flatley [James H. Flatley], Thach [John S. Thach], and men of that caliber, and thus your squadron was prepared when it was catapulted. 6

LKD: Well, I don't know where the great tactician thing comes from, but I do think that we profited by everything that had gone before. Because we did make it an effort to get our hands on anything that had been written or any oral observations or any lectures that we could get from returning pilots who had actually been in action.

00:06:28

LKD: We took time out and made an effort to absorb all of that. Anything that Flatley or Thach had written or said, or any of the returning pilots who made themselves available to give us lectures.

[Conditions on Guadalcanal, part one]

EAV: Duke, what were your thoughts after touching down at the Canal? I understand that your relieving squadrons, 223 and 224, were just about all through as far as dysentery, fever, and other ailments were concerned. Just plain fatigued.

LKD: Well, there was a very high fatigue factor in Guadalcanal. I don't know—unless you've been subjected to it really that you can understand it. It's a combination of very many things. One, people have said all we had was spam. Well, I hate spam, but I would have loved it if we had any. We had some very weird conglomerations for food. Most of the pilots that did a tour up there ended up with dysentery and malaria. We couldn't take quinine because it gives you a balance disturbance due to a blood pressure change or something physical that I'm not too familiar with. And the result was that we took Atabrine, which is nothing more than a deterrent and it will hold you for a while, but ultimately you’ll be—malaria will get you. I personally lost about 35 pounds in six weeks up there. And due to the dysentery, I lived for about two weeks on bismuth and paregoric every four hours just to keep you so you could fly. Otherwise you couldn't have existed with yourself in the cockpit, particularly at high altitudes. And most of our hops were to the maximum altitude that this particular plane would go, which was about 30,000 feet at that time, maybe 31.

EAV: Did, uh—can you give us a typical day on the Canal after everyone started to roll?

00:08:52

LKD: Well, a typical day would usually be getting up at daybreak, going down to the mess hall, and getting whatever the boys had figured out to dish up. Which, with what they had, I think they did a good job. The first raid would normally be about ten o’clock in the morning. It almost became a clockwork routine. This ten o’clock so-called standby for the first raid would be augmented by coast watcher reports through the Australian/New Zealand coast watching network, which was a fantastic thing in getting the information out and not getting caught. Then one group of us would take off. We'd use all the available aircraft, which would seldom be more 7

than 12 or 18, which meant that each pilot usually flew every other day as a rough go. If the raid came down, we would do what we could to keep them from bombing and strafing and try and break it up before it got to the island, come down, land, refuel. We ran out of gas once and had to sit on the ground for a couple of days because we were just physically out of gas. We had even drained the B-17 bombers that were wrecks on the field and had some gas left in the tanks, we drained. We had gotten every bit of gas you could get.

But anyway, then there would usually be an afternoon raid, maybe two or three o’clock in the afternoon, which we would go up. And then the, uh—you'd usually have a couple of drinks. We had a big—what we called a round table. And we'd have dinner and go back and have a couple of drinks. Well, you didn't have to worry about the guys getting loaded so they couldn't fly the next day because they were so tired that one drink and they'd be off to bed with the setting of the sun.

00:11:17

EAV: Incidentally, Duke, how did you arrange for the beer to be shipped in everyday or flown in?

LKD: Well, this was something that everybody appreciated, would be able to have a bottle of beer. [unintelligible 00:11:30] had done us a great favor. He sent us up an Australian case of beer, which was a magnificent thing. It was 48 quarts. And it went over so well that I made arrangements through the transport pilots that were flying in the MAG-25 at that time to get two cases of beer a day into there. And despite the fact that the transports were loaded to the gunnels, the pilots said that they would cut down on their personal belongings and everything else in order to deliver this to us, and they did most regularly. They very seldom missed a day.

[Enduring bombardments and shellfire]

EAV: Now that's fantastic. Duke, I understand that your nights were quite interesting.

LKD: That was one of the factors that produced the fatigue after you had been there a little while, because we had a constant harassment either by surface shipping coming down the channel, the so-called Bougainville or Tokyo Express. I've forgotten what they call it now. But ships would come down and shell us rather regularly, anything from destroyers on up to battleships shooting 18-inch guns. When I first got there, the squadrons previous to us had dug some rather magnificent foxholes. We probably weren't really conditioned to why they had done it. As a result, we were a little lax in preparing our own foxholes. The particular one that I shared with Joe Foss the first night that we really had a heavy shelling, was probably about 18-inches deep and was a little less in width than a twin bed, I'm sure. And our cover was a thin piece of aluminum that did nothing but hold the light of the bursting shells out. Fortunately, there was no shrapnel or anything else that hit us that evening. And I can tell you that the next day we spent a 8

lot of time on improving our foxholes so that we had log barricades and sand on top and that they were deep.

00:14:04

EAV: I understand that Joe annoyed you during one of the instances that night, that evening.

LKD: Well, that was the only evening we were lying there like two kids in a crib, I guess you could say. And he kept tapping on my hard hat with his fingernails. And I said, “Joe, stop that. You're making me nervous.” Which was an understatement. I was about as nervous as a man could get anyway, I imagine. We did have a respite in that particular area in that another camp became available to us that had some A-number-one foxholes already dug. As a matter of fact, I moved into a tent that General Geiger had had and he had a good foxhole there because they had moved theirs—their area for night—where they spent the night behind a hill, which put them in a defilade, so to speak. As a result, I had a magnificent foxhole that—whose opening was right in my tent, and I could roll right out of my bunk and down the hole in a matter of a second or two when the first bomb was starting off. And I had a cribbage board and a deck of cards down there and a little lantern or a little candle and a bottle of whiskey, so it was a comfortable foxhole. It also had duckboards in it so that the mud didn't come up to our knees. But that was an improvement over our original one and a very necessary one, to have something heavy above you because those 18-inch shells, when they fragmented, would cut a 20-inch palm tree in half just like you'd run a knife through butter. Actually, you weren't safe from a direct hit, but it kept any shrapnel off of you.

