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system—aggression. He often advocated that our fighters be stripped of their camouflage coating and left their natural silver color; it would make it easier for a fight to begin, he said. With the camouflage on our planes, an enemy formation might not see us, and a chance for a fight would be lost.
    As it turned out, the Black Sheep had plenty of opportunities to fight.
    That night, we all gathered in our hut to talk over plans, to sing, and to enjoy a general gabfest.
    â€œI think we should have a name for our squadron,” someone suggested.
    The idea was instantly accepted and we began to toss around one name after another. We agreed at once that we did not want one of theWalt Disney bugs, bees, and bunnies types of names that were so prevalent. Then someone said:
    â€œHow about Boyington’s Bastards?”
    After all, our squadron had been slapped together from replacement and pool pilots. Our skipper had been told he’d never fly again. We’d had practically no training as a squadron. We’d been assigned ground and administrative echelons, but they’d been left at Espiritu Santo.
    The name fit us perfectly.
    The next day I told Jack DeChant, the Marine Corps public relations officer in the Island Group Headquarters, about our choice.
    â€œThat won’t do,” he said. “You’ll have to find a more printable name.” The press was considerably more straitlaced in those days than it is now.
    When I reported this to the boys, we again got our heads together and came up with the name “Black Sheep.” It told somewhat the same story.
    Next, of course, we had to have an emblem, and after further discussion we worked out a heraldry shield with its top formed by the cowl and inverted gull-wings of the Corsair. Diagonally across the shield we put a bar sinister, the heraldry sign for bastard. In the upper left we had a woebegone, lopeared black sheep; in the lower right we put our squadron number—214—and finished off with a circle of stars in the center. Bill Case drew a preliminary draft, and then Pen Johnson, a Marine combat correspondent, produced a beautiful original for us. With a name and an emblem, we began to feel more like a unit.
    The first combat flight for the newly named Black Sheep came on 14 September. Munda airstrip had been taken by the Marines, although fighting was still going on around it. The earlier Marine pilots had written a glorious page in aviation history for us to carry on: between 7 December 1941 and that date nearly two years later, Marine airmen had shot down more than half of all the aircraft destroyed in the entire Pacific area—more than the Army, Navy, and New Zealand Air forces combined.
    So it was with a mixed feeling of anxiety and satisfaction that Doc Reames and I watched 24 of our Black Sheep (four of them in borrowed planes) take off on this first mission. They were to escort Army B-24s to bomb Kahili, strongest of the five Japanese airfields on Bougainville.
    Shortly before noon, our planes began to come back and circle in the landing pattern. Then the boys were in the ready room, and I beganto piece together the story of the flight. The B-24s had dropped most of their bombs in the water off the end of the strip; no enemy aircraft were encountered and very little antiaircraft fire.
    The boys were a little disappointed.

 
7 | “Zeros Spilled Out of the Clouds”
    At one o’clock in the afternoon of 16 September 1943, Pappy Boyington taxied to the end of the white coral runway, gunned his engine, and sped out over the blue waters of the bay off the Russell Islands. Twenty-three other Black Sheep followed in smooth order. The 24 planes got off the ground in just seven minutes.
    This was to be a strike on Ballale, a strategically located island in the bay off southern Bougainville. Its airfield was operational, and the whole island was solid with antiaircraft positions. Black Sheep pilots were to act as high