June 4, 2025 • 42 mins
When fighter pilot Jefferson DeBlanc survived being shot at in a crazy dogfight over the Solomon Islands in World War Two, his adventure was only beginning. What happened after he parachuted out of his burning plane is a story of grit, blind optimism, and against-all-odds survival.
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Episode bibliography:
DeBlanc, Jefferson. The Guadalcanal Air War: Col. Jefferson DeBlanc's Story. Pelican Publishing, April 15, 2008. https://www.amazon.com/Guadalcanal-Air-War-Jefferson-DeBlancs/dp/1589805879
Torres, Rivers. “Jefferson DeBlanc and the Air Battle for Guadalcanal.” The National WWII Museum, July 10, 2024. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/jefferson-deblanc-and-air-battle-guadalcanal
Lord, Walter. “Ordeal At Vella Lavella.” American Heritage, June 1997. https://www.americanheritage.com/ordeal-vella-lavella
Kwai, Anna Annie. Solomon Islanders in World War II: An Indigenous Perspective. Australian National University Press, 2017. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/481b8b20-5e35-4b66-bc3e-f8489e0745dc/643776.pdf
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:27):
The link is also in our show notes below. Pushkin
Jefferson de Blanc was falling through the air. The wind
(00:51):
roared in his ears, his shoulders were gripped by the
hardness of his parachute. He was plummeting thousands of feet
towards the Pacific Ocean, having jumped seconds before from the
wreckage of his plane. He was hoping to land somewhere
close to a shoreline, because as he was falling, night
(01:12):
was falling too. It was the evening of January thirty first,
nineteen forty three. Jeff was a Marine Corps fighter pilot,
and for the past hour he had been battling Japanese
warplanes and the skies over the Solomon Islands, weaving in
and out of enemy fighters, dodging bullets firing in return,
(01:34):
and watching his good friend, his wingman, get blown out
of the air. Jeff himself had shot down several enemy planes.
He had looked directly in the eyes of one of
the men he had killed right before the man's plane exploded,
and then Jeff's own plane had been shot to bits,
(01:55):
the engine caught fire, and the plane fell apart around him.
Not in minutes but in seconds. As Jeff scrambled onto
the wing and pulled the ripcord of his parachute, he
knew that falling through the sky was the best of
a bunch of bad outcomes, because there was no chance
he survived in his plane, but there was a chance
(02:18):
he could survive the fall, a slim one. Maybe the
water was filled with sharks, and even if he managed
to get to land, the islands below him were occupied
by the Japanese military. He had seen their bases from
the sky. If he survived the swim, and that was
a big if, he would be stranded deep in enemy territory.
(02:41):
But his current predicament was the direct result of two
very specific decisions. He had made, one at the start
of the battle and one at the end, but both
were the same. To stay and fight say, even if
it meant that this was the endgame. Plunging through the
atmosphere towards the water as the sun disappeared over the horizon,
(03:05):
Jeff de Blanc was twenty one years old, and somehow
he was incredibly calm, convinced that he wasn't going to die,
but how he would survive would be another story entirely.
I'm j R. Martinez and this is Medal of Honor
(03:27):
Stories of courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest
military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and
bravery and combat at the risk of life, above and
beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must be approved
all the way up the chain of command, from the
supervisory officer in the field to the White House. This
(03:50):
show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant,
and what their stories tell us about the nature of
courage and sacrifice. Jeff de Blanc's story is about long odds,
some of the longest I have ever heard, but that's
not the reason I love it. Jeff's story is incredible
(04:10):
because it gets to something that's at the very heart
of the Medal of Honor, a key to answering the question, why,
in the name of protecting others do some people knowingly
do things that might kill them. To Jeff the answer
was clear. It was because he felt accountable. Not to
(04:32):
his country, or his comrades or a higher power. He
was accountable to himself. Jefferson de Blanc was born in
nineteen twenty one. From a very early age, he was
(04:52):
obsessed with aviation. Here he is talking about the moment
he fell in love with it. When he was about
six or seven.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
An aeroplane came over a biplane and had engine trouble
and landed in the pasture about a mile from all home.
So we all ran to see the aircraft.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
That accent you hear in his voice, it's kajun. Jeff
was born in Louisiana, and he was descended from the
French speaking settlers of that region. He grew up in
the Bayous, specifically the Achafalaya basin the nation's largest river swamp,
bigger than the Everglades. He spent his youth scrambling around
(05:36):
in the murky heat of those dense, junglely swamps. Not
a place where planes usually just fall out of the sky,
but to a kid on that bayou. This was a
dream come true.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And of course I was the first one to get there.
And when I got there for a reward, he picked
me up and put me in a cockpit and I
looked at the dials. I was caught and hooked dot
in my mind. The instrumentation was fascinating and that's how
I got hooked on aviation.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
From then on out, you will come to know something
special about Jeff. Once he sets his mind to something,
decides to do something, that's it. It just sticks. From
a one time encounter with the plane as a kid,
he picked a life path and stuck to it. He
went to college in nineteen thirty eight, and by thirty nine,
(06:28):
with war escalating in Europe, the government started training civilians
to fly. Jeff signed up for flight school as quickly
as he possibly could. In July of forty one, at
the age of nineteen, he joined the Navy with the
plan of becoming a fighter pilot. The attack on Pearl
Harbor put pilot training on hyper speed. With the declaration
(06:51):
of war, the military had to turn out aviators in
record time, which meant that Jeff barely got two hundred
and fifty hours of flight training before he was shipped out.
No lessons in dog fighting tactics, almost no instruction on
how to fire guns.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And we did not have any schalvival training. The name
of the game was get the bodies odd fast, and
that's what they did.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Jeff graduated from flight school, but then he was told
the one thing that no fighter pilot wants to hear.
The Navy needs you to fly reconnaissance aircraft.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
They were going to make a peboard pilot out of me,
and I didn't want it. I wanted fighters.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So Jeff transferred to the Marines. There he could be
a fighter pilot. In the summer of nineteen forty two,
he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve.
His airplan would be the F four F Wildcat, rugged
and easy to maneuver, with six machine guns mounted on
(07:54):
the wings. It had a flying range of several hundred miles,
but any dog fighting would burn fuel quickly. You could
strap on an extra fifty gallon fuel tank, but that
tended to have problems, including making the plane more difficult
to fly and easier to blow up. Jeff couldn't wait
to start flying Wildcats, but he hadn't trained in them
(08:15):
at all. Before he fought in one for the first time,
he had only flown a wildcat for nine hours, almost nothing.
He would have to turn that nothing into something pretty
fast because he was shipping out to the Solomon Islands,
specifically Guadalcanal. We've talked about Guadalcanal before on this show.
(08:36):
Last season we told the story of Doug mon Roe,
the Coastguard signal men who died during one of the
early battles there. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the
Japanese Empire had gained footholds throughout the Pacific, the Philippines,
Eastern China, Singapore, New Guinea, and Moore. Their goal was
to move eastward to threaten Hawaii, and southward to cut
(09:00):
off Australia from the rest of the Allied forces. The
Allies were going to have to stop them if there
was any hope of winning the war, so the Allies
set their sights on the Solomons, a chain of more
than nine hundred islands scattered over eleven thousand square miles
in the South Pacific. In nineteen forty two, they invaded Guadalcanal,
(09:22):
the biggest of the islands, where the Japanese had carved
out an airfield. The Allies captured the airfield dug In
and used it as a staging ground to take on
the enemy.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
This is the airfield on the island of guadal Canal
in the Solomons, for the possession of which so much
heavy fighting has taken place in American hands. It's become
a vitally important base from which to bum Japanese warships
and convoys.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Fighter pilots and Wildcats would escort dive bombers as they
went to strife the Japanese. The Wildcats would take on
these Japanese floatplanes and fighter jets so that the bombers
could get close to their targets. You could have sent
out bombers without the Wildcats. They needed that protection if
they were going to get to their targets and get
home safely. These aerial missions were inherently dangerous, and estimated
(10:09):
four hundred and twenty American pilots would eventually lose their
lives in the skies over the Solomons, and so in
November of forty two, three months after the start of
this campaign, Jeff arrived in Guadalcanal. The terrain of the
Solomon Islands reminded him of Louisiana, the relentless heat, the mosquitoes.
