Appalachian Figures
On a summer morning in 1945, a silver P-51 with a green tail skimmed the clouds over central Japan. At the controls was a farm kid from Scooba, Mississippi, who had once picked cotton to stay in school. By the time he turned back toward Iwo Jima, his Mustang carried fresh cannon scars and three Japanese fighters had fallen from the sky.
That young captain was Abner Maurice Aust Jr., and over the course of thirteen very long range missions from Iwo Jima he became what the Air Force would later recognize as the last American fighter ace of the Second World War.
His story runs from Kemper County cotton rows to jet age combat over Vietnam. It is also a story about how a rural Southern upbringing prepared one man for a lifetime spent in the air.
Scooba, Kemper County, and the Aust family
Abner Maurice Aust Jr. was born 7 October 1921 in Scooba, a small railroad town in Kemper County near the Mississippi–Alabama line. His parents, Abb and Mamie Aust, raised their children in a region of red dirt farms, timber, and tenant patches that looked very similar to other upland and Appalachian border counties.
The Aust name runs deep in eastern Mississippi. Aust headstones dot the old Binnsville Cemetery on the Tombigbee watershed, with graves for nineteenth and early twentieth century family members who farmed and traded in what is now a ghost town. Facebook posts from descendants still show the old Aust home place at Binnsville, described as an 1880s house that has managed to remain habitable into the twenty first century.
Scooba itself would later become home to East Mississippi Community College. One campus building is named for Margie Briggs Aust, an early secretary at the Kemper County Agricultural High School that evolved into the present college, another sign of how the Aust and allied families were woven into local educational life.
Abner’s childhood straddled Mississippi and Oklahoma. Pacific Wrecks, drawing on his own recollections, notes that the family moved near Fort Sill in Oklahoma when he was around five or six years old, where he first watched Army aircraft overhead. The lure of airplanes began there, but his ties to Kemper County never disappeared.
He finished high school at Belzoni, Mississippi, in May 1940, then enrolled at Sunflower Junior College in Moorhead. To afford college, he worked the same kind of cotton rows that defined so much of the Black Prairie and Appalachian border South. In a later oral history for the National WWII Museum, Aust remembered growing up on a farm, picking cotton and using that money to stay in school while he chased a pilot’s license.
From Civilian Pilot Training to the Army Air Forces
When the Civilian Pilot Training Program reached Sunflower Junior College in 1941, it offered a lifeline to young rural students who dreamed of flying but had no money for private lessons. Aust signed up with enthusiasm. In a lengthy autobiographical account preserved on the 506th Fighter Group website, he describes building a simple grass runway on the college property, then soloing a small J-2 Cub after only a handful of flights.
By mid 1942 he had accumulated about eighty hours of civilian flight time and passed the ground school requirements for a private pilot’s license. When he traveled to Jackson, Mississippi to make it official, he discovered something many rural Southerners born at home could relate to: there was no birth certificate on file. He had to secure a delayed certificate from Jackson, dated 23 June 1942, before he could formally enlist in the Army Air Forces as an aviation cadet.
From there the path moved quickly. Aust reported to Santa Ana Army Air Base in California for preflight and classification, then to Oxnard and Bakersfield for primary and basic flying. In early 1943 he transferred to Luke Field in Arizona for advanced training. His class was the first there to fly the P-40 Warhawk before graduation, a sign of how urgently the Army Air Forces needed fighter pilots. He earned his wings and a commission as a second lieutenant on 12 April 1943.
Instructor in the Thunderbolt and the Mustang
Instead of shipping straight to combat, Aust spent much of the war teaching others to fly fighters. Official biographies and his own reminiscences show him cycling through several southern bases, including Page Field at Fort Myers and Venice Army Air Field, flying P-39 Airacobras, P-40 Warhawks, and P-47 Thunderbolts.
He enjoyed the heavier P-47 and treated gunnery and aerobatics almost like sport. In one episode he recalled diving a Thunderbolt down the runway at very low level and rolling it for the benefit of onlookers. Actions like that earned him a stint as runway control officer, the sort of administrative punishment that often followed when young fighter pilots showed off.
By 1944 the Army Air Forces began assembling a new Very Long Range fighter group in Florida, built around the new P-51D Mustang. The 506th Fighter Group drew many of its pilots from Page Field and Venice, including Captain Aust. He and his fellow pilots had never even sat in a Mustang cockpit when they were told they would soon escort B-29 bombers all the way from Iwo Jima to the Japanese home islands.
Iwo Jima and the “very long range” war
The 506th departed the United States in early 1945, staging through Tinian and then moving to North Field on Iwo Jima as the Marines secured the island. From there, P-51 units of the 7th Fighter Command were tasked with very long range missions that could last eight or nine hours, escorting B-29s or sweeping Japanese airfields hundreds of miles away.