00:16:08

LKD: In addition, if the ships weren’t down shelling you, a fellow by the name of Washing Machine Charlie, a nickname they had given to him, would come over in an aircraft and drop flares and bombs for maybe an hour or two at night. We had no night fighting capability at that time, although we did try to go up and shoot him down by using searchlights and the radar, which didn't do us much good for intercepts. It let us know that something other than friendly was in the area.

EAV: Did you have any luck? With your night fighting?

LKD: No. As far as I can remember, we never even got a glimpse of the guy. Another harassment was a fellow out in the hills who had a gun. He had some sort of a cannon up there. And he'd, every now and then, lob a shell into our area. The perimeter that we held at that time was a very tight one. As a matter of fact, just before we got there, a Jap had ridden up and down the middle of the fighter field on a bicycle with a Tommy gun and fired on both sides of the field and then road out the other end and opened up a firefight between our own troops. The perimeter 9

was very tight. We were fired on, for instance, in our final approach by ground sniper fire. Down at the strip, we had an old Chic Sale outhouse, and every now and then you'd see a guy come running out of there with his pants at half-mast because he had gotten sniped while he was sitting there minding his own business. This fellow—an amusing incident or amusing in retrospect, the first day I was there I was riding around with Bob Galer getting the lay of the land, so to speak, where the fields were and where the various outfits were. And this Washing Machine—or this cannon fired out of the side of the hill. And we never could find him to strafe him out or anything else. Apparently, he had a hole up there and he'd shoot the cannon and pull it back in.

00:18:31

LKD: And this shell landed and I was very upset about the thing and I said to Galer, “Don't you guys take any precautions?” Oh, he says, “As far as he can shoot is to the downwind end of Henderson Field. He's never gone any further than that.” About five seconds later there was another shell and it landed within about 50-feet of the jeep that Galer and I were in, which was a good half-mile from where the furthest he had ever shot before. Well, Galer and I both bailed out of the jeep at the same time. We took the precautions, and after that we didn't ride around outside of his range because he could range anywhere within the perimeter of Henderson or Fighter One. I don't know whether he got a bigger cannon or put more powder in it or what he did.

[Gas attack, false alarm]

EAV: I understand you nearly had a gas alarm?

LKD: Well, we had an amusing incident one night about dusk. Suddenly somebody yelled, “Gas.” And the call was immediately picked up, I guess, in a little bit of a panic situation. We all fumbled for our gas masks, which we had carried with us but had never given too much thought actually to using. And about the time that everything was getting all scrambled up, it turned out that one of the mechs had—was in a real hurry to gas his airplane, which had just come in from a hop, and he was yelling for the gas truck. But all he did was yell, “Gas, gas,” and that panicked everybody until it was straightened away that just what he wanted was a fuel truck to refuel his airplane.

[First aerial victories]

EAV: Duke, I understand your first encounter was on October 17th when you were leading a flight of eight, knocked down some nine aircraft, antiaircraft?

00:20:23 10

LKD: Well, I don't remember the date without referring to the diary, but we had—one of the early encounters was actually, oh, sort of a picture book or “this is the way you should do it” type operation that you might get in training. We had a flight of either six or eight single-engine bombers come in, and we were already airborne. I suspect they were maybe at eight or 10,000 feet, and we were probably at 12 to 15 or something like that. And they came in on opposite courses from the way we were flying, which gave you a perfect position for the traditional high side run, because it was a picture book type of operation. If you'd try to lay it out, you couldn't have done better. And as a result I told my second section—I think there were eight of us flying—I told my second section to take their lead section and I would take their back section, which meant we would roll over simultaneously being on opposite courses and come down on them. Which we did and got all eight planes in the first pass. Plus later I found out there were some Zeros in the area, which I didn't see, but some of my guys got two of them. But I think in that one pass basically we got ten aircraft. But as I say, it was a storybook type of operation. You don't run into it.

EAV: Sure don’t. Do you recall any other interesting…?

[Jack Cram’s torpedo mission]

LKD: Well, I—one of the most interesting and I think dramatic, which is been recounted before, was Jack Cram, who at that time was the general's aide and pilot, General Geiger's aide and pilot, in an old PBY. Took off with a couple of torpedoes slung under his wing to torpedo a group of Japanese transports who had been unloading on the beach a very short distance away from us. A matter of from the center of camp, I guess, not more than ten miles. And we were—in order to protect him in this ungainly bird that was very slow and very big, we coordinated a dive bombing attack and the fighter cover. The SBDs were to make the dive bombing attack at the time that Cram was to run in from the sea at a very low altitude, drop his torpedoes, and would necessarily have to pull up almost over the Japanese ships in order to make his getaway.

