Tom Lanphier
Tom Lanphier said that after he first turned left and up to meet the diving Zeros in a head-on pass that he shot the wing off of the lead Zero and zoomed up to 5,500 feet, rolled over on his back and looked down and saw a bomber that had apparently made a 360 degree turn and so he dove down and attacked that bomber and shot the wing off it and it crashed in the jungle. At the Nimitz Yamamoto Retrospective in April 1988, surviving Zero pilot Kenji Yanagiya, stated emphatically that all 6 of the Zeros escorting the bombers returned to Rabaul; he knew each one of the pilots and not one of them was shot down. Japanese records confirmed that no one of the 6 escorting Zeros was lost. Yanagiya also stated that the Admiral’s aircraft never made a turn but flew straight towards Buin until it went down in the jungle.
Excerpt from Cargill Hall's book, Lightning Over Bougainville, page 115
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