Wayne Gordon "Whitey" Johnson
Era: World War II
Military Branch: Air Force
Photo 1: Mr. Johnson in a P-51 Mustang, China, 1944. Photo 2: Mr. Johnson.
Wayne "Whitey" Gordon Johnson served during World War II in the Pacific Theater in the U.S. Army Air Forces from December 8, 1941, until November 26, 1946. He was one of the famous fighter pilots known as the “Flying Tigers.”
Mr. Johnson was assigned to the 23rd Fighter Group, the Flying Tigers, 14th Air Force.
Mr. Johnson was born on July 8, 1921, in Artichoke Township, Minnesota, the son of Jentoft Christian Blom and Aasta Karoline Olsen Johnson. His parents emigrated from Norway in 1907. He graduated from the Chokio, Minnesota, high school in 1939.
Source: Veterans’ Memorial Hall Veteran History Form; veteran’s account (see below)
Wayne Gordon Johnson was born on 8 July 192_ on a farm in Artichoke Township near Ortonville, Minnesota. He was one of 14 children. His parents, Jentoft Christian Blom Johnson and Aasta Karoline Olsen had emigrated from Norway in 1907.
Wayne started his flying career in 1937 when a farmer near Chokio, Minnesota, taught him to fly in a Curtiss Robin plane. He earned his flying lessons in exchange for farm chores while attending high school in Chokio. Spending over seventy years in the air as a pilot, he continued to fly well into his eighties.
On 8 December 1941, the day after a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Johnson joined the Army Air Corps. After cadet and tactical training, and commissioned a 2nd lieutenant, he was sent to China as a fighter pilot with General Claire Lee Chennault’s famed Flying Tigers 14th Air Force. He flew the P-40 Warhawk and P-51 Mustang fighters in combat. For a lark, and not officially authorized, he flew the Japanese Aichi Val and Jake dive bombers at a Shanghai air field after the surrender.
After the war he flew P-51s for the North Dakota Air National Guard while attending college and also did crop dusting in a Stearman biplane. He has over 7,500 hours pilot time in over 60 different types of military and civilian aircraft with single and multi-engine land and sea ratings.
His most memorable combat mission was the first fighter strike on Japanese airdromes near Shanghai on 17 January 1945 when a flight of eight P-51 Mustangs from the 118th Tactical Reconnaissance Black Lightning Squadron, of which he was a member, and eight P-51s from the 74th Fighter Squadron destroyed 94 Japanese aircraft on the ground and three in the air without loss of any U.S. planes. General Chennault, Commander of the Flying Tigers, said it was one of the most successful missions of the war.
Wayne Johnson is the editor of the four-volume history Chennault’s Flying Tigers and designer and editor of the “Flying Tigers” 2003–2007 calendars. He is the author of two privately published books, The Trial of Christ, where he analyzes the unfairness of the trial leading up to Christ’s execution, and A Sailor’s War, based on the diary of his brother-in-law, Reo Knudson, who was wounded while serving on the battleship Tennessee during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
Wayne has also written his memoirs, Whitey: From Farm Kid to Flying Tiger to Attorney, published in 2010 in both hardcover and paperback.
