He lost his squadron in the confusion of a dogfight, climbed back up, and found a formation of American bombers being torn apart by more than thirty German fighters.
There was no other Allied aircraft anywhere near them.
He could have waited for help. He attacked instead.
This is the story of James Howard..🧵1/4
James Howard was born in Canton, in China, where his American parents were working as missionaries. He grew up there, came back to the United States for his education, and learned to fly with the Navy, flying off the carrier USS Enterprise.
Then he did something unusual. He resigned his commission and went back to China.
He joined Claire Chennault's American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers, flying shark-mouthed P-40s against the Japanese over Burma, where he was credited with six victories. When the group was disbanded in 1942 he came home, and after a Navy base commander made it clear he was unimpressed by all that, Howard joined the Army instead.
By 1943 he was a major commanding a fighter squadron in England, and among the first Americans to take the new P-51 Mustang into combat. He named his aircraft Ding Hao, which is Chinese for very good.
On 11 January 1944 he was leading fifty Mustangs escorting B-17s to Oschersleben, near Berlin. It was one of the deepest raids yet attempted, and the Luftwaffe came up in strength to meet it.
Howard shot down a twin-engined Messerschmitt 110 almost immediately. In the fight that followed he lost his entire flight. His own account of it was typically flat. On the first encounter, which turned into a melee, my flight lost me.
He climbed back up to the bombers, and what he found was a formation of B-17s under attack by more than thirty German fighters, with no Allied fighters anywhere in sight to help them.
He was one man. He could have circled and tried to gather his squadron. Instead he turned and went straight into the middle of them, on his own.
He fought them for more than half an hour.
He attacked again and again, breaking up their runs before they could line up on the bombers. Three of his four guns went out of action. His fuel was becoming dangerously low. And he kept diving at them anyway, sometimes with almost nothing left to shoot with, because a Mustang coming down out of the sky was enough on its own to make a German pilot break off.
He was officially credited with three destroyed, with others probably destroyed or damaged. The men in the bombers watching the whole thing believed he had got as many as six.
When they landed, those crews told anyone who would listen. Within days it was in Stars and Stripes, written up by a young correspondent named Andy Rooney, under a headline calling him a one-man air force.
For what he did that morning, James Howard was awarded the Medal of Honor. He finished the war an ace in two theatres, six victories with the Flying Tigers and another six in Europe, and retired as a brigadier general. He died in 1995 and lies at Arlington.
Asked about it in an interview nearly fifty years afterwards, he did not have much to say. It was up to me to do it.
This was the story of James Howard.
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