In the 1970s, Howard retired to Belleair Bluffs in Pinellas County, Florida. In later years, they were divorced and Howard then married Florence Buteau. He married Mary Balles in 1948 in a military wedding ceremony. He later founded Howard Research, a systems engineering business, which he eventually sold to Control Data Corporation. Louis, Missouri, managing Lambert Field while maintaining his military status as a brigadier general in the United States Air Force Reserve. HowardĪs a civilian after the war, Howard was Director of Aeronautics for St. Air Force Reserve, commanding the Air Force Reserve's 96th Bombardment Group.
In 1948, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in the U.S. With the establishment of the United States Air Force as a separate service in 1947, then-Colonel Howard was transferred to the Air Force. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport) in Florida. In January 1945, Howard was promoted to colonel and assigned as base commander of Pinellas Army Airfield (now St. That same month, Howard helped direct fighter plane cover for the Allies' Normandy landings on D-Day. "An attack by a single fighter on four or five times his own number wasn't uncommon," wrote a fellow World War II fighter pilot in his postwar memoirs of Howard's performance, "but a deliberate attack by a single fighter against thirty-plus enemy fighters without tactical advantage of height or surprise is rare almost to the point of extinction." The following month, Howard was promoted to lieutenant colonel and in June 1944, he was presented the Medal of Honor by General Carl Spaatz for his January 11 valor.
The story was a media sensation, prompting articles such as "Mustang Whip" in the Saturday Evening Post, "Fighting at 425 Miles Per Hour" in Popular Science, and "One Man Air Force" in True magazine. The following week, the Army Air Forces held a press conference in London at which Major Howard described the attack to reporters, including the BBC, the Associated Press, CBS reporter Walter Cronkite, and Andy Rooney, then a reporter for Stars and Stripes. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport Howard exhibit, including his Medal of Honor, at St. He flew 56 missions and was credited with shooting down six Japanese airplanes. In June 1941, he left the Navy to become a P-40 fighter pilot with the American Volunteer Group (AVG), the famous Flying Tigers, in Burma.
Navy pilot aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6), based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Howard began his flight training in January 1938 at Naval Air Station Pensacola, earning his wings a year later. Shortly before graduation, however, Howard decided that the life of a Naval Aviator was more appealing than six years of medical school and internship, and he entered the United States Navy as a naval aviation cadet. Louis, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1937, intending to follow his father into medicine. After graduating from John Burroughs School in St. In later life, Howard was a successful businessman, author, and airport director.īorn on April 8, 1913, in Canton (now Guangzhou), China, where his American parents lived at the time while his ophthalmologist father was teaching eye surgery there, Howard returned with his family to St. CBS commentator Andy Rooney, then a wartime reporter for Stars and Stripes, called Howard's exploits "the greatest fighter pilot story of World War II". Howard was an ace in two operational theaters during World War II, with six kills with the Flying Tigers of the American Volunteer Group (AVG) in the Pacific and six kills over Europe with the United States Air Force. James Howell Howard (Ap– March 18, 1995) was a general in the United States Air Force and the only fighter pilot in the European Theater of Operations in World War II to receive the Medal of Honor - the United States military's highest decoration.