SPOTLIGHT: Col. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington

Ken Harbaugh:

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I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was a legendary WWII fighter pilot. He is credited with destroying 28 Japanese aircraft, and he was awarded the Medal of Honor- but his legacy has been tainted by his abuse of alcohol and a historically inaccurate TV portrayal. Today in a special episode of Warriors In Their Own Words, we’ll be hearing from two men who knew Boyington personally. Both Lieutenant Colonel Henry Bourgeois and Major J. Ned Corman served under Boyington as pilots in the famous Black Sheep Squadron, which operated in the Solomon islands during WWII. They both also reconnected with Boyington after the war, and got to see how he changed through his life.

LTC Henry Mayo Bourgeois:

My name is Henry Mayo Bourgeois. My parents and grandparents all came from French-speaking Parish, St. James Parish in Louisiana.

When I went over to the islands, he was a senior officer on the transport. I first met him just before Christmas 1943. Next door was a, I can't remember if it was an army or a Marine Lieutenant Colonel and his wife living there, and we bachelors were running the house right next door, and there was always parties and we were invited over there one night for a party. Boyington was there. I didn't know who he was at the time. He was just introduced as Greg. And that was the first time I met him. And then when we transferred to go overseas, it turned out that he was the senior officer in the pilot replacement pool aboard the ship. And that's when I first got to know him. He liked to play Bridge and I liked to play Bridge. And so it was 17 or 18 days getting over to New Caledonia. So we played a lot of bridge on the way. He had bought along a case of Scotch whiskey for some general friend out there, but I think he drank it all up on the way. And I liked him but when we got on the islands out there, he seemed to do a lot of drinking and he really was not an administrator on the ground. And whatever squadron it was in, it was really run by either executive officer or some administrative officer. And the black Sheep Squadron, it was Frank Walton who was intelligence officer. He really ran the ground part of the squadron. And Boyington just seemed to be kind of placid and drunk most of the time. Sometimes when he took off in the morning, he just staggered out an airplane. But in the air, God, I'll tell you, it was something.

I can remember flying dawn patrols with him. And you would go up there and it was really nothing to do, but just circle around for two hours and hoping if the Japanese came down to bomb Munder, you might get something. And it was nothing to do. So he'd get bored with making circles and we'd start doing loops and rolls and wing overs and anything else, just to… And God, by the time he ended up, he was sweating like mad, trying to keep up with him. But he was a brilliant pilot, very aggressive in anything he did on the ground hand-to-hand fight or anything like that. On the [inaudible 00:12:28] going over that was a Marine raider battalion being transferred out to the Pacific. And every day up on the recreation deck, they would practice hand-to-hand fighting and boxing and everything. And he was right in the middle of it all the time. Well, his opponent was a corporal or sergeant or another major. It didn't make any difference. He'd do his best to beat him to the ground.

He just seemed to have a will to win in everything. On the ground, fighting, arguing or in the air with an airplane. And he certainly, in the airplane field, was extremely capable pilot. He was really something.

It was kind of interesting, that combat tour, even though we supposedly had a division, when we get up there, you never had enough airplanes. You'd get a mission in the morning or we usually flew two missions a day. And he'd go on, Frank Walton would say, "Hey, look, you're going to fly this and you're going to fly that." And I had a reputation for having extremely good eyesight, which I did in those days. And Boyington was anxious to find Japs to shoot down because sometimes we go up on fighter missions and sweeps and they wouldn't be a Japanese in the air. And, so one, day he says, "Bourgeois, you are leading the mission today." And he was flying on my wing. In fact, I have a photo in that thing there I took from the cockpit. And that's the way he was. He was aggressive and he wanted to get into some sort of action. And that day we went up there, we're right over Bougainville area, and I'm looking up and there are two Japs way up high and the two Japs way down low. And I told the leader of the other division, I said, you take the two up there and I'll take the two down there. And we rolled over. We never could catch these two guys. They went into a cloud and disappeared. And when we got back, Boyington chewed my fanny out. He says, "Why didn't you just stay there and let them come at us so we could get them?" But that's the way he was. He was really aggressive.

Maj. J. Ned Corman:

My given name is initial J, initial only. Ned, N-E-D, Corman.

I'll tell you what Boyington used to do that just impressed the hell out of me. The duty officer always assigned a brand new airplane to Boyington whenever he was flying, and Boyington invariably would take that number off the board and put it down with one of the new boys and give it, his new airplane, to the new boys because he said, "I'll fly those old clunkers, I'll fly circles around them anyway." And that's exactly what he did. And I was in two squadrons after that. And there wasn't one CO that ever did that. That's what made him stand out in my mind.

It's pretty hard to put it into meaningful words, but the fact that he didn't take the greater-than-anyone's attitude. I was in two squadrons following 214 And the CO of each of those squadrons had his own airplane and nobody touched that airplane. Well as I repeated before Boyington would take the oldest clunker. In fact, you'd see him at times up there wiping oil off the windshield. He had the old airplane. But he always gave it to the new guys. And when you have a CO like that, there isn't anything you won't do for him.

