Yeager: An Autobiography

A NEW OLD MAN

Being back with a fighter squadron was like coming home to the hollers of West Virginia-back among my own kind, who talked my language. At Hahn, we were only minutes of flying time away from possible combat with the Russians and their allies. We'd barely get our wheels up before reaching the East German border. Czechoslovakia was a half-hour flight. A week seldom passed in the 1950s when East German or Czech pilots didn't invade our air space and cause us to scramble to intercept. They knew our Sabres could never catch up with their MiGs before they scooted back over the border. Often they staged their sweeps to coincide with our end-of-the-day beer calls, but there was more to it than just harassment. They were testing our reaction time. We were constantly on alert and kept at maximum readiness.

My squadron commander during World War II really was "the old man." He was all of twenty-five, leading a bunch barely out of their teens who thought he was over the hill. Now, I was "the old man," a thirty-two-year-old married major, commanding pilots whose average age was thirty and who were also mostly married, living on base with their families. To win their confidence I had to perform up to expectations. Once they saw I was really good, they would follow my leadership-not just obey orders- because I had proved that I knew what I was talking about.

Any new squadron commander is in a tough spot. There's a lot to learn, and being untested he is watched like a hawk by both his subordinates and his superiors. There were plenty of squadron commanders who couldn't lead a group in silent prayer. I knew I'd be watched closer than most, and by the top brass, too, because pilots with big reputations were often more trouble than they were worth, pains in the ass who threw their weight around and bugged out every chance they got. I knew plenty of guys like that. During my early years at Wright Field as a maintenance officer, one of the big war aces began parking his Lincoln Continental convertible in my hangar when he went off to fly. Nobody was allowed to park a car in a hangar, but he ignored the rule. I had the air police tow his car away and enjoyed telling him I was the one who did it. So, I told the squadron "Hey, I'm here to have a good time. To me, a good time is flying with you guys. I'd rather do that than get laid." They laughed and got the message.

I wasn't much on spit and polish or running around with a clipboard. I had thirty pilots, twenty-five airplanes, and five hundred ground and support personnel under my command. A good squadron can run itself only up to a certain point; the commander must stay on top of things, but I wasn't about to chain myself to a desk doing it. And, man, I learned fast that if one of my people got into trouble, so did I. Both of us landed in front of the wing commander, Col. Fred Ascani, a West Pointer who hadn't served as General Boyd's deputy without a lot of strict discipline rubbing off. Forget that Colonel Ascani helped to select me to fly the X-1, and that we had spent social weekends together at Jackie Cochran's place. This was a new ballgame.

My first weekend as squadron commander he called me at home at two in the morning. "Chuck what in hell is going on with your people?" God, I wondered if there was a riot. But he called me because the German police in town had called him. Two airmen from my squadron were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. I crawled out of bed and drove into town to get those guys out of the can. The next time I got such a wake-up call, I went straight to the barracks and woke up my first sergeant. I told him to wake up every man in the barracks. I said, "If I have to get up, so do you. This is our squadron and our guys.' We all marched downtown to the jail and picked up the airmen. After that, I never got any more late night calls about my airmen.

Colonel Ascani ran a tight ship. Fighter pilots are naturally competitive, and the three squadrons in his wing even competed in Friday afternoon beer guzzles at the club, where it was squadron against squadron. Really rough. He came in one Friday, saw the guys staggering around the bar with their shirts unbuttoned and ties undone, and took me and the other squadron commanders aside and reamed us out. "Goddamn it, I don't care how drunk they get but we're gonna look military doing it. I want those ties and shirts buttoned even when they hit the deck." He sounded just like General Boyd.

