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If there was a name that brought instant recognition to the
minds of Army Air Corps veterans of the Southwest Pacific, it's that of Lt.
Colonel Paul Irvin "Pappy" Gunn. Pappy Gunn made an impression on
the minds of those who knew them - and those who only knew of him by
word of mouth - that has remained with them forever. He was one of the
true characters of World War II and a full-fledged hero to boot, but
he was more than that as well.
Paul Irvin Gunn was born in Quitman, Arkansas, a small
town north of Little Rock, in 1899. He saw his first airplane
at a tender age and immediately decided that was what he was
going to do when he grew up. World War I broke out just as he entered
adolesence and by the time the United States entered the war, Paul was
seventeen years old and an expert mechanic. After being arrested for running moonshine, at the suggestion of the judge
the young PI Gunn joined the Navy and became an aviation machinists
mate, after initial training as - a cook! His mechanical aptitude had
led to a transfer to the motor pool, then an astutue chief machinist
recognized that he had a natural talent for mechanics and had him
transferred to the flight line as an aircraft mechanic. The war ended
before he
could realize his dream of becoming an aviator but he managed to learn to fly on
his own. He met his wife Clara while he was learning to fly.
When they were married a year later, they went on their honeymoon to Biloxi,
Mississippi in the Navy surplus seaplane Paul and a buddy had bought
and restored to flying condition. When PI's enlistment in the Navy ended in
1923, he was told that if he would reenlist he would be assigned to a new aviation program for enlisted aviators. His previous
flying experience served him well and he was soon recognized as one of the
best pilots in the Navy. As an enlisted aviator, he served as a fighter pilot
with the Navy's famous "Top Hat" fighter squadron and spent a
tour as a flight instructor at Pensacola, Florida. While instructing, PI Gunn
instructed some of the most famous names in Naval aviation, men who would rise to prominence in the World War II and
post-war Navy.
By the time America found itself in World War II, PI Gunn
had retired from the Navy and, after working for a time in Hawaii, had moved to
the Philippines where he was operating a small airline. A few days after World
War II broke out, the former enlisted naval aviator was impressed into
the United States Army. He was commissioned as an officer with the rank of
captain and his flight operation became the nucleus for a small
air transportation squadron charged with providing airlift to US military forces
in the Philippines. During the tragic early weeks of the war, PI
Gunn flew all over the Philippines in his Twin Beech light transports and the
makings of a legend was born. During his flights he often
dodged Japanese aircraft and was shot down over the jungle on one occasion. He
managed to walk out of the jungle to an airport that he
knew to be not far from his crash site and when he got there he found one of his
pilots off-loading supplies. While flying low over the jungles, PI Gunn thought about how low-level flying over the treetops
afforded an element of surprise and he speculated as to the damage an
airplane with a nose packed with guns could do to enemy ground
forces.
As the fall of the Philippines became apparent, PI Gunn was
ordered to fly a load of Far East Air Force staff officers to Australia. When he arrived, he was told to remain there
with the newly organized US Army forces. Since his wife - PI called her
Polly - and their children were with him in Manila, he was not happy
about the assignment. Before he left he gave Polly a wad of cash and instructed
her to not worry about him. After several uncertain weeks under Japanese occupation, Polly and the children would
be interned with other Americans and citizens of Allied nations by the
Japanese at Santo Thomas University for the duration of the war. After
he got to Australia, PI Gunn started fighting his own war, and began performing some truly amazing feats that probably exceeded the tall tales
that he became famous for telling to the young officers and enlisted men he came to know in coming years. Knowing that dozens of
young pilots were making their way south through the Philippines to
Mindanao, which was still in Allied hands, PI Gunn made an untold number of
flights from Australia back to the Philippines to deliver supplies and pick up pilots
and aircraft mechanics. Some of his flights were in his personal Twin Beech and
some were in Army Douglas transports. On one occasion
he flew a hastily repaired B-17 from Mindanao to Australia. Some, if
not most, of his flights were made without any kind of official authorization
but the men he brought out of the Philippines were grateful that he had
been there to pick them up. In January, 1942 right after a B-17 was
assigned to his ad hoc transport squadron, Americans in Java got word
that a Japanese fleet was just east of Borneo. PI rounded up a crew,
loaded the B-17 up with bombs and made seven attacks on the convoy, an
act for which he was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross. (The award was not approved.)
