From serving as waterboy for his preppie football team to becoming the hero of the hour at Pearl Harbor a few short years later, that was the George S. Welch story…but only part of it.
The Pearl Harbor part alone, coming with the Japanese attack on the home port of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii 65 years ago on December 7 of this year would have been enough, more than enough, to recall and extol on anniversaries such as this.
After all, George Welch, taking to the air over Hawaii even as the attack was underway, generally is credited with the first air-to-air kill of World War II by an American fighting the Japanese. He did so just moments before Kenneth Taylor, his friend and companion fighter pilot of the 47th Pursuit Squadron, also knocked down an attacking Japanese aircraft at Pearl Harbor. Both second lieutenants were able to take off in Curtiss P-40s previously sent to an auxiliary grass strip 10 miles from the center of activity on Oahu.
Contrary to most accounts, Lieutenants Welch and Taylor were not exactly at the U.S. Army’s Wheeler Field adjacent to the naval base at Pearl Harbor when the sounds of war woke them up that early Sunday morning in 1941. Instead, the two Pearl Harbor heroes “were on weekend leave at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and had not been to bed,” wrote Welch’s schoolmate and fellow WWII veteran Walter “Buzz” Speakman in the booklet World War II Stories: Experiences & Recollections by St. Andrews School Alumni (1995, St. Andrews School, Middletown, Del.).
Bed or no bed, the two neophyte fighter pilots never hesitated. Calling ahead to have two P-40s fielded and armed, “They commandeered a taxi and drove around Pearl City to a gunnery field on the north Shore at Haleiwa, a grass strip, where his squadron had a few P-40s,” Speakman explained.
From there, according to Air Force magazine contributing editor John L. Frisbee’s summary of their heroics, which appeared in the May 1993 issue, they immediately took off with only their .30- caliber machine guns loaded. They encountered a formation of Nakajima B5N2 “Kate” torpedo bombers strafing the Marine Corps airfield at Ewa…and attacked. “With three of his four guns firing, Welch shot down one ‘Kate,’ as did Taylor,” wrote Frisbee. “Turning to get behind another, Lieutenant Welch’s P-40 was hit by an enemy tailgunner. He ducked into a cloud to check his plane, then both lieutenants returned to the Pearl Harbor area, where each man downed another Kate.”
Needing ammunition, they both landed at Wheeler—in the eye of the storm. “As they prepared to take off, a wave of enemy bombers escorted by Zeros swept toward the field,” Frisbee continued. “Flying into the formation, Lieutenant Welch shot a Zero off the wounded Taylor’s tail, was again hit by enemy fire, then nailed another attacking plane before returning once more to Haleiwa to rearm.”
The carrier-based Japanese had broken off their devastating attack before Welch could take to the air a third time. By then, more than 2,400 U.S. military personnel had been killed or mortally wounded. The Pacific Fleet had been shattered. Even so, Welch and Taylor had made their sting felt as the first Americans to shoot down Japanese aircraft in the Pacific War.
“George was credited with four confirmed victories but said it was more like eight, as the others were over the Pacific and could not be confirmed,” wrote Speakman.
Both young pilots were awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and Welch was decorated at the White House by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. As Frisbee explained, that was only one stop in the prep-schooler’s outstanding career as a fighter pilot in the Pacific. Flying Bell P-39s out of New Guinea exactly a year after Pearl Harbor—on December 7, 1942—he shot down three Japanese aircraft, yet another memorable stop in a wartime career leading to 16 confirmed combat victories and a No. 10 ranking among the aces in the Pacific. Remarkably too he scored his victories in three different U.S. fighters—the P-40, P-39 and Lockheed P-38.
After the war, George Welch flew some of the nation’s first jet fighters as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was killed in October 1954 while testing a North American F-100 Super Sabre.
Naturally, on occasions such as this year’s 65th anniversary, he will always be remembered as “one of the great heroes of Pearl Harbor,” noted Frisbee. But the Air Force magazine editor also pointed out that his later combat tours were “marked by the same courage, skill and determination he displayed as an untested pilot during his country’s first hour of World War II.”
Additional note: With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a stunned United States was dragged into the unprecedented cauldron of violence and destruction that we call WWII. Within the week, probably three dozen nations holding half the inhabitants of the earth were officially at war. In scope and impact on virtually all peoples of the world, it really could be considered the first world war. Nothing like it had ever been seen before—and fortunately nothing like it has been seen since it all ended with the defeat of Japan midway through 1945.
Originally published in the December 2006 issue of Military History. To subscribe, click here.