I was as competitive as a college football coach in training my bunch to be the best squadron in the wing. I had high performance standards and because the men respected me, they stretched to reach them. Hell, it was like a little conspiracy. I'd teach them tricks that none of the other squadrons knew, things I had learned as a desert rat at Muroc. For example, a Sabre fighter needed a big electrical cart to start its engine. If the Russians could have found a way to blow up those carts, they would've ruled the skies. Sabre pilots who were forced to land somewhere discovered they couldn't take off again because there was no electrical cart available. That happened once at Muroc and somebody, maybe Ridley, came up with the idea of blow-starting a Sabre with another jet. I showed my guys how to do it using the T-33, the two-seat trainer version of the Shooting Star, that started on its own battery. I moved the T-33 about fifteen feet in front of the Sabre and ran up its engine to about eighty percent of power. The exhaust blew directly into the front of the Sabre's engine and began to spin the turbine blades to about six percent revolutions a minute, enough to crank its engine. It was like getting a car to start by coasting it in neutral down a hill. Man, those guys were speechless. Soon everyone in the Twelfth Air Force was practicing blow-starts.

Another trick I learned back at Tonopah during my training days in prop airplanes, when I saw a grizzled old crew chief hammering nails around the gun mounts in a P-39. "Help hold them guns steady," he explained, "and give you better shooting scores." I figured if it worked in a P-39 it should also work in a Sabre. And it did, although a few of my crew chiefs were scared to drive nails into a government property airplane. One of them complained, "But, Major, that's against regulations." I told him, "Hell it is. There's no regulation about it because no one else does it." When our pilots reported better gun scores over the other squadrons, we kept our little secret to ourselves.

There were dozens of little tricks that weren't in night manuals that could mean the difference between life and death in a combat situation, and to me it was a responsibility of what pilots call "an old head," a veteran flier, to pass on tricks of the trade. There was always something new to learn up there. When Hahn received the first radar system to land aircraft in bad weather, we practiced landings in zero visibility; during those first attempts a few of our guys came down on the beam through the fog and almost landed right in the middle of the Mosel River. But we practiced with the ground operators day after day until most of them were landing safely while crews on the ground couldn't see a hand in front of their faces. All of us enjoyed being in a good squadron that was becoming even better.

Toward the end of my first year in Germany, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Colonel Ascani made me the leader of our wing gunnery team. We competed against all the other fighter wings in Europe. Air-to-air shooting was my big scoring event. We fired at a target towed by a high-speed jet, our shells painted individual colors so that the holes could later be identified. Air-to-ground, we came in on the deck to shoot at large rectangular targets. The competition also included skip-and-dive bombing. My test piloting had really improved my precision as a flier so that I lined up early on the targets and let my good eyes take it from there. I was usually high man overall in the competitions, and our wing won the finals. Gunnery contests were a big deal; we were gone for months practicing and competing.

But I wasn't the only Yeager having fun. For the first time since we were married, Glennis was enjoying an Air Force assignment as much as I was. We had a German housekeeper to help take care of the kids, and unlike the majority of Air Force couples who spent the weekends at the club and base movie theater, we were eager to make the most of living in a foreign country. Every weekend that we could get away, we were gone. We became friends with the burgomaster of a nearby village called TrabenTrabach. Dr. Melscheimer was also a wealthy wine merchant, who owned the rights to several large hunting areas. Nobody in Germany just arbitrarily went out hunting. You had to be invited by somebody who had purchased hunting rights on a given piece of property called a revier. We became regulars at Dr. Melscheimer's hunting lodge, where the other weekend guests were businessmen and industrialists from Hamburg and Berlin. German hunting weekends are very aristocratic and social, and while Glennis's kitchen-deutsch was a helluva lot better than mine, I got by speaking the hunting language. Dr. Melscheimer was elderly, but his son Carl Armin was my age, and also an avid hunter. So was Carl's wife Siegrid, who was almost as good with a gun as Glennis.

While we were still at Ramstein, our quarters were located next to the base skeet range. One afternoon a few officers were out shooting and Glennis grabbed my shotgun and asked if she could shoot a few rounds. Those guys looked at her as if she had dropped out of the sky. Wives never shot skeet. Glen whacked out twenty-five straight hits. Between the two of us, we were no slouches on a hunt. We'd go out early in the morning, stalk game through deep forests of pine and beech, hunting stags, wild boar, or small deer. By late afternoon, we were back at the lodge for four o'clock tea, then after dinner, we often hunted by moonlight.