In
early 1942 the Army's Far East Air Force organized an Air Transport
Command in the Philippines and Captain P.I. Gunn was placed in command.
The new outfit consisted of a number of Douglas DC-2s and DC-3s
along with some Army C-47s and C-53s, both of which were militarized
versions of the DC-3. It also included a trio of converted B-24 Liberator
bombers that had been sent to Australia with crews trained for transport operations. Just what all PI Gunn and his crews did during this
period is not fully known and never will be, but the crews, particularly those flying the
B-24s, flew long and hazardous missions hauling supplies to the Philippines and
elsewhere in the Pacific and returning to Australia with
military evacuees. In addition to his flying, Captain Gunn took upon himself the
responsibility of finding repairable airplanes and organizing crews to repair them and pilots to fly them. Because of his
knowledge of the Pacific, he was called on to lead a formation of P-40s
north from Brisbane and then to Java. Once he got to Java, PI Gunn got into the war himself. According to
legend, he flew combat missions in Whirraway fighters with Australians at Rabaul until he was shot down and again found himself walking
out of the jungle. His son Nat relates that his father's hair turned white while he was surviving in the jungle and when
he returned to safety his friends started calling him "Pappy" because
he appeard to have aged. His hair did not stay white, however - after a few
weeks it had returned to its original color of brown.
Shortly after his arrival in Australia, Pappy Gunn became acquainted with Lt. Colonel James "Big Jim" Davies, a
dive-bomber pilot and the commander of the 27th Bomb Group. Davies and
his men had been on the way to the Philippines when the war broke
out and they had arrived without their airplanes. Davies and some of his pilots
were among those who were evacuated out of the Philippines when they were sent to Australia to pick up some Douglas A-24
"Dauntless" dive-bombers. Thinking they were to go back to the
Philippines, the A-24 crews instead were sent to Java. After General
Douglas MacArthur arrived in Australia and began reorganizing the
Allied forces, the A-24s went to New Guinea. Although the Navy version
of the "Dauntless" would play the major role in the Battle
of Midway, the airplane was too slow and poorly armed to survive if attacked by
Japanese fighters. The dive-bomber crews fought bravely
but were taking heavy casualties. When they returned to Australia after the
Allied defeat in Java, the 27th was disbanded and the men
were assigned to the recently arrived 3rd Attack Group and placed in command
positions in the squadrons due to their combat experience. The 3rd Attack Group had been equipped with Douglas A-20
light attack bombers but their airplanes had yet to arrive in Australia so the group continued to fight the Japanese with the
inadequate A-24s.
After returning to Australia, Pappy Gunn returned to his
air transport duties, but he spent much of his spare time hanging out with the
3rd Attack Group and helping the mechanics. During a flight to Melbourne, Pappy spotted a couple of dozen brand-new
North
American B-25 "Billy Mitchell" bombers sitting on the flight line of an
airfield he happened to fly over. Since they looked like combat
airplane, he landed to check them out. The airplanes had been consigned
to the Netherlands East Indies Air Force
but Java had fallen while the airplanes were enroute and the NEAF was
practically non-existent.
On the other hand, there was a contingent of American twin-engine
pilots at Charter Towers with no airplanes to fly. Pappy contacted the
3rd Attack Group and informed Big Jim Davies that there were some
brand-new B-25s at an airfield near Melbourne with nobody
to fly them. (Some accounts are that the B-25s had been delivered to
Brisbane but this is doubtful because they had been flown over from
Sacramento by civilian ferry pilots employed by Consolidated Aircraft
and the delivery point was Melbourne.) Thus began one of the most
humorous and unorthodox events of World War II. Pappy convinced Davies
to contact Colonel
Eubanks, the Far East Air Forces Bomber Command commander and obtain
"authorization" to pick up the airplanes. Fearing an international incident, Eubanks hesitated but gave Davies a letter
authorizing him to pick up the bombers. Davies and several of his pilots
loaded aboard Pappy's C-47 and flew down to Melbourne. When they got
there a rigid Army major at first refused to release the airplanes -
until Pappy threatened him with a courts martial! Davies and his men
jumped aboard the B-25s and flew them north.
