He took his first airplane ride at age six in his hometown of Coeur d'Alene. Sixty years later, in eighty-four days of combat in the Solomon Islands, the squadron he commanded destroyed two hundred and three Japanese aircraft. His friend at the burial said: "Ol' Pappy wouldn't have to go far to find a good fight."
A Pirep featured story · KCOE Coeur d'Alene - Pappy Boyington Field, Coeur d'Alene, ID
Gregory Boyington was born in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on December 4, 1912. He took his first airplane ride at age six, sitting next to a barnstormer named Clyde Pangborn who later became famous for flying the first non-stop Pacific crossing. The Boyington family moved to Tacoma when he was a boy. He wrestled and swam at Lincoln High School, won the Pacific Northwest intercollegiate middleweight wrestling title at the University of Washington, and graduated in 1934 with a degree in aeronautical engineering.
He joined the Marine Corps in 1936 and became a pilot. In 1941, with money trouble and a drinking problem, he resigned his commission to fly for the American Volunteer Group — Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers — in China and Burma. The AVG paid $675 a month plus $500 for every Japanese plane shot down. Boyington claimed six kills in Burma in 1941 and 1942. After Pearl Harbor he rejoined the Marines as a major.
In September 1943, after months of administrative billets, he was given command of a reconstituted Marine Fighter Squadron 214 in the South Pacific. He was thirty-one, a decade older than most of his pilots, who started calling him "Gramps" and then "Pappy." The 27 pilots flew F4U Corsairs from Espiritu Santo and later Vella Lavella. Boyington named them the Black Sheep. They publicly offered to shoot down one Japanese fighter for every World Series ball cap a major league team sent them. The St. Louis Cardinals sent 20. The Black Sheep returned 20 kill stickers.
On October 17, 1943, Boyington led 24 Corsairs over the Kahili airfield on Bougainville, where 60 Japanese fighters were based on the ground. He circled at 20,000 feet and goaded the enemy into the air. The Black Sheep shot down 20 of them and returned to base without losing a single Corsair. In 84 days of combat the squadron destroyed or damaged 203 enemy aircraft. Eight Black Sheep pilots became aces. Boyington personally finished with 28 confirmed kills.
On January 3, 1944, leading a sweep over Rabaul, Boyington was shot down after his 28th kill. The Marine Corps assumed he was dead. President Roosevelt awarded him the Medal of Honor in March 1944, in the belief that it was posthumous. He had actually been picked up by a Japanese submarine and was a prisoner of war. He spent the next twenty months in Japanese camps — Ofuna, then Omori near Tokyo, where he was held with the downed Olympic distance runner Louis Zamperini. He was liberated on August 29, 1945.
He retired as a colonel in 1947, wrote a 1958 bestseller called Baa Baa Black Sheep that became a hit 1970s television show, and died of lung cancer in 1988. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, next to the boxer Joe Louis. After the burial service, his friend Fred Losch looked at Louis's headstone and said, "Ol' Pappy wouldn't have to go far to find a good fight."
The Coeur d'Alene airport was renamed Pappy Boyington Field in 2007.