(10:30):
None of that was new to him. He was, as ever,
completely calm, full of hope, and a kind of giddy,
youthful faith. He told himself, I could survive here if
I had to. Soon enough, he would put that theory
to the test. The months passed and the Battle of
(11:03):
Guadalcanal ground on. The US troops still only held the airfield,
while the Japanese were elsewhere on the island and on
bases scattered throughout the Solomons. Both sides had lost thousands
of men, and yet as the years slowly turned to
nineteen forty three, it seemed that neither would budge. On
(11:24):
the afternoon of January thirty first, Jeff was given a mission.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Boyd came down from fire to command that a Japanese
invasion fleet was coming down with ships to probably reinforce
Guadacanal for the final fight. So they scrambled US eight
fire to Polish to go up after Escort twelve Dove
bombers to hit a Japanese destroyers and ships that were
(11:51):
in the Columbangala area, and Velo Novello two hundred and
fifty miles outs beyond the range of the Wildcat, so
we had to strap on a wing tank of fifty
gallons to make it.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
That fifty gallon tank of fuel was going to be
the difference between the fighter pilots making it all the
way out to the fight and back to the base
or potentially having to bel out of their aircraft somewhere
over the ocean fuel tanks on empty. But it was
also a liability. Jeff, as usual, was unfazed. He strapped
(12:27):
on a watch he had just bought on leave a
few weeks before. It was already a prize possession. He
was really proud of it and curious to see how
it would do in the altitude. He climbed into his
plane and fired up the engine. The eight fighters and
twelve bombers set out. Jeff was in the lead. It
(12:47):
was three PM when they took to the skies. Fairly shortly,
Jeff realized that things were going.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Sideways, and I worried about one hundred miles out. I'd
already used my fifty gallon and the main tank was
not full. I was using guys like mad. That was
a leak somewhere, I don't know where, it was, but
I knew that I would never make it back.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Something was up with the tank, and not just his.
He watched as two of the other fighter pilots peeled
off and returned to base.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Two guys must have had the same trouble because they
turned back. So that left six of us to do
the job of protecting the dive bombers. Now we needed
all the guns we could get up to him to
protect the dove bombers, so they'll give a dead ducks.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
The bombers desperately needed the Wildcats to keep them safe
and to fend off the Japanese attack that was sure
to come. Jeff knew that when they got to the
bombing site, he would most likely be engaged in a
dog fight. Every evasive action he would take would cost
him more precious fuel. Nevertheless, he made a decision he
(13:54):
would stay and fight no matter the cost.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Now, I'm not a brave man, but I have to
live with myself if I quit. Now, that would be
one last fighter pilot to go up there, so I
decided to keep going.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
As the convoy reached the target area, the dive bombers descended,
circling for marks, but Jeff realized they were no longer alone.
Two Japanese floatplanes appeared from above, diving down towards the
American bombers. Jeff had the advantage of altitude. He saw them,
but they didn't see him. He lowered his Wildcat and
(14:32):
got the rear floatplane in his sights. He led on
a burst of gunfire, a direct hit. He watched as
the aircraft went into a spiral and exploded. Then he
settled behind the next one, right in the Japanese pilot's
blind spot. He opened fire again. The floatplane climbed into
the sky and shattered into a flash of light. Jeff
(14:54):
and his wingman's sergeant, James Fullatin, climbed higher, searching for
a safer outitude, but then they saw it, a swarm
of Japanese fighter planes heading straight for them. Jeff swung
his Wildcat below the group of enemy planes, shooting at
the lead fighter. That plane caught fire but escaped. Another
(15:16):
Japanese pilot spiraled up from the pack, trying to figure
out what was happening. Jeff followed right on his tail.
He got the fighter in his sight and picked it off.
But now he and Phelason had the attention of the
whole group of Japanese pilots. They were completely outnumbered, so
the two Americans turned their wildcats towards each other, weaving
(15:39):
back and forth covering each other's tails. Then Pelosin swung
two wide and came straight into the crosshairs of one
of the Japanese guns. Felatson took a hit to his engine.
His plane started streaming black smoke. He had no choice
but to bil out parachute into the ocean below the
rest of them. The Japanese fighters scattered. For a moment,
(16:03):
the sky was clear of the enemy, The sun was setting,
and the window to return home and land safely was
quickly disappearing. The American dive bombers assembled in formation. They
had done their job. It was time to return to base.
Jeff glanced at his fuel gauge and what he saw
(16:24):
made his stomach turn. The dogfight had depleted his fuel
even further, but he might have enough to make it
close to Guadalcanal, close to where someone could find him
rescue him if he had to build out. He was
ready to head back when he noticed something out of
the corner of his eye. Two enemy fighters on his tail.
(16:46):
If he stopped to engage them. He would never make
it back to safety, but he had to draw them
away from the American bombers. That was what he had
been sent on the mission to do. Out of fuel,
thousands of feet in the air, ocean and jungle islands
beneath him, and a choice to me. Well, after all,
(17:09):
he told himself he'd grown up in the Louisiana swamps.
He wasn't afraid of the jungle.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
I figured I knew enough about survival. I wasn't trained
for him, but I was born and reared here in
the chapel at mission, and I could survive if I
hit the islands.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
So he decided once again to stay. He watched as
the American bombers disappeared over the horizon to Guadalcanal and safety,
and then he climbed higher to attack the two enemy
planes head on. They closed the space in a heartbeat.
He fired. The first Japanese plane caught fire, but it
(17:47):
wasn't going down. Jeff realized the pilot planned to fly
his burning fighter right into Jeff's Wildcat.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
This guy was shot. He knew he was dead. He
caught fire and he was gonna ram me. He's coming
straight toward me, he's still on fire, so I held
the trigger down. He explored, and I flew through the pieces.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Debris flew past him, hitting Jeff's plane, but his engine
was still running. His Wildcat was still flying, and as
far as he could tell, there was just one fighter left.
He banked sharply to get on the tail of the
second fighter plane as it sped by, but the pilot
had guessed his plan and pulled up high above him.
(18:31):
Then he came down straight towards Jeff.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
When I saw him coming down on him, he was
picking up speed, and he was too anxious for the kill.
And you get too anxious. You've seen birds that whale
animals get too anxious to kill, the anticipate and they
caught themselves. So he was coming down so fast that
he didn't realize he was overtaken me. The normally the
reaction let me get out of here and pressed the shit.
(18:56):
If I'd pick up most being run away from him,
that's your normal way of trying to present of your life,
run away, but not in the final plan. Instead of
trying to run away, I chopped his throttle, which slowed
me up. Then I skidd it so he couldn't stay
on my tail.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
In effect, Jeff slammed on the brakes, trying to force
the Japanese pilot to overshoot him. It worked. The two
pilots locked eyes.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Win kipped to wing tip. When we looked at each
other and I knew and he knew that he was
a dead man.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It was a moment that would stay with Jeff forever,
that tension between seeing your adversary acknowledging his humanity and
knowing what you were about to do to him, and
yet his conscience was clean.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
A lot of polots rationalize, we don't shoot down or
killed man, We just shoot down our planes. You know,
that's a shield to take away the idea of haven't
killed somebody. It doesn't work that way. You either kill
or you be killed, okay, and you have no remorse
(20:06):
for the enemy. He's ought to kill you. So the
name of the game is you kill him before he
kills you.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Jeff fired, and the Japanese pilot's plane exploded for the
first time in hours. Jeff seemed to be out of
harm's way.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I figured I hadn't made Let me go home, try
to survive, and while I'm doing that, the sun is setting.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
He glanced at his watch. It was six pm. It
would be dark soon.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
And that's when I got hit. The first bullet came
through it over my left shoulder and took my watch
off my wrist.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
He hadn't seen the new fighter planes behind him, but
now they were lighting up his Wildcat with bullets. The
instrument panel burst into flames, the engine lost power, his
plane was disintegrating. As Jeff looked frantically around, he saw
another fighter bank to take a run at him. He
(21:00):
was a dead man.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
So I got out of that like a tall dog
because the bullets were setting everything on fire and hitting
the armor plate and everything else. But I was lucky.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
I was.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I have a few shop Noel cuts, but I didn't
realize it that but adrenaline was flowing so fast and
I didn't even feel I was hurt.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
The only thing left to do was bell out. He
was about three thousand feet somewhere over the western Solomon Islands.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
So I jumped out, trailed the ledge of the wing
and pulled a rip cord, and flowing through the air
was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Like I said, this is one extremely unflappable man.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Man. That was the more sensational thing I ever did
in my life, and it was outstand it.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But then he hit the water harder than he'd anticipated.
