World War II ‘Black Sheep’ Ace Pappy Boyington Dies

World War II flying ace Gregory (Pappy) Boyington, the Marine aviator who led the famous Black Sheep Squadron, shot down 28 Japanese planes and won the Medal of Honor, died today at the age of 75.

He died about 4 a.m., said Nancy Hinds, operator of a hospice for terminal cancer patients.

Boyington wrote a book about his exploits with the Flying Tigers and the Black Sheep squadrons titled “Baa Baa Black Sheep” that was a best seller in 1958 and was the basis of a 1976-77 television series starring Robert Conrad.

Boyington, born Dec. 4, 1912, in Coeur d’Alene, Ida., was a war hero even before the United States entered World War II. He was credited with shooting down six Japanese planes in 1941 with the Flying Tigers, Gen. Claire Chennault’s American volunteer group in China.

When Marine surgeons said a broken leg would end his combat flying, Boyington molded a group of pilots rejected by other squadrons into the Black Sheep, a crack squadron that operated in the central Solomon Islands during 1943-44.

Captive of Japanese

Boyington spent the war’s final year and a half as a Japanese captive after his plane was riddled by bullets and crashed in Rabaul harbor, New Britain, in January, 1944.

The day he was captured, Boyington was credited with his 26th confirmed kill, tying the record set by Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker in World War I. He had also won the Medal of Honor and the Navy Cross.

Later, Boyington officially was credited with shooting down 28 enemy planes, he said in a 1972 interview with the Associated Press. Other U.S. fliers were credited with more kills as the war went on.

By the time he retired from the Marines at the end of World War II he held the rank of colonel.

” . . . This stuff is all gone, and I’d just as soon let it go and forget it,” Boyington said in the 1972 interview. “I rarely ever talk about it unless someone brings it up. I don’t want to bore anybody or give the impression of being a bore.”

But in the following years, he appeared at numerous air shows and other events, promoting his book and talking about his exploits.

He had been treated for cancer several times in the last two decades and moved to Fresno in 1971 to undergo cancer treatment at the local Veterans Administration Hospital.

Boyington was married to the former Josephine Wilson Moseman of Fresno in 1978. It was his fourth marriage.