Yeager: An Autobiography

TAKING WING

You're whipping through a desert canyon at three hundred miles an hour, your belly just barely scraping the rocks and sagebrush your hand on the throttle of a P-39 fighter. It's a crystal-clear morning on the desert of western Nevada, and the joy of flying-the sense of speed and exhilaration twenty feet above the deck-makes you so damned happy that you want to shout for joy. A hillock rises ahead, and you ease back, skim over the top of it, dropping down above cottonwoods lining the bank of a stream. You feel so lucky, so blessed to be a fighter pilot. Nearly one hundred of us are testing our skill and courage by leaving prop marks on the dirt roads, stampeding grazing cattle (a few angry ranchers even take pot shots at us) and raising the shingles off ranch houses. Swooping over the desert like a horde of metal locusts, we practice for strafing runs, the most dangerous missions that will eventually kill many of us. Our instructors warn us to get down on the deck as low as we can, staying below the beeline, where enemy machine guns can't target a clear shot.

That was Tonopah, where thirty fledgling pilots began six months of intensive training to become a combat fighter squadron-the 363rd. We lived surrounded by Nevada sand dunes in tarpaper shacks belching black smoke from the oil-burning stoves that only warmed themselves on cold desert nights. The wind never stopped blowing and the chow was awful, but none of us complained. We flew from dawn to dusk, six flights a day, six days a week, dogfighting, buzzing, and practicing gunnery. We crawled exhausted into the sack at ten and straggled to breakfast at 4:30 A.M., taking off on our first flight of the day just as dawn broke. I logged one hundred hours of flying that first month. Hog heaven.

No matter what happened later, the war had already changed my life forever. Unlike others in the squadron I had never dreamt of being an aviator. Even as kids, guys like Bud Anderson and Jim Browning used to hang around airports and wash old Boeing tri-motors to get a free ride. Me, I was a pool hustler from the West Virginia hollers. I saw my first airplane close-up when a Beechcraft bellied into a cornfield on the Mud River, and I went to look at it to see what all the excitement was about. I was fifteen, and stopped by on my bike to see the wreck before heading out to the county poor farm where I helped out on Saturday afternoons, giving shaves to the old codgers. Between running chores, playing kelly pool in the poolhall or poker under a covered bridge at the edge of town, and catting around with three or four different gals, there wasn't a helluva lot going on in my life in the summer of 1941. I had my diploma from Hamlin High School tucked in a drawer somewhere, and I fished it out, together with my birth certificate proving I was eighteen, when an Army Air Corps recruiter came to town. I enlisted for a two year hitch. I thought I might enjoy it and see some of the world. Dad never preached at us, and I can recall him giving me only two pieces of advice: never buy a pickup truck that wasn't built by General Motors and, much later, on the day I left for the service, he said, "Son, don't gamble." He hadn't been pleased with a job I had had sweeping up and racking the balls at the poolhall for ten bucks a month, and especially he hadn't liked it when I picked up side money hustling games.

I became an airplane mechanic. Growing up around truck engines and drilling equipment generators, I was one of the few kids in town who could take apart a car motor and put it back together again. Dad was an expert mechanic, and I just understood motors-a natural ability, like having exceptional eyes and the coordination to be a crack shot. Hand a rifle to a hillbilly and he'll hit a bull's eye every time. So, without knowing or even caring, I had the talents needed for flying in combat. But after taking my first airplane ride, I'd rather have crawled across country than go back up. I took off for a spin with a maintenance officer flight testing a ship I had serviced, and I threw up all over the back seat, staggering out of that damned thing as miserable as I'd ever been. But teenagers blot out the past when the present seems appealing. I saw a notice announcing a "Flying Sergeant" program. I'd take my chances with trying to become a sergeant. Three stripes and you were out of pulling K.P. and guard duty. I applied.

The war was only a few months old when I was accepted. There were only a few of us enlisted men; the rest were college boys, cadets who would become commissioned officers when they received their aviator's wings. At first I worried about keeping up with guys who were a little older and a whole lot better educated than I was, but once we took off in a trainer, we were all created equal. I got sick the first few flights, but quickly overcame it. Because I was well coordinated, I had less trouble than most handling a stick and rudder. But it was hard work learning to fly, and like everyone else, I sweated through my first solo and bounced in for a landing in one piece. But rather soon, the differences between students began to show. After fifteen hours of flying, an instructor complimented me by assuming I had flown a lot in civilian life. He was damned impressed when I told him I was just a learner.

