The Younger Generation

To military theorists the South Pacific was still a static battle area. But in the day-to-day run of patrols and minor battles, new heroes were born, new air tactics proved by flyers grown skillful and canny in the school of war.

Out from a Solomons base streaked 16 twin-tailed Army Lightning fighters, feathering their own wind-blown wakes as they hugged the water to stay out of the beams of Jap radiodetectors. Near the enemy base at Kahili, twelve of the pilots horsed back on their wheels, ripped skyward with whining turbosuperchargers to give top cover. The four near the water bored on, found unexpected game: three Jap bombers waddling home with a heavy cover of Zeros.

The bombers lurched frantically for the cover of their own antiaircraft. The Zeros piled into the Lightnings and both top covers swirled in a thundering dogfight. Down below, Lieut. Rex T. Barber whipped into a bomber, sawed off its tail with a burst of fire, knocked off a second as he pulled out of the attack.

The squadron commander, lean, black-eyed Captain Thomas G. Lanphier, tangled with a low-flying Zero, shot it down. He swung away, picked a bomber, shot it down too. Up above, the top-cover fight had broken off. A mission had been completed. The squadron whisked back to its Solomons base, wondered if it had nailed some Jap bigwig in the bombers.

Three weeks earlier, Lanphier's squadron had whipped into Poporang Island with six planes, wrecked twelve float-Zeros, disabled a destroyer in an attack so fierce and low that Barber left three feet of his wing tip in the destroyer's funnel.

After that one the Japs hit back, sent bombers and an escort of Zeros to shoot up the American base. Tommy Lanphier and four other Lightning pilots attacked eleven Jap fighters, pulled away and began to climb. At 35,000 feet, where the turbo-supercharged Lockheeds were still flying handily, they turned on the gasping Zeros. In a few seconds seven were plunging down in flames. The other four started downhill.

Just below them, at 25,000 ft., was a flight of Vought Corsairs. Their Marine pilots got all four Japs. And that was how Tommy's younger brother, Lieut. Charles Lanphier, U.S.M.C., who had just arrived in the Solomons, shot down his first enemy plane. Charley picked off one of the four that Tommy had run down his way. The coincidence made that day's combat reports remarkably fine reading for their father, Lieut. Colonel Thomas G. Lanphier Sr., a West Pointer who won his pilot's wings in World War I, later resigned to survey commercial air routes and is now on duty again with the General Staff in Washington.

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