00:23:28

LKD: The attack went off very well. It was thrown together in a matter of relatively few minutes. There was no operation order or anything like that. It was just a question of getting together and deciding on it. Jack just took one man with him because he didn’t want to—did not want to have any more people subjected to the danger than he could help, so he took just a crew chief with him. They dropped their torpedoes, made the hits, pulled out, and were at that time, even though the dive bombers were doing pretty much to suppress any flak or at least draw some of it away from him, he was jumped by a group of Zeros who just made continuous passes on him like he was the old slow-flying sleeve. But I got into the act momentarily on the thing and may have helped him some. I don't know. And at that time they pulled up and he went in and 11

landed, and we all came back and landed. His plane was completely riddled. Why he or his crew chief weren't hurt by either bullets or flying debris was just one of those things.

EAV: That's the encounter that Haberman [Roger A. Haberman]...?

LKD: Yes. That's the same one that Roger Haberman spoke of.

EAV: Did you—did Jack Cram hear your comments when you were informed of the operation?

00:25:00

LKD: Well, I was a little appalled at it because I didn’t—personally didn't think that it would accomplish as much as we were throwing into it. I mean, that was my immediate reaction. And I came up with an expletive and said, “I don't think he'll make it.” Jack was standing next to me, which I did not realize at the time, which I don't suppose helped his mental attitude out, but he went ahead with the thing. It was his idea, and I guess he was going to do it come hell or high water, which he did.

[P-400 squadrons]

EAV: That's fantastic. Duke, what did you—what were your feelings about the P-39 or P-400 guys? That was an orphan group.

LKD: The P-400, due to its characteristics, it wasn't much good at altitude. I think maybe about 15,000 was the best they could do any work, and the Zeros were usually above that. As a result, they were used mostly in ground support. And I don't know how much experience they had had with it, but they did a wonderful job. There were only a few pilots down there, and I think maybe a total of nine aircraft at the most, which would put anywhere from three to six in commission. They were surely an orphan group because they were with the Marines and it just appeared to me that, without taking any cracks at anybody, that the Army had forgotten about them. They had a few tents down there at the end of Fighter One, and they had a few mechs to keep their planes in commission. But for aerial combat they just weren't the airplane that could do it. They did do some very good strafing missions, though, with the cannon that they had in the nose. They had a 37-millimeter in the nose. And I don't know how many machine guns, but they did a good job on doing some ground support missions for us.

EAV: You were mentioning that they had an old Zero wing for their mess table?

00:27:19 12

LKD: Well, that was—as far as I ever saw down there, that was their mess table, desk, operations desk, and everything else, was a complete Zero wing that had been sheered right at the rut and fell almost intact into the camp. They picked that up and put it in a couple sawhorses and that was their desk.

EAV: I'll be darned.

LKD: One of the wonderful things about the operation in the Canal—and naturally, an operation that couldn't have existed without the enlisted personnel who maintained their aircraft, loaded the guns, and kept them flying under very, very difficult conditions of weather, sand, mud, no transportation, and everything else that just would go against making an efficient operation, was probably present in the Canal. One other thing, even though we've always stressed the unit esprit de corps, I think that a thing that showed up in the Canal that, to me, was rather interesting was that due to the surface transportation, or lack of surface transportation, the squadron pilots would fly in in their aircraft and be maintained by the enlisted personnel of the previous squadron. As a result, my first maintenance up there was done by the mechanics of Smith’s [likely John L. Smith] and Galer's squadrons. By the same token, the squadrons that followed me, much of their early maintenance was done by my personnel. Just as an example, the last personnel, ground personnel of my squadron to come on the Canal got there the day before I left, which was after completing my tour.

00:29:28

EAV: Duke, concerning that amazing incident of Jack Conger’s. I understand you witnessed practically the whole thing from the ground and then later on in the briefing?

[Jack Conger’s bailout]

LKD: Well, I was standing at what we called our operations office, which was a tent and a couple of boxes at the end of Fighter One, when two aircraft were observed over—well, at the tip of the island off of Henderson Field, actually. One a Zero and one an F4F. And the F4F pulled up and cut off the tail of the Zero. I later found out the reason he did that was because he was out of ammunition. The planes both started spinning in. They were at a relatively low altitude. I wouldn't say much over 1,000 feet, if that, when the occasion happened. And we saw the Jap chute open, but we didn't see the American pilot chute open. We were rather upset thinking that he had not gotten out, when in actuality, both of them had gotten out, but apparently Jack's chute didn't open until he was below our line of sight over the palm tree level, which might have been 300 or 400 feet at that range. 13

A boat came out from the shore and picked up Jack, went over to pick up the Japanese pilot who was floating in the water, and Jack reached over to help pull him over the gunnel into the boat, at which point the Jap pilot pulled out a pistol and pointed it at Jack and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, I guess having been water-soaked or for any other number of reasons, it didn't fire. Jack fell back in the boat head-over-tea- kettle just from the surprise of the thing, picked up a five-gallon gas can, and leaned over the gunnel and drove the Jap pilot back into the water like a piling. When he surfaced again, why, they pulled him on board with no problem. And later I sat in at the interview, although it didn't give us very much. He spoke no English and I couldn't get much from the interpreter and he didn't give out much information. It wasn't of any value or use. But it was an interesting little thing. Yeah.

[Remembering Harold W. “Indian Joe” Bauer]

EAV: [overlapping] Yeah. It certainly was. Say, Duke, one of the—of course, the legend of Guadalcanal has to be Indian Joe Bauer [Harold W. “Indian Joe” Bauer]. Just what did this guy do that made everyone from the ground troops up to the airedales, look up and just love the guy?