As it turned out, no one had thought to get the bombsights
that had come with the bombers. Pappy jumped in a transport and
returned to
Melbourne, where he allegedly used the threat of force to obtain the
bombsights. (That the bombsights were in Melbourne is further evidence
that this is where Gunn and Davies "stole" the bombers. Bombsights are
aircraft equipment and were transferred to the NEIAF with the B-25s.)
Just what he actually did he never did tell and no one at Melbourne was willing to comment. Although he was still officially with the Air Transport Command, Pappy took charge of the
conditioning of the B-25s for combat, promising to have them ready in
"two days." It took a little longer but on April 5, 1942 the
3rd Attack Group flew the first B-25 combat mission in history as they attacked
the Japanese airfield at Gasmata. The following day Davies and
Gunn were called to Melbourne, along with one of the other "senior" officers in
the 3rd Attack Group. The three men were expecting to be called on the
carpet and perhaps arrested for stealing the B-25s from the Dutch, but
when they got there they were greeted by Brigadier General Ralph Royce, who was
in command of bombing operations in the Southwest Pacific. Royce had been directed to go back to the Philippines and carry
out offensive operations from Del Monte Field on Mindanao and the
B-25s afforded the means of doing so. As it turned out, only three B-17s and
eleven B-25s could be made ready for the mission. Gunn was given a verbal
order transferring him from the Air Transport Command to the 3rd Attack
Group as a maintenance officer and assigned to the mission. The fourteen bombers left northern Australia for Mindanao on April 11. Their
cabins were laden with supplies for the airmen who were stranded at
Mindanao and were still fighting the Japanese.
The men of the Royce Mission flew three missions from Del
Monte. While the three B-17s attacked Nichols Field outside Manila, the
B-25s carried out two missions against Japanese facilities at Cebu City.
Pappy Gunn led one element on the second Cebu mission and was
assigned to attack the harbor. He and his wingmen are reported to have destroyed at least one
Japanese motor launch and badly damaged a merchantman. The bombers were escorted by P-40s that were operating out
of Del Monte. Reasoning that the attack could have only come
from Mindanao, the Japanese attacked Del Monte several times. One of the B-17s
was destroyed and the other two were damaged but
the B-25s were well-hidden and escaped the attacks unscathed. The B-25s
flew another mission the following day but Pappy Gunn was not on it. He
had been ordered to Panay to pick up Japanese-American intelligence
agents and a Chinese officer who had been flown out of Corregidor
earlier in the day. (They were supposed to be flown on to Del Monte by
Major Bill Bradford, the commander of an ad hoc transport squadron at
Del Monte, but Bradford's engine had problems and had to be repaired.)
But when General Royce learned that Japanese ground forces were within
24 hours of the field, he decided it was time to abandon the field. The pilots
loaded as many American airmen aboard their airplanes as they
could and the B-25s departed for Australia. Pappy Gunn was the last to leave and
the last to arrive - the long-range fuel tank for his bomber
had been shot-up by Japanese strafers and he had to make an emergency
repair. According to reports, he remained on Mindanao for perhaps as
long as two weeks flying combat missions. A little-known interview of
Major Bradford indicates that Gunn remained at Del Monte for several
days to fly high priority passengers Bradford was sent to fly out of
Corregidor to Australia. Bradford made it to Corregidor on what had
been called a "suicide mission" but cracked-up on takeoff. Bradford
told an Air Corps interviewer that he was expecting to be flown out of
Del Monte on one of the Royce mission B-25s but was stranded on
Corregidor. He was flown out on a Navy PBY that made the last flight
out of Corregidor.