His gun, canteen and extra shells were ripped away from him.
He managed to inflate his life jacket. When he broke
the surface of the water, he could see shoreline ahead
of him, but the current was sweeping him out to sea.
Jeff knew he was bleeding, and he knew there were sharks.
(22:12):
All aviators at the time were giving chlorine pills to
break into the water to keep sharks away. So Jeff
broke his as he swam and swam and swam. It
would take six hours of swimming for Jeff to reach shore,
dusk settling into full darkness, the stars coming out, and
(22:35):
an unknowable amount of swimming left to do, but he
kept going. Finally he reached the shore. He pulled himself
up on the sand, tore off his life jacket, and
ran across the beach to the underbrush. It might have
been dark, but he knew the Japanese had a base
on this island. He had seen it from the sky.
(22:57):
He was an enemy terary.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Now I knew enough to get off the beach and
cover up my tracks. And I fell asleep.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
For the moment. He could rest, kind of like a
worn out kid. Jeff could sleep pretty much anywhere. This
place was Kullambungara Island. That night he found peace, but
what awaited him on the island was every bit as
dangerous as anything in the sky. Jeff de Blanc woke
(23:30):
up to the filling of rain. He ached all over.
He had a backpack with the basic survival kit, so
he dressed his wounds as best as he could and
had a bite of chocolate from his pack. He had
no idea where to go or if the Allies knew
he was still alive. He was pretty sure the Japanese did.
One of the pilots had circled him as he was
(23:51):
parachuting down.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I had to figure, well, I'm an animate territory, and
I know they're looking for him because the man circled
in and they shot me arm, So they're looking for
me definitely.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yet, somehow Jeff was convinced that he could survive in
the jungle, maybe even still a plane off the Japanese
base and get home. He started to trek inland. He
had a knife in his pack and he walked with
it out in front of him. The vegetation was so
thick he found it easier to climb into the trees,
(24:22):
moving above ground from one to the next. The second night,
he fell asleep, this time in a tree, even though
his wounds had started to bother him. The following morning,
he spotted a grass hut in a small clearing. It
had a straw sleeping mat inside, and Jeff gathered coconuts
from the trees and rain water from where it had
(24:43):
pulled on massive leaves. While exploring the jungle, he found
a downed Allied fighter jet swarming with flies. He saw
that the machine guns had been removed, and he shuddered
had the Japanese been there? But then he saw bare
foot prince surrounding the wreckage. He knew what that meant.
(25:04):
One of the local indigenous tribes must live close by,
because the Solomon Islands were populated, of course, by people
who lived there for thousands of years, some Melanesians, some Polynesians.
In fact, more than eighty different languages are spoken by
the peoples of the Solomons, making it one of the
Pacific's most diverse countries in terms of language and ethnicity.
(25:29):
Jeff had known he wasn't alone, not really, but he
didn't know if these islanders would be happy to see him.
He didn't count on it. He gauged his safety by
listening to the birds outside his hut. As long as
they were singing, He told himself he was alone.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
And the birds are shanging. Everything is right on, no doubt,
from the swamps just all over the world. That way,
the birds are shanging. Fine.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
He spent a night in the little hut, and then
another and another listening to the birds song, tending to
his wounds, staying his same hopeful self. And then he
woke one morning, and since something had shifted, the birds
stopped singing.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
What does I tell you, I tell you in trouble.
Something is out there.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
He grabbed his knife and walked to the door of
the hut. A young islander stood there, about five foot two.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
He was grinning. Now why should he be grinning. I'm
taller than he is. I have a knife, he has
a machete. I can throw a knife, and I have
had to fight him hand to hand. But for some
reason for him to be grinning. And when I stepped
out that hut, four or five others right there with macheads.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Oh, Jeff thought that's why he was grinning. Jeff was
totally outnumbered. He dropped his knife, but he wasn't exactly stressed.
He wasn't an anxious guy, just in his twenty one
year old, not particularly sophisticated way. He was a little
worried that they might eat him.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I could see myself in the pot.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah right. The men moved Jeff through the jungle to
the water's edge. An outrigger canoe was waiting there, and
they motioned for him to get inside.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
When it put me into twelve men out rigor. Then
I knew they were going to trade me to the
Japanese because they weren't friendly. They punched me in if
i'd moved. The stick me with a knife, which means
don't move, and I got the message in a hurry.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
They paddled along the shoreline for hours towards the village,
towards the Japanese base. Jeff had no way of knowing.
Finally they stopped and motioned Jeff out of the canoe.
He followed them to a village where they put him
in a bamboo cage with two guards set outside. Jeff waited.
Even to unflappable Jeff, this was starting to seem pretty bad.
(28:05):
Then six more Islanders entered the village. One of them
was carrying a sack.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
When he walked into that compound, you could tell he
had authority, and he had a ten poundshakaraj, which he
put down at the feet of the men who held me.
They let me go, and I quickly joined him, and
we all took off head and oft of the jungles
towards another village.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Jeff wasn't sure what was happening, but he knew one thing.
He had been traded for a sack of rice.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
When he threw a ten pound shack of rise non,
I knew exactly how much I'm with a ten pound
shock of riag. That's the value of my life.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The new group of men walked for an hour without
exchanging a word, and then the leader turned to Jeff
and spoke to him in Pigeon, a dialect close enough
to English that Jeff could understand. They weren't taking Jeff
to be sold to the Japanese, he said, they were
rescuing him. Unbeknownst to Jeff, a network of coast watchers
(29:04):
had been hunting for him every bit as hard as
the Japanese had. The coast watchers were largely British and
Australian men, mostly civilians who had stayed in the Solomons
after the Japanese invasion. Now they worked as Allied spies,
hiding in the jungles to report on enemy activities. Islanders
(29:26):
had been helping the Allied forces since the start of
the war as well, working as guides providing valuable intelligence,
leading down pilots like Jeff through the jungle to safety,
often passing within inches of the enemy. They were the
primary communication link between the coast watchers. There were also
targets of the Japanese. That was the reason Jeff had
(29:49):
been kept in the cage.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
In that first village, Japanese plans had shokued each village,
you're looking for me, and did it see a white
man in the village, that strafed the village and bombed
regardless of the natives.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
That man, who had traded Jeff for the sack of rice,
was named Ati Lu Ducolo. He was tasked with bringing
Jeff miles across the Kullabangara Island, across the sea and
onto the next largest island, which was called Vela la Vela.
From there they could arrange for the Allies to pick
Jeff up, but they would have to get there first.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
So we went to another village and I was in
chief there. I'm stripped of the waists and everything else.
I have my Marine Corps buckle. There the chief grabs
my buckle. The intelligence officer said, if any native takes
something from you, you take something from them. It's protocol.
When he grabbed that buckle, I grabbed that spirit that
he had. Well, we traded. In other words, he nodded, no, nodded,
(30:48):
and I walked off with the spear.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Jeff held tightly to that spear as he and Ati
traveled on. They reached another twelve man out rigger canoe.