00:32:26

LKD: Well, he was a very personable guy to begin with. He was a very good man in an airplane, and he just had natural leadership qualities which are very hard to pinpoint. He was an excellent man in an airplane. He was down at one of the other islands with his squadron at the time, and they used to come up from time to time to ferry in new aircraft, when we could use them or when they got them to bring to us. And also, even though it wasn't strictly according to the rules, they would make flights with us in combat. And technically they were in an area that was a little bit removed from us, but his pilots used to do it and he used to engage in them himself. One of his most spectacular missions was arriving at Guadalcanal after a long ferry flight, practically out of gas, and in the landing pattern at the time a raid was going on. The dive bombers—they were single-engine Jap dive bombers—were pulling out of their dives and returning north to their bases. Joe pulled up, as I say, at the end of this ferry flight, practically in his landing pattern, and started chasing them and shot down four of them. And probably would have gotten some more, but he was now right down to his last drop of gas and came back in and landed on what amounted to fumes.

EAV: On that last flight, which has often been referred to as the Buzzard Flight or Patrol, what did happen to them?

00:34:16 14

LKD: Well, I wasn't on that flight, but I believe Foss was with him on that one, and he just let a Zero apparently get—this is hearsay, but I think it's fairly authentic. A Zero got behind him and shot him down. He made a controlled landing in the water and was seen swimming in his life jacket, Mae West, and pointed over toward—I've forgotten the name of the island, but there was an island I believe about ten miles away. And he pointed to that island, apparently indicating that that's where he was going to try to swim to. Unfortunately, this happened in mid-afternoon. By the time the aircraft got back to the base and we were informed on what happened—they launched another set of fighters as cover for an old Grumman, a J2F, an amphibious aircraft which could, if they spotted Joe, land on the water and pick him up. They got back to the scene of where he had gone down just about dusk, which gave them very little time to make any search that would have been of any value. As a result, they returned to base without finding him.

On two or three successive days, I've forgotten just how many, we launched fighter sweeps searching for him and never did find him. So whether he reached the island or not is completely unknown as far as we know.

EAV: That was certainly a sad loss.

LKD: It was. It was very tragic.

[recording stops and starts again 00:36:02]

LKD: Well, one amusing incident that stands out was one of the very low-time pilots, probably had ten hours in type when we had left Miramar, was shot down while we were there and got picked up by a boat and brought back to the field. Got back to the field about noon and Joe Bauer was there and more or less in charge at that moment, and he said, “Well, you can go ahead and get yourself cleaned up and washed off and come on back tomorrow to do your flying. You don't have to fly this afternoon.” And the second lieutenant said, “Colonel, I just want to tell you this doesn't bother me a goddamn bit.” And he was back flying that afternoon.

00:36:54

[Shot up by a Zero aircraft]

EAV: That's great. Duke, what happened the day you were really shot up? You thought it was oil and blood? I've heard that story many times.

LKD: Well, I made the mistake of letting a Zero get on my tail and a couple of 20-millimeters went—spaced just right, I guess, came in through the rear of the cockpit on each side of the armor plate. A lot of them hit the armor plate. You can feel those 20s hit the armor plate just like somebody's kicking you. But they don't hurt you. However, these two came through, exploded or at least hit my instrument panel, and blew up all my instruments, along with a lot of glass from the canopy and the instruments and metal fragments from the bullets. And I thought I felt something warm on my face and thought I had broken an oil line, particularly when I looked 15

down and saw my manifold pressure was about ten inches. Well, I hadn't realized that we were still in high blower and lost a lot of altitude, and actually I was drawing about 60 or 70 inches on that engine. And then I felt that I had power and I reached up and I found out that it was a lot of blood on my face from all these fragments, which made me look like the devil but didn't actually hurt me very much. I had my goggles. At that time the goggles didn't fit right when you had your oxygen mask on. So you usually flew with a canopy closed and your goggles up and your oxygen mask on. So I was very lucky not to get some fragments in my eyes because it splintered my face. And the plane itself was completely riddled and never flew again.

00:38:51

LKD: I got back to the field all right and landed the thing. And they were very concerned. And all it was, was just very, very superficial wounds and I still carry a hunk of it in me yet. Some of it came out shaving over a period of the next ten years. Every now and then there would be an extra scrape and a hunk would come out of my face.

[Thoughts on Japanese aircraft]

EAV: Duke, that brings up the point, what were your thoughts concerning the Japanese pilots, his tactics, his aircraft? First with the pilot.

LKD: Well, I don't know as far as piloting is concerned. The aircraft that they had were much more spectacular maneuverers than we were. I've sat at 30,000 feet, which is as high as we could go and stay in formation, and that would be a very sloppy formation, and had Zeros doing slow rolls above me, which is rather disconcerting. I think—I don't think there's a pilot that was out there, though, that would sacrifice that maneuverability for the strength of the aircraft that we flew. Because one burst from us and they were finished. Whereas we could absorb an unlimited amount of punishment from their aircraft and still get back home, and this was proved time and time again.

EAV: Did he have any particular tactic at that time that was particularly effective?

LKD: No. Except he had such a maneuverable airplane that you just couldn't stay in flight with him, really. You had to either dive away and come back at him or be in an advantageous point, as far as the Zero was concerned. Now, of course, when you're talking fighter against dive bomber or against the Betty or something like that, why, we had everything we needed. But with the strength of the aircraft, not only structurally but also self-sealing tanks and the armor, we had what I consider a far superior aircraft. I would rather be in it than sitting in one of those cracker boxes.

