Pappy Gunn

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Summary: World War II's Greatest Hero
Review: If there is a single outstanding American hero of World War II (and perhaps in all of American history) it is Colonel Paul Irvin "Pappy" Gunn.A former US enlisted naval aviator, Gunn had retired from the Navy and was living in the Philippines with his wife and four children when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and invaded the Philippines. As the owner of a small air taxi operation, Gunn and his airplanes were impressed into the United States Army Air Corps immediately after the outbreak of war. On Christmas Eve, 1941 Gunn was ordered to fly a load of Far East Air Force staff officers to Australia and to stay there awaiting further orders. His family - including the author - remained in Manila and were interned by the Japanese for the duration, leading Gunn to fight his own private war. And fight he did! Historian and author Walter Edmond stated that no other single invidual did as much to defeat the Japanese as did Gunn, who is best known for his conversion of the Douglas A-20 and North American B-25 into powerful gunships that did a number on a Japanese convoy in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. But he did a lot more, especially in those dark days of early 1942. It's not widely known, but Gunn flew several missions from Australia to Bataan by way of Mindanao in his role as the commander of the newly organized Air Transport Command. During the Java Campaign he took a war-weary B-17 that had been turned over to his transport squadron and used it to attack Japanese ships in the Java Sea. In March 1942 he literally stole two dozen B-25s from the Netherlands East Indies Air Force, then flew one of ten on the Royce Raid into the Philippines a few weeks later.

Pappy Gunn is the the famous aviators story in the words of his son Nat, who grew up in the Japanese internment camp at Santo Thomas Prison, then lived with his dad in the Philippines after the war and until his untimely death in 1957. Nat has done an outstanding job of telling not only his father's story, but also that of his mother, brother and two sisters as they waited helplessly in the Philippines for their father and husband to return for them. Instead of their father, it was no less a figure than General Douglas McAthur who came to the gates of Santo Thomas University to put them on a C-47 for the flight to Australia, where Pappy Gunn had been evacuated a few months before after recieving a serious wound from a Japanese white phosphorus bomb. This book should be read by every American! It's the story of a real hero, not a media or politically generated one.

Sam McGowan, Author - The Cave, A Novel of the Vietnam War