They paddled in the darkness through a rainstorm, with nothing
but the tides to guide them and daylight, and into
another canoe. This time Ati made Jeff lie on the
bottom and covered him with palm fronds. Being spotted by
(31:13):
the Japanese would have meant death to them all. They
paddled on swiftly, quietly, until finally they reached Vella La Vella.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
So they took Franze off of me.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Jeff blinked and looked out from the Canoe.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I see a big red borne, and I see a
white man coming down with three natives. And he spoke
Oxford English and said to me Lieutenant de Blanc. And
he didn't mission a de Blanc or this or that.
He came out in perfect French.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It was Reverend A. W. E. Sylvester, a New Zealand
missionary who had refused to evacuate the islands after the
Japanese invasion. He was a coastwatcher too, That's how he
knew who Jeff was. In fact, Sylvester himself had only
survived the Japanese invasion because the Solomon Islanders had led
(32:06):
him to safety, just as they had helped Jeff and
the other stranded allies. Here's Sylvester speaking to an interviewer
about it back in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
I certainly owe my life to the natives. One of
my native teachers came and gave me the warning, and
all my decisions regarding evacuation were made on their information.
We never made a mistake during the services of the natives.
The total number of people we evacuated were two hundred
and fifty four from our island.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Jeff couldn't have known it but his route from Ati
to Sylvester to safety was one that the coast watchers
and the Islanders had been perfecting for months. He had
fallen into just the right place. Sylvester welcomed Jeff into
his home, where Jeff, unsurprisingly slept like a log. He
(32:59):
also got a piece of welcome news. His wingman Peloton
had survived as well, wounded, ribs, broken, but alive. The
following day was a Sunday, and the men were having
a leisurely British cup of tea when an Islander ran
up and whispered something in the Sylvester's ear. The minister
put down his teacup.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
He said, well, we'll have to have mask now and
then after Mass, you're gonna have to leave. I said why,
He said, the Japanese are coming in. He said, I
know you're a Catholic Initiative Church of England, which is
not the same denomination process. But I said, please, I'll
be on the first sheet, in the first row.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And so in the middle of the jungle with the
Japanese on their way, the group gathered and prayed. Then
Jeff Ati and a few other Islanders booked it out.
They wound up trekking for miles, finally reaching the village
where Peloton had been hidden. Safety started to feel closer,
(34:00):
but the two Marines would have to wait until an
American rescue mission could be organized to take them back
to Guadalcanal. Two coast watchers invited Jeff to hight to
their secret outposts in the mountains, where he saw Japanese
planes take off and land from nearby bases. Only then
did he understand the extraordinary work these hidden ally spies
(34:22):
had done and what risk they had taken to save
Americans whenever they fell. On February twelfth, nineteen forty three,
three days before Jeff's twenty second birthday, planes left Guadalcanal
to pick up Jeff and his wingman. They were taken
offshore in a canoe. Atti rode with them, safeguarding them
(34:46):
until the end. The rescue plane landed, escorted by fighter pilots,
within sight of three Japanese airfields.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
They picked us up when they run. Atti was the
one who brought me back through the peaboat made underwater
to pick up things. So they landed on the water,
but didn't cut the engines up through my spear and
there first and then jumped in after him.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
The men on board had risked their lives to get
Jeff and Peloton just as Ati had. The pee boat
took off, headed to Guadalcanal, and Jeff finally exhaled.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I knew I was shaved.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
He had lived with this decision to not turn back,
to stay and fight, and he had also lived. Jeff
(35:50):
went on to serve a few more months in the Solomons.
When he returned home on leave, his little town presented
him with a watch to replace the one that had
been blown off his wrist. He was awarded the Navy
Cross for his actions in the Skies. That last day
of January nineteen forty three, he volunteered for active service again.
(36:12):
He flew missions during the Battle of Okinawa. He touched
down in Japan after the war ended, curious to see
what the country looked like, but he was ready to
return home, specifically to Louise Burrard, his high school sweetheart.
He had known her since she was the star ford
of the championship girls basketball team, A dark haired beauty
(36:36):
with a sweet smile. They got married. Jeff went to college,
and then in December of nineteen forty six, he got
a call he was told that he was going back
into active duty. He couldn't understand it. Why he has
served as country, he was a reservist. What active duty
(36:59):
was going back to?
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I said what, I don't I'm a reserve. I'm not Oh,
go go. We said, just to come to Washington to
get into Medal of Bana said, you got to be joking.
I said, shout it two men riding and they did.
So they putting on active duty to go back. She
wouldn't cast anything.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yep. They put him on active duty so that he
wouldn't have to pay for the trip anyways. He and
Louise went to Washington and President Harry Truman gave Jeff
his Medal of Honor at the White House. Jeff went
on to stay in the Marines as a reservist until
nineteen seventy two. He and Louise had five children, a
(37:40):
girl and four boys. Jeff got advanced degrees in science
and mathematics. He became a teacher. He taught middle and
high school kids, and then he went back to the
Solomon Islands four times. The first was in nineteen ninety
two for the fiftieth anniversary of Guadalcanat. He went up
(38:01):
in a plane, this time flown by someone else, and
peered down over Kullabungara Island, searching for the hut where
he'd hidden out so many decades before. And then in
two thousand, he flew to Vella Lavella to be reunited
with Ati Lo Ducolo, the man who had guided him
(38:22):
on his treacherous path to safety. Jeff was taken by
boat to ATI's village, where his former guide, now in
his nineties, was waiting. The two hugged. They ate dinner together.
They exchanged gifts. Fifty seven years had passed since they
(38:44):
had met in the jungle. Since Atti saved Jeff's life,
Jeff had never forgotten his bravery, or his kindness, or,
of course, that ten pound bag of rice. Jeff de
Blanc died in two thousand and seven at the age
of eighty six. The spear he traded his belt buckle
for now sits in the World War II Museum in
(39:07):
New Orleans, Louisiana. Even at the end of his life,
when asked about the Medal of Honor and his actions
on January thirty first, nineteen forty three, Jeff brought everything
back to one thing, not heroism, not bravery, but personal accountability.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I could have used to turn back and nobody would
have questioned it, because two guys did already. But I
would have to live with myself because, no doubt in
my mind, a lot of bombas would not have return,
and that would be a part that I would have
to be accountable for, and I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
The kind of accountability Jeff is talking about isn't expectations
from others or a job description. It's a personal ethos.
It's the feeling of being sure what your values are
and the determination to stick to those values no matter
the cost. Some might call it a conscience. That little
(40:08):
voice inside your head. That little voice told Jeff that
if he turned back and abandoned his mission, he'd be
turning back to a life he wouldn't want to lead.
So he stayed and protected those bombers, even when he
knew he might never make it home. I think that's
(40:28):
why Jeff felt such peace when he found himself falling
thousands of feet through the air, the empty ocean rising
up to meet him, seeing this glorious beauty in the fall,
with a conscience as light as a feather. Medal of honor.
(40:53):
Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced
by Meredith Rollins, Jeff Shane, and Zan Gabber. Our editor
is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey. Sound design and additional music by
Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo. Fact checking
by Arthur Gomperts. Original music by Eric Phillips. The rest
(41:16):
of the team includes Carl Catele, Greta Cone, Christina Sullivan,
Sarah Nix, Nicole Appendosh, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jordan McMillan,
Kira Posey, Owen Miller, Amy haggerdarn and Jake Flanagan. Special
thanks to the series creator Dan McGinn, to the Congressional
Medal of Honor Society, and to Ja to Anga the
(41:39):
Audio visual Archive of Atiuroa, New Zealand. If you want
to learn more about this story, take a look at
our show notes, where we have some of the resources
we use to put together this episode, including a book
by the man himself, Jefferson de Blanc. We also want
to hear from you. Send us your personal story of
courage or highlight someone else's bravery. Email us at medalof
(42:03):
Honor at Pushkin dot fm. You might hear your stories
on future episodes of Medal of Honor, or see them
on our social channels at Pushkin Pods. I'm your host, JR.
