Yeager: An Autobiography

THE ULTIMATE HIGH

When I returned to England in the middle of May, 1944, the guys in the squadron couldn't believe what they saw. Not only did they never expect to see me again, but I was twenty pounds heavier and brown as a hog in mud. I was the first evadee to make it back. "Yeager," Obie said, greeting me, "when are you gonna do things right? When you're shot down, you're supposed to stay down." My shoulders were peeling from the Spanish sun, while the guys were pale and skinny. Flying daily above the weather they got sunburn circles around their eyes-contoured around the outlines of their oxygen masks and flying helmets-and looked like a pack of damned raccoons. When I handed out a bunch of ripe bananas I brought back for them, man, they were speechless; they hadn't seen a banana since we left the States. That's how I got so fat, I told them, eating bananas in Spain while soaking up sunshine at a resort hotel. All expenses were paid by Uncle Sam, including civilian clothes, room, food, and booze. By the time I was finished, they couldn't wait to bail out over Spain.

Mostly, I was telling the truth. About Spain at least; I really didn't spend my time in France hidden out on the second floor of a whorehouse in Lyon. But I did have a room with a balcony in a resort hotel in Alma de Aragon, where there was nothing to do but sunbathe, eat, and flirt with the chambermaids for six weeks while the American consul tried to free six of us downed airmen from our hellish existence. Because of the war-which I heard about from time to time-the Franco government was short of gasoline, and that's how we were negotiated out: so many gallons of Texaco per evadee.

I was sent back to England to pack my bags: I was going home. No more combat. The regulations were strictly enforced to protect the underground in occupied countries who assisted Allied airmen. German intelligence kept dossiers on most of us and knew who had been shot down before; they'd go right to work on your fingernails if you were shot down again.

Of course you had to be crazy to want to stay and shiver at Leiston, which was three concrete runways surrounded by a sea of mud, and cold and clammy Nissen huts. The Eighth Air Force had stuck us where the sun never shines, sixty miles up the coast from London with only two miles of land between us and the gales blowing in from the North Sea. We huddled around coke stoves and shivered in sleeping bags. The locals in the nearby village of Yoxford resented having seven thousand Yanks descend upon them, their pubs, and their women, and were rude and nasty. Who would want to fight to stay in such a miserable place where you flew off every day to get your ass shot off, and existed mainly on beer and greasy fish and chips? Well, much to my surprise, I did.

In Spain, I looked forward to going home and marrying Glennis. But from the moment I arrived back at Leiston, I knew that this was where I belonged until I had done my share of the fighting. I felt like a bug-out artist. And the idea of sitting out the war as a damned flight instructor in Texas or somewhere tore me up. Guys like Bud Anderson and Don Bochkay were already double aces who completed their tours and then volunteered for more. I was raised to finish what I started, not slink off after flying only eight missions. Screw the regulations. And when I said as much to friends like O'Brien and Browning, they looked at me as if my brains had been boiled into oatmeal by the Spanish sun. Group put me in for the Bronze Star for helping Pat to make it over the Pyrenees, and my friends told me to take my medal and run. I was scheduled to fly to New York on June 25.

"No way," I said.

I sat alone in my room, staring at the empty bed across from mine, where a bare mattress was rolled, waiting for a new occupant. My roomie was gone; Mack McKee had been shot down over Germany a few weeks after I was. Mack and I had stuck together all the way, from Nevada on. We even shared the same eight decker bunks aboard the Queen Elizabeth and kept things interesting by sawing through the ropes holding those bunks, so when the top sleeper crawled in the sack, he broke through and started a chain reaction pileup that landed six others on top of the bottom sleeper. At Leiston, we outsmarted the gamekeepers and poached His Majesty's rabbits and pheasants in the nearby woods, frying them on our small coke stove. We bought a couple of wirehaired terriers from a kennel; I named mine Mustang, he named his Ace. The dogs were gone, because we both had our asses shot off, the guys thought they were jinxed. Mack was a bloody mess when he bailed out. He left one of his arms in the cockpit.

I told myself, "Well, that's war. That's how it is." But that wasn't much comfort. I felt like I had lost a close brother, which, in a way, I had. He had flown more than twenty missions and fought the good fight, which was a lot more than I could say for myself. Evadee rule or not, I figured the war had been cut out from under me before I could make worthwhile all those hard and expensive months of combat training. There wasn't a rule ever invented that couldn't be bent. So I marched on group headquarters and began my fight.