Flying became fun. I knew what I was doing in the cockpit and understood the airplane. In only a month, I graduated from being air-sick even while flying level to actually enjoying spins and dives. I was lucky; some cadets never made it past the airsick phase. Being cocky and competitive, I began bouncing other students and staging mock dogfights. I could line up on air or ground targets before others in the class even saw them. My instructor knew who was best in the group, and in the end, I was the one he recommended to become a fighter pilot. I was thrilled.

Dad and my kid brother, Hal, Jr. came to Arizona to see me get my wings, but I didn't report to the 363rd Fighter Squadron as a flying sergeant. By then, the regulations had changed, and those of us receiving our wings as enlisted men were made noncommissioned flight officers, wearing blue bars instead of gold. I didn't care. In fact, I felt damned lucky that because of the war mobilization, my military records had not caught up with me. Otherwise, I would have probably been bounced from flight school when they discovered I had been court-martialed as a corporal for shooting a horse with a thirty-caliber machine gun. On guard duty one night, I showed a guy how to fire the gun by shooting bursts out into the desert. I saw the horses grazing, but thought I would fire short; I didn't, and an angry rancher demanded that the Air Corps pay for his dead horse.

In Nevada, we trained in the Bell Airacobra, the P-39, a compact tricycle-geared fighter, with the engine mounted behind the cockpit and a 37-millimeter cannon barrel protruding through the prop shaft. You entered the cockpit through a car-type door, which made you wonder how quickly you could get out if the ship spun in. But I was excited to be flying in a real fighter plane. I remember my first morning there, Bill "Obie" ' O'Brien, one of the squadron leaders, with three hundred hours more flying time than the rest of us, checked me out in the ThirtyNine. Obie was tough and demanding. I sat in the cockpit while he explained all the switches. "Okay, Yeager," he said, "when you take off, raise the nose-gear at sixty miles an hour-it'll get airborne about ninety or one hundred. Then, raise your landing gear and keep the son of a bitch wide open until you get out. Then, cut the power back. Same way on landing. Hell, it's no problem." Then he slammed the cockpit door and signaled for me to fire up my engine. Instruction over.

There were three squadrons in our fighter group, and among all those pilots, I was one of the few who loved the Thirty-Nine and would have gladly flown it off to war. The British refused it, and so did our own Air Corps, except for instruction, so we gave P-39s to the Russians to fight in. Our guys even sang a song about it:

Well, it was true that the drive shaft ran right up the center of the cramped cockpit, that the airplane performed beautifully at low altitudes but was underpowered up high, and that if you stalled it, you might wind up boring a deep hole because it spun like a top going down. But once you had a feel for the ship and understood it, the Thirty-Nine was a fun airplane to fly. Another problem was maintenance. We flew so much, yet there were few old hands among the ground crews working on the airplanes. There was a lot of trial and error, both on the flight line and in the sky.

"Crash" is not a word pilots ever use. I don't really know why, but the word is avoided in describing what happens when several tons of metal plows itself and its pilot into the ground. Instead, we might say, "He augered in." Or, "He bought the farm." However you chose to describe it, we were doing it. Hell, the sky was filled with green pilots practicing night landings, dogfighting, and strafing, so accidents were inevitable, although our kill-rate cost the group commander his job. We lost thirteen pilots in six months. And in nearly every case, the worst pilots died by their own stupidity-making a low-altitude turn that dropped them into the ground, or waiting too long to come out of a dive. One pilot dropped out of formation for no apparent reason and plunged like a boulder into the ground; guys snapped wings off their planes doing crazy power dives, or buzzed into the side of a hill. And if something went wrong, they made the wrong decision about whether to jump or stay. I saw a guy try to land with his engine on fire, Flames streaming, doing at least 150 mph, skidding off the runway in flames and smoke. The crazy bastard hit the ground on the run just as his tail melted off.

A gruesome weeding-out process was taking place. Those who were killed in Nevada were likely to have been the first killed in combat. But those of us who did survive the training were rapidly becoming skilled combat pilots and a cohesive team. I turned my back on lousy fliers as if their mistakes were catching. When one of them became a grease spot on the tarmac, I almost felt relieved: it was better to bury a weak sister in training than in combat, where he might not only bust his ass, but do something (or, more than likely, fail to do something) that would bust two or three other asses in addition to his own.

