He Fought 9 Bombers Alone – And Used Just 28 Rounds Per Kill
At approximately 5:00 in the afternoon, February 20th, 1942, nine Japanese bombers were inbound toward the fleet carrier Lexington operating in the Bismarck Sea. They were in stepped formation at cruising altitude loaded with enough ordnance to break the ship’s back if the hits landed right. The Lexington had exactly two fighters available to stop them.
The reason there were only two came down to timing and direction. The Japanese had launched the first wave of bombers at the Lexington earlier that afternoon >> >> and the carrier’s fighters had scrambled in force to meet them. Those pilots had broken that formation apart, but they were now engaged, refueling, or too far out of position to reach the second wave in time.
The second wave had approached from the carrier’s undefended side, a deliberate choice that had worked. The ship was not without defenses. Her anti-aircraft batteries were manned and her screen of escort vessels was in position. Rear Admiral Aubrey Fitch, in command of the task force, >> >> had assessed that the fleet’s guns could absorb the attack if the fighters failed to stop it.
The assessment was command confidence under pressure. Nine G4M bombers >> >> do not stop for command confidence. The two available fighters were Grumman F4F Wildcats. The combat reports circulating through the Pacific Fleet were already clear about what a Wildcat could and could not do against Japanese aircraft.
It was slower than the Mitsubishi Zero, climbed more slowly, >> >> and turned worse at low speeds. The Navy’s tactical guidance told its pilots plainly to avoid one-on-one combat with a Zero because the outcome of a turning fight at low speed was predictable enough to have been written down in advance.
Against bombers, the problem was different, but it reduced to the same hard truth. Standard doctrine for intercepting a formation of nine required multiple attacking fighters. The way a fire burning in several rooms at once requires more than one hose. Two fighters was half the minimum the doctrine assumed.
One fighter was not a number the doctrine had a procedure for. One of those two was flown by Lieutenant Edward Henry O’Hare. O’Hare was 27 years old, born in St. Louis, Missouri, and the son of a man whose life had established a pattern he inherited. Edward Joseph O’Hare had worked as legal counsel and business manager for Al Capone’s gambling operations in Chicago.
>> >> He had then become a federal informant. His cooperation was instrumental in the tax evasion prosecution that sent Capone to Alcatraz. On November 8th, 1939, gangland assassins killed him in his car on a Chicago street. The Navy had known this history when his son applied to Annapolis and had monitored the application specifically.
O’Hare graduated in 1937. He had taken his father’s example into a different kind of war. He earned his wings in 1940 and was assigned to Fighting Squadron 3 aboard the Lexington. His commanding officer was Lieutenant Commander John Thach, who was developing the weaving defensive tactics that would give Wildcat pilots their best odds against the Zero.
>> >> Thach had drilled into his pilots an understanding of exactly where the Wildcat’s advantages lived. The aircraft dove faster than a Zero and could absorb hits that would tear a Zero apart. A short burst of precisely aimed fire was worth far more than a long spray from the wrong angle. O’Hare had been trained by that man in that environment in an aircraft he understood completely, limits and all.
He was also the best shot in the squadron. His wingman was Lieutenant Marion Dufilho. Together, they were everything the Lexington had left in the air. They climbed toward the nine bombers with the count already against them. And over the Bismarck Sea, Duffilo pulled the trigger on his first firing pass.
His guns did not fire. He tried the trigger again. Nothing. The mechanism had failed. He was circling with a full ammunition load he could not deliver. And nine bombers were continuing on course toward a ship carrying several thousand men and enough aviation fuel to ensure that whatever hit it would burn for a long time.
>> >> The fleet’s guns were ready and the command assessment that they could absorb the attack was still on record. O’Hare looked at the formation, undamaged, holding course, and checked his fuel and his ammunition. >> >> He did not look at Duffilo again. He turned.
The F4F Wildcat was not the aircraft the Pacific War story preferred to tell. That story preferred the Spitfire and the P-51, sleek machines built for speed and agility. The Wildcat was neither. It was a barrel-shaped, gull-winged fighter built for survival. The fuselage was short and thick, housing a Pratt & Whitney radial engine that produced over 1,200 horsepower, but pushed the aircraft no faster than 318 mph at altitude.
It was heavier than it looked. It was tougher than anything the Japanese had put in the air. Where a Zero was built to the lightest possible specification and sacrificed armor and self-sealing fuel tanks to achieve agility, the Wildcat was built with both. A burst of .50 caliber fire that punched into a Zero’s wing root and found the unprotected fuel tank ended the fight instantly.
The same burst hitting a Wildcat would hold a wing, bleed some hydraulic fluid, and leave the pilot flying. Against Japanese fighters, this toughness was a consolation. A Wildcat that could take a hit still lost the turning fight. And being able to absorb punishment mainly meant you lasted a few more seconds before the outcome arrived anyway.
