I had to keep my plane wrapped up in a tight turn in order to stay out of the low-lying clouds. I wasn’t about to fly through them; I didn’t know what mountain might be inside. There was a patch of blue that I was chasing, and at about six thousand feet I broke clear of the clouds. So I eased off on the turn and throttled back to about 85 percent to allow my wingman to find me and join up.
I looked over my left shoulder to see if I could assess the damage we had done on the truck column, but the target area was blocked by the clouds. However, I was pleased to see one, then two, then three, Panthers coming up through the hole in the overcast, their dark blue silhouettes very clearly defined against the whiteness of the cumulus tops. I was still in a gentle climb at about 85 percent power when Pete Lebuski joined up. As he did, he flew above and slightly to the forward of me, as I was in a left-hand turn, so that I could check his ordnance stations. The purpose of this post-attack procedure was, first, to determine if all the ordnance had indeed been released, and, second, if a weapon had hung up, to see whether it still had its arming wire in place. A bomb hung up on a rack without an arming wire was a worrisome hazard. The arming propeller on the fuse had probably completely unwound and the bomb was not safe. That is, it would detonate with virtually any shock that the fuse would sense to be striking the target, including the plane’s deceleration due to an arrested carrier landing. I was able to tell Pete that his racks were clear. Then he dropped back and down to perform that same function for my aircraft. I was shocked when Pete gave me a thumbs-down signal and held up two fingers. That meant that I still had two bombs aboard. The other planes were now joining us and I was swinging around to a southerly course to head for friendly territory. But first, before departing the objective area, I had to determine what our overall ordnance situation was.
After we had reached an altitude of eight thousand feet and I had settled down on a course of south, I stuck my head down in the cockpit to check my armament switches and saw that they were all properly set up, so the failure of the bombs to release was not a pilot problem. Unfortunately, what I also saw as my eyes swept the instrument panel was a fire warning light. In the F9F-2 there was a warning light that glowed bright red when it sensed a fire in the engine compartment of the aircraft.
At this point I felt the ordnance problem had to be resolved before I could make a further decision on the next evolution, and did not want to go through the uncertainty of trying to do this by hand signals. So I called up Lebuski on the squadron tactical circuit and asked for a report. He said that two 260-pound frag bombs were hung up, one on each side, on the wing bomb racks. He added that the arming wires appeared to be in place. The other two section leaders, hearing this report on the radio, chimed in to report that there were no hung bombs in their sections. Now I had to make a tough decision. This was too important a target to abandon without dropping our full bomb load, so I was going to have to make another run. At the same time, I had to decide whether I had a serious fire in the after section of the aircraft. Third, I really didn’t want to take all five of the other pilots through that valley again with the low clouds and the hornet’s nest of flak that we had stirred up. I told Lebuski that I had a fire warning light and asked him to drop back and check for signs of battle damage in the after section of the aircraft and to look for any smoke or flames in the tail section. Lebuski slid back and gave my plane the complete once-over. He called up saying there were no visible signs of flak damage or fire.
There was no time for debate with myself or the other pilots. I called the flight and told them that I had a fire warning light but Lebuski had failed to find any indications of damage and that I had two hung frags and was going to go back and get rid of them on the truck column. I told Lt. Paul Hayek, the next senior pilot on the flight, to rendezvous the other four aircraft, get out of the flak zone, but remain in the vicinity to pick up Lebuski and me as we climbed out after making this final pass. I then instructed Lebuski to drop back half a mile as we approached the target and told him I would make a thirty-degree bombing run. I wanted him to come in flat on the deck, where he probably would not be detected, and fire his 20mms in a strafing run to enfilade the entire column. Lebuski acknowledged with two clicks of his mike switch.
I swung around to the north again and was able to quickly establish my position with relationship to the truck column by the proximity of the target area to a prominent mountain sticking up through the clouds. Finding a hole in the broken ceiling, I wrapped up my plane in a four-G corkscrew letdown at 350 knots, pulling the turn tight to stay within the cloud opening. I almost immediately picked up the road again, and I knew that the weather in the vicinity of the trucks was at least three thousand feet because the truck column had been immobilized and the weather wasn’t moving much. I was going so fast when I hit the undercast that I overshot the road, and there was no way at my speed I was going to be able to get lined up on the target, which I could now spot — by the smoke, bursting shells, and gasoline fires — only a mile away. So I did what I did not want to do: throttled back and popped open my speed brakes in order to get the plane slowed down and under control in this narrow valley with the mountains on both sides and the clouds above me. I figured that with the 260-pound fragmentation bomb I had to have at least twenty-five hundred feet of altitude at release point in order to avoid being damaged by my own bomb blast. That didn’t give me a hell of a lot of room for setting up my bombing run. So this final pass was a real makeshift affair.
I sucked up my speed brakes, added full power, pushed the nose over to level off at about three thousand feet, and headed up the highway toward the leading trucks of the column, which was now burning fiercely with most of the vehicles smoking and exploding. As I approached the trucks, I dipped my nose and, using a lot of mil lead, put my pipper on the center of the column. At this point the flak and tracers were very thick, although it was hard to differentiate them from what could have been exploding ammunition. I released both bombs using the manual handle, which required ducking my head into the cockpit, reaching for the T-handle, and yanking with all my might. I popped my head back up, broke into a very hard left climbing turn, and was able by looking over my left shoulder — a particularly hard exercise with four Gs on the plane — to see the explosions of my bombs. I couldn’t tell whether I had made a direct hit or not, but I knew that a 260-pound frag in the vicinity of that truck column loaded with gasoline and ammunition was not going to go unnoticed.
As I was about to pull my eyes away, there was Pete Lebuski flying over the column in his strafing run, and I could see his tracers going into the trucks all through the column. He pulled up hard in a climbing left turn, and at this point I dove for the deck and followed the road south at five hundred feet and four hundred knots. As I passed the fourhundred-knot mark on the airspeed gauge, I pulled back on the stick and climbed straight up until I was on top of the cloud layer at seven thousand feet. I looked around for the rest of my flight, who were to be waiting for me, and there was no one in sight. That upset me. Then I started a left-hand turn to clear my six o’clock and there, strung out behind me, were the other five airplanes of my flight. Disregarding my instructions, they had all come down to follow me and shoot up the remnants of the column with their remaining 20mm ammunition. They wanted every pilot in the attack to be covered by a wingman’s fire.