He had wrestled somebody and I don't know whether he had his leg broken or whether the other guy had his leg broken, but it ended up with a broken leg. But he was always into that sort of trouble. But I never saw that side of him personally. When I saw him, he was very much a professional fighter pilot and always with the good of his squadron at heart. And there wasn't a man in that squadron that wouldn't lay down his life for Pappy Boyington. And that's more, all I can say about it. I never ran into a comparable pilot anywhere. There may be a few captains we had in Pan Am that's compared to that but if you see how a man operates in combat, you're pretty much bonded with him.

This man that he referred to as Colonel Lard at Espiritu Santo was just... A complete ass. And when we went up for our tour of combat, he had put Boyington in hack because Boyington had gone down to see General Moore at Wing Headquarters with a Jeep. And he was unauthorized to take that Jeep off the base. And so this Colonel Lard put Boyington on report, put him in hack, restricted him to his quarters. But that didn't stop us from having parties with him, but that's the kind of guy he was. So he had influence in the right places.

He was just a God to us. I'm sure you've heard that description of it before, but Boyington had a knack of surrounding himself with the pilots. He liked the way they flew. And if you weren't aggressive, you didn't fly with Pappy Boyington. But he also, I had flown tail-end Charlie on him. And normally when you're flying with any other group leader, you could go along with normal power settings. With Pappy Boyington, you had to have everything firewall there because he'd turn inside of you. And his first thing, you sucked way flat out to the outside. So he wasn't easiest pilot to fly on, and this is in a formation attitude, but you had to be aware of what he had to anticipate, which way he was going to turn or you'd be out in the cold.

LTC Henry Mayo Bourgeois:

We went to Sydney on R&R after every combat tour. Boyington, he was in 122, and went down with us the first time. And we all stayed at the Royal Australian Hotel in Sydney and everybody had their rooms. We never saw Boyington but at the party at night, I don't know what he did during the day. But one of the interesting things at the hotel was they had a bar. And the rules in Australia at that time was the bar opened, say like 4:30, and it had to close at 5:30 and they rationed whiskey and booze and stuff like that. And you'd go into the bar early, they'd open the door and there was a waitress there called Frieda, big blonde, buxomest girl, jolly and all that stuff. And you'd go up to Frieda and say, "I'm going to have four scotches."And she'd pour four scotches and put them out there. And Boyington would be there and he'd say, "I want six bourbons." And she'd pour them six bourbons, and everybody in the squadron would do the same thing that was there. So as soon as the bell rang, you paid her whatever the bill was, and you started belting him down. So hopefully to get another one before they had to close the bar, and mostly it was all men in the bar. I don't think women were allowed in this bar. And as soon as the bar closed, you'd walk out, Boyington would have some lady waiting for him always. Or he'd pick up one. And the men were all gone and women were looking for fun. And they were a lot of underage girls there, which had fake IDs.

The last time was after our first Black Sheep combat tour, and we're flying down on this transport from New Caledonia to Sydney, and we're talking in the back of the airplane and Boyington says, "You know what I'm going to do this thing?" He says, "I'm going to screw five times a day while we're there." And he disappeared. We didn't see him for the whole week, and we didn't see Frieda at the bar at night. So on the way back, I'm in the same airplane and I said, "Well, Greg, did you do it?" I always called him Greg. Everybody else called him Pappy. And he said, "I sure did."

He really didn't care about saluting. He didn't respect rank. I think if he liked you as a pilot, then that was your gold star. But as far as administrative stuff, he never involved. Never involved. I don't know if Bolt told you about coming back from that Sydney trip. We all tried to bring back cases of beer and booze and stuff like that. And we got to the Sydney airport for the Marine to fly us up into Caledonia. We had our baggage and everything else and these cases of beer. And the pilot says, "You can't take that. It's going to overload the airplane." And Boyington argued with him and argued with him, and the pilot says, "Look, you can't take it. I'm not going to take you. You can stay here." Now, Boyington says, "Boys, drink the beer." We all sat around and drank beer and emptied the bottles. And I think that was the last time I saw him in the islands.

Maj. J. Ned Corman:

Listen, he was the last person in the world that we thought would ever be shot down, and it was a shock to all of us when he was, but his favorite [inaudible] "Don't worry about me, I'll meet you in a bar in San Diego or San Francisco." And that's exactly what happened.

I believe he came in from Honolulu in some kind of transport. And when he walked off that airplane, that's just like a dream because none of us ever believed that he was dead. We had heard rumors that he was alive, and I don't know how that ever got out, but we all questioned him. We knew he'd had a drinking problem and we said, "What did you do all the time?" I think was a prisoner for 20 months. And so we asked him, "What did you do for booze?" He says, "I dried up a little," he says, "But I scraped everything," he says, "I was so hungry that I scraped everything off of anything that stuck on the wall, I ate." He said, "It was tough." And they beat him up. They literally hammered him with baseball bats and I guess loosened some teeth because I can... Pappy, I'm sure he was... He always antagonist. He was just a battler. You can't ever say he was anything else. That's the man I knew.