Without realizing it, I was about to take charge of my life and push it in a direction where everything that happened in later years was a logical outcome for a career fighter pilot who had compiled an outstanding combat record. If I had submitted to being sent home, I doubt whether the Army Air Corps would have been interested in retaining my services when the war ended. I would've been just another noncommissioned officer who had spent most of the war instructing young fighter pilots how to fly. Not very impressive. I would probably have been mustered out and my flying career abruptly ended. But I wasn't consciously thinking about my future; I was just being stubborn about the present. I knew the odds were stacked against me, but in the end events and luck came together for me, and one man-the only one who could-decided my fate: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I was brassy and pushed my way up the chain of command at group headquarters, arguing my case. And because I was the first evadee to make it back, the majors and colonels I talked to were kinder than they might have been and helped me to keep climbing the ladder by allowing me to go to London and talk to the brass at Supreme Headquarters. Everyone I saw told me I couldn't stay, but the brass enjoyed meeting a very junior officer who refused to go home. "We'd like to help," I was told, "but the regulations won't allow it." While I was being passed around among colonels and generals at SHAPE, the Allies launched the invasion of Normandy on June 6, and the London newspapers reported that the French Maquis were now openly battling the Germans in the hedgerows of Normandy, behind the lines. "Well, there you go," I remember telling a colonel at SHAPE, "the Maquis are out in the open now, and there's no way I can blow them to the Gestapo if I were shot down again."

On June 11, I had an appointment with a two-star general and was joined by a bomber captain named Fred Glover, who had evaded back through Holland, and didn't want to be sent home, either. The general listened to our arguments, sighed, and finally told us that only General Eisenhower could decide the matter. "I think Ike would like to meet you two," the general said. "I'll see what I can do." He got us an appointment for eleven the next morning.

I woke up scared to death. My hotel room was shaking from a roaring putt putt putt, and I rushed to the window thinking I would see one of those German jet fighters I had heard about in trouble and about to crash over central London. Instead I saw a German V-1 buzz bomb directly overhead; even as I watched, the engine quit and the damned thing nosed over from fifteen hundred feet and began to fall. I hit the deck. There was a jarring explosion only a few blocks away. The first V-bomb attack on London had begun, and I figured that my appointment with Eisenhower would be canceled. But exactly at eleven Glover and I were saluting smartly in front of the Supreme Allied Commander's desk in his map-lined office.

"I just wanted to meet two guys who think they're getting a raw deal being sent home," he said with a grin. I was so in awe, I could barely talk. "General " I said, "I don't want to leave my buddies after only eight missions. It just isn't right. I have a lot of fighting left to do." Glover, who was a pretty sharp college boy, did most of the talking, and Eisenhower kept nodding in agreement. Finally, he said, "I just don't have the authority to keep you here. That's a War Department regulation, not mine. But I can ask Washington if they will give me the authority to make the decision. That's all I can promise."

I returned to Leiston not knowing what to think. The guys were impressed that I had actually seen Eisenhower, and they figured that the odds were now in my favor. Meanwhile, they let me fly above England, practicing dogfighting with new replacements. Through attrition and losses, there were only about a dozen of us left from the original gang, and I was considered one of the old heads. I was flying over the base with three new guys when the control tower ordered me to lead the others out over the North Sea, near Heligoland, to provide air cover to a couple of shotdown B- 17 crewmen in a dinghy awaiting rescue by a patrol boat. We headed out and found them bobbing in the swells. We began circling above them when I spotted a Junkers JU-88 approaching from the east. He was heading for us, probably to strafe the crewmen, and without even thinking or saying a word to the others in my flight, I turned toward him; when he finally spotted me, he turned tail, but I cobbed my engine and caught up with him right on the coastline of occupied Heligoland. German ground gunners were firing flak by him trying to scare me off, but I closed on him at about two hundred yards and opened up. He burst into flames and rolled up on the beach. I got spectacular gun camera film as the JU-88 exploded. And I received a spectacular ass-chewing when I landed.

