Pappy Boyington, VMF-214 Black Sheep Squadron, and the Corsair Pilot Who Won the Medal of Honor While Listed as Dead

Gregory “Pappy” Boyington led the VMF-214 Black Sheep Squadron to one of the most remarkable records of the Pacific air war - 97 confirmed aerial kills in roughly 84 days of combat operations - before being shot down over Rabaul in January 1944 and spending nearly two years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. He came home to find the President had already awarded him the Medal of Honor. He received it standing on his own feet in October 1945. With 28 confirmed aerial victories, he remains the highest-scoring Marine fighter pilot of World War II.

Who Was Gregory “Pappy” Boyington?

Gregory Boyington was born in 1912 in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. By every official measure, he was not what the Marine Corps considered a model officer. He drank too much, fought too readily, and had a gift for getting crossways with authority. He had three children by his mid-twenties and a first marriage that did not survive the strain.

What he had, unmistakably, was the ability to fly. He came up through ROTC at the University of Washington, earned his commission, and trained at Pensacola. He flew biplanes first, then the Grumman Wildcat and Brewster Buffalo. The touch was there from the beginning. His instructors recognized it. His squadron mates recognized it. Boyington recognized it too, which was part of his problem - a man who knows he is the best in the room does not always have patience to pretend otherwise.

Boyington and the Flying Tigers

By 1941, Boyington was in serious debt, technically absent without leave from the Marine Corps, and signing on with Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group in China - the Flying Tigers. He flew P-40s over Burma and the Salween River alongside men who would become legends of the Pacific war.

Boyington claimed six kills with the AVG. The official record credits him with three and a half. He disputed that number for the rest of his life. When the AVG disbanded in the summer of 1942, Boyington returned home, was reinstated in the Marine Corps, and appeared to be headed for a desk job. Then he got his hands on a Corsair.

The Vought F4U Corsair: The Airplane the Navy Didn’t Want

The Vought F4U Corsair originated as a Navy contract in 1938. Vought’s chief engineer Rex Beisel faced an immediate problem: the most powerful available radial engine, Pratt & Whitney’s R-2800 Double Wasp rated at 2,000 horsepower, required a propeller 13 feet 4 inches in diameter. A conventional straight-wing design would have placed the landing gear struts through the ceiling of every carrier hangar afloat.

Beisel’s solution was the inverted gull wing. Bend the wings down and then back up, and the gear struts become short enough to clear the deck, the propeller clears the ground, and the airplane looks like nothing else in the sky. The Corsair first flew in 1940. Test pilots recorded a top speed of 417 miles per hour - faster than anything in the American inventory at the time.

The Navy still could not use it. The long nose ahead of the cockpit blocked the pilot’s sight line on carrier final approach, making arrested landings too dangerous to standardize. The Navy sent the Corsair to the Marines and told them to sort it out from land bases. The Marines sorted it out. By mid-1943, the Corsair was the dominant fighter over the Solomon Islands. Japanese pilots called it Whistling Death - the name came from air flowing through the wing leading-edge oil cooler inlets at high speed, a distinctive shriek that carried for miles across the Pacific sky.

The Formation of VMF-214 and the Black Sheep

In September 1943, Marine aviation faced a logistics mismatch in theater. A large number of replacement pilots had arrived with nowhere to go - the established squadrons were full. The solution was to stand up a new unit and fill it with whoever was left over. They designated it VMF-214.

The pilots named themselves the Black Sheep. The name was unofficial and embraced without apology. They were the cast-offs and castaways, the men no established squadron had claimed. Boyington took command and told them exactly what they were going to do with that reputation: bury it under the wreckage of Japanese aircraft.

How Boyington Flew and Led the Black Sheep

VMF-214 flew from a series of forward strips carved from jungle mud and crushed coral - Munda, Vella Lavella, and later Bougainville. The conditions were miserable. Their primary target was Rabaul on New Britain, the largest Japanese air base in the Pacific south of Truk.

