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.
I was a flight leader, an ace with 5 1/2 kills, and being young and competitive, I'd have given a lot to have eyes like Bud Anderson and Chuck Yeager. Hell, we heard them over the radio. "A gaggle of bogies coming in from down south," Andy might say. And you'd hear Yeager's flat twang: "Rhat I been watchin' 'em." The others would be asking: 'What! Where?" Five minutes later we'd see them. I'd ask that son of a bitch, "Chuck, how do you do it?" He'd grin and say: "Well goddamn it, Obie, you should've seen them, too. They were practically dropping their wing tanks right on your canopy."
The guys trusted Chuck because he always knew what he was doing. He knew the difference between being aggressive and reckless. I remember flying back from a mission one day, and this green kid got on the radio, excited because he spotted a German fighter base below. Well, Chuck got on the horn with that kid and said, "You want to go down and hit it, I'll give you top cover." The rest of us laughed. The only way to survive strafing a fighter base was to take the flak gunners by surprise. Yeager might be a hellraiser on the ground, but he was cunning in combat, with good instincts about what was a risk worth taking, and what was a no-win, impossible situation. If he said, "Let's give it a try," we went with him.
He knew he was damned good, but was low-key about it. If the weather was terrible and new kids were clutched about landing, Chuck would get on the horn and say, "Hey, no sweat. I know the way if you want to follow me in." And sometimes, when you were going balls-out-at fullthrottle-in a dogfight and concentrating on shooting down an enemy, you'd suddenly hear, "Blue flight leader, visitor on your tail, break right." Hell, he wasn't Superman, but he kept his concentration and alertness in that cockpit. Nothing got by him. And in a dogfight, if he got on a German's tail, that son of a bitch might as well recite the Lord's Prayer.
The better pilots were all highly motivated to shoot down German planes; hell, that was the name of the game. We had more balls than brains and figured being outnumbered ten to one were acceptable odds. If you were good and lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, you'd score victories. For quite a while Chuck was low man on the victory scoreboard, but then his luck changed; the Germans began to come up to challenge us and ran into a goddamn West Virginia buzzsaw. He'd never let up: as long as he had a few belts of ammo left in those guns, he was always looking for more.
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.