Meanwhile, Andy and I worked it out that we would complete our missions on the same day, go home together, and try to be reassigned to the same place. I admired him totally and just felt good in his company. We shared the same background and interests. He was a rural boy from northern California who loved to hunt, fish, and fly as much as I did. Whenever we had a quiet time together, we were always dreaming up hunting trips or going through gun catalogs his folks sent him.
Our personalities meshed, too. We both loved fun and blowing off steam, although he was a helluva lot more tolerant than I was. I was impulsive and headstrong-something is either right or wrong; I didn't spend any time in between. We saw eye to eye on rights and wrongs, but Andy saw the other side; I wasn't interested. That wasn't my nature, but friends- real friends-don't have to always agree or try to cover over their differences. We found our harmony from mutual respect and just plain liking one another.
God, we had fun during those last months in England. As Andy put it, "Captain Yeager may be very busy, but somehow he will manage to fit into his daily program both dogfighting and hellraising." Andy, Bochkay, and I complained a couple of times to the base ambulance crew, who parked their damned meat wagon next to our Nissen and woke us up gunning that engine to warm it. Finally we rigged a string of whistle bombs and attached it to the motor. You could've heard that racket in Glasgow; that crew's ears didn't stop ringing for weeks. We'd go out and poach pheasants and rabbits and have ourselves a feast. A Texan named G.I. Carlisle was a genius at making Texas white gravy to pour over our fried hares. One time I got myself invited to a legitimate hunt on the estate of a local lord. We shot grouse and he used Italian prisoners of war as beaters. I was standing next to our host when he fired twice and missed. I turned around and shot that bird and it dropped behind him. Somebody whispered to me: "Don't ever wipe the governor's eye like that."
A few weeks before Christmas, I received an unexpected vacation from the British. Group sent me off to Switzerland; the assignment was so hush-hush I wasn't even told why I was going. I flew over to Lyon, where we now had advanced fighter bases, and was driven over the Alps to Lake Annecy, just south of Geneva, and put up at the Beaurivage Hotel. At Leiston, we slept in sleeping bags on a G.I. mattress, and this bed was so comfortable I couldn't get used to it. I quickly learned what my trip was about when Peter De Paoio, a famous racing car driver, now the American air attaché in Switzerland, arrived at my room and took me to dinner. As a former evadee who had escaped from France by climbing the Pyrenees, I was asked to help in an escape plan for eight hundred American fliers who were interned in neutral Switzerland. There were also sixteen hundred Americans interned in Spain.
"We want to do some discreet smuggling," Pete said. "Maybe set up a mountain-climbing expedition one of these moonless nights. We can't just ask the neutral Swiss to let them go home. The Germans would see this as a hostile act." He asked my advice about the ideal size of a group trying to get across, the best time to try it, and so on. Frankly, it sounded to me like a better war movie than a practical plan. Those Alps were mighty big, even compared to the Pyrenees. I told Pete I'd help plan it, but not help climb It.
Between Christmas and New Year's, we planned a small smuggling operation, bringing in canvas covers to protect a half-dozen American airplanes that had force-landed at Swiss air bases, shot-up but still serviceable, if we could get them out. As far as I know, the escape plan was never attempted.
It was amusing when I left, because I gave a lift to an O.S.S. guy. He sat on my lap when I took off from France in my Mustang. I carried him, his bag, and a case of champagne, in that tiny cockpit. We flew back low with the canopy opened.
Chuck and I flew eight missions in January, beginning with New Year's Day, and a couple of them worried us-strafing operations in support of the U.S. counterattack during the Battle of the Bulge. But finally, on the morning of January 15, 1945, the great day dawned-our last mission. We both flew as spares on an escort mission over Leipheim. We flew with the squadron over the Channel and when no other Mustang was forced to abort with engine problems, we left the squadron and went off by ourselves.
Where we were headed, I really didn't know. Chuck had planned the day for both of us. I followed him to Switzerland. The weather over Europe had been dreadful for weeks, but on this day at least, it was a dazzling sunlit winter morning, and the Alps were majestic and glorious, sparkling in snow. We buzzed the peak of Mont Blanc and dropped our wing tanks near a stone shelter. Now, over the years, I've heard Chuck tell this story dozens of times. In his version, we strafed those tanks and set them on fire. The truth is, we used up all of our ammo trying to set them on fire, but couldn't. But, as Chuck says, it's a slightly better story if the darned things burned.
Anyway, with Chuck' you never knew what might come next. I was feeling nostalgic, my last flight in Old Crow, my loyal Mustang that had pulled me through just about everything imaginable without a scratch on me or her. So, I just followed my leader into Switzerland. He wanted to show me Lake Annecv and the hotel he had staved at, and show me he did. We came in at 500 mph, practically blew the shingles off the rooftop of that place, and swept over the lake, our props a few feet off the water. "Look, Andy," he said, "isn't it beautiful?" It was. But we were in the middle of a war, Switzerland was a neutral country, and we were buzzing its lakes and cities. I had to figure we could be at least court-martialed, maybe drawn and quartered. But, hell, Chuck would not be denied. He showed me Geneva, a small restaurant where he had dined at Christmas, and gave me a blow by blow description of all he had done and seen as we roared over the rooftops.
The next stop was the south of France. We came in over the woods where he had bailed out, swooped over the farmhouse where he was first hidden, then the one in Nerac, where he had lived in a shed. Then, we traced his route over the Pyrenees and actually found the wooden shack where Germans fired their rifles at him and the other fellow. Then we turned around and headed for Paris. Neither of us had ever been there, but we knew all the landmarks, and we buzzed in over the Arc de Triomphe.
It was a wonderful day. And time and again I was struck with the thought that if the entire Luftwaffe, or whatever was left of it, had decided to take to the air and finally get even with the two of us Chuck and I would have busted the ass of every last one of them. When I said this to him over the radio, he laughed and said he had been thinking the same thing.
Now, this story has a special ending. We were the last two Mustangs to come back in at Leiston. It was already dark, exactly at 6:00 P.M. We taxied up to our hard-stands and turned off our engines for the last time. Our wings were seared from all the heavy gunning we had done in the Alps and the ground crews came running up excitedly. "How many did you guys get?" my crew chief asked. He saw the black around my guns, and my own puzzled look. "The group ran into more krauts than they had ever seen," he said, "and shot down fifty-seven of them." The two squadron hotshots, the last to come in, their wings all smoke-stained, everyone figured we had shot down about fifty of our own. The real dogfight occurred just around the time that Chuck and I were trying to ignite those damned wing tanks with our tracers. Man, we were sick.