But I got mad at the dead: angry at them for dying so young and so senselessly; angry at them for destroying expensive government property as stupidly as if they had driven a Cadillac off a bridge. Anger was my defense mechanism. I've lost count of how many good friends have augered in over the years, but either you become calloused or you crack. By the time we flew combat in England, most of us had reached a point where, if a pilot borrowed our Mustang on our day off and was shot down, we became furious at the dead son of a bitch. The dead pilot might have been a friend, but he wasn't as special as our own P-51 that loyally hauled our own precious butt through the flak and tracers. Some losses, of course, tore into your guts as if you'd been shot. Then there was nothing left to do but go out and get blind drunk-which is exactly what we did. Those who couldn't put a lid on their grief couldn't hack combat. They were either sent home or became a basket case.

Death was our new trade. We were training to be professional killers, and one day at Tonopah, we crowded into the day room to hear an early combat veteran in the Pacific, named Tex Hill, describe his dogfights against the Japanese. Man, we were in awe. Shooting down an airplane seemed an incredible feat. I had no idea why the German people were stuck with Hitler and the Nazis and could care less. History was not one of my strong subjects. But when the time came, I would hammer those Germans any chance I got. Them or me. Even a "D" history student from Hamlin High knew that it was always better to be the hammer than the nail.

Those six months of squadron training were the happiest that I've ever been. Now that I was a fighter pilot, I couldn't imagine being anything else. We were hell-raising fighter jocks with plenty of swagger. When we weren't flying, we zipped on our leather night jackets that told the world who we were and crowded into Anderson's 1939 Ford convertible or Willet's Essex and drove into Tonopah, a wide-open silver-mining town. On paydays, we crowded around the blackjack tables of the Tonopah Club, drank ourselves blind on fifths of rotgut rye and bourbon, then staggered over to the local cathouse. Miss Taxine, the madam, tried to keep a fresh supply of gals so we wouldn't get bored and become customers of Lucky Strike, a cathouse in Mina, about thirty miles down the road. But we went to Mina anyway, wrecked the place, and the sheriff ran us out of town. The next morning, a P-39 strafed Mina's water tower.

My roommate and closest buddy was the only other flight officer in the squadron, a lanky Texan named Chuck McKee; I called him "Mack." Being the only two guys in the squadron who hadn't gone to college and weren't commissioned officers, we thought of ourselves as a different breed of cat. We were both rural boys who loved to hunt and fish, and we wore the blue flight officer's bars on our leather jackets as a badge of honor. So, it was natural that we paired off. On Sundays, we would drive jeeps out into the desert and hunt rabbits with Springfield rifles. We raced our jeeps through the sage and rocks and why we weren't killed right then and there, I'll never know. But one Sunday we went roaring up a dirt road into a canyon we had buzzed a few days earlier, causing a herd of cattle to stampede, and to our embarrassment the rancher happened to be on his front porch that morning. Instead of grabbing his shotgun, he signaled to us to stop and say hello. His name was Joe Clifford. His place was called the Stone Cabin Ranch. He invited us to stay for Sunday dinner and introduced us to his two boys, Joe, Jr., and Roy. Ma and Pa Clifford and their boys became like family, not only to Mack and me, but to all the other guys in the squadron. Ma cooked on a wood stove for sometimes as many as ten or fifteen hungry fighter jocks. I remember huge roasts, mounds of mashed potatoes, three different pies and cakes. We'd waddle out of that place.

We buzzed the ranch all the time, and if Pa Clifford came out and waved a bed sheet, it meant yo'all come over tonight for Ma's chow. Mack and I used to fly over and drop the Clifford boys all kinds of ammo for their hunting, whole belts of thirtyought-six, since bullets were hard to come by in wartime. There was a dry lakebed about a hundred yards from the house, and we would practice divebombing over that lakebed dropping practice bombs while Pa Clifford, down below, watched and laughed like hell.

One day I heard Pa mention that he'd like to get rid of a tree that stood near the roadway to the house. The next day, I buzzed that tree in my P-39 and carefully topped it with my left wingtip. I enjoyed that kind of challenge, but when I landed there was hell to pay. The maintenance officer demanded to know why my smashed wingtip looked as if it were taking root-hunks of wood were rammed into it. "l hit a bird," I told him. "Well," he replied, "that son of a bitch must've been sitting in one helluva nest." I was grounded from flying P-39s for a week. But there were several BT-13s available, and I flew them instead. A few nights later, when most of the squadron was seated around Ma Clifford's table, I came in on them in a BT-13, raised the shingles on the roof from my prop wash, while the guys inside never doubted who was buzzing them. "I wonder which crazy hillbilly did that?" I was always up to something.