00:41:15 16

EAV: I certainly agree. Your squadron, Duke, certainly piled up an amazing record. You destroyed 164 planes, Japanese aircraft, in 122 days of combat with a loss of 20 pilots. That in its entirety is somewhat of a record, is it not?

LKD: Well, I believe that 121 holds the record for total number of aircraft destroyed. That 122 days is not in one tour, however. Our first tour up there was approximately six weeks.

EAV: How many planes did you get at that time?

LKD: I'd have to look in the diary there. I can get it, but I don't know.

EAV: And the pilots, Duke? Your—this loss then was an accumulative loss.

LKD: Yes. Because we didn't lose that many in our tour.

[Fighter ace characteristics]

EAV: Concerning your own pilots, Duke, what would you consider would be the prerequisite for a fighter ace? The right time, the right place? Could you spot the individual that was going to be successful or the one that you could count on and feel sure that he would get back after a mission?

LKD: Well, you can to a certain extent. There's so many variables that even the best of them get shot down. Foss got shot down several times. At one time he was a Japanese ace. He had wrecked five of our Grummans. A couple of them shot down, a couple of them busted up landing coming back shot up, and things like that. There's, to me, a terrific element of luck. Probably one of the things that I would say that made Foss what he is is his aggressiveness. He just has a— well, if you've ever hunted pheasant with him, you get the same idea. The guy is half bird-dog and half shotgun, and he's the same way in an airplane. I think the aggressiveness is part of it, luck is part of it, flying skill is part of it. A lot of it is not forgetting certain things that have been drilled into you, which in the heat of combat you can. I think that's one reason I got shot up. I just rolled over on something without looking around and got a Zero behind me.

EAV: And you would say it does take a certain breed to fulfill all these requirements, to take advantage of being at the right place at the right time?

LKD: There's a terrific combination. And the difference between just being a terrific aviator or a pilot, for instance, is being in the right place at the right time, being aggressive, and being a good shot. You can use all your sights and everything else that you have to help you, but I think, too, there's a certain amount of inherent, built-in ability to hit a moving object.

EAV: Duke, with your background and exposure to international affairs, current events, do you think we've seen the last of the fighter ace as such? 17

00:44:34

LKD: No, I don't think so. Well, let me phrase it this way. As long as we're going into the type of war that we have now, if the enemy does have fighter aircraft there's going to be a battle for air superiority. Just because you've got a plane that you can't make the old traditional high side run on or that you'll only get one pass with a plane that's doing 1,500 miles an hour, we still have the advantage of certain missile and certain advancements that make it possible for a man to shoot down an aircraft, even just getting one pass at him. And as long as you count bombers and everything else shot down, the fighter is going to be in there.

[recording stops and starts again 00:45:35]

[Stories about a pessimistic officer]

EAV: Duke, one of the most interesting incidents that I've heard was concerning the staff intelligence officer, who was more or less a prophet of doom.

LKD: Well, we had one—I don't know whether he was a staff intelligence officer, but he was on the wing staff and he was one of the most pessimistic people that—well, the most pessimistic guy on the whole island, I guess, because he was there when we got there and he left during our tour of duty. But during the entire time he was there, he—being a staff officer, he had a jeep— and he carried a rubber boat with him, right next—between the seats on the jeep. And at night he'd put it next to his cot when he turned in, but he was never more than I'd say 25 feet from his rubber boat. And the idea was that he was sure that we were going to have to evacuate the island, and he was going to be prepared if he had to do it in this one-man dinghy. [laughter]

EAV: So he carried the rubber boat, and he also had a brass bed?

LKD: Well, he had a—everybody on the island had cots, but he had a thing that—oh, I suppose it was about a three-quarter bed. More or less an old brass bedstead type. I don't know where he had gotten it. I must presume that it came from one of the Australian planters or coconut growers on the island. And he was always willing this to everybody on the island. I ended up with this thing.

00:47:30

[Conditions on Guadalcanal, part two]

EAV: Your logistics, I understand, were very, very poor. At one time your—the gas or the fuel was so critical that you couldn't get airborne.

LKD: Well, we had been running low and been getting fuel to just about meet our minimum requirements. About that time a big fuel load that was coming in got hit. The tanker got hit off 18 the end of the island by a Japanese bomber that had gotten through, which made our fuel most critical, so critical in fact that we tied down for one day. We had gone—we had gotten all the gas that we could, even so far as draining the gas from all the duds, including some wrecked B-17s that were on the island at that time. And it gave us enough to fill up our tanks to have either an evacuation arrangement or at least one last shot at them. But it would only be a one-mission thing, and we didn't fly for about two days. Fortunately, the raids were light during that period.

EAV: Duke, I understand that one time—in fact, oh, it was October 26th—that there were only 12 F4Fs available. Thirty aircraft in commission on the whole island. Was this due to shore bombardment or ship bombardment of Henderson?

LKD: Well, it—probably a combination of aircraft that had gotten back to the field but were not flyable because of any number of things that could have happened to them, plus shore bombardment by the battleships and cruisers and destroyers.

EAV: It was effective?

00:49:20

LKD: It was most effective. It was probably the most terrifying thing about—as far as I was personally concerned, and I think a lot of others felt that way, that that shore bombardment was the most terrifying thing of the tour.

EAV: In anticipation of impact, the shells, the noise?