The 3rd Attack Group used the B-25s with great success
against the Japanese but there weren't enough of them to go around, so some
crews continued to fly combat in the A-24s. But a disasterous mission in
New Guinea in late July led Big Jim Davies to decide to discontinue operations with the dive-bombers. Prior to leaving Savannah
Georgia, the 3rd had been flying A-20 light bombers and their airplanes finally began arriving in Australia in April but when
the bombers were off-loaded from the ship, they were discovered to have
been shipped without either guns or bomb racks. When Pappy Gunn inspected the
A-20s he advised Davies that the gun installations were
inadequate - he wanted to remove the bombardier's station and pack the nose full
of .50-caliber machineguns and use them for low-level attack. As it were, Australia had
plenty of .50-caliber guns around, wing-guns that had been salvaged from wrecked
fighters. Gunn worked up a nose package of six machineguns, with four in the fuselage and one mounted on either side. He
was in the midst of the modifcations when Major General George
C. Kenney arrived at Charter Towers on an inspection tour in early August. Kenney had recently
taken command of Allied air forces in Australia, including American units - which he organized into
the United States Fifth Air Force - and was getting acquainted with his men. He
found Pappy Gunn working on the A-20s and when the installation was explained to him, he asked if they could build bomb
racks that could carry the 27-pound fragmentation bombs he had himself
developed before the war, and which had recently arrived in Australia. Pappy
said it would be no problem - the concept of spreading fragmentation bombs all over a Japanese airfield or troop positions
appealed to him.
Kenney was very impressed with Pappy Gunn; he recognized
that he had just met a fellow innovator. And, he realized that Gunn's
talents
were too many to be restricted to a single unit. He informed Major Gunn
that, effective immediately, he was relieved of his duties with the troop carriers and was transferred to his personal staff.
However, he could remain at Charter Towers long enough to train the Army
mechanics to complete the installation of the guns and bomb racks on the
A-20s.
Historians - particularly naval historians - consider the
Battle of Midway as the turning point of World
War II. That's when a formation of SBD "Dauntless" dive bombers got lucky and
sank most of the Japanese carrier force in five minutes. But after
Midway it was more than a year before the US Navy
was able to go on the offense in the Pacific. The Army went on the offensive in
New Guinea as soon as Pappy Gunn completed his installation of
the nose guns and the para-frag bomb
racks in the A-20s. The real turning point of the war was when Pappy Gunn
decided to turn the A-20 from a light bomber into a formidable ground
attack weapon.
The A-20 gunships were a feather in Pappy Gunn's hat, but
an even more powerful weapon was to follow. While enroute to Australia, General Kenney had experimented with the
concept of skip-bombing and had
put his aide, Major Bill Benn, in command of a B-17 squadron with instructions
to develop low-level attack methods. But the four-engine
bombers were lacking in forward firing guns and were practically defenseless against Japanese deck gunners so
Kenney ordered that they only attack at night. Pappy Gunn had suggested that
once the A-20s had been modified, the practice should be carried
over to the B-25s. Kenney recognized that
the B-25 modification might be the best solution to his problem of finding a
"commerce destroyer" that could be effective against Japanese
shipping in low-level daylight attacks. After the A-20 conversion proved itself, he gave Pappy
permission to begin work on a similar conversion for the B-25s. By December the project was nearly
complete.
Kenney picked a new arrival, Major Ed Larner, who had risen from first
lieutenant to major in just a few weeks because of his daring in
low-level attack, to take command of the 90th Bombardment Squadron, the
unit he had picked to operate the modified B-25s. He introduced Gunn to
Larner and told him to teach the young officer how to skip-bomb. When
the squadron was fully equipped, it moved to New Guinea to wait.
In early March 1943, the converted B-25s teamed up with the
modified A-20s in the historic Battle of the
Bismarck Sea. The epic battle is recorded by US Navy historian Samuel Eliot
Morison as "The most devastating attack of the war by airplanes
against ships." The first low-level attack on the
morning of March 3 literally stopped the convoy dead in the water. A second
attack later in the day finished the job. Not a single one of the twelve
transports in the convoy survived the battle - one
cripple was sunk by a Navy PT boat - and four of the eight destroyer escorts
were also sunk. Suddenly Pappy Gunn's fame spread to no less of a
portal than the War Department in Washington, DC. Army Air Corps chief General Henry H. Arnold wanted to
bring Pappy back to the
States to work with the engineers at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio but General
Kenney would have none of that. He agreed to allow Pappy go come to the
States on temporary duty - during his visit
Pappy showed the engineers at Wright Patterson and the North American factory
how to convert the B-25 into a gunship. During his visit to the
factory at Long Beach he was shown North American's own conversion - the installation of a 75-millimeter cannon in
the nose of a B-25.
