They Told Him Never Dogfight a Zero – He Did It Anyway And…

 

The war had not yet begun when Henry “Hank” Bourgeois raised his hand and swore into the United States Marine Corps. It was September 1, 1941—his twentieth birthday—and America still clung to the uneasy illusion that it could stay out of the conflict tearing the world apart. Hank had joined for the same reason so many young men did: to fly. In those early days, the path from cadet to combat pilot stretched nearly two years, a grueling eighteen-to-twenty-month program that demanded perfect eyesight, iron nerves, and a mind sharp enough to calculate the impossible in seconds. But when Pearl Harbor fell, time itself seemed to collapse. The nation could no longer afford patience. The training pipeline, once meticulous and academic, became a crucible of speed.

“They cut out all the crap,” Hank would later say. Six months after beginning, he earned his wings.

By June of 1942, he was a Marine Corps pilot—a second lieutenant with no combat experience, barely out of his teens, but soon to be tested in the most unforgiving classroom on Earth. He was sent to North Island, California, just outside San Diego, for fighter training. It was here that he first fell in love with the aircraft that would carry him through the war—the F4F Wildcat, squat and sturdy, underpowered but unyielding. “She wasn’t pretty,” he admitted, “but she could take a beating.” He finished training that December, then boarded a transport ship bound for New Caledonia. From there, he moved through the stepping stones of the South Pacific—Espiritu Santo, the New Hebrides, Guadalcanal—names that would later define the blood and courage of a generation.

When Hank finally reached his first combat unit, Marine Fighter Squadron 122, the reality of war greeted him not with heroism, but with scarcity. There were too few planes, too few experienced men, too few chances to prove himself. The veterans got the combat missions. The new guys took what they could get. For Hank, that meant flying a photographic Wildcat, a modified F4F-7 armed with cameras instead of guns. “They gave me two or three of those runs,” he remembered, “over Munda, just taking pictures. A couple times we came back with holes in the fuselage.” The danger was real even on those quiet missions, the sky a constant threat. Every engine hum could mean death.

His first real taste of combat came not from a dogfight, but from a strafing run. A damaged Japanese destroyer had been spotted limping through the straits, and VMF-122 was sent to finish it. The Wildcat may have been outdated by then, but in the hands of a determined pilot, it was still lethal. The mission left him shaken and exhilarated—the first time he had seen tracer rounds fly both ways, the first time he realized how close death could feel at 250 knots.

But the Wildcat era was fading. In 1943, Hank’s second combat tour began—and with it came the aircraft that would make Marine aviation legend: the F4U Corsair. “We got eighteen of them,” he said, “not brand new, but close enough.” The Corsair was an entirely different animal—a monster of a plane, with a 2,000-horsepower engine and wings bent like a gull’s. Its nose seemed to stretch forever, and when the massive propeller turned, it looked like the plane wanted to tear free of gravity itself.

The first time Hank climbed into one, he had the pilot’s manual open on his lap, reading step by step as he went. The mechanic beside him had never seen one before either. They learned together, button by button, lever by lever. When the engine coughed to life, shaking the ground beneath them, Hank felt something primal ignite inside him. “It was a thrill,” he said softly, remembering that first roar decades later. “You could feel it in your bones.”

He logged barely seven hours in the Corsair before volunteering for his first night mission. Japanese submarines had been launching reconnaissance seaplanes under the cover of darkness, slow-moving silhouettes gliding above the harbor at Espiritu Santo. They were ghosts in the night sky—small, elusive, and dangerous. The call went out for a volunteer. Hank, eager and untested, raised his hand.

“They told me, go get it.” He smiled at the memory. “I said, yes sir.”

He took off into the dark, guided only by the shaky voice of a radar operator trying to vector him toward the intruder. The seaplane flew slow, almost lazily, while Hank’s Corsair was built for speed. He saw it once—just a shadow against the stars—but every time he tried to slow, he overshot it. The Corsair simply wouldn’t crawl. “I must’ve gone under that thing three times,” he said. “Couldn’t shoot. Too dark. Too fast. But it was a thrill, my first hunt in a Corsair.”

A few weeks later came his first real dogfight.

The mission was to escort dive bombers—SBD Dauntlesses—on a strike over Bougainville. Eighteen bombers, sixteen Corsairs for cover, climbing through a patchwork of tropical thunderheads. Over the radio, chatter was low and professional. The Japanese were expected, but no one ever really expected to live through the first time.

Then it happened.

“About twenty or thirty Japs jumped us,” Hank said. “It spread all over the sky, maybe ten miles by ten miles. You couldn’t tell who was who after a minute.”

