How many of the Black Sheep Squadron are still alive? The current count from the original 51
Pappy Boyington's Black Sheep flew for 84 days in 1943 and spent the next seven decades answering questions about a television show. The roster ran to 51 men. Here's how that number is counted, who the last ones standing were, and where the record stands now.
VMF-214 fought for twelve weeks, produced nine aces, and then got handed to Hollywood, which gave it nurses, brawls, and Robert Conrad. The men who actually flew it spent years politely correcting the record.
None of them are left. The last original Black Sheep, Lieutenant Harry "Skinny" Johnson, died at his home in Destin, Florida on the night of December 3–4, 2014, aged 93. The count has been zero for more than eleven years.
Where the number 51 comes from
The squadron number was recycled. VMF-214 was commissioned on July 1, 1942 at MCAS Ewa on Oahu as the Swashbucklers; that crew finished a tour and was broken up, and in August 1943 the designation was handed to Major Gregory Boyington and 27 unassigned pilots at Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides. He and Major Stan Bailey had under four weeks to make them combat-ready.
Replacements came in across the two tours. The roster that historians treat as "the original Black Sheep" runs to 51 men: 49 pilots and two ground officers. Frank Walton, the squadron's own intelligence officer, used that figure as the spine of his 1986 book Once They Were Eagles, for which he tracked down the 34 who were still alive at the time.
Boyington was 31 and about a decade older than most of his pilots, which got him nicknamed Gramps and then Pappy. The squadron's first choice of name was Boyington's Bastards; the public information officer on the island, Captain Jack DeChant, killed it on the grounds that no newspaper would print it.
What the 51 actually did
Eighty-four days of combat, September 12, 1943 to January 8, 1944. Flying tired, borrowed F4U Corsairs out of Guadalcanal, Munda, and Vella Lavella, they were credited with 203 aircraft destroyed or damaged and 97 confirmed air-to-air kills, produced nine aces, and took a Presidential Unit Citation. They also lost about a fifth of their pilots.
Boyington went down over Rabaul on January 3, 1944 with his 26th claim. A Japanese submarine crew pulled him out of the water; he spent 20 months as a prisoner and the Marine Corps spent most of that time assuming he was dead. Truman handed him what everyone believed was a posthumous Medal of Honor in October 1945, with Boyington standing there. He died January 11, 1988 and is buried at Arlington.
Read more: Why did Band of Brothers lie about Blithe? The title card is off by nineteen years — and no DVD or stream has ever corrected it
The last two
Colonel Edwin A. Harper died on February 14, 2014 at Lake Saint Louis, Missouri, aged 93, of kidney failure and congestive heart disease. His obituary in the St. Louis press listed his survivors and then, unusually, included Johnson under that heading — the last surviving Black Sheep, of Destin, Florida.
Johnson outlived him by just under ten months. He had joined as a replacement in November 1943, flew the second tour including the Rabaul missions, and claimed a single Zero on the final day of the six-week rotation.
That kill is still the last aerial victory anyone flying under the VMF/VMA-214 designation has scored, in any war since.
Harper's daughter told St. Louis Public Radio in 2014 that the 1970s series never bothered him. He knew what had actually happened; he just thought the nurses would have been nice. Johnson, at a squadron reunion decades later, made the sharper version of the point about all the other Pacific squadrons that fought just as hard:
"They just didn't get the publicity or a bad TV show named after them."
One thing that trips people up
Searches for Black Sheep casualty figures often turn up 32 deaths aboard the USS Franklin on March 19, 1945. Those men belonged to a different VMF-214 — the squadron was reformed at MCAS Santa Barbara on January 29, 1944, weeks after Boyington's group was dissolved and its pilots scattered into the MAG-11 pool. Same name, different roster. The 51 had already gone home.
Earlier we wrote: What happened to Sgt. William Quinn in Masters of the Air? The show's version, and what the real records say