Soon, Dr. Melscheimer was trusting me to act as joeger, or "hunting guide," for an important guest. I followed all the customs and learned their hunting traditions. I wore lodencloth, the green hunting uniform of a guide, a green shirt and tie, and a green felt hat with a boar's hair shaving brush in the back. When we killed an animal, I gave it the traditional letzter bissen, a "last bite," by placing a twig in its mouth, a symbol of respect to the animal. I also took a twig off an evergreen shaped like a cross, dipped it in the animal's blood, and wore it in my hat as a trophy of that day's hunt. The cross-shaped twig honored St. Hubertus, patron of hunting.

Carl Armin and I competed as guides, each of us trying to lead a guest to the day's biggest head. But I had an advantage: The day before the hunt I flew over the revier and carefully mapped it out, much the same as I had done at Edwards, picking out fishing holes and good hunting areas. So my party usually beat Carl Armin's by bringing in the day's biggest head, and the guests raved about me to Dr. Melscheimer, who smiled and nodded, saying, "Yes, I've trained that American well." He made me a master hunter on his revier, a real honor that meant, among other things, that I could go out and hunt alone, and he invited me to join the guild of German hunting guides, the only foreigner in that outfit.

Glennis didn't sit around waiting for me to get back if I was off flying somewhere. She and Siegrid took off in our four-wheel drive jeep station wagon and hunted on their own. They once joined a party of German boar hunters and bagged the day's only kills. While those German men grimly watched, they had their pictures taken by the local newspapers, and then they had to buy drinks for all the other hunters- the price for having beaten them.

The kids had a ball, too. They enjoyed the snow in winter, not having seen much of it out on the Mojave. Hahn, high up in the mountains, brought us drifts right up the lower windows and a white Christmas was guaranteed every year. About the only thing that slowed them down were a couple of bad accidents. Susie, who was then four, stuck her finger in a light socket and electrocuted herself. The housekeeper saw it happen, grabbed her, almost getting zapped herself. Glennis got the power turned off and saw that Susie; had stopped breathing. She gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and got her heart started, then raced her to the base hospital, where they slapped oxygen on her. She was okay in an hour or so, but it took Glennis a couple of days to stop shaking. Then Mike, who was six, almost lost an eye going up concrete stairs on a pogo stick, while Susie tumbled off a bike and broke an arm. Her arm was still in plaster when she fell and broke her leg, and I began to think it was more dangerous being Susie than flying the X-1.

About ten months after I arrived at Hahn, life became more complicated and dangerous for all of us. The wing received new airplanes-a bigger and more powerful version of the Sabre, called the H model, which gave us much faster acceleration. The MiGs discovered that fact when a couple of them wandered over our small gunnery range at Furstenfeldbruck, outside of Munich. I scrambled, leading a flight of four model Hs, and shocked the hell out of those MiGs by catching up with them before they reached their border. We just sat on their wings, eyeball to eyeball with those Czech pilots, who were taken completely by surprise. We escorted them back where they belonged and gave them plenty to report in their mission briefings. The new Sabres had greater range and could carry heavier loads, and our mission was suddenly changed from air defense to "special weapons." We became fighter-bombers carrying nuclear- weapons.