I reported in to Ed Hiro, now a major and our squadron's operations officer. When I told Ed what I had done, he reminded me I was under strict orders to avoid combat. "Goddamn it, Yeager," he shouted, "can't you do anything right?" Ed took the gun camera film from my plane and gave it to Eddie Simpson, who had four kills. Eddie wrote up a claim and became an ace. We gave the combat time to a young guy in the squadron. As for me, I was grounded. I kept a low profile for a day or two, and then was summoned back to Hiro's office. I remember thinking, "Christ, what now?" Ed handed me a message filtered down from group. My travel orders home were rescinded. The War Department had allowed General Eisenhower to decide whether or not I could stay, and he decided in my favor.

Within two weeks, my tan was gone and I had lost the twenty pounds I gained in Spain. I was back to being skin and bones with two sunburnt circles around my eyes, a Leiston raccoon. But I couldn't care less. For me, the real war had begun.

On mission days, you're up at five-thirty splashing icy water on your face because there is no hot, trying to shave close to avoid any stubble that will chafe your face beneath the tight-fitting oxygen mask you'll be wearing for nearly six hours. It's cold and dark as you stumble out the door and grab your bike to pedal through the mist to the group briefing hut, where the pilots from all three squadrons are assembled-like you, barely awake. Another "Ramrod" mission-escorting heavy bombers deep into Germany. The group leader briefs you and you jot down on the back of your hand three vital numbers: takeoff time, rendezvous time with the bombers, and the average course coordinates back to base. Then the intelligence officer takes over telling us to expect heavy flak and possibly vicious fighter opposition in the corridor between Bremen and Berlin. We hope he's right about meeting fighters. The weather officer is always grim. The weather is seldom good, but no matter how bad, he predicts even worse, just covering his bet so that we can't later complain that we weren't warned about fifty-foot visibility or headwinds that blow you backwards. When the weather is really unflyable, we just don't go.

You bike over to the squadron operations shed to suit up. You put on your flying suit, your two pairs of wool socks, and then a pair of fleece-lined boots. You strap on your forty-five, then your leather flight jacket and your Mae West. You draw your parachute pack from supply, put on your leather flying helmet and goggles, then stand around and drink a couple of cups of coffee and eat a piece of hard dark bread spread thickly with peanut butter and orange marmalade: your breakfast. No one talks very much. Before a mission, guys are pretty well closed into themselves, like players before a big game. We know that this lousy snack could well be our last meal.

You remember to pee-very important, because you'll be sitting in that cockpit for more than six hours, and it gets so cold at high altitudes that the elimination tube usually freezes solid. You're already cold and weary before the day has even begun as you climb up on a weapons carrier for a lift out to the flight line. Glamorous Glen always looks beautiful. She's a P-51 Mustang, the best American fighter in the war, equal to anything the Germans can put up against her. With her two-thousand-mile range she is turning around the air war against Germans by protecting our bombers over the deepest targets. Her Packard-built Rolls-Royce Merlin engine with a twostage, two-speed supercharger provides terrific speed and maneuvering performance-a dogfighter's dream. Loaded with fuel and ammo, she's a tricky airplane to fly, and also vulnerable. Get hit in your radiator and lose your coolant, and you are going down. That's all there is to it.

Sergeant Webber, your crew chief, is up on the wing, leaning into the cockpit. You ask him if anything is wrong, but there never is, so you crawl in and strap yourself to your seat. A thick piece of armor plating protects your back; behind that is an eighty-five-gallon tank of high-octane aviation gasoline. You look up at the sky, thickly overcast as usual, and check out the instruments and especially the oxygen system. You'll be flying at 30,000 feet most of the day. You're alert now for engine-start, hoping what you always hope in the moments before taking off: that the sky will be crowded with German fighters, that you and your buddies will shoot down all of them. You always get butterflies before a mission, although by now it is almost routine.

Our first mission, on February 11, 1944, we were all scared to death, even though it was a routine sweep alone the French coast. I remember looking down and thinking, "Jesus, that's occupied territory down there." It looked really evil as the flak rose to meet us; I heard the drone of German radar on my own VHF radio and it sounded to my ears as if they were zeroing in on me personally. We didn't encounter any fighters that day, and I don't think we were too disappointed. But now, a mission without a dogfight is like going to London only to find that all the women have been evacuated.