LTC Henry Mayo Bourgeois:

Yeah, the word spread through the Marine Corps in a hurry. And I was really kind of upset that it happened. And then the story about how many he shot down 26, 28 or whatever it was, was in all the papers and the reports and things. Then what else can you do? You got your own job in the States. So I didn't pay too much attention to him. But when he got out of prison camp after the war and then flying him back to the United States, I was stationed at Marine Air Base at El Toro, California down by Santa Ana. The Marine Corps said, where getting a squadron together in San Francisco to welcome Boyington home Chance Vought paid for everything, but the Marine Corps flew everybody, every Black Sheep they could get to San Francisco for a three-day, wild-ass party. And then I learned all these other things from word of mouth, from Boyington and other people.

Well, it was hilarious. Everybody's carrying him around on their shoulders and the band playing and the whole bit. It was wild. And of course the Life Magazine people were all around taking pictures and publicity people and public iterations. Then we went to the hotel. It was a three-day, wild-ass drunken party. Finally, Sunday afternoon we had to go back and go to work.

After his return after the war in San Francisco, I didn't see him again. He went his way and I had my job in the Marine Corps until I retired and went to work for the Singer Company. And I was sent down to Dallas-Fort Worth area where they were building F-16s. I forget the company. And Boyington had was invited as a speaker to a management group and they knew I was coming down. I was a Black Sheep. They invited me there to be part of the... I didn't give a presentation, but I just introduced and all that thing. And Boyington was down there selling his book and the whole [inaudible 00:44:55] and after the dinner and everything was over, and he and I were staying in the same hotel with his fourth wife, I think, Jo.

And we sat down in the bar and started the talk. And I think I drank coffee until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. We didn't talk about the war. We talked about family and our lives and what our kids were doing, philosophy of life and things like that. I got very close to him that night. And then from there he went to various air shows and my son up in Chicago area, he was up there at one time and he went to the air show and he went up to Boyington and he says, "My father is Henry Bourgeois." And Boyington got up, "Boo, boo," and he shook his hand and sign books for him and everything else.

And I met Boyington again at a New Jersey air show a little later we spent another evening together talking. We got a little bit into the war then, but not much. He was saying that he thought people were getting to not believe his combat record. And he said he was disappointed about that, but he says, "I did it. And I'm proud of it," words to that effect.

This was after he got out of the booze bottle and he says, "I miss so much in my life in those years when I was in the bottle all the time, I really didn't care about anything." But he says, "Now I find I miss so much." He had a son, I believe was in the Air Force then he says, "I'm so proud of that boy." And I think he had a daughter that was married too, and he was so happy to have met Jo that got him out of the bottle. And he says, "I feel almost religious right now." Although I'm sure he didn't go to church, but maybe he did. But in his own way, he had really changed.

We were invited to the Smithsonian in Washington DC where they were unveiling a Corsair they had restored and they invited all the Black Sheep there. And we went there, they rolled out the Corsair and everybody got in the cockpit and I had my wife there and she got in the cockpit and Boyington was there with everybody else. And they had a reception in the Smithsonian. And then he gave a presentation about his experience in the war and the Corsair and his pilots, everybody was his pilot. And that was the last time I saw him.

Maj. J. Ned Corman:

I didn't really know him when we were out there in combat. I got to know Pappy when he came up to Reno to those air shows. He used to stay at my house up at Incline Village and he never had more than a cup of coffee, black coffee. And that's when I got a chance to sit down and get to know Pappy the man. And I loved what I heard. He was a man's man. You could find no fault with him that I could find.

He had a van with a Congressional Medal of Honor license plate on it. And somebody, my neighbors used to come by, "Who do you know that's a Congressional Medal of honor?" And I'd tell them about Pappy. But we spent a lot of time together. I really was able to sit down and get to know him. And that's one of the reasons why I ended up on that odyssey down to see him when he had cancer because I knew he was in bad shape.

We went down to the hospice. We went primarily, we had seen Jo, his wife had a home in California. So Fred and I showed up there. We hadn't known that we were coming, but we ran into each other on the way into the hospice. And we walked in, and here's Pappy in this bed. And he's just horribly emaciated, just skin and bones. But let me tell you, he got up, got the nurse to dress him, and sat in a chair and talked to us. And I leaned over to him and said, "Pappy, you get your butt out of here. You've been in tougher spots than this." And he says, "Ned," he said, "There are times when you get in a situation where the odds are completely against you and you can't do a thing about it." And I walked out of that room and the tears were just... I couldn't stop crying. It just affected me tremendously. You just don't expect to see a man that was that tough just being skin and bones. It's amazing what cancer can do to a person.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mayo “Hank” Bourgeois, and Major J. Ned Corman. To hear Bourgeois’ personal stories from his service, check out our episode titled “Inside the Black Sheep Squadron”. The link is in the show description.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.