Yeager: An Autobiography

ON THE DECK

"Blow jobs," the bomber crews called them, but no one was eager to be on the receiving end of the twin-engine German jet fighters that screamed down on our formations to quickly hit and run. The jets had a 150 mph speed advantage over the Mustang, but their pilots tried to avoid dogfights, concentrating instead on hammering the bombers. So, rarely did we encounter any jets. The word on them was that they were wing-heavy; the Mustang, with its laminar flow wing, could easily turn and dive with them, but in a level chase there was no contest; the Me262 easily sped beyond gun range. Andy, for example, waxed the fanny of a 262, and was just about to open fire when the German pilot spotted him and left him in the dust.

German jet pilots were probably under orders not to get shot down in a dogfight. Some of their pilots were damned arrogant and didn't bother about dropping their wing tanks in a chase. They just teased around, let a Mustang get close, then cobbed the throttle and thumbed their nose. If one of our pilots got off a shot, it was a quick burst at long range. So I could hardly believe my good luck when I looked down into broken clouds from 8,000 feet and saw three jets cruising about 3,000 feet below. I was leading a flight of four Mustangs, just north of Essen, Germany, and I dove after them. I fired a few bursts before losing them in the cloud deck. My gun camera recorded that I put a few bullets into two jets. Chasing those guys, I was a fat man running uphill to catch a trolley. I was doing 450, but they zoomed out of sight. I climbed back to 8,000 feet to search for my flight, but I couldn't find them, so I headed north figuring I'd pick them up over the North Sea on the return home.

Meanwhile, I kept watch below, hoping I'd spot those jets again and get another chance at them. Instead, I saw a large airdrome with a six-thousand foot runway and a lone jet approaching the field from the south at 500 feet. I dove at him. His landing gear was down and he was lining up the runway coming in at no more than 200 mph, when I dropped on his ass at 500 mph. He never saw me, but the damned control tower did. Ground gunners began blasting at the lunatic American swooping right at them, who was trying to line up a quick burst and pull out of there. I came in full-throttle at 500 feet and fired above and behind the jet from four hundred yards. My hits slapped into his wings and I pulled up 300 feet off the ground with flak crackling all around me. Climbing straight up, I looked back and saw that jet crash-landing short of the runway shearing off a wing, in a cloud of dust and smoke. I d rather have brought down the son of a bitch in a dogfight, but it wasn't exactly an easy kill-one quick, accurate burst, with flak banging all around me. Group apparently thought so, too, because they recommended me for the Distinguished Flying Cross.

I was elated flying home, but shaky, too. That flak was damned close, and I always figured that if I busted my ass, it would be down on the deck rather than up in the sky. Dogfighting, there were thousands of feet of sky in every direction to outmaneuver an enemy airplane determined to destroy you. There wasn't much room for ducking on the deck, where one lucky shot could blow the radiator in your belly and bring you down. With only sporadic fighter resistance against our bombers, we had full ammo to strafe targets of opportunity on the way home. But the strafing missions I most dreaded were hitting airfields. Then, you had to hit fast, come at them from different directions and varying altitudes, and take them by surprise. God help your ass if you were a tail-end charlie in the last wave. By then, those ack-ack guns were ready.

A few days after shooting down that jet, I was assigned to lead the entire group on a strafing mission against Rechlin, the most heavily defended air base in Germany. Located in the suburbs of Berlin, it was the German Wright Field, where all of their latest aircraft were tested and maintained. Bombing operations had been ineffective; I was ordered to lead our three squadrons onto the deck to destroy their service hangars and any airplanes caught on the ground. The place was swarming with antiaircraft batteries, and we were relying on the element of surprise plus predicted low visibility to make it through. I wasn't a worrier; after months of flying combat, I was fatalistic. Hell, if I took off with a rough engine, so what? It would probably smooth out, but if not, I'd cope somehow. But the Rechlin assignment scared me to death.