Boyington flew every mission he could get himself assigned to. He was 30 years old when he checked out in the Corsair - ancient by fighter pilot standards of that war, which is how he earned the name Pappy from pilots barely old enough to shave. His tactical doctrine was straightforward: use the Corsair the way it was built to be used. Hit fast, hit hard, preserve your energy, stay fast, and never enter a slow turning fight with a Zero. The Zero would win that fight every time. The Corsair was a pure energy fighter, and flown correctly, it was more lethal than anything Japan could put over the Solomons.

The Black Sheep’s Combat Record

In roughly 84 days of combat operations, VMF-214 destroyed 97 enemy aircraft in the air, damaged more than 100 others, sank a destroyer, and wrecked shipping and shore installations across the theater. They lost six pilots.

The numbers are remarkable on their own. The context makes them more so: these were men who had been given an airplane the Navy had rejected and told to figure it out.

Boyington Shot Down Over Rabaul

By January 1944, Boyington’s confirmed score stood at 22 kills with the Marines. Combined with his disputed AVG credits, he had matched or potentially broken the Marine record of 26 held by Joe Foss, depending on which number was used. The Marine Corps and the press back home were watching.

On January 3, 1944, Boyington led a fighter sweep over Rabaul. His Corsair was hit. He was last seen going down over St. George’s Channel, the stretch of water between New Britain and New Ireland. His wingmen believed they may have seen him bail out, but no one could confirm it. The search found nothing. The Marine Corps listed him missing in action, then presumed dead.

President Roosevelt signed a posthumous Medal of Honor citation - the highest recognition the country could offer, awarded to a man with no known grave.

Twenty Months as a Prisoner of War

Boyington had in fact bailed out. He was in the water, wounded, burning under the Pacific sun, when a Japanese submarine surfaced and pulled him aboard. He was eventually transported to Omori camp on Tokyo Bay, one of the harshest POW facilities holding Allied personnel in Japan. The Japanese knew exactly who he was.

He endured what prisoners of war endure when their captors have decided the Geneva Convention does not apply - beatings, starvation, and sustained brutality - for twenty months, through the remainder of 1944 and into 1945. He survived through refusal to quit.

Boyington Comes Home

Japan surrendered in August 1945. When American forces moved through the prison camps, among the men walking out of Omori was a Marine colonel, gaunt and hollow-eyed, who had been listed as dead for nearly two years.

President Truman awarded Boyington the Medal of Honor in person in October 1945. Boyington received it standing on his own feet. He had heard about the posthumous award while still a prisoner. He intended to pick it up himself. The citation recognized his “superb airmanship, outstanding leadership, persistent aggressive fighting spirit, and great personal valor” - and documented 28 confirmed aerial victories, the most by any Marine pilot in the war.

After the War

Boyington spent the rest of his life the way many combat veterans do - carrying the weight of his experience and not always carrying it gracefully. He wrote a memoir, Baa Baa Black Sheep, that was unflinching about both the genius and the flaws. The book became a television series in the mid-1970s.

Boyington died in January 1988 at age 75. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

The Corsair he flew went on to serve in Korea, with the French Navy over Indochina, and in Central American air forces well into the 1960s. The last military examples were retired in 1969 - nearly 30 years after the prototype first flew. Restored, airworthy Corsairs still appear at airshows today, carrying the same whistle on approach and the same thunder at full power that Japanese pilots heard over the Solomons in 1943.

Key Takeaways

Gregory “Pappy” Boyington (1912–1988) was the highest-scoring Marine fighter ace of World War II, with 28 confirmed aerial victories.
The VMF-214 Black Sheep Squadron was assembled from replacement pilots no established squadron would take; under Boyington’s command, they destroyed 97 enemy aircraft in roughly 84 days, losing only 6 pilots.
The F4U Corsair’s inverted gull wing was an engineering solution to fit a 13-foot-4-inch propeller on a carrier-capable airframe; rejected by the Navy for carrier operations, it became the dominant fighter over the Solomon Islands in Marine hands.
Shot down over Rabaul on January 3, 1944, Boyington spent 20 months as a prisoner at Omori camp while the Marine Corps listed him as dead and President Roosevelt signed a posthumous Medal of Honor.
Boyington survived, returned home, and received the Medal of Honor in person from President Truman in October 1945 - insisting on collecting it himself.