Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots.

On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately, to pull a Japanese fighter off his wingman’s tail.

He was 24 years old, had 38 confirmed victories, and was two behind Richard Bong.

An ace in two days

McGuire left Georgia Tech and aeronautical engineering in his third year to join the Aviation Cadet Program in July 1941. His first combat posting was the Aleutians in 1942, flying P-39 Airacobras on patrols that produced nothing at all. He married Marilynn Giesler, known as Pudgy, that December.

Then he got a P-38 and went to New Guinea, and everything changed.

On 18 August 1943, escorting bombers over Wewak, he shot down two Ki-43 Oscars and a Ki-61 Tony. The next day, in the same patch of sky, he shot down two more Oscars. Five victories in two days.

Twelve thousand feet, snagged

The moment that should have ended him came on 17 October 1943 over Oro Bay.

McGuire saw a lone P-38 trailing smoke with at least seven Zeros on it. He dived into the middle of them and shot down three. The remaining four then had him, and shot his aircraft to pieces.

With his controls gone he went over the side, and his parachute harness snagged on something in the cockpit. He fell with the wrecked aeroplane from 12,000 feet to 5,000 feet, fighting to get free. He worked himself loose and got the canopy open at a thousand feet, landed in the water, and was picked up by a PT boat.

He had a 7.7mm bullet through his wrist and several broken ribs. Six weeks in hospital, a Silver Star and a Purple Heart, and back to the squadron.

Author John Bruning on the rivalry between Bong and McGuire, and what the competition did to the men in it.

The 1943 training film that taught new pilots to fly the P-38, restored in colour. McGuire wrote his own tactical manual on top of this.

The man who bossed Charles Lindbergh

One of the stranger details of McGuire’s war is that Charles Lindbergh, then in the Pacific as a civilian contractor, bunked with him for a period and flew several missions as his wingman.

Visitors remembered McGuire sending the most famous pilot on earth on errands, ordering him about as though he were a servant. Lindbergh was 41 and a national monument. McGuire was 23 and running a fighter squadron.

In May 1944 he took command of the 431st Fighter Squadron and was promoted major. That same month he wrote Combat Tactics In The Southwest Pacific Area for the Fifth Air Force, setting down what he had learned about how to fight and survive in a P-38. One of its principles was that the Lightning should not be turned against more agile Japanese fighters down low.

Seven in two days, and then a stall

Over Luzon on Christmas Day 1944 and Boxing Day, McGuire shot down seven Japanese aircraft. Those two days earned him the Medal of Honor. They also left him on 38, agonisingly close to Bong’s 40.

On 7 January he led four P-38s off Dulag Airfield on Leyte for a fighter sweep over northern Negros. The purpose of the sortie was victories.

Near an airstrip at Manapla they met a single Ki-43 Oscar. Its pilot was Warrant Officer Akira Sugimoto, an instructor with more than three thousand hours on the type, which is a great deal of experience to meet in an aeroplane everyone had learned to underestimate.

Sugimoto got behind Lieutenant Douglas Thropp. Major Jack Rittmayer fired at him. Sugimoto broke off and found himself behind McGuire and his wingman, Captain Edwin Weaver.

Weaver called that he was being attacked and tightened his turn to spoil the shot. McGuire eased his own turn out, deliberately making himself the easier target, to pull Sugimoto onto him. It worked. Then he hauled the turn in hard.

At three hundred feet, with drop tanks still fitted, the P-38 stalled, snap-rolled inverted and went into the ground. He very nearly recovered it. Had he jettisoned the tanks when the fight started, he might have.

What happened in the next four minutes

The fight did not stop when McGuire hit the ground.

Sugimoto was hit by Rittmayer’s fire, crash-landed in the jungle and was killed by Filipino guerrillas. Minutes later a Ki-84 Frank flown by Technical Sergeant Mizunori Fukuda came at Rittmayer head-on, shot his cockpit to pieces and killed him. Fukuda’s own aircraft was badly damaged by the two surviving P-38s, but he got it back to his airfield and survived the war.

Four aircraft went out. Two Americans and one Japanese pilot died within a few minutes of each other over a strip of the central Philippines.

Filipino witnesses reached the crash site immediately and secured his body so that it would not be taken. His remains were recovered by the US Army in 1949 and he was buried at Arlington National Cemetery on 17 May 1950. In 2007 the aviation archaeologist and former fighter pilot David Mason placed a memorial at the crash site on Negros.

Richard Bong, the man McGuire spent his last months chasing, and the record that stood at 40.

Fort Dix Army Air Force Base in New Jersey was renamed McGuire Air Force Base in 1948. The aircraft based there still carry a P-38 silhouette on their tails.

The uncomfortable part of the story is that the manoeuvre that killed him is the one the Medal of Honor cites. He broke his own rule at three hundred feet because his wingman was about to be shot down, and both things are true at once: it was the wrong decision, and it is why Weaver went home.

Sources: Congressional Medal of Honor Society; National Museum of the United States Air Force; 475th Fighter Group Historical Foundation; Martin, The Last Great Ace (1999); Bruning, Race of Aces (2020); Berg, Lindbergh (1998); Caidin, Fork-Tailed Devil (1968); David J. Mason via PacificWrecks.