I wasn't much on spit and polish or running around with a clipboard. I had thirty pilots, twenty-five airplanes, and five hundred ground and support personnel under my command. A good squadron can run itself only up to a certain point; the commander must stay on top of things, but I wasn't about to chain myself to a desk doing it. And, man, I learned fast that if one of my people got into trouble, so did I. Both of us landed in front of the wing commander, Col. Fred Ascani, a West Pointer who hadn't served as General Boyd's deputy without a lot of strict discipline rubbing off. Forget that Colonel Ascani helped to select me to fly the X-1, and that we had spent social weekends together at Jackie Cochran's place. This was a new ballgame.
My first weekend as squadron commander he called me at home at two in the morning. "Chuck what in hell is going on with your people?" God, I wondered if there was a riot. But he called me because the German police in town had called him. Two airmen from my squadron were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. I crawled out of bed and drove into town to get those guys out of the can. The next time I got such a wake-up call, I went straight to the barracks and woke up my first sergeant. I told him to wake up every man in the barracks. I said, "If I have to get up, so do you. This is our squadron and our guys.' We all marched downtown to the jail and picked up the airmen. After that, I never got any more late night calls about my airmen.
Colonel Ascani ran a tight ship. Fighter pilots are naturally competitive, and the three squadrons in his wing even competed in Friday afternoon beer guzzles at the club, where it was squadron against squadron. Really rough. He came in one Friday, saw the guys staggering around the bar with their shirts unbuttoned and ties undone, and took me and the other squadron commanders aside and reamed us out. "Goddamn it, I don't care how drunk they get but we're gonna look military doing it. I want those ties and shirts buttoned even when they hit the deck." He sounded just like General Boyd.
I was as competitive as a college football coach in training my bunch to be the best squadron in the wing. I had high performance standards and because the men respected me, they stretched to reach them. Hell, it was like a little conspiracy. I'd teach them tricks that none of the other squadrons knew, things I had learned as a desert rat at Muroc. For example, a Sabre fighter needed a big electrical cart to start its engine. If the Russians could have found a way to blow up those carts, they would've ruled the skies. Sabre pilots who were forced to land somewhere discovered they couldn't take off again because there was no electrical cart available. That happened once at Muroc and somebody, maybe Ridley, came up with the idea of blow-starting a Sabre with another jet. I showed my guys how to do it using the T-33, the two-seat trainer version of the Shooting Star, that started on its own battery. I moved the T-33 about fifteen feet in front of the Sabre and ran up its engine to about eighty percent of power. The exhaust blew directly into the front of the Sabre's engine and began to spin the turbine blades to about six percent revolutions a minute, enough to crank its engine. It was like getting a car to start by coasting it in neutral down a hill. Man, those guys were speechless. Soon everyone in the Twelfth Air Force was practicing blow-starts.
Another trick I learned back at Tonopah during my training days in prop airplanes, when I saw a grizzled old crew chief hammering nails around the gun mounts in a P-39. "Help hold them guns steady," he explained, "and give you better shooting scores." I figured if it worked in a P-39 it should also work in a Sabre. And it did, although a few of my crew chiefs were scared to drive nails into a government property airplane. One of them complained, "But, Major, that's against regulations." I told him, "Hell it is. There's no regulation about it because no one else does it." When our pilots reported better gun scores over the other squadrons, we kept our little secret to ourselves.
There were dozens of little tricks that weren't in night manuals that could mean the difference between life and death in a combat situation, and to me it was a responsibility of what pilots call "an old head," a veteran flier, to pass on tricks of the trade. There was always something new to learn up there. When Hahn received the first radar system to land aircraft in bad weather, we practiced landings in zero visibility; during those first attempts a few of our guys came down on the beam through the fog and almost landed right in the middle of the Mosel River. But we practiced with the ground operators day after day until most of them were landing safely while crews on the ground couldn't see a hand in front of their faces. All of us enjoyed being in a good squadron that was becoming even better.
Toward the end of my first year in Germany, I was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and Colonel Ascani made me the leader of our wing gunnery team. We competed against all the other fighter wings in Europe. Air-to-air shooting was my big scoring event. We fired at a target towed by a high-speed jet, our shells painted individual colors so that the holes could later be identified. Air-to-ground, we came in on the deck to shoot at large rectangular targets. The competition also included skip-and-dive bombing. My test piloting had really improved my precision as a flier so that I lined up early on the targets and let my good eyes take it from there. I was usually high man overall in the competitions, and our wing won the finals. Gunnery contests were a big deal; we were gone for months practicing and competing.
But I wasn't the only Yeager having fun. For the first time since we were married, Glennis was enjoying an Air Force assignment as much as I was. We had a German housekeeper to help take care of the kids, and unlike the majority of Air Force couples who spent the weekends at the club and base movie theater, we were eager to make the most of living in a foreign country. Every weekend that we could get away, we were gone. We became friends with the burgomaster of a nearby village called TrabenTrabach. Dr. Melscheimer was also a wealthy wine merchant, who owned the rights to several large hunting areas. Nobody in Germany just arbitrarily went out hunting. You had to be invited by somebody who had purchased hunting rights on a given piece of property called a revier. We became regulars at Dr. Melscheimer's hunting lodge, where the other weekend guests were businessmen and industrialists from Hamburg and Berlin. German hunting weekends are very aristocratic and social, and while Glennis's kitchen-deutsch was a helluva lot better than mine, I got by speaking the hunting language. Dr. Melscheimer was elderly, but his son Carl Armin was my age, and also an avid hunter. So was Carl's wife Siegrid, who was almost as good with a gun as Glennis.
While we were still at Ramstein, our quarters were located next to the base skeet range. One afternoon a few officers were out shooting and Glennis grabbed my shotgun and asked if she could shoot a few rounds. Those guys looked at her as if she had dropped out of the sky. Wives never shot skeet. Glen whacked out twenty-five straight hits. Between the two of us, we were no slouches on a hunt. We'd go out early in the morning, stalk game through deep forests of pine and beech, hunting stags, wild boar, or small deer. By late afternoon, we were back at the lodge for four o'clock tea, then after dinner, we often hunted by moonlight.