The Mitsubishi Zeros were fast, nimble, and lethal at close range. Every Allied pilot was warned: never dogfight a Zero. Keep your speed. Keep altitude. Dive away if you must. Do not try to out-turn them. But combat doesn’t honor training manuals.

Hank’s leader that day was Captain Lundin. They were flying cover together when the sky erupted. Tracers streaked past his canopy. His radio crackled with chaos. Then—silence. His squadron had scattered.

A Zero latched onto his tail. Hank dove into a cloud, engine howling, praying the Japanese pilot would lose him in the white void. When he burst back into the sunlight, he was face-to-face with another Zero—barely a hundred yards ahead, so close he could see the pilot’s scarf ripple in the slipstream.

Instinct took over. Hank pressed the trigger.

Six .50-caliber machine guns thundered at once. The Zero disintegrated, its fuselage erupting in a fireball that tumbled through the clouds. “He just blew up,” Hank said simply. “Then I went back into the cloud. They were after me again.”

The fight stretched on, in and out of clouds, glimpses of enemy shapes flashing like ghosts in the mist. He shot down two Zeros that day. When the air finally cleared, the sky was empty. Not a single plane in sight—just silence, smoke, and the long flight home.

That was his baptism. His first true dogfight. The day he broke every rule he’d been taught.

The Corsair he flew that day had a number painted under its cockpit: 13. It would become his favorite. “It always seemed faster, smoother, better trimmed,” he said. “I can’t explain it. Some planes just have a soul.” The ground crews—young Marines barely older than Hank—worked through the night patching bullet holes, replacing wings, swapping engines. “We’d come back shot up,” he said, “and by morning, that plane was ready to go again. I never once had a bad airplane.”

They were warned never to fight a Zero on its own terms. “You can’t out-turn one,” Hank said. “But if you can hit it—just once—it’ll go down. No armor. No self-sealing tanks. They burn easy.”

He recalled the firepower of the Corsair’s six .50-caliber guns with awe. “When you hit something with that,” he said, “it exploded. Wings, tails, pilots—it all went.”

There was nothing romantic about it. “Our attitude was simple,” Hank admitted. “Kill the bastards.”

There were tragedies too—moments of confusion and horror that haunted every squadron. Pilots shooting at friendly planes in the chaos of battle. Ships mistaken for enemy vessels. Friends lost in clouds, never seen again. The war blurred judgment, and in that haze of noise and adrenaline, mistakes were paid for in blood.

But through it all, the Corsair remained his companion, a steel and aluminum extension of his will. “I could climb in one today,” he said decades later, “and fly it like I never left.”

When the day finally came for rotation, Hank had flown two combat tours with VMF-122. He had survived dogfights, engine failures, and countless missions into the unknown. And then his name appeared on a list that would change everything.

Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, the hard-drinking, hot-tempered Marine ace who would soon become one of the most famous pilots in history, was forming a new unit—a squadron built from men with combat experience and something to prove.

Hank’s record made him a natural pick. He was assigned to the newly designated VMF-214. The men would soon name themselves the Black Sheep Squadron.

But at that moment, Hank didn’t know the legend he was stepping into. He only knew the war wasn’t done with him yet.

And the skies over the Solomon Islands were waiting.

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When Hank Bourgeois first met Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, he wasn’t entirely sure what to make of him. It was December of 1943, just before Christmas, somewhere between the tropic calm of the Pacific and the rumble of distant war. Boyington had a reputation that followed him like a contrail — part war hero, part troublemaker, and all Marine.

“I didn’t know who he was at first,” Hank recalled. “He was just introduced as Greg. He liked to play bridge, and I liked to play bridge, so that’s how we started talking.” The two men were traveling together aboard a transport bound for the South Pacific, part of a replacement pool of pilots heading for assignment. During the long 17-day voyage, the ship carried not just fighter pilots, but a battalion of Marine Raiders training on the recreation deck each morning in hand-to-hand combat. Boyington was always in the middle of it, brawling with anyone who’d step up — private, sergeant, or fellow officer. “He’d fight anybody,” Hank said. “Didn’t matter who. He just liked to win.”

Some nights, after the bouts ended, the bridge games would start. Boyington had brought along a full case of Scotch meant for a general friend in the islands, but he drank most of it before they ever reached port. Hank watched as Pappy drank, gambled, laughed, and argued — all with that restless energy of a man who couldn’t sit still. “He wasn’t much of an administrator,” Hank admitted later, “but in the air, he was something else.”