We take off at 8:00 A.M., taxiing by twos to the edge of the runway where the ops officer stands and waves a red flag every eight seconds. Go. I'll take off climbing straight ahead, while the guy on my wing will turn ten degrees for ten seconds to parallel me and provide space between us as we come up through the low clouds, bouncing around in prop wash and struggling to break out on top before ramming into one another. We all climb at the same power, 2,600 rpm, indicated airspeed of 120. We're all carrying the same full weight of fuel and ammo, so climbing at the same rate, we all begin popping out of the clouds together. The morning sun is dazzling, and Mustangs are forming up into flights of four. Your wingman slips in next to you, slightly to the rear, a new guy, and you hope he's good and knows what he's doing. His job is to protect your rear, stick with you no matter what, while you hammer German fighters. We are spread across the sky, three squadrons of four flights of four airplanes each, and to maintain radio silence you use visual signals to tighten up your four-plane flight. You rock your wings and the guys move in closer.

You clip your oxygen mask into place and begin climbing to 28,000 feet. The sun warms your face and shoulders, but outside it is sixty below zero and the lower half of your body, in the shadows, is already cold and stiff. The small cabin heater keeps your right foot warm but your left foot is numb. You're sitting on that damned dinghy which is a genuine pain in the ass. The cabin isn't pressurized and at 30,000 feet you fatigue easily. You adjust your silk scarf, making sure its edges are higher than the rough collar of your leather jacket. You'll be looking back constantly to check your tail. "The German who gets you is the one that you'll never see." That's been drummed into us from the first day of squadron training.

We cross the North Sea, following the group leader in the lead formation whose responsibility is to get us to the rendezvous point with the bombers we will be escorting. The bombers take different routes to avoid flak concentrations. Exactly on time, flak begins drumming up at us. Without even looking down, you know you are over the Frisian Islands, off the Dutch coast. They always fire four-burst patterns that hit at the same moment. Over Dummer Lake, farther south, they fire vertical clusters at increasing altitudes. Once you know the flak patterns in various places, you can practically navigate by them. You can't hear the flak exploding over the drone of your engines; and if you ever do hear it, you'll probably be blasted.

We pick up our bombers southwest of the Zuyder Zee, three boxes of lumbering B-24s, and provide top cover. The bombers chug along at 200 mph, while we, going at twice that speed, weave back and forth above them, staying alert for any bogies diving at us from above. The bomber boys claim to be winning the war by blasting German industry to rubble; while we claim to be winning it by an almost ten to one kill ratio over the Luftwaffe. Big egos are at work on both sides, although until recently we were not allowed to go lower than 12,000 feet to chase German fighters. Stick with those bombers, were the standing orders. So, we're not exactly fond of bomber boys, but we respect their guts. They take a terrible pounding, and when one bomber goes down, ten crewmen buy the farm.

You know how it is going to be for this bomber box this day. They're in the second or third wave, hitting fuel storage facilities, and by the time they reach the target there will be a dark cloud hanging in the sky, looking just like a thundercloud-old flak smoke-and those B-24s will fly straight and true, lining up their bomb sights on the target, disappearing into that black cloud to catch hell. There's nothing they can do about it. And after they drop their bombs and begin to turn toward safety… that's when they get bounced by the Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts. Then those bomber boys worship us fighter jocks.

You stay alert, checking the skies above and behind. You're over German soil now, the most likely place to be bounced. On your right is a P-51D, the latest model, with six fifty-caliber machine guns instead of the usual four, and a slightly faster and more maneuverable airplane. Daddy Rabbit is painted over the engine cowling. The airplane is flown by Capt. Charles Peters, a buddy from New Orleans who's flying his last mission. "Daddy Rabbit" is his nickname, and he's agreed to turn that beautiful P-51 D over to you when this mission ends. Tomorrow it will fly as Glamorous Glen III. You keep Daddy close and check his tail almost as often as you check your own, which is why he agreed to let you have his airplane. "I know you, you son of a bitch," he laughs. "You won't let anything happen to me on my last ride. You want my airplane too much." Ol' Daddy is right.

A cloud of dark smoke looms above the target. The bombers head straight for it. One of them suddenly blows up in a fireball of bombs and gasoline. No chutes. You turn and catch a glimpse of hundreds of bomb flashes through the smoke and clouds, a moment of maximum alertness because those bombers will soon be turning and the squadron commander orders us to drop our wing tanks. You can't dogfight with wing tanks. You pull the release cable, but the damnedest thing happens: your tanks drop away but so does Daddy Rabbit. He drops like a damned rock, right out of the formation. Nothing hit him, you're certain of that, but he's falling to earth. You dive after him. "My engine quit," he says. It's one of those moments in war that is so horrible that it's actually funny. Daddy is falling to below 5,000 and you're right with him, on his wing, and the flak is coming up. His last mission and he's about to auger in. "Christ, I'm thinking about leaving this thing," he says. "Hold off," I tell him. "I'm gonna ride in that thing tomorrow. Let's figure this out." We go around the instrument panel, checking every possibility, while the damned ground fills the windshield. Machine gun tracers are flashing by.