But O’Hare was not flying against fighters this afternoon. He was flying against nine heavy bombers whose defensive guns covered forward, rear, and sideways in overlapping arcs. Against those bombers, the Wildcat’s toughness was not a consolation, it was the plan. The Mitsubishi G4M carried dedicated gunners whose sole responsibility was to watch assigned arcs of sky and fire the moment a fighter entered their field.
Each aircraft held a rear-facing 20-mm cannon and multiple 7.7-mm machine guns covering the nose, the sides, and the tail. Nine aircraft in step formation created a pattern of overlapping fire. Each bomber’s gunners covering the gaps in the neighboring aircraft’s coverage. The result was overlapping fire from every direction an attacking fighter could come from. There was no gap.
Standard doctrine for attacking a bomber formation existed specifically to manage this problem. A fighter approached from the rear quarter driving up behind the formation, targeting the engines, and breaking away before the defensive fire could track him. The tactic worked when multiple fighters attacked simultaneously from different positions, forcing the gunners to divide their attention and reorient faster than they could aim.
The doctrine was designed for teams. O’Hare was alone, and alone meant the rear quarter approach was a long, slow passage through the heaviest defensive fire the formation had. With every gunner who could bear on him doing exactly that. Attacking a bomber formation from the rear is like running onto a highway from behind a moving convoy.
Every vehicle’s back end is facing you, the coverage overlaps, and the convoy has time to track you. O’Hare chose the side. An attack from the side meant the convoy had to turn to bring its weapons to bear. The overlapping fields of fire did not cover a side attack cleanly because they were calibrated for the rear.
The gaps in the coverage opened for a fraction of a second as the attacking aircraft passed through. The pass was harder to set up and required more speed on the approach. It was faster through the danger zone >> >> than any other approach. O’Hare understood that faster through was the only way through. The situation demanded a precision the Navy’s gunnery doctrine had never planned for.
The standard training budget for aerial gunnery was approximately 500 rounds per aircraft destroyed. The figure was not arbitrary. It was an honest average drawn from combat records accounting for the difficulty of aiming from a moving cockpit at a moving target while under defensive fire with a human nervous system trying to calculate angle and closure rate and lead while the aircraft around it is being shot at.
Most pilots sprayed the target area and trusted that volume of fire would produce a result. 500 rounds was the cost of that approach. It was like a construction estimate that accounts for the average worker on the average job. The estimate was accurate for everyone else. O’Hare had been on a rifle team before he had ever touched a fighter.
He did not spray targets. He aimed at specific components of the aircraft ahead of him and fired in bursts short enough to keep the gun sight steady on the point of aim. That discipline was what the rifle team had built into him. It was also what the nine bombers ahead of him were about to confirm. The nine G4M bombers were flying at cruising altitude with their step formation intact and their gunners at their stations.
They had spotted the two American fighters climbing from below and made the professional assessment that experienced crews make. Attacking fighters came from the rear quarter. They had always come from the rear quarter. The defensive positions were set for that approach and the gunners were ready for it.
One American fighter was still visible climbing and turning to position himself for the attack run the formation expected. The second had broken away for reasons they could not yet explain. They were looking at the right place. O’Hare came from somewhere else entirely. He came in from the side at the highest speed the Wildcat could manage in a diving turn, closing the angle on the lead group before the gunners had finished identifying the direction of the attack.
The left engine of the lead aircraft filled the gunsight. He did not fire yet. The distance was still too great for the precision the situation required. He closed to the range where missing was no longer possible and fired a burst of approximately 10 rounds. The left engine of the lead bomber caught fire and stopped turning.
He was already moving to the second aircraft. The second bomber’s left engine was ahead of him and to the right and he adjusted the angle and fired again. Another short burst. Another engine gone. The third aircraft tried to turn away and broke from the formation’s coverage. It was alone. O’Hare followed the turn and fired.
Three aircraft from the lead group were finished or falling. The Japanese gunners defending the group had been watching the rear quarter. >> >> The attack had come from the side. By the time the formation’s defensive coverage could reorient, there was no longer a lead group to defend. The formation spread.
This was the moment the doctrine had been designed to produce and O’Hare had produced it alone. The bombers that remained were no longer flying in tight step formation. They were individual aircraft trying to find each other again and their overlapping defensive coverage was broken. The overlapping gunfire that had protected the formation existed only while the formation held together.
Once the aircraft separated, each bomber was on its own. The surviving bombers were now separate problems instead of one compound one and O’Hare was already turning for the second group. He came in from the side again. The second group’s aircraft were separating, the pilots trying to make themselves harder targets while trying to regroup.
A bomber trying to evade is a slower bomber and a slower bomber is a larger target. He lined up the first aircraft of the second group and fired, then the second, and both went down. He swung wide, found a sixth aircraft attempting to reach the carrier, and fired a longer burst at the engine as he closed in. The aircraft began to smoke and lose altitude. He had almost nothing left.
