Fred Dungan doesn't need a fireworks show to remind him what the Fourth of July means.

Dungan, 88, of San Clemente, can vividly recall fireworks that filled the night sky in front of him on that date 65 years ago over a Japanese island in the Pacific.

Those July 4 fireworks came at 3:30 in the morning in the form of a hail of anti-aircraft fire directed at Dungan and a fellow Navy night fighter pilot, Johnny Dear, as their Hellcat fighter planes were after an enemy ship.
pilot recalls July 4 with real bombs bursting


In the wee hours of July 4, 1944, Dungan shot down four Japanese planes, wiped out a destroyer escort, was hit and made it home to land on an aircraft carrier despite a bullet wound that grounded him for five months and took him out of the war.

So bloody was Dungan's cockpit as he landed on the USS Yorktown that the man who arrived to help him out of his plane nearly passed out. "He screamed, 'Get a stretcher, this man is dying!'" Dungan said.

This past April, Dungan was inducted into an elite band of naval aviation pioneers, the Golden Eagles – not just for what he did July 4, 1944, but for being a pioneer in radar-assisted night flying.

On Dec. 23, 1942, at Quonset Point, R.I., Dungan was the safety pilot in the back seat (set to take the controls if anything went wrong) as pilot Bruce Griffin made the first "blind" landing, with the cockpit windshield blocked out.

Later, Dungan and four other pioneer night fighter pilots in his unit shot down 27 enemy aircraft in battles around Japanese-held Pacific islands during 1944.

"I shot down 10 but couldn't count three of them," Dungan said. He was credited with seven, qualifying him as an ace. "We just had our aces reunion in Tucson," he said.

picture: Decorated Navy pilot Fred Dungan's picture covers the front of the New York Herald Tribune's This Week magazine in 1945. The accompanying article was about night fighters

Flashback to July 4, 1944.

Dungan and Dear were sent up at 3 a.m. from the USS Hornet, each Hellcat equipped with six machine guns and a 500-pound bomb. The target was Chichi-jima, a fortified island 150 miles from Iwo Jima, an island that seven months later would become one of World War II's bloodiest battlegrounds.

At 3:30 a.m., as Dungan and Dear flew over Chichi-jima trying to spot shipping in Futami Cove, the island's ground batteries erupted in anti-aircraft fire, Dungan recalled. Just outside the harbor, a destroyer escort added its own fire.

Dungan and Dear made a low run at the destroyer escort, which was aiming its anti-aircraft blasts high. On three runs they strafed the ship with bullets, leaving it dead in the water, aflame. Later, Dungan said, pilots reported an oil slick.

"So two Hellcats knocked out a fighting ship," he said, "which was really unusual. We hadn't used our bombs. We were saving those for a tanker or something."

The bombs never would find targets. Dungan and Dear soon found themselves in a dogfight.

"I saw a shadow pass in front of me … a float plane. It was a 'Zeke,' a Zero with floats," Dungan said. "A short burst and it blew up. There were three on my tail. I could outrun them. I said , 'Johnny, I'm bringing some company.' He shot two down. I turned around real fast and shot the other one down. Then I got involved in a dogfight and shot that fellow down in a head-on run."

Dungan shot down four Zekes, Dear three, in the pre-dawn foray, Dungan said. His last opponent was an experienced pilot who knew how to hide.

"He went in the clouds," Dungan said. "It's just getting barely light, he's in the clouds and I'm pecking away at him. Every time I could see him, I'd give him a shot."

After the Zeke blew up, Dungan turned to "tease" an anti-aircraft battery on the island to get it to fire at him so he could get a fix on its location and alert U.S. bombers. Something hit him in the shoulder. He went into a cloud to assess the damage.

"I'd been hit badly," he said. "A 7.7 mm went through the canopy of the aircraft and through the buckle on my parachute harness. That slowed it down. It hit my clavicle and took four inches out of that."

picture: Medal from the Japanese and medals from the grateful people of the United States~Fred Dungan's medals from World War II, clockwise from top, are the Navy Cross, the Air Medal, the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross. In the middle is a bullet that was removed from Dungan's shoulder after he shot down four enemy planes July 4, 1944, as a pilot in the Navy.

Dear's plane also was hit. Both pilots headed back. Doctors extracted Dungan's bullet and tried to repair his clavicle. He had further treatment stateside, was deemed fit to fly and was assigned as a night fighter instructor.

For him, the Fourth of July, 1944, ended under sedation. He slept through a shipboard observance of Independence Day. By then, he didn't really need it.

"We had our own fireworks," Dungan said. "Fourth of July was always a favorite holiday. Afterward, I always thought Fourth of July was my second birthday. I was so thankful."

By FRED SWEGLES
The Orange County Register July 4, 2009




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