LKD: Well, you hear all this stuff blast snap you offshore and hear all this stuff exploding, and you just feel sort of helpless. It isn't like you’re—we're in a fight or something like that. Or even the days that we were—for instance, when the other flight would be airborne trying to stop an attack and we would be subject to dive bombing and horizontal bombing, for some reason it didn't carry the terror that those 18-inch shells did. They could do a magnificent amount of destruction.

EAV: Incidentally, Duke, I understand the SBD people really put on a good show during their tour. Extended missions, this type of thing. Sometimes without escort.

LKD: They did. A number of times they went beyond where we could escort them because we didn't have any type of long range tank at all. No capability of lengthening our range. As a result, we would go out to our radius of action with them and then we'd have to come back and they had gone on past that. I can remember several incidents of that happening.

EAV: Was their attrition quite high?

LKD: No, I don't believe—I can't remember the attrition rates now. They, too, had a plane that was very durable and could take a lot of punishment. Both from flak and from machine gun fire 19

from the enemy. We lost some good people in them, but I don't think their rate was—it wasn't nearly as high as the Jap rate.

00:51:26

EAV: Say, Duke, who was the gentleman that mentioned the fact that he didn't particularly like rooming with you because of your ability to sleep through, or possibly sleep through, some of the raids?

LKD: Well, there was a ground officer who had been through World War I and was back on active duty as a reserve in World War II. And his former roommate, he claimed, could hear the bombers take off from Bougainville, so they'd be in their foxholes by the time the raid started. And he said living with me was dangerous because I'd be snoring through most of the raid unless somebody woke me up to tell me to get in the foxhole.

[recording starts and stops again, brief audio distortion, 00:52:11]

LKD: ...sort of a bridal bed, mosquito screen came down from the top. Hell, it was like an eight-foot [unintelligible 00:52:29] sort of arrangement. And the senior guy had that bed.

EAV: This was in Tontouta?

LKD: This was back in the rest home at Tontouta. Well, that was my bed when we got there. And did you ever know Rex [unintelligible 00:52:50]?

EAV: No.

00:52:51

[Rest camp in Tontouta and breaking up VMF-121]

LKD: He was a head-shrinker, and he should have a head-shrinker looking at him, but he was a Navy captain. He was the chief flight surgeon for [unintelligible 00:53:01] SOPAC or whatever it was at that time, and ran the rest home. And this is a combination of circumstances and it's hard to have happen, but this was the morning that I learned that the squadron was being broken up completely. And the guys that had gone to Australia—or were going to be in Australia, and we were going to be sent to Samoa, the last of the seven of us.

EAV: This is why you held yourself up making sure your guys would get to Australia.

LKD: Yeah. This was the last. So I had just heard this, and of course, we had a hell of a time there at the rest camp. I mean, we—a place to relax and everything else. I used to have a picture of me there, and this is where I weighed 130 pounds. This was a real skinny old dad. But anyway, old Rex gave me [unintelligible 00:54:07] rest home. And he's very proud of everything and that's a real nice place. We're getting some pretty good food and got a nice place to sleep and 20

going Tontouta and spend a certain amount of nights, what almost amounts to a nightclub. And I had just heard that Roy Geiger was going to break the squadron up, send the rest of us to Samoa. And this was the other 121 as the unit that we had left the states with. And I was sitting on the edge of the bed that morning and abject—well, I was just dejected as hell. That's all there was to it. Here comes the admiral and I've forgotten his—a little Irishman. A wonderful guy who has since made, I think, vice admiral. But [unintelligible 00:55:19] lieutenant came through with Fitch, who had been the guy that before had been back in Washington and had gotten Sam Moore's letter about the F2As and that it had the F4Fs—

EAV: How the hell did that letter—not interrupting the story.

LKD: Well, it was one of those things—as a matter of fact—

00:55:43

EAV: Was it Wake?

LKD: It came from either Wake or Midway or French Frigate. I don't remember. But when the copy got to the next chain of command, Sam Moore was already back to Hawaii, so in case the people got mad at him the General could put him in jail right now. But he had—it already went through. It never happened because they recognized—

[overlapping voices/unintelligible 00:56:24]

EAV: Why are F4Fs going to the training command while we're out here?

LKD: With F2As or Brewsters.

EAV: He had a lot of guts.

LKD: Sam, of course, is now divorced and remarried, but one of the things that his first wife said, you know, he was impossible as a major. When he made lieutenant colonel, I didn't know what was going to happen. And then when he made colonel, why, I wasn't sure at all. Because this guy should—if you wanted to pick a guy that just has a complete coverage of everything, to my mind, this was the guy. I would have picked him above all.

EAV: And he's out?

LKD: Yeah. He's retired in Vero Beach, enjoying life. He's the deacon of the church. I said, “Sam, those guys in Vero Beach must be losing their mind making you a deacon of the church, collecting the money.” He said he got 500 people to check the money with me every Monday morning.

00:57:42 21

[Ordnance procedures]

EAV: Duke, how did—on the takeoff of your aircraft, when you were flying in on the ordinance load, would you go through that, please?

LKD: Well, I'm a little lost on this one now.

EAV: When you wanted the guns loaded, you were taking off to the Canal.

LKD: Well, I had the contention that we should take off with the guns loaded.

EAV: This when you going in to relieve 223, Smith and Galer—

LKD: Well, we were going into the Canal. The, uh—usually, in peacetime, you're always taking off with a dummy in the chamber and then you load it in the air. And my contention was that we should take off with a live round. The same type of operation that we did later on in combat, one of the first things we did when we got airborne and wheels of them settled down, was to check our guns. And this was my contention that we should be able to press a trigger and have a live round come out of the thing rather—because we had these hand chargers—

EAV: [unintelligible 00:59:04].

