Saunders of the Solomons

Stealthily through a Solomons channel a Jap Kongo Class battleship slipped near dusk on Oct. 25. A squad of Navy SBDs dive-bombed it, streaked back to Guadalcanal. A half-hour later six Army Flying Fortresses swung over the channel. From a tight, high-level formation they straddle-bombed the ship, scored two square hits. The battleship turned 45 degrees, headed north. Suddenly a magazine let loose. Fire leaped from bow to stern. The ship stopped dead. For hours the calm South Pacific sky and sea were lighted by flames until at midnight the battleship sank.

Navy communiques have not yet credited Army bombers with sinking the battleship but other sources have verified it as "one of the great air stories of the war," a feat of one Bombardment Group (designation secret). It was the high mark in the crack battle record of that group and its Flying Fortresses. From their arrival on Guadalcanal in August until November, they had met the enemy 500 times, shot down 113 Jap planes, destroyed 13 more on the ground.

Last week a Distinguished Service Medal was on the way to the Group's Commander, Brigadier General La Verne George ("Blondie") Saunders, a blackly hirsute Irishman who got his ill-fitting nickname and a reputation for indefatigable practical jokery at West Point.

The reputation held long after he had become one of the Air Corps' best pilots. But in 1940 a change began to come over rollicking Blondie. Assigned to Hickam Field, Hawaii, he was made Commander of a Flying Fortress outfit. And Blondie became serious, sobersided, calculating. On Dec. 7, Saunders was taxiing a Fortress across the field when Jap planes shot it from under him. He tried another, with the same result. It made him coldly furious.

Charged with forming and training a new Bombardment Group, Saunders sweated until he had whipped his Group into combat shape.

By August, his planes were dropping down on Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, then a clearing barely big enough for a Fortress to land. Saunders became Airbase Commander, quickly got the field into better condition, established air supply lines for gasoline, parts and crews. At heart still a tackle (West Point 1924-25), Blondie was a Flying Commander, too, led many a bombing mission. On a raid over the Shortland Islands his pilot and co-pilot were killed. Saunders took the controls, crash-landed on a beach from which he and other survivors were picked up next day.

Last Christmas Day Saunders and his chief executive, Major Jack Malloy, were summoned to headquarters of the Solomons' Air Commander, Major General Millard Harmon, for a cocktail party. In the midst of festivities COMSOUPAC Admiral William F. Halsey showed up, read an order, pinned on flustered Blondie the stars of a brigadier general.

Stammered Saunders, mindful of his Bombardment Group: "Fifteen hundred men are pinning those stars on my shoulders."

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