Base security was increased to guard the bombs that were stored in special underground bunkers, and we began to train in techniques for dropping them. Each Sabre carried one Mark XII tactical nuclear bomb, which in those days was still heavy and cumbersome, about the size and shape of one of our wing tanks. The bombs were low-yield, but we didn't know whether or not we could really survive the blast after dropping one on a target. We practiced various techniques using dummies. We came in low on the deck until we were about ten miles from target, then we raised our nose about forty degrees and fired off the dummy bomb in a shellike trajectory. Or, we'd come in on the deck, then climb straight up over the target, release the bomb, then flip over backwards in an Immelmann and race to get the hell out of there. The bomb, meanwhile, continued to climb to about 10,000 feet before nosing over and dropping to earth. We also practiced high-altitude dive bombing, releasing the bomb at about 18,000 feet. All we had to do was drop it within twelve hundred yards of our target. And that was a low-yield weapon. None of us was happy about coming in on the deck, exposed to enemy ground fire, with an atomic bomb strapped to our belly. We just hoped to God we would never have to really prove the effectiveness of those techniques.

The wing now had a big intelligence section that supplied each pilot in all three squadrons with his own personal target in Russia and East Germany. Each pilot kept his flight plan folder stashed in his cockpit until he had it memorized and practiced flying his profile so often that he could do it in his sleep. Our Sabres could not be refueled from airborne tankers, and we could keep flying only for a couple of hours before our tanks ran dry. All of our targets were deep inside the Soviet sector and included radar and other communications sites. Our attack was meant to pave the way for the main strike force of long-range Strategic Air Command bombers, but unlike those guys, we had no way of making it a round trip mission. To get to the target and back would take longer than our fuel supply. So, a big part of our training was E and E classes-escape and evade-because all of us would be forced to parachute down in enemy territory. Man, missions didn't get more serious than that, but the guys just accepted it as their job.

During the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Russian tank divisions began moving all over Eastern Europe, our wing went on the highest priority alert. At two in the morning, our pilots were roused and assembled in the briefing room and given their targets, while real atomic weapons were attached to their airplanes. The guys climbed into their cockpits around three A.M. and sat all night on the flight line waiting for the word to take off. By the first light of dawn, the alert was called off. Not many guys dozed off that night; it was as close to the real thing as any of us ever wanted to be.

Because we were now a nuke squadron, the powers that be decided to move us out of Germany in order to disperse targets of potential Soviet attack. They ordered our wing into France, and, God, none of us wanted to go from our comfortable brand new base into a make-ready strip just across the German border in Toul, that was little more than a sea of mud with some trailers and Quonsets trucked in overnight. Glennis and the kids got there a week after I did and just rolled their eyes. It was the pits. Just miserable. Everyone hated every minute being there, and to make it worse, the strategic move became a joke when General de Gaulle decided that no American nuclear weapons could be stationed on French soil.

At that point we should have packed and gone back to Hahn. Instead, we just sent our bombs back there; now, if there were nuclear alerts, we would fly to Hahn to load our bombs, then take off and fly to the target. Whoever approved that plan deserved to be stationed at Toul for life. To make it worse, tensions were really high with the French. We were limited to flying in a narrow corridor around our base, and Mirages flew real aggressive against some of our flights. On one occasion, the French actually dropped their wing tanks and our guys did, too, usually a sign of aerial combat. In the mood I was in, if I had been in the sky that day, I might have started a war.

The only thing good about the place was that it was close enough to Germany so that if Glennis and I drove most of Friday night, we could at least spend all day Saturday and most of Sunday at Dr. Melscheimer's hunting lodge. I had expected to spend a three-year tour at Hahn; instead, we suffered more than a year in the mud at Toul.

But in spite of the bad conditions, I commanded the best performing squadron in the wing. I had come to Germany as a green and untried major and left France as a light colonel with good marks as a TAC squadron commander. There were plenty of ambitious colonels who always wanted more than what they had. I was never ambitious in terms of career moves. I just wanted to keep doing what was fun, and when I was offered command back in the States of a squadron of F-100 Super Sabres, an airplane I had helped to test fly at Edwards, I grabbed the offer before I even asked where my new squadron was located. Being a gypsy was part of the military life, so, I really didn't care that this new assignment took me back practically to where I started from three years before-out on the California desert at George Ai. Force Base. Glennis wasn't thrilled going back to the wind and sand again. "Make it short and let's get back to Germany," she said. I agreed. But neither of us would bet on our chances.