Martinez
Hey everyone, We've put together a survey for listeners of
Medal of Honor and we want to hear from you.
Tell us what you love about the show, what we
can improve on, or stories you think we've missed. We're
committed to making this show even better and you can
help to take the survey. Visit bit dot lee slash
h survey. That's bit dot l y slash mh survey.
(00:27):
The link is also in our show notes below. Pushkin
Jefferson de Blanc was falling through the air. The wind
(00:51):
roared in his ears, his shoulders were gripped by the
hardness of his parachute. He was plummeting thousands of feet
towards the Pacific Ocean, having jumped seconds before from the
wreckage of his plane. He was hoping to land somewhere
close to a shoreline, because as he was falling, night
(01:12):
was falling too. It was the evening of January thirty first,
nineteen forty three. Jeff was a Marine Corps fighter pilot,
and for the past hour he had been battling Japanese
warplanes and the skies over the Solomon Islands, weaving in
and out of enemy fighters, dodging bullets firing in return,
(01:34):
and watching his good friend, his wingman, get blown out
of the air. Jeff himself had shot down several enemy planes.
He had looked directly in the eyes of one of
the men he had killed right before the man's plane exploded,
and then Jeff's own plane had been shot to bits,
(01:55):
the engine caught fire, and the plane fell apart around him.
Not in minutes but in seconds. As Jeff scrambled onto
the wing and pulled the ripcord of his parachute, he
knew that falling through the sky was the best of
a bunch of bad outcomes, because there was no chance
he survived in his plane, but there was a chance
(02:18):
he could survive the fall, a slim one. Maybe the
water was filled with sharks, and even if he managed
to get to land, the islands below him were occupied
by the Japanese military. He had seen their bases from
the sky. If he survived the swim, and that was
a big if, he would be stranded deep in enemy territory.
(02:41):
But his current predicament was the direct result of two
very specific decisions. He had made, one at the start
of the battle and one at the end, but both
were the same. To stay and fight say, even if
it meant that this was the endgame. Plunging through the
atmosphere towards the water as the sun disappeared over the horizon,
(03:05):
Jeff de Blanc was twenty one years old, and somehow
he was incredibly calm, convinced that he wasn't going to die,
but how he would survive would be another story entirely.
I'm j R. Martinez and this is Medal of Honor
(03:27):
Stories of courage. The Medal of Honor is the highest
military decoration in the United States, awarded for gallantry and
bravery and combat at the risk of life, above and
beyond the call of duty. Each candidate must be approved
all the way up the chain of command, from the
supervisory officer in the field to the White House. This
(03:50):
show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant,
and what their stories tell us about the nature of
courage and sacrifice. Jeff de Blanc's story is about long odds,
some of the longest I have ever heard, but that's
not the reason I love it. Jeff's story is incredible
(04:10):
because it gets to something that's at the very heart
of the Medal of Honor, a key to answering the question, why,
in the name of protecting others do some people knowingly
do things that might kill them. To Jeff the answer
was clear. It was because he felt accountable. Not to
(04:32):
his country, or his comrades or a higher power. He
was accountable to himself. Jefferson de Blanc was born in
nineteen twenty one. From a very early age, he was
(04:52):
obsessed with aviation. Here he is talking about the moment
he fell in love with it. When he was about
six or seven.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
An aeroplane came over a biplane and had engine trouble
and landed in the pasture about a mile from all home.
So we all ran to see the aircraft.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
That accent you hear in his voice, it's kajun. Jeff
was born in Louisiana, and he was descended from the
French speaking settlers of that region. He grew up in
the Bayous, specifically the Achafalaya basin the nation's largest river swamp,
bigger than the Everglades. He spent his youth scrambling around
(05:36):
in the murky heat of those dense, junglely swamps. Not
a place where planes usually just fall out of the sky,
but to a kid on that bayou. This was a
dream come true.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
And of course I was the first one to get there.
And when I got there for a reward, he picked
me up and put me in a cockpit and I
looked at the dials. I was caught and hooked dot
in my mind. The instrumentation was fascinating and that's how
I got hooked on aviation.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
From then on out, you will come to know something
special about Jeff. Once he sets his mind to something,
decides to do something, that's it. It just sticks. From
a one time encounter with the plane as a kid,
he picked a life path and stuck to it. He
went to college in nineteen thirty eight, and by thirty nine,
(06:28):
with war escalating in Europe, the government started training civilians
to fly. Jeff signed up for flight school as quickly
as he possibly could. In July of forty one, at
the age of nineteen, he joined the Navy with the
plan of becoming a fighter pilot. The attack on Pearl
Harbor put pilot training on hyper speed. With the declaration
(06:51):
of war, the military had to turn out aviators in
record time, which meant that Jeff barely got two hundred
and fifty hours of flight training before he was shipped out.
No lessons in dog fighting tactics, almost no instruction on
how to fire guns.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
And we did not have any schalvival training. The name
of the game was get the bodies odd fast, and
that's what they did.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Jeff graduated from flight school, but then he was told
the one thing that no fighter pilot wants to hear.
The Navy needs you to fly reconnaissance aircraft.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
They were going to make a peboard pilot out of me,
and I didn't want it. I wanted fighters.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
So Jeff transferred to the Marines. There he could be
a fighter pilot. In the summer of nineteen forty two,
he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps Reserve.
His airplan would be the F four F Wildcat, rugged
and easy to maneuver, with six machine guns mounted on
(07:54):
the wings. It had a flying range of several hundred miles,
but any dog fighting would burn fuel quickly. You could
strap on an extra fifty gallon fuel tank, but that
tended to have problems, including making the plane more difficult
to fly and easier to blow up. Jeff couldn't wait
to start flying Wildcats, but he hadn't trained in them
(08:15):
at all. Before he fought in one for the first time,
he had only flown a wildcat for nine hours, almost nothing.
He would have to turn that nothing into something pretty
fast because he was shipping out to the Solomon Islands,
specifically Guadalcanal. We've talked about Guadalcanal before on this show.
(08:36):
Last season we told the story of Doug mon Roe,
the Coastguard signal men who died during one of the
early battles there. In the months after Pearl Harbor, the
Japanese Empire had gained footholds throughout the Pacific, the Philippines,
Eastern China, Singapore, New Guinea, and Moore. Their goal was
to move eastward to threaten Hawaii, and southward to cut
(09:00):
off Australia from the rest of the Allied forces. The
Allies were going to have to stop them if there
was any hope of winning the war, so the Allies
set their sights on the Solomons, a chain of more
than nine hundred islands scattered over eleven thousand square miles
in the South Pacific. In nineteen forty two, they invaded Guadalcanal,
(09:22):
the biggest of the islands, where the Japanese had carved
out an airfield. The Allies captured the airfield dug In
and used it as a staging ground to take on
the enemy.
Speaker 3 (09:33):
This is the airfield on the island of guadal Canal
in the Solomons, for the possession of which so much
heavy fighting has taken place in American hands. It's become
a vitally important base from which to bum Japanese warships
and convoys.
Speaker 1 (09:46):
Fighter pilots and Wildcats would escort dive bombers as they
went to strife the Japanese. The Wildcats would take on
these Japanese floatplanes and fighter jets so that the bombers
could get close to their targets. You could have sent
out bombers without the Wildcats. They needed that protection if
they were going to get to their targets and get
home safely. These aerial missions were inherently dangerous, and estimated
(10:09):
four hundred and twenty American pilots would eventually lose their
lives in the skies over the Solomons, and so in
November of forty two, three months after the start of
this campaign, Jeff arrived in Guadalcanal. The terrain of the
Solomon Islands reminded him of Louisiana, the relentless heat, the mosquitoes.
