Squadron
Leader John "Scarsdale Jack" Newkirk
The newspapers called him
"Scarsdale Jack," though he was actually a native of New York City,
born there on
October 15, 1913. Improbably, he had worked as a copy boy for Time
magazine.
He also served a
three-year hitch in the U.S. Army as an infantry lieutenant, before
switching
to the Navy and
flying, and somewhere in there he apparently also flew for American
Airlines.
Jack was a
fighter pilot aboard Yorktown when he volunteered for the AVG. At the
age of 27,
with his
leadership training, he was already a dominant figure in the group by
the time he
arrived in Burma.
By the time he was killed on the Chiang Mai raid, he too had been
credited
with 7 air-to-air
victories.*
* 3 Jan 1942: 1
Ki-44 Shoki? fighter, 1 Ki-27 Nate fighter
* 20 Jan 1942: 2
Ki-27 Nate fighters
* 23 Jan 1942: 1
Ki-21 Sally? bomber, 2 Ki-27 Nate fighters
From
Time Magazine - Monday, April 6, 1942
"John van Kuren ("Scarsdale Jack") Newkirk, death-dealing leader of the
A.V.G. Second Pursuit
Squadron, was killed last week. Newkirk had started to be a marksman at
the age of five, when
he got a bow & arrow. When he was ten his friends in Scarsdale,
N.Y. dared him to shoot the
first person who came along. That person happened to be the county
sheriff, but Jack let fly
anyway. When he grew up he studied chemistry and aeronautical
engineering. A double mastoid
operation in childhood almost kept him out of the Navy's air school at
Pensacola, but his
hearing was normal and he squeezed in. His weak eardrums were twice
ruptured during dive-bombing
practice. They healed. Last summer Newkirk married a Michigan girl; she
took a defense job in
California when he went to the Far East with the A.V.G.
After bagging 25 Jap planes, Squadron Leader Newkirk was awarded a
D.S.C. by the British
Government. To his family he wrote letters describing the flora and
fauna of Burma; he told
of killing a seven-foot cobra in the barracks one day.
Newkirk's last combat was a raid on the Jap airdrome at Chiangmai in
Thailand. He and his squadron
dived low, burned or shot up 40 planes on the ground, machine-gunned
the Jap pilots as they ran
for their cockpits. At the edge of the field a Jap gunner with a
machine gun mounted on a truck
drew a bead on the enemy leader's plane, poured a long burst into its
belly. While all the others
zoomed away, Scarsdale Jack's plane stalled, shuddered, crashed in
flames."
