Boeing P-26, the Philippines’ WWII Peashooter
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We went to the Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center and watched Top Gun: Maverick on the big screen, and I took this picture of a "P-26." The P-26 has a special place in Philippine history. (Photo by Erwin Tiongson)
John Eisenhower recalls when they first arrived in the Philippines in the mid-1930s. “During the time I was visiting Clark Field an event occurred that caused a great deal of excitement, the arrival of a new fleet of airplanes from the United States,” he wrote in his memoirs. He described the P-26 as a “lower-wing ship, with a powerful Pratt and Whitney engine and with pants to streamline the wheels.” He had great “affection” for these planes, he wrote.
John had been raised in the Philippines in the 1930s about which he wrote in his book, Mabuhay: Coming of Age in the Philippines, published a few years ago, just before he died. John’s father—then the future Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe and future US President Dwight (“Ike”) Eisenhower—helped acquire the P-26s while serving as aide to General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippine Commonwealth Government. As MacArthur organized the Philippine Army, Eisenhower convened a group of Philippine pilots who would constitute the beginnings of a Philippine air force. Some of these Filipino pilots, in turn, helped teach Dwight Eisenhower to fly and helped him acquire, in late middle age, a long-desired pilot’s license. “Flying at Camp Murphy and organizing the Philippine Air Force were important to Dad, and among his greatest pleasures,” John recalls. “It has been argued that they helped him in his later conduct of the war in Europe,” he writes.
Though the arrival of the P-26 had been celebrated, its days were soon numbered, and John recalls that only about 150 were ever made, as more advanced aircraft outclassed it. He writes that the planes had a “blunt nose” and “had a disturbing tendency to nose over on landing.” They were, John said, “only transitory in the march of American aircraft development.”
Nonetheless, within hours of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, these planes would play a decisive role in the heroic defense of the Philippines against the invading Japanese imperial forces.
Accounts vary—and the reported “kills” of a brave group of Philippine pilots led by Jesus Villamor against numerically and technologically superior Japanese fighter planes have, over the years, acquired legendary status. But this much is clear from the citations of the two Distinguished Service Crosses that Villamor received in quick succession: The December 10, 1941 award cited his “extraordinary heroism,” his “courage and leadership at great personal hazard” and “unquestionable valor” while “serving as Pilot of a P-26 Fighter Airplane,” leading “three pursuit planes into action against attacking Japanese planes.” And according to the December 12 award, “Captain Villamor led six pursuit planes against 54 Japanese bombers” and an enemy plane was “destroyed by fire from Captain Villamor's plane,” the citation said. In MacArthur’s official announcement, he commended the “six Filipino pilots” who were “undaunted by the tremendous odds against them.”
“Villamor saw an enemy plane shoot down his friend Cesar Basa’s plane. ‘I heard the scream of bullets, of the Zero’s tracers chewing into the thin metal skin of his P-26,’”
In Villamor’s posthumously published memoirs, these moments are remembered in less heroic terms. “It was hard to believe that I was still alive, I wanted desperately to bring my plane down,” he wrote. He saw his friends “in their rickety P-26s” desperate to “escape the snapping bursts of Japanese tracers.” When Villamor and his crew fired at the Mitsubishi “Nells” with their “puny 30-caliber guns,” they were surprised to see that “smoke spilled out of one of the Nells.” (It was, according to historian John Fredericksen, the “only known aerial victory” of the P-26.)
These moments of frenzy and fear, and improbable victory, were also moments of real loss. Villamor saw an enemy plane shoot down his friend Cesar Basa’s plane. “I heard the scream of bullets, of the Zero’s tracers chewing into the thin metal skin of his P-26,” he wrote. “The last time I saw him he was struggling to free himself from his cockpit.”
How do we remember and imagine these moments? At the Air and Space Museum, we watched Top Gun: Maverick. On a giant screen, the heroics of “Maverick” and “Rooster” are literally larger than life. The images of those euphoric seconds after their final victory are moving: As they land their obsolete and badly damaged F-14, a crowd quickly gathers around them, sharp foreground, blurry background, the cheers muted by the soaring notes of the Top Gun anthem.
There were no such joyous scenes in December 1941, but God willing, those moments will endure anyway. “There was fright on people’s faces,” Villamor recalled. A general asked if he was scared, soon after he landed. “I blessed the crater-pocked earth beneath my feet,” he wrote.
First posted in the Philippines On the Potomac (POPDC) Facebook page.
SELECTED REFERENCES
Eisenhower, John. Mabuhay: Coming of Age in the Philippines. Washington, DC: Ferrous Books, 2012.
Fredriksen, John C. The United States Air Force: A Chronology. Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2011.
Villamor, Jesus A. They Never Surrendered: A True Story of Resistance in World War II. Quezon City: Vera-Reyes, 1982.
Villamor’s citations here:
https://valor.militarytimes.com/hero/6215
I wrote about Eisehower’s flying lessons in the Philippines here:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/.../ike-learns-fly-180978277/
Edited 7:26 AM 9/12/2022 for clarity.
Erwin R. Tiongson is an economist and teaches at Georgetown University. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, the Washington Post, and Washingtonian.
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