(10:30):
None of that was new to him. He was, as ever,
completely calm, full of hope, and a kind of giddy,
youthful faith. He told himself, I could survive here if
I had to. Soon enough, he would put that theory
to the test. The months passed and the Battle of
(11:03):
Guadalcanal ground on. The US troops still only held the airfield,
while the Japanese were elsewhere on the island and on
bases scattered throughout the Solomons. Both sides had lost thousands
of men, and yet as the years slowly turned to
nineteen forty three, it seemed that neither would budge. On
(11:24):
the afternoon of January thirty first, Jeff was given a mission.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Boyd came down from fire to command that a Japanese
invasion fleet was coming down with ships to probably reinforce
Guadacanal for the final fight. So they scrambled US eight
fire to Polish to go up after Escort twelve Dove
bombers to hit a Japanese destroyers and ships that were
(11:51):
in the Columbangala area, and Velo Novello two hundred and
fifty miles outs beyond the range of the Wildcat, so
we had to strap on a wing tank of fifty
gallons to make it.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
That fifty gallon tank of fuel was going to be
the difference between the fighter pilots making it all the
way out to the fight and back to the base
or potentially having to bel out of their aircraft somewhere
over the ocean fuel tanks on empty. But it was
also a liability. Jeff, as usual, was unfazed. He strapped
(12:27):
on a watch he had just bought on leave a
few weeks before. It was already a prize possession. He
was really proud of it and curious to see how
it would do in the altitude. He climbed into his
plane and fired up the engine. The eight fighters and
twelve bombers set out. Jeff was in the lead. It
(12:47):
was three PM when they took to the skies. Fairly shortly,
Jeff realized that things were going.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Sideways, and I worried about one hundred miles out. I'd
already used my fifty gallon and the main tank was
not full. I was using guys like mad. That was
a leak somewhere, I don't know where, it was, but
I knew that I would never make it back.
Speaker 1 (13:08):
Something was up with the tank, and not just his.
He watched as two of the other fighter pilots peeled
off and returned to base.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
Two guys must have had the same trouble because they
turned back. So that left six of us to do
the job of protecting the dive bombers. Now we needed
all the guns we could get up to him to
protect the dove bombers, so they'll give a dead ducks.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
The bombers desperately needed the Wildcats to keep them safe
and to fend off the Japanese attack that was sure
to come. Jeff knew that when they got to the
bombing site, he would most likely be engaged in a
dog fight. Every evasive action he would take would cost
him more precious fuel. Nevertheless, he made a decision he
(13:54):
would stay and fight no matter the cost.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Now, I'm not a brave man, but I have to
live with myself if I quit. Now, that would be
one last fighter pilot to go up there, so I
decided to keep going.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
As the convoy reached the target area, the dive bombers descended,
circling for marks, but Jeff realized they were no longer alone.
Two Japanese floatplanes appeared from above, diving down towards the
American bombers. Jeff had the advantage of altitude. He saw them,
but they didn't see him. He lowered his Wildcat and
(14:32):
got the rear floatplane in his sights. He led on
a burst of gunfire, a direct hit. He watched as
the aircraft went into a spiral and exploded. Then he
settled behind the next one, right in the Japanese pilot's
blind spot. He opened fire again. The floatplane climbed into
the sky and shattered into a flash of light. Jeff
(14:54):
and his wingman's sergeant, James Fullatin, climbed higher, searching for
a safer outitude, but then they saw it, a swarm
of Japanese fighter planes heading straight for them. Jeff swung
his Wildcat below the group of enemy planes, shooting at
the lead fighter. That plane caught fire but escaped. Another
(15:16):
Japanese pilot spiraled up from the pack, trying to figure
out what was happening. Jeff followed right on his tail.
He got the fighter in his sight and picked it off.
But now he and Phelason had the attention of the
whole group of Japanese pilots. They were completely outnumbered, so
the two Americans turned their wildcats towards each other, weaving
(15:39):
back and forth covering each other's tails. Then Pelosin swung
two wide and came straight into the crosshairs of one
of the Japanese guns. Felatson took a hit to his engine.
His plane started streaming black smoke. He had no choice
but to bil out parachute into the ocean below the
rest of them. The Japanese fighters scattered. For a moment,
(16:03):
the sky was clear of the enemy, The sun was setting,
and the window to return home and land safely was
quickly disappearing. The American dive bombers assembled in formation. They
had done their job. It was time to return to base.
Jeff glanced at his fuel gauge and what he saw
(16:24):
made his stomach turn. The dogfight had depleted his fuel
even further, but he might have enough to make it
close to Guadalcanal, close to where someone could find him
rescue him if he had to build out. He was
ready to head back when he noticed something out of
the corner of his eye. Two enemy fighters on his tail.
(16:46):
If he stopped to engage them. He would never make
it back to safety, but he had to draw them
away from the American bombers. That was what he had
been sent on the mission to do. Out of fuel,
thousands of feet in the air, ocean and jungle islands
beneath him, and a choice to me. Well, after all,
(17:09):
he told himself he'd grown up in the Louisiana swamps.
He wasn't afraid of the jungle.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
I figured I knew enough about survival. I wasn't trained
for him, but I was born and reared here in
the chapel at mission, and I could survive if I
hit the islands.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
So he decided once again to stay. He watched as
the American bombers disappeared over the horizon to Guadalcanal and safety,
and then he climbed higher to attack the two enemy
planes head on. They closed the space in a heartbeat.
He fired. The first Japanese plane caught fire, but it
(17:47):
wasn't going down. Jeff realized the pilot planned to fly
his burning fighter right into Jeff's Wildcat.
Speaker 2 (17:56):
This guy was shot. He knew he was dead. He
caught fire and he was gonna ram me. He's coming
straight toward me, he's still on fire, so I held
the trigger down. He explored, and I flew through the pieces.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Debris flew past him, hitting Jeff's plane, but his engine
was still running. His Wildcat was still flying, and as
far as he could tell, there was just one fighter left.
He banked sharply to get on the tail of the
second fighter plane as it sped by, but the pilot
had guessed his plan and pulled up high above him.
(18:31):
Then he came down straight towards Jeff.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
When I saw him coming down on him, he was
picking up speed, and he was too anxious for the kill.
And you get too anxious. You've seen birds that whale
animals get too anxious to kill, the anticipate and they
caught themselves. So he was coming down so fast that
he didn't realize he was overtaken me. The normally the
reaction let me get out of here and pressed the shit.
(18:56):
If I'd pick up most being run away from him,
that's your normal way of trying to present of your life,
run away, but not in the final plan. Instead of
trying to run away, I chopped his throttle, which slowed
me up. Then I skidd it so he couldn't stay
on my tail.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
In effect, Jeff slammed on the brakes, trying to force
the Japanese pilot to overshoot him. It worked. The two
pilots locked eyes.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
Win kipped to wing tip. When we looked at each
other and I knew and he knew that he was
a dead man.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
It was a moment that would stay with Jeff forever,
that tension between seeing your adversary acknowledging his humanity and
knowing what you were about to do to him, and
yet his conscience was clean.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
A lot of polots rationalize, we don't shoot down or
killed man, We just shoot down our planes. You know,
that's a shield to take away the idea of haven't
killed somebody. It doesn't work that way. You either kill
or you be killed, okay, and you have no remorse
(20:06):
for the enemy. He's ought to kill you. So the
name of the game is you kill him before he
kills you.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Jeff fired, and the Japanese pilot's plane exploded for the
first time in hours. Jeff seemed to be out of
harm's way.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
I figured I hadn't made Let me go home, try
to survive, and while I'm doing that, the sun is setting.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
He glanced at his watch. It was six pm. It
would be dark soon.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
And that's when I got hit. The first bullet came
through it over my left shoulder and took my watch
off my wrist.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
He hadn't seen the new fighter planes behind him, but
now they were lighting up his Wildcat with bullets. The
instrument panel burst into flames, the engine lost power, his
plane was disintegrating. As Jeff looked frantically around, he saw
another fighter bank to take a run at him. He
(21:00):
was a dead man.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
So I got out of that like a tall dog
because the bullets were setting everything on fire and hitting
the armor plate and everything else. But I was lucky.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
I was.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I have a few shop Noel cuts, but I didn't
realize it that but adrenaline was flowing so fast and
I didn't even feel I was hurt.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
The only thing left to do was bell out. He
was about three thousand feet somewhere over the western Solomon Islands.