LKD: …that have been mentioned before. And I just didn't think it was proper if you were in a combat area to take off without having a loaded round.

00:59:19

EAV: How far off were you? This was the Indispensable Reef area?

LKD: Reef.

EAV: 200?

LKD: I'd say two to 300 miles. I've forgotten exactly now, but it was in the vicinity of that. It was below Indispensable Reef, so I would say about 300 miles into Guadalcanal. Over an hour, an hour and a half of flight, something like that.

EAV: The ordnance officer was the one that objected?

LKD: Well, there was a young fellow that was reading a book, and this was the way it was supposed to be. But this was based, I'm sure, on a peacetime operation of some kind, which was normal during that time. We never took off—we had a dummy round, got in the air, and then charged the guns. And when we were going out sleeve firing and stuff like that. And I didn't feel that that was the proper thing.

EAV: And you went to the captain? 22

LKD: Well, yes. And just, as I say, when I talked to him and said, “This is what I'm supposed to do.” And he said, “I'll court-martial you if you don't do it that way.” We had reached a complete rapport in just a few minutes.

01:00:47

[Logistics of alcohol shares]

EAV: This is the same captain that gave each one of your pilots that were taking off a six pack of—

LKD: We had a six pack of Lejon Brandy, which would be the last thing you'd drink, like committing harakiri or something.

EAV: But it was pleasant.

LKD: It was much more pleasant than having nothing.

EAV: How did you—the liquor you had for the squadron, each guy got a share? We did this in the Essex. Each guy got a share for a case?

LKD: Well, what we did with 40 pilots, each put in whatever the case cost at that time. We bought 40 cases, labeled it medical supplies, and shipped it overseas. When I left Guadalcanal, as I mentioned earlier, the drinking was very light because the guys were so damn tired that one or two drinks—

EAV: [unintelligible 01:01:49]

LKD: ….ready to go to bed because they had to get up early. Well, they had to get up at sunrise. As a result, when I left Guadalcanal I had still, oh, 15 or 16 cases left out there. The next squadron that came through had either taken a mark from our book or had their own ideas of the same thing, and they had their whiskey down in Efate, as I remember it. So I said, “All right. I'll trade what I have up here for what you have down there.”

01:02:37

LKD: And we made a trade, which meant I had a 15- or 16-case credit down in Efate. Now comes a logistic problem of trying to get this whiskey into my possession, which resulted in taking an SNJ from a little field outside of Tontouta up to the bigger airfield, getting in a DC-3, going through Efate, getting in a J2F from that field to another field where the whiskey was in a warehouse, getting my 16 cases of whiskey, putting it in the bottom of the J2F, flying it back to the other airfield, putting it in the DC-3, and getting it back to Tontouta and then down to the little airfield in an SNJ in two or three loads, which we held for the rest of the squadron because now some of them were in Australia. 23

Now we were going to Samoa, seven of us, and only seven of us rate a case of whiskey and there's about 16 cases left. So I take the 16 cases with the seven guys to Samoa and I hold it in sort of escrow there because I don't know what's going to happen to the rest of the squadron. I guess we held it for about three months, and then we had heard that the rest of them were on their way back to the United States and split up all over. So now we split it up among the squadron. And that's what happened to the whiskey we had there.

But one of the most interesting things about the flight from Tontouta to Samoa was the pilot, an Air Force pilot that put us on an Air Force DC-3. And I didn't know this until we had been airborne for a while. And he had gotten an air medal.

[background chatter 01:05:13]

01:05:32

LKD: This guy had gotten an air medal for landing a DC-3 full of patients, running out of gas and lost on the edge of New Caledonia. This perturbed me, so I went up front and what little I knew of overseas navigation, it just gave me a little bit of a better plan to be up there with him and see these islands come in front of us. But we went to Suva and then onto Samoa. But I get a little bit of a start when I found out this guy had gotten an air medal for landing a plane lost and out of gas with 21 patients on the coral reef outside of [unintelligible 01:06:28].

[Stories about fellow pilots and other personnel]

EAV: Duke, you were talking now about—Joe pulled a fast one on you. When did that happen? About almost going AWOL after an afternoon off.

LKD: Well, I think we spoke of that earlier, but—

EAV: We missed it on this.

LKD: …he asked for an afternoon off while we were at Miramar, at that time called Camp Kearny. And we were operating off a 2,100 foot strip at that time.

EAV: Were you flying Brewsters in?

LKD: Well, Brewsters and F4Fs, both. And Joe said he wanted the afternoon off without saying anything about it. And later on I found out that he had gotten married. And I told him that I considered he had been AWOL, because if he told me what he wanted to get the afternoon off for I wouldn't have given it to him.

01:07:35 24

EAV: You know, Duke, staying with Joe—and as I said, he's said many times he had never gone anywhere without you saving him from that photo outfit and teaching him what he thought he knew. The one group commander type or senior officer that he told that if he caught him in the air he wouldn't have to worry about the Japs without even going into—

LKD: Well, he had one time offered to shoot down another fellow that he wasn't enchanted with. That's as far as I'll go on that one.

EAV: But there was a senior guy and told him he'd never have to worry about a Jap if he saw him in the air and he'd shoot him down?

LKD: That's right.