"Hey, what about your fuel mixture? Go to emergency rich and see what happens." He does, and his engine suddenly comes alive, ol' Daddy zooms upstairs as fast as that Packard Merlin will carry his homeward-bound butt. "I must've accidentally knocked back my mixture control when I pulled the wing tank release cable," he says when he can talk again. It was a close call, but we laugh about it. "Damn it, Daddy, you park that thing and hand over the keys." My voice is shaky, too.

No enemy fighters are sighted this day, but no combat mission is ever routine, by definition, the outcome of any mission is unknown until you safely land, and often the worst part is making it home in terrible weather, sometimes in a crippled airplane, fighting against fatigue and exhaustion. It's early afternoon when you drop down to 3,500 feet above the North Sea and unfasten your oxygen mask. The cabin stinks of gas, oil, and your own sweaty body. You've got a headache and you're starved. You reach for a D ration chocolate bar that's hard as a brick from the cold. You use the side of your jaw to bite into it, and it tastes wonderful. Those damned gravelcrunchers back at the base already had their lunch, and by the time we land the chow hall will be closed. We have an hour of mission debriefing with the intelligence officers before we are off for the day. By then it will be three-thirty. If it isn't raining and we aren't too tired, we'll pedal off on our bikes to Yoxford and fill up on fish and chips. The chow hall situation always pisses us, but we're usually worse to deal with when we come back without scoring any victories.

You're about forty miles from the British coast when you call in and request a compass steer. Sometimes Leiston is so socked in that we land at other fields. Bud Anderson was once forced to land at a bomber base that had the luxury of fifty feet of visibility, he came in, leading a flight of four, groping for the runway lights, when he saw two Flying Fortresses directly ahead and below. He almost landed right on them. It can be terrifying, but you get used to it; like a motorist who makes it home safely in terrible weather, you just forget about it the minute you walk in the door. Anyway, you know the surrounding countryside like the back of your hand, so you line up your descent with landmarks like a lighthouse or a road or a plowed field. When it's really bad visibility, they shoot up flares and you corkscrew down to the edge of the runway. The miracle is we've only lost one guy landing-a stupid accident. He came in after finishing his last mission, shouted over his radio, "Tell Ma I'm coming home." He did a victory roll over the field and augered into a tree.

This time you've got a hundred yards of visibility and a light crosswind-a piece of cake. You taxi up to the hardstand, where Sergeant Webber is waiting, and turn off the engine. You see his disappointed look when he glances at the gun ports which are still taped shut. Another dry run. Your twenty-first mission since returning to combat without encountering an enemy airplane. It's like hunting for six hours in the woods and not even seeing a damned chipmunk. But you crawl out of that cockpit as stiff and tired as if you had taken on the whole damned Luftwaffe. Tomorrow, you might bag three or become a German's victory, but the routine of these long, tiring days is always the same. Yet, you enjoy it. Hard to believe, maybe, and harder to explain, but you really do.

That summer of 1944 was a dry gulch for those of us eager to mix it up with the Germans. The real fun of combat was at the end of a day of action, when we'd sit around in the Nissen set aside as an officer's club, drinking Scotch and eating Spam sandwiches while chattering like a bunch of bluejays-refighting our dogfights or refiring our high angle deflection shots that nailed a 109. Now, all we talked about was whether or not the air war was over. Paris was liberated and it seemed as if the Germans were ready to call it quits, at least in the sky. All they were sending up were buzz bombs, many of them fired from the Dutch coast and passing right over Leiston, en route to London. Some of them came in so low that they blew up against the hills near our base. It was an awesome weapon, but it couldn't win the war. Ed Hiro and a few others thought the Germans were biding their time, building up their strength to sock it to us in a few big punches. Whatever the truth I was frustrated. I still had only one air victory officially credited to me, which was really amusing because I was now one of the four squadron flight leaders, the only one who wasn't an ace with at least five victories, and the only one not a commissioned officer. My new roommate was Bud Anderson. Andy was the best fighter pilot I've ever seen, with the eyes of an eagle and the instincts of a mongoose. We had the best eyes in the group, and could pick up specks in the sky from fifty miles away. And as he said, "Chuck, if we don't see 'em, they just ain't up there." Well, they weren't up there, and Andy and I were left to dogfighting each other to see who got to lead the flight home.