60 rounds remained. Throughout the engagement, Lieutenant De Fillo had been in the air above the fighting, circling with a full ammunition load his failed guns could not deliver. He had watched every pass. >> >> The formation’s defensive coverage had broken on the first attack, and he had seen it happen.
For 4 minutes, he had watched a man do alone the work that doctrine said required a team. There was nothing else for him to do. Below the surviving bombers were pushing toward the Lexington. The carrier’s anti-aircraft batteries opened fire, throwing a curtain of exploding steel into the sky above the ship. Black bursts of flak appeared around the aircraft still making their runs, and the escort ships added their guns to the barrier.
The bombers that were still flying and still intact held their course for a few more seconds. Then they turned. The sky north of the Lexington went quiet. The bombers that had turned were already small shapes heading back toward Rabaul. The columns of smoke where five aircraft had been were thinning in the sea air, markers that would not last the afternoon.
The Lexington had not been hit. O’Hare turned for home. He set the Wildcat down on the carrier deck and cut the engine. The tail hook caught the wire and the aircraft jerked to a halt. He climbed down from the cockpit and handed the gun camera film canister to the intelligence officer waiting at the flight line. The film would tell the story more precisely than any debrief could.
The intelligence room was quiet. Two officers, a projector, the gun camera footage running on a screen. The footage showed what O’Hare had aimed at and what had happened when he fired. It showed the left engines. It showed the duration of each burst, which was brief by any standard the officers had previously recorded.
They ran the footage twice. Then they counted the ammunition. 60 rounds remained across all his guns. Starting load minus 60 gave them his total expenditure. Divided by five confirmed kills, the result was approximately 28 rounds per aircraft destroyed. The officers ran the numbers again. >> >> The result did not change.
28 rounds per kill is the kind of number that belongs to snipers, not fighter pilots. The standard training budget for a kill was 500 rounds. O’Hare had spent 28. The estimate had assumed the average worker on the average job. The number on the table was not the average worker. And this was not the average job. One of the officers wrote it down.
Neither of them said much. There was not a great deal to say that the number on the table did not already say more precisely. The Lexington was undamaged, its crew safe, its aviation fuel unexploded in the tanks below the flight deck. And somewhere on the deck above them, a 27-year-old lieutenant from St.
Louis was probably standing by his aircraft thinking about what had held on the first two passes and what had needed adjustment. The number stayed on the table. The Navy processed the gun camera footage and the ammunition count through its ordnance records and rewrote a number.
The assumption that a pilot in combat could be expected to spend approximately 500 rounds per kill had been reasonable when it was first calculated. It was not reasonable after February 20th, 1942. And the officers who revised the training documentation noted specifically that O’Hare’s expenditure represented a precision standard that training programs had not previously attempted to produce.
The citation for the Medal of Honor was prepared. And O’Hare received it from President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House on April 21st, 1942. He was the first United States Navy ace of the war and the first naval aviator in the conflict to receive the Medal of Honor. He kept flying. He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and continued looking for the next necessary thing.
Carrier-based night fighter interceptions were considered too dangerous to be workable outside the framework of any existing doctrine. O’Hare built the arguments for developing the capability anyway, wrote the tactics, and flew the training missions. The Navy, to its credit, eventually gave him the clearance to use it in combat.
The approach was exactly what it had always been. On November 26th, 1943, O’Hare flew the first carrier-based night fighter interception in United States Navy history, a mission built on the doctrine he had created. The most widely accepted finding is that he was shot down by friendly fire from another aircraft in his own formation.
He was 29 years old. His aircraft and his body went into the Pacific Ocean. Neither was ever recovered. Edward Joseph O’Hare had identified the necessary thing to do in Chicago in 1939, done it, and been killed for it. His son had identified the necessary thing to do over the Bismarck Sea in 1942, done it, and come home.
Then he had identified the necessary thing to do in the dark over the Pacific in 1943, done it, and not come home. Both of them had made the same kind of choice in the same kind of world in different wars. He has no grave. There is no marker in any cemetery. The body of the first United States Navy ace of the Second World War is somewhere in the Pacific Ocean in water deep enough that it has never been found.
The one place that carries his name is Chicago, where a city named an airport after him. Chicago O’Hare International Airport is one of the busiest airports on Earth, carrying more than 80 million passengers a year. None of them passed through a gate that explains what happened over the Bismarck Sea on February 20th, 1942. The name of the airport is the only monument he has.
Every flight that lifts off from O’Hare International departs from ground that carries his name and rises into the airspace above it. He defined what it meant to be alone in that sky with a problem bigger than any single man, and he solved it in 4 minutes with 60 rounds to spare. The sky he flew is still there.
He is not. If this story stayed with you, share it. There are more like it in the archives, and the people in them are running out of time to be remembered.