Aust’s Mustang on Iwo Jima carried the serial 44-72599. His crew chief eventually painted a pinup of actress Betty Grable on the fuselage and a distinctive green tail, with the squadron’s markings on the opposite side.
The cost of these operations was high. On 1 June 1945, in what pilots later called “Black Friday,” a massive mission encountered a severe squall line soon after leaving Iwo. Aust, recalling the day in his oral history, described climbing his flight above the weather and hearing pilots crying out over the radio as aircraft collided or ran out of fuel in the clouds. Twenty nine Mustangs and twenty seven pilots were lost in a single day.
Aust survived Black Friday, but he had not yet sighted an enemy aircraft. That changed in July.
Nagoya, 16 July 1945 – three “Franks” in one fight
On 16 July 1945, Aust finally met the air war he had trained for. Flying with the 457th Fighter Squadron near Tsu, south of Nagoya, he and his flight intercepted a formation of Japanese Army fighters, the fast and agile Nakajima Ki-84 that American pilots code named “Frank.”
In the combat that followed, Aust attacked the enemy formation head on and broke it apart. Drawing from wartime reports and later interviews, Pacific Wrecks summarizes that he engaged six Franks, shot down three, and badly damaged three more before breaking off. His Mustang came home riddled, its radio and direction finder knocked out and .50 caliber bullets from friendly P-51s dug out of the wing after landing.
That single fight instantly made him the leading scorer in his group, but official records initially showed him with three victories and three damaged aircraft rather than the five air-to-air kills needed to be called an “ace.” The other two official credits would not arrive until weeks – and then years – later.
In early August, Aust led an eight ship sweep over Honshu that located a well camouflaged Japanese airfield southeast of Tokyo. Repeated strafing passes left more than two dozen parked aircraft in ruins on the ground, and Aust was credited with several of those destroyed or damaged machines.
Tokyo, 10 August 1945 – the last American ace
Aust’s last mission of the war came on 10 August 1945. He launched as a spare on a B-29 escort and initially had no guarantee of seeing combat. When a gap opened in the formation, he slid into it, then spotted incoming Japanese fighters.
In his National WWII Museum interview, Aust recounts calling out two Mitsubishi Zeros, breaking formation, and shooting one down as it approached the bombers. He then chased and destroyed a second while damaging a third, only to discover that his gun camera had run out of film. Officially, only one of those kills was credited at the time.
Postwar, he was credited with three air victories on 16 July and one on 10 August. During the early 1960s he asked a cousin in the Air Force, stationed in Japan and married to a Japanese woman, to visit the area where he recalled downing that uncredited Zero. According to Pacific Wrecks, local officials helped his relatives identify a grave for a Japanese pilot whose date of death matched the 10 August combat. That evidence went before an Air Force records board, which eventually granted Aust his fifth official aerial victory.
USAF Historical Study No. 85, the master list of World War II aerial victory credits, now lists Abner M. Aust Jr. with five enemy aircraft destroyed in the air: three Ki-84s on 16 July 1945 near Tsu–Nagoya and two A6M Zeros near Tokyo on 10 August 1945. Because his last credited victory came so near the end of hostilities, later writers and unit histories often describe him as the “last ace of the war.”
Counting both air and ground targets, his wartime tally reached eight enemy aircraft destroyed and seven damaged. Five of those kills were in aerial combat.
Aust was back in the United States by September 1945 and spent time with his parents in Belzoni before returning to an Air Force that was rapidly shifting from piston engines to jets.
Thirty years in the Air Force
Unlike many wartime pilots who returned to civilian life, Aust stayed in uniform. He flew P-47s and early jets such as the F-80 in Panama after the war, then moved with the 36th Tactical Fighter Wing to Germany in support of Cold War missions.
Assignments followed at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, advisory work with the Danish air force, and test and training roles at Wright–Patterson and Edwards. At Edwards he took part in early supersonic work, flying prototypes that would evolve into the F-100 Super Sabre.
By the early 1960s he had risen to colonel. Both the 506th Fighter Group profile and his obituary note that he helped prepare the Air Force’s first Fighter Tactics and Doctrine Manual around 1963, part of a broader effort to modernize fighter employment in the jet age.
He commanded the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, then moved into the thick of the Vietnam War. According to Veteran Tributes and Air Force histories, he served as an F-4 Phantom II pilot and vice commander of the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing at Da Nang from January to May 1968, then took command of the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing at Tuy Hoa Air Base.
From Tuy Hoa he flew F-100 and F-4 missions, logging more than 300 combat sorties over both North and South Vietnam. His own end-of-tour report, cited in USAF research studies, comments on the effectiveness of forward air controllers and the challenge of coordinating close air support in a complex political and tactical environment.