But we were still taking losses. Because there was no action upstairs we were ordered down on the deck to find targets of opportunity like trains and barges and motor convoys. That's how we lost Ed Hiro in early September. He was strafing German positions in support of the airborne invasion in Arnheim, Holland, when he was shot down on his last mission. We lost Eddie Simpson when he collided with another Mustang on the deck over France. I remember Andy and me climbing on the wing of Col. Don Graham's Mustang after a really hairy strafing run. Graham was our group commander and he looked in shock. Stubby Gambel was Graham's wingman and our friend. "Where's Stubby?" Andy asked. Graham shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "There were all these tracers…." He stopped and stared at his propeller blades. One of them had a bullet hole the size of a silver dollar. He turned white. So, we lost Stubby, too, and by now there were only a handful left who had joined the 363rd the day it originated in Tonopah. Each loss of one of the original guys drew together those of us who were left; in fact, we were living together under the same roof, and we became so close that it was as if we were flying in our own separate squadron.

Don Bochkay was the old man. He was about twenty-five, a Californian who loved to tinker with cars. Silk panties or nylons were impossible to get in wartime London, and he had his mother send him some to use as bait. One night, five of us were in a West End pub getting drunk, while 0l' Boch made a play for one of the barmaids by giving her a pair of fancy silk panties. "Honey," Boch said to her, "you stick with me and you'll be fartin' through silk." That line became famous throughout the entire Eighth Air Force. London had nightclubs, and we'd stay in a hotel and chase girls and get drunk. We'd go there whenever Doc Tramp, the flight surgeon, thought we needed a rest. He watched over us like a damned mother hen. You'd have thought we'd race to London every chance we got, but we were afraid of missing something-like a big dogfight-on our days off. But once we did go, we had ourselves a blast. One time Andy and I, more drunk than sober, raced down the platform to catch the last train to Leiston, which was just pulling out. We managed to toss our bags on board, but the damned train left without us. Doc Tramp would just shake his head when we got back from a three-day "rest" in London. We were in sorry shape.

Not that we didn't keep ourselves amused back at the base. We'd finish a night of boozing by dogfighting on our bikes in the pitch dark until the night when Jim Browning went ass over teakettle and almost broke his back. Then the C.O. threatened court martial. All the Nissens attracted rats, and all of us had .45s, so it was worth your life to wander around at times. Obie O'Brien's Nissen was like a damned sieve, bullet holes everywhere. Obie was quick on the draw with a temper to match, and one night, after polishing off a bottle of Scotch with a few buddies, he marched on the chow hall, shot the lock off the food locker, and helped himself to a couple of hunks of corned beef. If I got hungry, I'd sneak out in the woods and shoot the head off a rabbit. And if the truth be known, I made a few "emergency landings" that summer in parts of France occupied by our troops. Once I flew back to base with a case of champagne in my lap. To a country boy it tasted like sody pop; I drank it celebrating my promotion to lieutenant. After turning me down three times because of the court martial on my record, a board of colonels finally agreed that I was commissioned officer material.

I was still the most junior officer in our squadron because any other second lieutenant had seniority over me; rank meant nothing in combat, or should've meant nothing, but by early fall I was actually leading our entire squadron on missions, and there were several captains who were rubbed wrong being led by a new lieutenant. One of them was assigned to my flight of four, and refused to follow my orders. Flying combat is deadly serious, life-and-death stuff, and a flight leader is like a captain of a ship. His job is to spot the enemy fighters and order when to drop wing tanks, how and when to attack, and so forth. We were over Germany and this guy was flying as tail-end charlie, but lagging too far back in the rear, and ignoring my order to close up. So far back, he could be picked off by a 109 sneaking up on us and we'd never know it. Man, I got hot. I did a big barrel roll and came in behind him; he never saw me. Then, I fired a burst right over his canopy. The bastard saw that. He closed up immediately, and did what he was told. But I couldn't understand a guy like that: without discipline and teamwork, we'd all be killed.