In late June, we left Nevada to begin training in bomber escort and coastal patrol operations at Santa Rosa, California. The morning we left from the train depot, Taxine and the gals from the local cathouse came down to see us off with sandwiches, doughnuts and hot coffee, and gave us a heroes' send-off. For us the war was drawing ever closer.

But I unexpectedly found myself close to home. Travel orders sent me to Wright Field in Ohio, to be-of all things-a test pilot. The assignment was temporary: to do accelerated service testing on a new propeller developed for the P-39. I was chosen because of my maintenance background and flying ability, and all I had to do was fly as much as possible and keep careful records. And because I couldn't keep my hands off airplanes, I managed to get checked out in the P-47 fighter, and began to fly that big old fighter regularly.

Early one morning, I took off thinking that my hometown of Hamlin was only 130 miles away and I could make it down there in only half an hour. I had about two hours of fuel. I followed the Ohio River into Huntington, West Virginia, then banked south across the thickly-wooded rolling hills. Hamlin looked a lot smaller from the air, although even on the ground it was only a few city blocks. I could pick out streets and my high school, but I had trouble finding my house. It was about seven in the morning when I kicked everything wide open on that P-47 and dived on Main Street, shooting across town at 500 mph. Then I pulled up, did some rolls, and came in again just over the tree tops. That night, back at Wright Field, I called home. I think if I had been there, my folks would've shot me. I was accused of wrecking the town and causing such fright to one old lady that she had to go to the hospital. One farmer claimed I blew down his entire crop of corn; another complained that I terrified his horse while he was plowing, and ruined his crop. God knew how many cows and sows miscarried because of me. One old guy even insisted that I flew underneath his pasture fence. And everyone knew who was flying; I was Hamlin's only fighter pilot.

Anyway, I didn't stop. I buzzed Hamlin regularly and people gradually got used to it and actually began to enjoy the air show. Once, I even buzzed Grandpa Yeager's place. He lived on a small farm so deep in a holler that you had to pipe in sunshine. I spent a summer up there once slopping the hogs and hoeing in his garden. I flew to his place in a P-47, but that damned holler was so crooked and narrow, I couldn't get down in it. Finally, I discovered that if I turned extremely tight around the hilltops and kept my wing pointed straight at Grandpa's house, I could corkscrew my way down. And sure enough, I saw Grandpa standing on the front porch, shading his face from the sun. I found out later, he called into the house for Grandma to come out. "Adeline," he said "come out here. There's an airplane up there with no wings on it." My wing was pointing straight at him and he was looking only at the fuselage.

I got back to California on the day my squadron flew from Santa Rosa to Oroville, the next stop on our training schedule. That first day in Oroville, Mack and I went over to the local gymnasium to try to arrange a USO dance, a way for our guys to meet the local girls. I remember walking the length of an enormous gym to a small office where a very pretty brunette was seated behind the desk. Her name was Glennis Dickhouse. She was eighteen, had just graduated from high school, and was holding down two or three jobs, including social director for the town's USO. I asked her if she could arrange a dance that evening for about thirty guys. She looked so annoyed I thought she might throw me out. "You expect me to whip up a dance and find thirty girls on three hours' notice?" Glennis exclaimed. I said, "No, you'll only need to come up with twenty-nine, because I want to take you."

Glennis did it. The Elks Club gave her their hall and it looked as if every available woman in Oroville showed up. I took her, and she was both the sharpest looking and the best dancer there. I could two-step, but we sat out anything faster; so we sat out a lot, and it was tough to make small talk with her because she complained that she couldn't understand my West Virginia accent. "That's how they talk in your neck of the woods?" She couldn't believe it. But I made her laugh, and that's always a good start.

I asked her out again, but I had to wait my turn. She didn't lack for dates, including our squadron's physical training officer, "Muscles" Muldoon. Glennis was too young to take to a bar (I was underage, too, but being in an officer's uniform, nobody asked to see my I.D.), so we went to the movies and ate popcorn, and discovered that we had similar backgrounds and interests. She had been raised on a small ranch and her Dad taught her how to shoot, hunt, and fish to help put food on the table. She was a great shot. Not only was she a champion swimmer and dancer, but she was also as tough and gutsy as she was good-looking.

