"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.