When they reached the islands, Boyington was tapped to command a new Marine fighter squadron — VMF-214 — assembled from the pool of experienced pilots scattered throughout the Pacific. Most of the men had seen combat before, many were misfits, transferred, or temporarily detached from other squadrons. “That’s how we got the name,” Hank said. “We weren’t supposed to be together. We were a bunch of orphans, replacements. The Black Sheep fit.”

Boyington picked his pilots himself, walking through the pool with a clipboard, asking a few questions, and making snap judgments that would decide life and death. Hank’s two combat tours and confirmed kills made him an easy choice. “He wanted fighters,” Hank said. “Guys who’d been shot at before and didn’t freeze.”

The first thing that struck Hank about the Black Sheep was the chaos. “You never had enough planes,” he said. “You’d get your assignment for the day, and that’s what you flew — whatever was ready.” Sometimes it was Number 13, the Corsair Hank swore flew smoother than any other; sometimes it was a patched-up plane with bullet holes still fresh from yesterday’s battle. The mechanics worked through the night, cannibalizing damaged aircraft to keep others flying. “They’d swap wings, tails, engines — whatever it took,” Hank said. “We never knew what we’d get, but somehow, they kept us flying.”

VMF-214 operated out of Vella Lavella, then Munda, then Bougainville — the names all blending into one long memory of heat, mud, and tension. Their Corsairs stood on pierced steel planking, the air thick with the smell of oil and tropical decay. Missions came at dawn, at noon, at dusk — whatever the war demanded. “We usually flew two missions a day,” Hank said. “You’d land, grab a can of rations, refuel, and go again.”

And in the middle of it all was Pappy Boyington — hungover, loud, unpredictable, but unmatched in the air. “He’d stagger to his plane some mornings,” Hank said, “and you’d think, there’s no way he’s flying. But once he got in that cockpit, everything changed.” Boyington’s flying was pure aggression. He led with instinct, not procedure. “He didn’t think about it — he just did it. Loops, rolls, dives, climbs — the man could make that Corsair dance.”

Their dawn patrols were long, monotonous circles over the ocean, waiting for something to happen. “We’d get bored,” Hank remembered. “So we’d start playing in the sky — loops, barrel rolls, wingovers. He’d push you to the limit every time. By the end, you’d be sweating, just trying to keep up.”

Boyington’s will to win was ferocious. Whether it was a dogfight, an argument, or a boxing match, he had to come out on top. That same hunger made him a natural combat leader. “When he saw Zeros, he went for them,” Hank said. “He didn’t care if it was four-to-one, he’d go.”

Once, Boyington asked Hank to lead a mission — sixteen Corsairs escorting bombers over Bougainville. Pappy flew on his wing, impatient, scanning the sky for enemy movement. “He wanted to find trouble,” Hank said. “And we did.” High above, two Japanese planes glinted in the sunlight, with two more below. Hank radioed to his division leader to take the high pair while he went after the low ones. But before they could engage, the Zeros disappeared into a cloudbank. They lost them. When they returned to base, Boyington tore into him. “‘Why didn’t you stay put and let them come to us?’ he yelled. That was Pappy — always wanting a fight, always convinced he could outfly anyone.”

Despite the volatility, Hank admired him. “In the air, he was brilliant,” he said. “He could read a fight like nobody else.”

Life on the ground was another story. The Black Sheep Squadron was a strange fraternity — part flying circus, part family. They lived hard and fought harder. There were no women, no luxuries, and little rest. The doctor rationed out brandy each night to steady nerves, and afterward, the men would gather to sing. “We had a few guys who could really sing,” Hank said. “We’d sit in a circle, brandy in hand, and belt out songs. It sounds simple, but it mattered. You get that close to death every day, you hold on to what you can.”

They developed a bond deeper than friendship. “It’s like a football team,” Hank explained. “You trust the guy next to you, and you’d do anything to keep him alive.” The shared danger erased rank, age, and background. It made them brothers.

When it came time to choose a squadron name, the men gathered one evening to argue it out. They wanted something raw, something honest — a reflection of who they were. “Somebody said, ‘Let’s call ourselves Boyington’s Bastards,’” Hank laughed. “Frank Walton, our intelligence officer, said no way — the newspapers back home would never print it.”

After some debate, they settled on “The Black Sheep.” Walton contacted a Marine artist to design the emblem — a shield bearing a diagonal “bastard stripe,” a reference to their name that only they would truly understand. “That was us,” Hank said. “Not proper, not polished, but damn proud.”