Glennis was living alone. She stayed behind to finish high school when her parents moved to Oakland, where her Dad found a job in the shipyards. She held down three jobs-as secretary to the superintendent of schools, as bookkeeper for a drug store, and as social director at the USO. Hell, I couldn't help getting serious about a girl as pretty as a movie star who made more money than I did.

Mack dated her girlfriend, and the four of us spent the weekends together going on picnics, swimming in the Feather River, or hiking in the hills. Glennis had her own apartment, but some people in town did not think too highly of local girls who dated fighter pilots. Working for the school superintendent, she had to be careful, especially living alone without her parents. So, it wouldn't do for her landlady or anyone else to see me visiting. I used to climb out the back window and shimmy down a tree. One night, I slipped and crashed on to the back porch below, knocking over two garbage cans and scattering half a dozen cats.

By the time the squadron left Oroville (we were there only two months), Glennis gave me her picture, and we promised to write. We never talked about the future because in a few months I'd be in the middle of World War II. We would wait and see what happened, and try to get to know each other better through the postal service.

Sorry as I was to be leaving Glennis, I was glad to be leaving Oroville. I was in trouble at the base. There was a basic training school for cadets about twenty miles away, at Chico, and I flew over there one day and bounced those cadets right in the traffic pattern and began waxing their fannies in dogfights. They flew BT-13s, and one of them followed me back to Oroville and landed right behind me. I thought "What now?" when out charged a furious bird colonel. He was Chico's commanding officer and he wanted me drawn and quartered on the spot. He accused me of busting through the traffic pattern, endangering the lives of his cadets, and disrupting his training program. Boy, he chewed on me. Then he blasted into base headquarters and began chewing on all our squadron's officers for allowing a menace like me to fly without proper supervision. So, moving on to Casper, Wyoming, for the final phase of our training, was welcome to me: I needed all the mileage that I could get between me and Chico airspace.

At Casper, the group commander led us in a simulated attack on a box of bombers, but instead of turning to the left, as he instructed us, he turned right and had his tail chewed off by another P39. We were in such a tight formation that the tail pieces nearly knocked us out of the sky; but all of us chuckled watching the old man bail out.

We lived in drafty barracks with coal stoves. One freezing day, I came in and saw a bunch of guys sitting around the stove shooting the breeze. I walked up to the stove as if I had some coal in my hands and dumped it in. It was actually a handful of fifty-caliber bullets. I put the lid back on and then began to walk fast to get out of there. The guys detected something wrong in my actions and scrambled in every direction. One dove under a bunk, but the others ran for the door just as that ammo knocked off the lid in a big cloud of soot. They never trusted me after that. The word on me was, "Keep your eye on Yeager and your back to the wall."

Wyoming was great hunting. The ranges were full, and because of the war, no one was hunting those big herds of deer and antelope. We went out with carbines in weapons carriers. That's how I lost Ed Hiro, one of our squadron leaders. It was night, and we had about six deer in the back that I had shot. I cleaned them and piled them in the back of the carrier, and I was driving like a son of a bitch to get back to the base for chow. Hiro was sitting next to me when we skidded out, bounced across a ditch and nearly turned over. I finally recovered and began talking to Hiro, but he didn't answer me. Damned if his seat wasn't empty. So, I stopped and turned around. I found him doubled up, holding his side, madder than hell about falling out and busting a couple of ribs. We laughed about that episode for months afterward. Ed was later shot down and killed over Holland.

Sergeant Miller, who ran the flight line, knew how to make antelope roasts and steaks. One day, I drew a map for Miller and a few other enlisted men, who left base before dawn, armed with knives, carbines, and a map showing the backroads to a place where I had seen thick herds of antelope. I took off in a P-39 and began herding the antelope toward the road where Miller and his boys stood waiting. I charged one of the guns to fire one shot at a time and laid about ten antelope right at their feet. Roast would be the main course at the big squadron blowout before we left for Europe.

But before then, I almost bought the farm. Our fighter group staged a mock attack on a box of B24s. I was indicating about 400 mph when there was a roaring explosion in the back. Fire came out from under my seat and the airplane flew apart in different directions. I jettisoned the door and stuck my head out, and the prop wash seemed to stretch my neck three feet. I jumped for it. When the chute opened, I was knocked unconscious. A sheepherder found me in the hills and tossed me across his burro, face down.

I remember the date: Friday, October 23, 1943. I was supposed to fly to Reno later in the day and meet Glennis at the Kit Carson Hotel. Instead, I was moaning and groaning in a damned hospital bed. My back was fractured and it hurt like hell.