Shortly after he returned to Australia the first
cannon-equipped B-25 arrived and Kenney gave Pappy
permission to test it in combat and make the necessary changes to ready the new
airplanes for operational duty. Pappy was impressed with the Big Gun and
made several spectacular kills with it - and he also made several
changes to the design, including the addition of
waist and tail guns. In reality, although the B-25G is held in high regard among
aviation enthusiasts today, it was actually not very effective and
most of the cannons were removed and replaced with .50-caliber guns.
As the war moved further north, General Kenney came up with
new ways to utilize the resourcefulness of his "secret weapon." Before the invasion of the
Philippines, he put Pappy in charge
of a special battalion made up of aircraft mechanics and construction engineers who would
go onto the beach immediately after the invasion to set up a
forward airfield and then support the arriving fighters and medium and light bombers. Shortly after the Leyte landings,
Pappy's experience as a sailor
saved the lives of a large number of naval aviators when the carrier
Princeton was
sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. With their ships sunk and running
out of fuel, the only place the Navy pilots could go was the new airfield that was under construction at Tacloban. Night had fallen and there were no lights on the runway - but Pappy
Gunn was there with a pair of flashlights. Using the landing signals he had learned as a naval aviator,
Pappy guided the Navy fighters
to safe landings on shore. (A Marine Corps aviation history claims the
airplanes were guided in by a Marine general who had gone ashore with
the Air Corps contingent as an advisor/observer.)
Pappy had been fighting his own personal war since leaving
the Philippines. His wife and children were
all in the hands of the Japanese and the knowledge burned inside him in spite of
his jovial exterior. Pappy had a reputation among the young officers
and enlisted men as a teller of tall tales
and he was always ready with a story. He was also looked on as a hero, and a
hero he truly was. General Kenney was afraid that Pappy would decide to
take the war to the Japanese on Luzon
himself and he issued orders that Gunn was not to be allowed inside an
airplane.
The war ended for Pappy Gunn when he was severely wounded
by fragments from a white phosporous bomb that was dropped on the airfield at Tacloban. A bomb
fragment buried itself in his
shoulder, causing great pain and rendering the arm useless. Pappy was evacuated
to Australia
and remained in convalesence until the end of the war. When US troops
landed on Luzon, General Douglas MacArthur personally ordered a "flying
wedge" of the 1st Cavalry Division to liberate Santo Thomas Internment
Camp, where the Gunn family was being held. Col. Dave Hutchinson,
commander of the 308th Bombardment Wing, a special unit that controlled
operations in forward areas, went with them to find the Gunn family.
Two weeks later MacArthur visited the camp and met the family, then put
them on an airplane bound for Australia to join the dad who had become
famous throughout the Pacific during the preceeding three years.
After World War II ended, Pappy Gunn
returned to the Philippines and resumed his work with the Philippines Air Lines,
then with his
own charter company. His biggest customer was the US government, which
contracted with his airline to deliver cargo and passengers to areas
where it didn't want to have a public presence. He was killed in an
airplane crash while trying to avoid a tropical thunderstorm in 1957. His remains were returned to the United States and
interred at the US Navy cemetary at Pensacola Naval Air Station, where he had spent much of his
naval career. But his memory
still lives in the hearts and minds of those who knew him.
The Gunn Family Story Needs To Be Told - Like on Facebook.
The following books might be of interest to Pappy Gunn fans. John P.
Henebry knew him in the Southwest Pacific. Nathan Cannon is the pen
name of his son Nathaniel. Where The Hell is Indonesia Anyway tells the
story of the Gunn's involvement in US covert operations in Indonesia in
the 1940s.
A recent book about the Gunn family:
Last Updated April 27, 2017