EAV: The B-17s when you were [unintelligible 01:08:38] on the dispatch?

LKD: Well, we did have a group come over from—I guess they were from Australia. And they supposedly bombed a group of transports that were against the beach, but they missed—I'd rather erase this.

EAV: Okay. Forget it. How about our friend Benny who couldn't sleep with you, finding him with a boot.

LKD: Well, Ben, who—now I talk freely about Ben, who I think is a wonderful guy.

EAV: Marvelous guy.

01:09:27

LKD: And Ben, who had been in World War I and was back in World War II, stayed with us in Guadalcanal for a while. And one night in one of those horrible torrential rains, which flooded our tents, and the only way you can keep the water out of the tent is dig a trench around the outside. And I heard this crunching going on and looked out, and here is a rather rotund, freckled Irishman with nothing on but one boot to protect his foot from his shovel digging a trench around the tent. Rather an unusual and interesting—

EAV: Duke, was this the same gent again who keeps popping up with humor?

LKD: Uh…

EAV: Cohesion for the group story, that sent you a telegram to meet him some place from out of nowhere? How did that—

LKD: Well, after I had been transferred from Guadalcanal back to Tontouta to the rest home and then to Samoa—one afternoon while at the race track in Samoa, I got a dispatch from Johnson Island and said, “Please meet me in Wallis Island, if practicable.” And through a combination of circumstances, I was able to catch one of our logistic planes going through and 25

got up there just about ten minutes before Ben and the B-24 on his way back out to the southwest Pacific, got there. And it was sort of a comical and wonderful type of reunion.

01:11:57

EAV: Well, Duke, when you got the message, didn't this come in rather at an inopportune time? And there was no other way to get in? You wouldn't take a fighter [unintelligible 01:12:06], the Duck was gone, J2F was gone, and who was your friend that stood out with a cigar in front of the R4D to make sure it wouldn't go—with a cigar at a rather jaunty angle and made sure that the plane commander knew that he’d have to run over him if he left without you. And then you would have to fly the darn thing.

LKD: Well, I had a wonderful guy that was my adjutant, was an old time ground adjutant and probably this was the first time he’d served with Marine aviation and he probably didn't know too much about it. But he was a fellow that knew what his boss wanted and that's what he did.

EAV: He was a Marine?

LKD: That's right. He was a big, rough, old timer. And when I asked him to hold the plane, if it was in from American Samoa, he said he would. And when I arrived at the airfield, why, he was standing in front of it with a cigar cocked in front of his mouth, and I suspect that if they had started the airplane they would have to run over him to get out on the airfield. And so as a result, I was able to go up to Wallis that evening.

EAV: Well, this of course entailed going some 20-odd miles over a nothing road to get your gear to go into Wallis while he held a plane.

LKD: Well, it took that time or—that was what I had to do to get from Apia to our field at Faleula.

01:14:16

EAV: Now when you got aboard the plane, I understand you were a little hungover, as you mentioned. Then the pilots asked you to come up and—

LKD: Well, the pilots were friends of mine and they asked me to come up and fly the aircraft, which—

EAV: You never have refused to this day.

LKD: And we had a good flight up to Wallis and got in there just before sundown in time to meet Ben coming in from Johnson in the B-24 on his way out to southwest Pacific. 26

EAV: Duke, there is no other Marine, no combat Marine air-wise, that has had the experience, friends, and loyalty that you had. Incidentally, can we go back to that one incident where you were really perspiring, when you got the Jap without firing a shot?

LKD: Well, it—

EAV: When you rode it into the ground.

LKD: As I say, I got on this fellow's tail and normally a Zero can out-ride or out-maneuver and I guess he didn't know enough to do about it. But I rode him down from about 15,000 feet, I would guess, and I ran out of ammunition, never could hit him because he could pull better than I could on the G-force. But using both hands I rode him down and he finally went into a hill and I pulled up over it. And I had at that time thought somebody else must have shot him down.

01:16:12

LKD: After the briefing—or debriefing, rather—after the flight there was no one in that area except myself and that fellow, so I said, “Well, I'm going to claim him.” And so I rode him into the ground, although I didn't shoot him down.

EAV: You were playing a fine game there, too. You could have well gone in.

LKD: Well, the aircraft that we had—

EAV: Stayed together.

LKD: They just stayed together and you could pull yourself silly on the damn things and they'd hold together. We had—I've forgotten his name now, but we had another fellow in almost the same circumstances. And he—when he got back, the airplane had rivets popped all over the darn thing. And he must have pulled somewhere around 12 Gs. But the airplane got back there. There were rivets just popped out of that thing like it—shot them out of a gun.

EAV: Duke, we were talking about—

LKD: And this guy's eyeballs were blood and everything else.

EAV: We were talking about Sam Logan earlier. Do you recall that incident?

01:17:40

LKD: Yeah.

EAV: That had occurred while you were on the—

LKD: No, I think it occurred later. I don't think I was there when that happened, but I recall the incident very vividly, either because I—well, as I said, I don't know whether I was there or 27 not at the time. But I've heard it authentically from various sources. And that Sam had bailed out and the Jap aircraft was strafing him in his parachute. [audio distortion 01:18:23] And apparently had strafed himself out of ammunition, was now trying to cut him down with his propeller, which he did. He cut off Sam's foot. I think it was his left foot just a little above the ankle. Sam ended up in the water, opened his raft and put a tourniquet on himself and was later picked up.

01:18:52

[END OF INTERVIEW]