On September 18, I led two squadrons in support of airborne landings in Holland. Our assignment was to provide top cover to C-47s towing gliders filled with combat troops. German flak and small arms fire were intense, and we sat up there watching those slow-moving C-47s getting hammered. Ten of them were blown out of the sky in minutes, and the ground was littered with smashed gliders. It was a bloodbath, and a part of me ached to get down on the deck and strafe hell out of those German guns; but another part of me was damned glad that our orders were to stay at 5,000 feet, well above the murderous flak, and escort the surviving C47s out of there.

I was really shocked when group headquarters chose me to lead the entire group on a mission. I was only twenty-one, a new second lieutenant, not even worth mentioning when it came to kills. By then, there were more than twenty aces in the three squadrons comprising the 357th Fighter Group-I wasn't even close. But group noticed me. The captain filed a complaint against me for firing warning shots at him; we were both called on the carpet. He was sent packing, and I was complimented. I was aggressive and reliable, and while fighter jocks don't lack egos and a few guys might've thought they could outfly me, there was nobody in the entire group who claimed they could outsee me. Being out there in front, your job is to see the enemy ahead of anybody.

A few days later, I was assigned as group leader and led all three squadrons on a bomber escort mission over Germany. Andy ragged me by calling me "colonel." The group leader is usually the group's commanding officer. Although I acted pretty matter of-fact about it (actually there wasn't that much to it: I was responsible for getting us to the rendezvous point with the bombers and positioning each squadron) I did manage to squeeze off a quick prayer we all used in tight spots: "Lord, just don't let me screw up." Anyway, I figured that as group leader, if there were any Germans in the sky, at least I'd get first crack at them. And that's exactly what happened.

On October 12, leading the group on a bombing escort over Bremen, I scored five victories-the first ace in a day.

I take credit for being plenty lucky. We picked up our two boxes of B-24s over Holland, and I positioned two squadrons to escort them, then took off with my own squadron to range about one hundred miles ahead. We were over Steinhuder Lake when I spotted specks about fifty miles ahead. "Combat vision," we call it. You focus out to infinity and back, searching a section of sky each time. To be able to see at such distances is a gift that's hard to explain, and only Andy and I could do it. The other guys, who had excellent eyesight on the ground, took it on faith that the two of us actually saw something far out there. This time, I didn't even radio to the others, but just kept us heading toward the German fighters from out of the sun. We were at 28,000 feet and closing fast. Soon, I was able to count twenty-two individual specks. I figured they were Me109s, just sitting up there, waiting for our bombers. And I was right.

They were just circling and waiting and didn't see us coming at them out of the sun. We closed to about a thousand yards, and if their leader saw us, he probably thought we were additional 109s because he made no effort to scramble out of our way. In the lead, I was the only one yet in firing range; I came in behind their tail-end charlie and was about to begin hammering him, when he suddenly broke left and ran into his wingman. They both bailed out. It was almost comic, scoring two quick victories without firing a shot. But, apparently, the big shortage in Germany was not of airplanes, but of pilots and they were probably under orders to jump for it in tight spots. (After the war, it was learned that a few of their leading aces had flown more than a thousand combat missions and bailed out more than twenty times.) By now, all the airplanes in that sky had dropped their wing tanks and were spinning and diving in a wild, wide-open dogfight. I blew up a 109 from six hundred yards-my third victory-when I turned around and saw another angling in behind me. Man, I pulled back on my throttle so damned hard I nearly stalled, rolled up and over, came in behind and under him, kicking right rudder and simultaneously firing. I was directly underneath the guy, less than fifty feet, and I opened up that 109 as if it were a can of Spam. That made four. A moment later, I waxed a guy's fanny in a steep dive; I pulled up at about 1,000 feet; he went straight into the ground.

That night at the officer's club, I took a pounding. The other squadron leaders were furious because I didn't invite them in for the kill, which totaled eight, all by our squadron. They sat fifty miles back with the bombers, listening to our radio chatter: "He's in flames," "Watch your tail," etc., while I ignored their request for our vector. Over beers, I told them the damned truth: "There just weren't enough krauts to go around." And Bochkay didn't let me forget that two of my victories were scored without firing a shot. He presented me with a pair of silk panties. He wrote across the bottom: HILLBILLY PARACHUTE. DROP THESE WHEN YEAGER GETS ON YOUR TAIL.

But the Stars and Stripes said it better in their front page headline: FIVE KILLS VINDICATE IKE'S DECISION. Group recommended me for the Silver Star.