Speaker 2 (21:28):
So I jumped out, trailed the ledge of the wing
and pulled a rip cord, and flowing through the air
was beautiful.
Speaker 1 (21:36):
Like I said, this is one extremely unflappable man.
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Man. That was the more sensational thing I ever did
in my life, and it was outstand it.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
But then he hit the water harder than he'd anticipated.
His gun, canteen and extra shells were ripped away from him.
He managed to inflate his life jacket. When he broke
the surface of the water, he could see shoreline ahead
of him, but the current was sweeping him out to sea.
Jeff knew he was bleeding, and he knew there were sharks.
(22:12):
All aviators at the time were giving chlorine pills to
break into the water to keep sharks away. So Jeff
broke his as he swam and swam and swam. It
would take six hours of swimming for Jeff to reach shore,
dusk settling into full darkness, the stars coming out, and
(22:35):
an unknowable amount of swimming left to do, but he
kept going. Finally he reached the shore. He pulled himself
up on the sand, tore off his life jacket, and
ran across the beach to the underbrush. It might have
been dark, but he knew the Japanese had a base
on this island. He had seen it from the sky.
(22:57):
He was an enemy terary.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Now I knew enough to get off the beach and
cover up my tracks. And I fell asleep.
Speaker 1 (23:07):
For the moment. He could rest, kind of like a
worn out kid. Jeff could sleep pretty much anywhere. This
place was Kullambungara Island. That night he found peace, but
what awaited him on the island was every bit as
dangerous as anything in the sky. Jeff de Blanc woke
(23:30):
up to the filling of rain. He ached all over.
He had a backpack with the basic survival kit, so
he dressed his wounds as best as he could and
had a bite of chocolate from his pack. He had
no idea where to go or if the Allies knew
he was still alive. He was pretty sure the Japanese did.
One of the pilots had circled him as he was
(23:51):
parachuting down.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
I had to figure, well, I'm an animate territory, and
I know they're looking for him because the man circled
in and they shot me arm, So they're looking for
me definitely.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
Yet, somehow Jeff was convinced that he could survive in
the jungle, maybe even still a plane off the Japanese
base and get home. He started to trek inland. He
had a knife in his pack and he walked with
it out in front of him. The vegetation was so
thick he found it easier to climb into the trees,
(24:22):
moving above ground from one to the next. The second night,
he fell asleep, this time in a tree, even though
his wounds had started to bother him. The following morning,
he spotted a grass hut in a small clearing. It
had a straw sleeping mat inside, and Jeff gathered coconuts
from the trees and rain water from where it had
(24:43):
pulled on massive leaves. While exploring the jungle, he found
a downed Allied fighter jet swarming with flies. He saw
that the machine guns had been removed, and he shuddered
had the Japanese been there? But then he saw bare
foot prince surrounding the wreckage. He knew what that meant.
(25:04):
One of the local indigenous tribes must live close by,
because the Solomon Islands were populated, of course, by people
who lived there for thousands of years, some Melanesians, some Polynesians.
In fact, more than eighty different languages are spoken by
the peoples of the Solomons, making it one of the
Pacific's most diverse countries in terms of language and ethnicity.
(25:29):
Jeff had known he wasn't alone, not really, but he
didn't know if these islanders would be happy to see him.
He didn't count on it. He gauged his safety by
listening to the birds outside his hut. As long as
they were singing, He told himself he was alone.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
And the birds are shanging. Everything is right on, no doubt,
from the swamps just all over the world. That way,
the birds are shanging. Fine.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
He spent a night in the little hut, and then
another and another listening to the birds song, tending to
his wounds, staying his same hopeful self. And then he
woke one morning, and since something had shifted, the birds
stopped singing.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
What does I tell you, I tell you in trouble.
Something is out there.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
He grabbed his knife and walked to the door of
the hut. A young islander stood there, about five foot two.
Speaker 2 (26:28):
He was grinning. Now why should he be grinning. I'm
taller than he is. I have a knife, he has
a machete. I can throw a knife, and I have
had to fight him hand to hand. But for some
reason for him to be grinning. And when I stepped
out that hut, four or five others right there with macheads.
Speaker 1 (26:49):
Oh, Jeff thought that's why he was grinning. Jeff was
totally outnumbered. He dropped his knife, but he wasn't exactly stressed.
He wasn't an anxious guy, just in his twenty one
year old, not particularly sophisticated way. He was a little
worried that they might eat him.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
I could see myself in the pot.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Yeah right. The men moved Jeff through the jungle to
the water's edge. An outrigger canoe was waiting there, and
they motioned for him to get inside.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
When it put me into twelve men out rigor. Then
I knew they were going to trade me to the
Japanese because they weren't friendly. They punched me in if
i'd moved. The stick me with a knife, which means
don't move, and I got the message in a hurry.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
They paddled along the shoreline for hours towards the village,
towards the Japanese base. Jeff had no way of knowing.
Finally they stopped and motioned Jeff out of the canoe.
He followed them to a village where they put him
in a bamboo cage with two guards set outside. Jeff waited.
Even to unflappable Jeff, this was starting to seem pretty bad.
(28:05):
Then six more Islanders entered the village. One of them
was carrying a sack.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
When he walked into that compound, you could tell he
had authority, and he had a ten poundshakaraj, which he
put down at the feet of the men who held me.
They let me go, and I quickly joined him, and
we all took off head and oft of the jungles
towards another village.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
Jeff wasn't sure what was happening, but he knew one thing.
He had been traded for a sack of rice.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
When he threw a ten pound shack of rise non,
I knew exactly how much I'm with a ten pound
shock of riag. That's the value of my life.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
The new group of men walked for an hour without
exchanging a word, and then the leader turned to Jeff
and spoke to him in Pigeon, a dialect close enough
to English that Jeff could understand. They weren't taking Jeff
to be sold to the Japanese, he said, they were
rescuing him. Unbeknownst to Jeff, a network of coast watchers
(29:04):
had been hunting for him every bit as hard as
the Japanese had. The coast watchers were largely British and
Australian men, mostly civilians who had stayed in the Solomons
after the Japanese invasion. Now they worked as Allied spies,
hiding in the jungles to report on enemy activities. Islanders
(29:26):
had been helping the Allied forces since the start of
the war as well, working as guides providing valuable intelligence,
leading down pilots like Jeff through the jungle to safety,
often passing within inches of the enemy. They were the
primary communication link between the coast watchers. There were also
targets of the Japanese. That was the reason Jeff had
(29:49):
been kept in the cage.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
In that first village, Japanese plans had shokued each village,
you're looking for me, and did it see a white
man in the village, that strafed the village and bombed
regardless of the natives.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
That man, who had traded Jeff for the sack of rice,
was named Ati Lu Ducolo. He was tasked with bringing
Jeff miles across the Kullabangara Island, across the sea and
onto the next largest island, which was called Vela la Vela.
From there they could arrange for the Allies to pick
Jeff up, but they would have to get there first.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
So we went to another village and I was in
chief there. I'm stripped of the waists and everything else.
I have my Marine Corps buckle. There the chief grabs
my buckle. The intelligence officer said, if any native takes
something from you, you take something from them. It's protocol.
When he grabbed that buckle, I grabbed that spirit that
he had. Well, we traded. In other words, he nodded, no, nodded,
(30:48):
and I walked off with the spear.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Jeff held tightly to that spear as he and Ati
traveled on. They reached another twelve man out rigger canoe.
They paddled in the darkness through a rainstorm, with nothing
but the tides to guide them and daylight, and into
another canoe. This time Ati made Jeff lie on the
bottom and covered him with palm fronds. Being spotted by
(31:13):
the Japanese would have meant death to them all. They
paddled on swiftly, quietly, until finally they reached Vella La Vella.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
So they took Franze off of me.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Jeff blinked and looked out from the Canoe.