By September 1943, the Black Sheep were flying their first combat tour. They made a name for themselves fast. Boyington’s leadership style — reckless, defiant, hungry for kills — drove them into the thick of combat. They fought over the islands of Bougainville, Kahili, and Rabaul, clashing daily with the Japanese in twisting, screaming dogfights that stretched for miles. Pappy shot down five Zeros in one mission, earning instant fame and cementing the squadron’s reputation.

But with fame came chaos. The press, hungry for heroes, began to romanticize the squadron’s exploits. Frank Walton sent glowing press releases home, sometimes embellishing details to feed the public’s appetite. “He even sent one to my hometown paper in New Orleans,” Hank said. “When I got home, people treated me like a hero. I didn’t even know why.”

For every triumph, there was a loss. Pilot Bill Case nearly downed a friendly Corsair by mistake, firing on what he thought was a Japanese plane. Another pilot, Alexander, was shot down by an American PT boat he’d strafed in error. The line between victory and tragedy was thin, blurred by fatigue and the chaos of aerial combat. “You make mistakes,” Hank said quietly. “You just pray you don’t make one you can’t come back from.”

The squadron’s first combat tour ended after weeks of relentless fighting. The men were exhausted, their aircraft battered. They rotated back for rest, but few could truly relax. “You lived every day knowing tomorrow might be it,” Hank said. “You’d see empty bunks in the morning and try not to think about it.”

Still, in the air, Boyington’s legend grew. The press painted him as a swashbuckling hero, a modern-day pirate of the Pacific. To his men, he was flawed but fearless. “He could be half-drunk on the ground,” Hank said, “but once he took off, he was the best damn pilot in the sky.”

By the time VMF-214 finished its first tour, it had become one of the most feared and famous fighter units in the Pacific. Boyington was a national name, though he hardly cared. He was chasing a record — the title of Marine Corps ace of aces — and every mission brought him closer.

For Hank, it was the beginning of a brotherhood that would define his life. He’d flown with other squadrons, but none had the mix of chaos, courage, and camaraderie that the Black Sheep carried like a badge. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t polished. But they were alive.

And for a fighter pilot in 1943, that was everything.

When the Black Sheep roared over Bougainville, the Japanese knew who they were. And so did every Marine on the ground watching the sky.

The Black Sheep Squadron had arrived — and the war would never look the same again.

By late 1943, the legend of the Black Sheep Squadron had spread across the Pacific. Newspapers back home were printing heroic stories, many written from Frank Walton’s vivid press releases, painting the men as a band of fearless misfits led by a reckless, cigar-chomping ace named Pappy Boyington. The truth, as always, was messier—grittier, lonelier, and more human.

For Hank Bourgeois, the war had settled into a strange rhythm. Each mission began with the same ritual: a quick briefing, a shot of black coffee, and the tightening of the straps across his parachute harness. He had learned to live with the tremor in his chest, the cold awareness that every takeoff could be his last. But with every successful return came the same numbing fatigue, a kind of hollow gratitude that was impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t felt it.

The Corsair had become an extension of his body by then. “Three hundred fifty hours in that plane,” he said later. “I could fly one today, no problem.” He spoke of the F4U with reverence—the way it handled, the way it roared, the way its six .50-caliber guns could tear a Zero apart in a heartbeat. “You hit a Japanese fighter with that kind of firepower,” he said, “and it just came apart. It wasn’t pretty, but it was final.”

Still, no amount of experience or machine could erase the unpredictability of the air. Every sortie was a gamble, and every day the odds grew thinner.

One mission began like countless others: clear skies over Bougainville, a routine patrol that quickly turned into chaos. Hank was flying lead in his division, with his wingman Bill Hyer tight on his flank. They’d barely cleared altitude when a formation of Japanese aircraft appeared on the horizon. “They were above us, maybe eight or ten thousand feet higher,” Hank said. “Zeros, moving fast.” The radio crackled. Orders were shouted. The sky fractured into motion.

In moments, the formation was gone, replaced by individual duels scattered across ten miles of airspace. Hank rolled his Corsair into a dive, his eyes scanning the clouds for any flash of silver wings. Then—tracers. Bright orange streaks zipped past his canopy, followed by the dull thud of cannon shells slamming into the air around him. “I looked back,” he said, “and there he was. A Zero, right on my tail.”

Instinct screamed: dive.

He shoved the throttle forward and pointed the nose down, trading altitude for speed. The Corsair howled, shaking violently as it ripped through the thick tropical air. Normally, a Zero couldn’t match that dive—its lightweight frame would lose control—but this one stayed with him. The enemy pilot was skilled, relentless, closing the distance inch by inch. “I threw everything forward,” Hank said. “Full throttle, closed all my cooling flaps, oil flaps, everything that slowed me down. But he stayed with me. I couldn’t shake him.”

