U.S. Army 1LT James B. McGovern, also known as “Earthquake McGoon,” of Elizabeth, N.J., was laid to rest in Arlington Cemetery Thursday. He took the long way home:
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of an American civilian pilot, missing in action from Vietnam while flying for Civil Air Transport, a proprietary of the CIA, have been identified and returned to his family for burial with full military honors.
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On May 6, 1954, McGovern, along with his co-pilot, First Officer Wallace A. Buford, and four French servicemen, departed Haiphong, Vietnam, in their Civil Air Transport C-119 on what was to be the last supply drop to the besieged French forces at Camp Isabelle—the remaining French holdout in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. As the aircraft approached the drop zone, it was hit by anti-aircraft fire. The pilots attempted to fly southwest to the relative safety of Laos, but crashed along the Song [River] Ma in Houaphan Province. Only two of the Frenchmen survived and were taken prisoner by Lao forces. One of them died within a few days, and the other was released and returned to France a few months later. McGovern, Wallace and two of the French servicemen were not recovered.During WWII, McGovern flew in China with the Flying Tigers and is credited with destroying two enemy aircraft in the air and five on the ground. He was captured by the North Koreans and held as a prisoner of war for several months during the Korean War.
James McGovern’s post-World War II exploits were legendary:
McGovern, Buford and Life magazine photographer Robert Capa — killed later that month — were the only Americans known to have died in the conflict that doomed French colonialism in Indochina — as the area was then widely called — and set the stage for Vietnam’s “American war” a decade later.
The death of swashbuckling Earthquake McGoon was big news in 1954, when his grinning face was splashed across newspapers and magazines. Yet most details remained shrouded for decades in Cold War secrecy — especially the fact that the pilots’ airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), was owned by the Central Intelligence Agency.
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Arriving in China in 1944, James McGovern joined the 14th Air Force’s “Tiger Shark” squadron, descended from the famed Flying Tigers volunteer group. He was credited with shooting down four Japanese Zero fighters and destroying five on the ground, Smith said.At war’s end in 1945, Maj. Gen. Claire Chennault, founder of both the Flying Tigers and the 14th Air Force, recruited McGovern and other veteran pilots for his next enterprise, a commercial airline called Civil Air Transport.
Under contract to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime, CAT flew civilian and military missions during China’s civil war and evacuated thousands of refugees to Taiwan before the Communist victory in 1949.
At 260 pounds, the ex-fighter pilot liked the roomy cockpits of CAT’s war-surplus C-46 transports but still sometimes used a wicker chair instead of the standard pilot’s seat.
A saloon owner in China dubbed him Earthquake McGoon, after a hulking hillbilly character in the then-popular “Li’l Abner” comic strip. “It didn’t bother him. He was a character himself, and I think he thrived on it,” John McGovern said.
[Felix] Smith [a retired CAT pilot and friend of McGovern], who once shared a house with McGovern, said he was “a real big-hearted guy,” but not the “wild man” some reports implied. “He was a bon vivant, happy-go-lucky. He loved kids, and he was the guy who in a tense situation would come out with some joke.”The McGoon legend was assured by an episode in which he ran out of fuel, made an emergency night landing in a riverbed and was captured by Chinese Communist troops.
When McGovern turned up safe six months later, other pilots joked that his captors “got tired of feeding him.” But Smith said McGovern had argued his way out. “He told them, ‘You keep saying you’re going to release me but you haven’t, so I don’t believe anything you say. You’re liars.’ Then they let him go.”