Under the Southern Cross: The South Pacific Air Campaign Against Rabaul by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver

Author:Thomas McKelvey Cleaver [Cleaver, Thomas McKelvey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Military, Naval, World War II, Modern, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781472838216
Google: ewT7DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-05-13T23:53:48.987262+00:00

9

Pappy Gunn and the Sunsetters

General George C. Kenney called Colonel Paul Irvin Gunn “one of the great heroes of the Southwest Pacific in World War II.” The young fliers in the B-25s and A-20s called him “Pappy,” for the fact he was then in his mid-40s, and thought of him as “The General’s Uninhibited Engineer.” To aviation history, he was the inventor of one of the most terrifying weapons used in the war, the “gunship,” a medium or light bomber with its nose full of machine guns and cannons, capable of shredding any target from a building to a destroyer in a matter of minutes with up to 14 .50-caliber machine guns firing 600 rounds per minute. Admiral J.J. “Jocko” Clark, who knew him in the early 1930s when both were pilots for Admiral William A. Moffett, “the father of naval aviation,” remembered Gunn – then an enlisted Naval Aviation Pilot – in his memoirs thus, “He was exceptionally able, always ready to go anywhere at any time, day or night. He had a cheerful and inspiring personality and a high sense of duty. On our team of pilots, he was universally regarded as the crack member.” Kenney later wrote that he had noted in one of Gunn’s efficiency rating reports, “This officer gets things done.” The general went on to say, “I couldn’t think of any higher compliment to pay him.”

Born in Quitman, Arkansas, on October 18, 1900, Paul Gunn fell in love with the idea of flying at age ten, when one of the first airplanes in the South flew over his family farm. When the United States became involved in World War 1 in 1917, he changed the date of his birth to 1899 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was trained as an aircraft mechanic. Remaining in the Navy after the war, he volunteered for work as a mechanic to a local barnstormer in return for flying lessons, and had his own airplane by 1922, which he had rebuilt from a wreck. In September 1925, the Morrow Board appointed by President Coolidge to review the development of naval aviation recommended the Navy should increase the use of enlisted men as pilots, to reduce the demand for the limited number of officers. Legislation was passed in Congress in 1926, adopting a fixed ratio of 30 percent of total naval pilot strength as enlisted pilots, which constituted a significant increase in the ranks of Naval Aviation Pilots (NAP), the designation of enlisted pilots in the Navy. Gunn, who had re-enlisted in 1924 and had repeatedly requested assignment to flight training to be a NAP, took advantage of this new opportunity and by 1927 was a Chief Aviation Pilot with wings of silver rather than gold. When then-Lieutenant Commander Clark took command of the elite Fighting 2, known as “The Flying Chiefs” for the fact that all the pilots other than section leaders were NAPs, he made sure that Gunn followed him to San Diego to join the squadron.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.