I remember sitting in my airplane, warming up for takeoff, feeling clammy with a real premonition that I was taking my last ride. The weather was terrible at both ends, rain squalls and turbulent winds; and I had to figure a way to get to the target and then get out in one piece. I knew I was leading a lot of guys to their death, and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it. Andy was scheduled to lead the final wave of Mustangs in the attack, probably taking the worst pounding of all. I was usually confident and gung-ho, but I found myself praying for a mission abort. Man, I had the shakes: I did not want to fly into the sky that day. And that morning, at least, God turned out to be a West Virginia Methodist: we got an abort just as I began to taxi out to the runway. Zero visibility at the target. I never wore a bigger grin, and when I saw Andy, I hugged that son of a bitch and we began to laugh like two crazy men. We had the rest of the day off and all of us went out and got falling-down drunk. Reichland was never rescheduled.

It's a very different war at 50 feet off the ground; you see everything, especially in winter, when cars and trucks and people are easily spotted against a blanket of snow. Coming in so low, my eyes once met with the driver of a German staff car. I was coming straight at him; one quick burst and that car disintegrated, four bodies tossed out on the icy road like rag dolls. Another time, I spotted a five- or six-truck German troop convoy; by the time I swooped down on them, the troops had jumped out and were hunkered down in a roadside ditch. I opened up with my six fifty-caliber machine guns and watched those sparkling butterflies dance right up the line in that ditch. Before leaving, I hit their trucks. It was the first time I had ever strafed troops, and I was surprised at how quick and easy it was to take out an entire battalion. Enemy troops were fair game: a driver in a jeep- zap him. A soldier running through the snow-zap him. But we weren't always scrupulous about our targets.

Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort. Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population. Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it. If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody refused, as I recall) that person would have probably been court-martialed. I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing and whispering to him: "If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side." That's still my view.

By definition, war is immoral; there is no such thing as a clean war. Once armies are engaged, war is total. We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between "innocent civilians" and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops. And because German industry was wrecked by constant bombing, munitions-making was now a cottage industry, dispersed across the country in hundreds of homes and neighborhood factories, which was the British excuse for staging carpet bombing and fire bombing attacks on civilian targets. In war, the military will seldom hesitate to hit civilians if they are in the way, or to target them purposely for various strategic reasons. That's been true in every war that has ever been fought and will be fought. That is the savage nature of war itself. I'm certainly not proud of that particular strafing mission against civilians. But it is there, on the record and in my memory. Early in my tour, I heard that one of the guys had seen a 109 strafe an American bomber crew in their chutes. I thought it was bad practice in every way. Both sides at least gave lip service to a gentleman's agreement not to do it. And if I had to jump for it again, I could hope the agreement was being honored that day.

You didn't sit around brooding, because if you did, you'd never get through it. It could be tough playing God down on the deck, picking and choosing who or what to target in your gun-sight. For example, during D-day operations, Andy and a few others spotted a German Tiger tank entering a small French village. They strafed the damn thing, but their bullets just bounced off that thick armor plating. The tank pulled up next to a little hotel. Our guys were carrying bombs and one of them told Andy, "I think I can dive bomb and get a direct hit." Well, he missed and blew that hotel into the next province. He was sick about it; that incident haunted him for a long time. Don Bochkay came in on a freight train as it was passing through a French village. Just as he began to strafe, he saw the engineer jump down from the locomotive and run for his life. That train was packed with munitions and when it blew, the village was demolished.

Targets of opportunity meant legitimate military targets, which should have been a clear mandate, but often wasn't. Three of our guys came in over a clearly marked German hospital train. They were passing overhead when the sides of one car slapped down and machine guns opened up, knocking down one of them. During the Normandy invasion, the Germans used church belfries as observation posts, and stored ammo and biyouacked troops in school houses. They were ruthless about hiding behind civilians in occupied territory, while we became calloused in order to get the job done. And over Germany, where you would be killed or taken prisoner if forced to bail out, there were hundreds of scared young pilots free-lancing down on the deck every day-hitting fast and getting the hell out, and maybe not being too particular about what they shot at.

That's why I loved to dogfight. It was a clean contest of skill, stamina, and courage, one on one.