He was running low on fuel, running out of sky, and running out of luck. The ocean rushed up below, a blue mirror flecked with whitecaps. He knew he couldn’t keep running. “I figured I’d have to turn and fight,” he said. “Win or die, one or the other.”

Then, as suddenly as it began, the Zero broke off. It pulled away, banking gracefully to the east before disappearing into a line of clouds. Hank leveled out, shaking, his hands slick on the controls. “He could’ve finished me,” he said quietly. “He had me dead to rights. But he didn’t.”

He flew home alone that day, the roar of the engine his only company. The others were scattered, some missing, some damaged, some silent. He didn’t think much more of the encounter—there was always another mission, another fight. In war, survival was enough reason to move on.

When VMF-214 returned from its second combat tour, the Black Sheep were legends. Boyington had racked up an extraordinary number of kills before being shot down and captured, earning the Medal of Honor while still a prisoner of war. Hank went home with his own scars and memories, some too tangled to ever fully explain. He stayed in the Marine Corps after the war, eventually retiring with the rank of lieutenant colonel. For a while, he thought the war was behind him.

Then, thirty years later, it came back to find him.

By 1973, Hank had traded flight suits for business suits, working for the Singer Company’s aerospace division. His career brought him back to Japan—a strange, full-circle journey into the land of his former enemy. One of the company’s partners was Mitsubishi, the same manufacturer that had built the Zero fighter planes that once hunted him across the Pacific.

His counterpart there was a retired Japanese Air Force general named Sugawara, now a dignified, silver-haired executive. “He liked to hunt,” Hank recalled. “So did I. We got along right away.” They spent evenings talking about work, life, and eventually, the war. “He asked what I flew,” Hank said. “I told him—Corsair, Marine Corps, South Pacific.” The general nodded thoughtfully, his eyes distant.

Weeks later, Sugawara was invited to visit Singer’s facilities in New Jersey. Before he left Japan, Hank made a casual request: “Bring your logbook,” he said. “I’ll bring mine. Maybe we’ll find something interesting.”

When they met again in the States, the two men sat across from each other, each with a faded leather logbook resting on the table. They began flipping pages, comparing dates and locations—Bougainville, Rabaul, the Solomons. Then they both stopped.

The same date. The same time. The same coordinates.

“That was the day,” Hank said softly.

Sugawara looked at him for a long moment. “You were the Corsair,” he said.

Hank nodded. “And you were the Zero.”

The two men stared at each other, silent, the weight of that realization hanging between them. The decades that separated them—the war, the loss, the bitterness—seemed to dissolve in that instant. They were not enemies anymore. They were survivors of the same impossible sky.

They became friends. Real friends. Sugawara even arranged for a custom shotgun to be made for Hank—a gesture nearly impossible in Japan at the time. “He made it happen,” Hank said with quiet gratitude. “That was the kind of man he was.”

Years later, the Japanese general visited America again. Hank took him duck and goose hunting on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, far from the jungles where they had once tried to kill each other. After the hunt, they went out to dinner. Hank had been picking up the check all week, but that night Sugawara insisted. Over whiskey, they laughed about the strange turns of life.

Then, as the evening ended, Sugawara turned to him and smiled faintly.

“Thank you, son,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t shoot you down.”

It was such a simple line, but it carried everything—the ghosts of a thousand dead pilots, the strange mercy of survival, the quiet understanding between two men who had shared the same sky on opposite sides of history.

The war had begun as a test of machines, of courage, of nations. But in the end, it came down to something smaller, more human: a moment of choice, a hand that didn’t pull the trigger.

In 1976, when the television series Baa Baa Black Sheep debuted, dramatizing Boyington’s memoir and the exploits of VMF-214, the real men behind the legend began meeting for reunions. They were older now—grayer, slower, but still carrying that same spark. “Out of the fifty-four of us from those two combat tours,” Hank said at one gathering, “there aren’t many left.” He smiled wistfully. “I wonder who’ll fly the last mission. I hope it’s me.”

As the years passed, the legend of the Black Sheep grew into something larger than life. To the public, they were heroes from an era of clear lines and noble causes. To the men who lived it, they were just Marines—young, scared, reckless, doing their best to survive a war that had no guarantees.

Hank Bourgeois never forgot that sky over Bougainville, the impossible dogfight that ended not with death but with mercy. He carried it with him through the rest of his life, a reminder that even in the darkest places, humanity could still break through the smoke.

“They told us never to dogfight a Zero,” he said once, with a faint, knowing grin. “But I did. And I’m still here.”