Speaker 2 (31:29):
I see a big red borne, and I see a
white man coming down with three natives. And he spoke
Oxford English and said to me Lieutenant de Blanc. And
he didn't mission a de Blanc or this or that.
He came out in perfect French.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
It was Reverend A. W. E. Sylvester, a New Zealand
missionary who had refused to evacuate the islands after the
Japanese invasion. He was a coastwatcher too, That's how he
knew who Jeff was. In fact, Sylvester himself had only
survived the Japanese invasion because the Solomon Islanders had led
(32:06):
him to safety, just as they had helped Jeff and
the other stranded allies. Here's Sylvester speaking to an interviewer
about it back in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
I certainly owe my life to the natives. One of
my native teachers came and gave me the warning, and
all my decisions regarding evacuation were made on their information.
We never made a mistake during the services of the natives.
The total number of people we evacuated were two hundred
and fifty four from our island.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
Jeff couldn't have known it but his route from Ati
to Sylvester to safety was one that the coast watchers
and the Islanders had been perfecting for months. He had
fallen into just the right place. Sylvester welcomed Jeff into
his home, where Jeff, unsurprisingly slept like a log. He
(32:59):
also got a piece of welcome news. His wingman Peloton
had survived as well, wounded, ribs, broken, but alive. The
following day was a Sunday, and the men were having
a leisurely British cup of tea when an Islander ran
up and whispered something in the Sylvester's ear. The minister
put down his teacup.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
He said, well, we'll have to have mask now and
then after Mass, you're gonna have to leave. I said why,
He said, the Japanese are coming in. He said, I
know you're a Catholic Initiative Church of England, which is
not the same denomination process. But I said, please, I'll
be on the first sheet, in the first row.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
And so in the middle of the jungle with the
Japanese on their way, the group gathered and prayed. Then
Jeff Ati and a few other Islanders booked it out.
They wound up trekking for miles, finally reaching the village
where Peloton had been hidden. Safety started to feel closer,
(34:00):
but the two Marines would have to wait until an
American rescue mission could be organized to take them back
to Guadalcanal. Two coast watchers invited Jeff to hight to
their secret outposts in the mountains, where he saw Japanese
planes take off and land from nearby bases. Only then
did he understand the extraordinary work these hidden ally spies
(34:22):
had done and what risk they had taken to save
Americans whenever they fell. On February twelfth, nineteen forty three,
three days before Jeff's twenty second birthday, planes left Guadalcanal
to pick up Jeff and his wingman. They were taken
offshore in a canoe. Atti rode with them, safeguarding them
(34:46):
until the end. The rescue plane landed, escorted by fighter pilots,
within sight of three Japanese airfields.
Speaker 2 (34:54):
They picked us up when they run. Atti was the
one who brought me back through the peaboat made underwater
to pick up things. So they landed on the water,
but didn't cut the engines up through my spear and
there first and then jumped in after him.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
The men on board had risked their lives to get
Jeff and Peloton just as Ati had. The pee boat
took off, headed to Guadalcanal, and Jeff finally exhaled.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I knew I was shaved.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
He had lived with this decision to not turn back,
to stay and fight, and he had also lived. Jeff
(35:50):
went on to serve a few more months in the Solomons.
When he returned home on leave, his little town presented
him with a watch to replace the one that had
been blown off his wrist. He was awarded the Navy
Cross for his actions in the Skies. That last day
of January nineteen forty three, he volunteered for active service again.
(36:12):
He flew missions during the Battle of Okinawa. He touched
down in Japan after the war ended, curious to see
what the country looked like, but he was ready to
return home, specifically to Louise Burrard, his high school sweetheart.
He had known her since she was the star ford
of the championship girls basketball team, A dark haired beauty
(36:36):
with a sweet smile. They got married. Jeff went to college,
and then in December of nineteen forty six, he got
a call he was told that he was going back
into active duty. He couldn't understand it. Why he has
served as country, he was a reservist. What active duty
(36:59):
was going back to?
Speaker 2 (37:01):
I said what, I don't I'm a reserve. I'm not Oh,
go go. We said, just to come to Washington to
get into Medal of Bana said, you got to be joking.
I said, shout it two men riding and they did.
So they putting on active duty to go back. She
wouldn't cast anything.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
Yep. They put him on active duty so that he
wouldn't have to pay for the trip anyways. He and
Louise went to Washington and President Harry Truman gave Jeff
his Medal of Honor at the White House. Jeff went
on to stay in the Marines as a reservist until
nineteen seventy two. He and Louise had five children, a
(37:40):
girl and four boys. Jeff got advanced degrees in science
and mathematics. He became a teacher. He taught middle and
high school kids, and then he went back to the
Solomon Islands four times. The first was in nineteen ninety
two for the fiftieth anniversary of Guadalcanat. He went up
(38:01):
in a plane, this time flown by someone else, and
peered down over Kullabungara Island, searching for the hut where
he'd hidden out so many decades before. And then in
two thousand, he flew to Vella Lavella to be reunited
with Ati Lo Ducolo, the man who had guided him
(38:22):
on his treacherous path to safety. Jeff was taken by
boat to ATI's village, where his former guide, now in
his nineties, was waiting. The two hugged. They ate dinner together.
They exchanged gifts. Fifty seven years had passed since they
(38:44):
had met in the jungle. Since Atti saved Jeff's life,
Jeff had never forgotten his bravery, or his kindness, or,
of course, that ten pound bag of rice. Jeff de
Blanc died in two thousand and seven at the age
of eighty six. The spear he traded his belt buckle
for now sits in the World War II Museum in
(39:07):
New Orleans, Louisiana. Even at the end of his life,
when asked about the Medal of Honor and his actions
on January thirty first, nineteen forty three, Jeff brought everything
back to one thing, not heroism, not bravery, but personal accountability.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
I could have used to turn back and nobody would
have questioned it, because two guys did already. But I
would have to live with myself because, no doubt in
my mind, a lot of bombas would not have return,
and that would be a part that I would have
to be accountable for, and I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (39:46):
The kind of accountability Jeff is talking about isn't expectations
from others or a job description. It's a personal ethos.
It's the feeling of being sure what your values are
and the determination to stick to those values no matter
the cost. Some might call it a conscience. That little
(40:08):
voice inside your head. That little voice told Jeff that
if he turned back and abandoned his mission, he'd be
turning back to a life he wouldn't want to lead.
So he stayed and protected those bombers, even when he
knew he might never make it home. I think that's
(40:28):
why Jeff felt such peace when he found himself falling
thousands of feet through the air, the empty ocean rising
up to meet him, seeing this glorious beauty in the fall,
with a conscience as light as a feather. Medal of honor.
(40:53):
Stories of Courage is written by Meredith Rollins and produced
by Meredith Rollins, Jeff Shane, and Zan Gabber. Our editor
is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey. Sound design and additional music by
Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo. Fact checking
by Arthur Gomperts. Original music by Eric Phillips. The rest
(41:16):
of the team includes Carl Catele, Greta Cone, Christina Sullivan,
Sarah Nix, Nicole Appendosh, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jordan McMillan,
Kira Posey, Owen Miller, Amy haggerdarn and Jake Flanagan. Special
thanks to the series creator Dan McGinn, to the Congressional
Medal of Honor Society, and to Ja to Anga the
(41:39):
Audio visual Archive of Atiuroa, New Zealand. If you want
to learn more about this story, take a look at
our show notes, where we have some of the resources
we use to put together this episode, including a book
by the man himself, Jefferson de Blanc. We also want
to hear from you. Send us your personal story of
courage or highlight someone else's bravery. Email us at medalof
(42:03):
Honor at Pushkin dot fm. You might hear your stories
on future episodes of Medal of Honor, or see them
on our social channels at Pushkin Pods. I'm your host, JR.
Martinez
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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