James B. Morehead, 1916–2012

Col. James B. Morehead was flying a P-40 Warhawk above Darwin, Australia, on April 25, 1942, when he spotted 28 Japanese bombers protected by a fleet of fighter planes. He ordered his vastly outnumbered eight-aircraft unit to launch a surprise attack. Morehead’s guns alone took down three planes; all told, his squadron shot down 11 enemy planes before returning to base unscathed. “Take that for Pearl Harbor,” Morehead later said. He received the Distinguished Service Cross for “unquestionable valor in aerial combat” for his actions that day.

Born in 1916, Morehead was raised in Washington, Okla., where his father ran the general store and his mother was a schoolteacher, said The New York Times. Growing up during the Depression, Morehead became a “crack shot with a rifle, which helped put food on the table.” He studied at the University of Oklahoma before moving to California to join the Army Air Corps in 1940. His brazen exploits in the air, including flying 80 miles upside down “simply because he could,” earned him the nickname Wildman.

During World War II, Morehead put his boyhood hunting skills to work and “became one of the country’s most highly decorated fighter aces,” said the Santa Rosa, Calif., Press Democrat. He shot down eight enemy planes in all, including a German Messerschmitt fighter over Romania on D-Day, and was awarded a second Distinguished Service Cross, as well as a Silver Star and more than a dozen other air medals. He went on to train Chinese Nationalist pilots for two years during the Korean War before taking a Pentagon desk job, from which he retired in 1967.

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He never lost his love of hunting, said The Washington Post, and spent his retirement traveling the world “in pursuit of big game.” His ranch house brimmed with exotic trophies, including a Cape buffalo from Botswana, an African lion rug, a stuffed baboon from Ethiopia, and a hippopotamus skull in his front yard. In his 90s, the Wildman was “not so wild anymore,” he said, but still managed to bag a buck on a hunting trip last year without using a scope.