BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP (384 pp.)—"Pappy" Boyingfon—Putnam ($4.50).
"If this story were to have a moral, then I would say: 'Just name a hero and I'll prove he's a bum.'"
In this long, rambling autobiography, one of World War II's authentic heroes does his best to prove that he was also a bum. Gregory ("Pappy") Boyington's saga begins in the summer of 1941, when he was a Marine officer and a flying instructor on the naval air base at Pensacola. He was, as usual, restless. "I was forever going somewhere but never getting anywhere. For the most part I was always leaving some geographical location just prior to my being asked to leave." Marine Corps Headquarters was getting tiresome about the growing difference between his debts and his income, there were frowns from his superiors because of his drinking, and the chance of getting promoted from first lieutenant to captain seemed slim indeed. Then he met a fast-talking World War I pilot who had come to Pensacola to recruit volunteers for General Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. Boyington instantly sensed that it was time to be going somewhere. Within days he had resigned from the Marine Corps and was organizing a farewell drunk before leaving for Burma.
Boyington soon had learned to regret his impulse. The pay that had seemed so attractive—$675 a month, plus $500 for each Japanese plane—bought familiar pleasures: whisky and women. But though the Tigers were all technically civilians, Greg found himself jousting with superiors again. There was the old, retread captain who turned the boys out for a military muster every morning, and the group adjutant in Toungoo who threatened so many of his men with so many courts-martial that Boyington suspected "he must have been at least one jump ahead of a few himself in his military days." There was Chennault himself, who "thought his face was a piece of Ming-dynasty chinaware he was afraid might break if he were to show emotion of any kind."
But there were also P-4Os to fly. With terrifying shark teeth painted on their long, snarling snouts, they held their own and better with Jap Zeroes from Kunming to Thailand. And in them, Greg Boyington learned the unforgiving trade of the fighter pilot. He was an ace when he heard that the entire outfit was about to be drafted into the Army. By then, Boyington suspected that "Laughing Boy" Chennault was old-school Army, and had no use for marines. ("I shouldn't think he would even want a dead marine's body stinking up his precious China.") So, just ahead of General Chennault's efforts to get him into the new 10th Air Force, U.S.A., Greg Boyington beat it out of China and applied for reinstatement in the U.S. Marine Corps. In January 1943 he sailed for the South Pacific, a major in the Marines.