In March 1971, Aust assumed command of the 3rd Tactical Fighter Wing in South Korea, a storied unit whose official history lists him among its postwar commanders. He retired on 1 July 1972 with roughly 7,000 flight hours and more than 500 hours in combat, having flown almost every major Air Force fighter type from the P-39 to the F-4.
His decorations included the Distinguished Flying Cross with multiple oak leaf clusters, the Bronze Star Medal, the Air Medal with twenty five clusters, the Legion of Merit, and several high ranking Republic of Vietnam awards.
Later life, honors, and controversy
After retiring, Aust settled in Florida and worked in the construction industry. He remained active in aviation circles, appearing at events such as the Sun ’n Fun fly in and giving interviews to organizations like the Florida Aviation Network and Pacific Wrecks. In 2019, at age ninety seven, The Ledger in Lakeland profiled him as one of the last living World War II flying aces.
His public legacy, however, is complicated. In the early 2000s Aust was arrested and later convicted in Florida for soliciting an arson attack on his former wife’s home. Contemporary reporting in the Tampa Bay Times and follow up stories summarized by other outlets describe how a local investigation led to a sting operation and a conviction that sent the decorated colonel to prison. A 2009 Associated Press piece carried by Fox News noted his release after roughly eight years incarcerated, framing the story around the contrast between his wartime heroism and his later criminal case.
Despite that record, Aust continued to appear in veterans’ publications, on oral history platforms, and at air shows. In 2015 he joined other American fighter aces in receiving the Congressional Gold Medal, a collective honor authorized by Congress and presented in Emancipation Hall at the U.S. Capitol. Official U.S. Mint and Air Force releases list him among the honorees.
He died on 16 June 2020 at Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida. His obituary from Marion Nelson Funeral Home and the Pacific Wrecks profile both note that he was buried at Sarasota National Cemetery on 6 July 2020.
A Kemper County story in a global war
Why does a fighter ace from coastal Pacific runways belong in the story of Appalachia and the upland South? In part because his journey began in places like Scooba and Binnsville, where families scraped by on cotton and timber and where many young people saw military service as the surest path beyond the farm.
Federal programs such as the Civilian Pilot Training Program brought the aviation age to small Southern colleges and opened the cockpit to boys who had never before left their counties. Aust’s delayed birth certificate, his long drive from the farm to Jackson, and his description of listening to the news of Pearl Harbor on a dormitory radio at Sunflower all echo the wider experience of rural students across the region who watched a distant war suddenly reach into their lives.
The Aust name in Kemper County also illustrates how one extended family could produce both local civic figures and a global combat record. While one branch lent its name to a college building and appears in school and cemetery records, another sent a son into an Air Force career that spanned propeller planes, swept wing jets, and the long, grinding years of the Vietnam War.
Abner Aust’s life reminds us that the story of Appalachia and its borderlands does not stop at the ridgeline. It stretches across oceans, into cockpits and prisons, through moments of courage and of failure. Remembering him with all of that complexity intact is one way to honor both the communities that shaped him and the many people his actions affected, from farmers in Kemper County to civilians and airmen half a world away.
Sources & Further Reading
National WWII Museum, oral history segments: “From Picking Cotton to Flying Fighters,” “P-51s in the Pacific,” “Last Ace of the War,” and “30 Years in the US Air Force,” interviews with Col. Abner M. Aust Jr.
506th Fighter Group website, “Pilot: Abner Aust,” including Aust’s autobiographical notes on training and combat.
Pacific Wrecks, “Abner M. Aust Jr., P-51D Mustang Pilot and Ace and USAF in Vietnam,” compiled from Aust’s correspondence and official records.
Marion Nelson Funeral Home, “Colonel Abner Maurice Aust Jr. Obituary,” June 2020.marionnelsonfuneralhome.com
U.S. Air Force, Historical Study No. 85, USAF Credits for the Destruction of Enemy Aircraft, World War II (via references summarized in Pacific Wrecks and Hall of Valor).
Rowley, Ralph A., The Air Force in Southeast Asia: US FAC Operations in Southeast Asia and related USAF Research Studies Series volumes that cite Col. Aust’s end of tour reports from Tuy Hoa.
“Abner Aust,” Wikipedia entry with detailed notes and links to official and veteran sources.
Hall of Valor Project, “Abner Maurice Aust,” for a summary of awards and combat credits.
Veteran Tributes, “Abner M. Aust Jr.,” for an assignment by assignment career timeline.
Pacific Wrecks image collection of Aust and his P-51D on Iwo Jima.
Scooba and Kemper County cemetery, town, and family records, including Binnsville Cemetery listings and EMCC history articles documenting the Aust family’s local presence.
U.S. Mint and U.S. Air Force press releases on the 2015 Congressional Gold Medal for American Fighter Aces.
Contemporary news coverage of Aust’s criminal case and release from prison, including reporting summarized by Fox News and other outlets.