Maj, USMC — World War II
Gregory Boyington was born on December 4, 1912, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, took his first airplane ride at age six, and grew up in Idaho and Tacoma, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1934 with a degree in aeronautical engineering, worked briefly as a draftsman and engineer at Boeing, and became a Marine Corps aviator in 1937. In 1941 he resigned his commission to fly with the American Volunteer Group — the famed “Flying Tigers” — fighting the Japanese in Burma and China.
Boyington rejoined the Marine Corps in September 1942 as a major and deployed to the South Pacific flying the F4U Corsair. In September 1943 he took command of Marine Fighting Squadron 214, a squadron assembled largely from replacement pilots that became famous as the “Black Sheep Squadron.” At 31, Boyington was a decade older than most of his pilots, who nicknamed him first “Gramps” and then “Pappy.”
The Medal of Honor citation covers Boyington’s service from September 12, 1943, to January 3, 1944, in the Central Solomon Islands, and credits him with personally destroying 26 Japanese aircraft. In one celebrated action on October 17, 1943, he led 24 Corsairs over the Japanese airfield at Kahili on Bougainville, circling the field to taunt some 60 enemy planes into the air; in the fight that followed, his squadron shot down 20 of them without losing a single aircraft. On January 3, 1944, on a fighter sweep over Rabaul, Boyington shot down his 26th plane, tying Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I record — before he himself was shot down into the Pacific.
Picked up by a Japanese submarine, Boyington spent some 20 months as a prisoner of war, held in secret and never reported to the Red Cross; one of his fellow prisoners at the Ōmori camp near Tokyo was submarine commander Richard O’Kane. Liberated on August 29, 1945, he received the Medal of Honor — awarded by the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt while Boyington was still missing — from President Harry S. Truman on October 5, 1945, along with the Navy Cross. He retired as a colonel in 1947 and told his story in the 1958 memoir Baa Baa Black Sheep, which inspired a television series in the 1970s. He died on January 11, 1988, in Fresno, California, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society