AN EVEN ONE-HUNDRED
All pilots . . . briefing . . . max effort: a damned poor joke on a night like this night. But we shuddered and stretched and grumbled a bit, fished out cigarettes, and slipped into our duds quickly and without much chatter.
Not much chatter, but we were all thinking hard and fast, and the same maggoty thoughts nibbled persistently through each of our heads: black night . . . rain . . . low ceiling . . . zero visibility . . . no flare-pots . . . a blind takeoff with 3,000 pounds of high-octane aboard that tiny little Mustang. To hell with it. My fingers had developed a tremor. And on the tin roof the drizzle rattled, dripping upon our heads through the twenty-seven bullet holes we’d shot there one night (whilst endeavoring to extinguish the lights without having to leave our bunks).
Mac remarked cheerily to no one in particular that, one time on just such a night as this, he had seen an elderly seagull come spinning out of the soup. More of such whimsy, until at the blast of a horn we scrambled into our jeep and took off up the road, the headlights poking into a dismal night, windshield-wipers clicking away the drizzle, cigarettes glowing nervously.
All was quiet until we slid to a halt in the mud behind Headquarters where Frascotti leaped wildly from the jeep, waved his hands to the dripping overcast, and beseeched the gods who lurked therein to clean up the forbidding skies. Slipping into his Jimmy Durante persona, he shouted out his conviction that he was surrounded by assassins. And that he should never have said—for within a few hours he was dead. We’d laughed at the time, but later wished we hadn’t.
We scampered out of the rain and into the briefing room, curious to learn just what the sadists down at Fighter Command might have been smoking when they’d dreamed up a flight for this dreary, rainswept midnight. Our eyes lost all traces of indifference when we cast them onto the great chart of the Continent: for there before us was written the climax to the relentless offensive battle we’d been waging for the past year. Tonight, to mark out our mission, the confusion of red ribbons and colored tacks extended from the coast of England south across the Channel to focus upon the beaches of France.
The significance was obvious: tonight we covered the Invasion of Normandy. Paratroopers and gliders were on their way at this very moment. At 0330 hours, Allied landing craft would hit the beaches behind the cover of a terrific naval and aerial bombardment. Our mission was to run a patrol along the west coast of Cherbourg Peninsula and prevent attack from that quarter by Jerry aircraft. Every flyable ship and pilot in the 8th Fighter Command would go out tonight, to remain in assigned zones until there was only fuel enough to return to England. We would take off on instruments four abreast in tight formation, and the flights would rendezvous over the field—so hoped the Colonel as he concluded his briefing.
The Intelligence Officer briefed us as to possible enemy opposition, and the Chaplain gave us the Word. When Stormy the meteorologist came up with his terrifying weather charts and worse theories, we laughed him off the stage and headed for our squadron dispersal area.
We milled around in the pilots’ hut, emptying pockets of telltale trinkets and puttering about with our flying gear, all hands busily trying to forget about the weather in which we’d soon be flying. With minutes remaining, I headed through the rain toward my good ship, the Joker, swinging my ‘chute and muttering a funny little flying tune: “. . . owls and nitwits fly by night . . .” and I thought, “Goddam, ain’t it the truth! But which am I?” I knew I wasn’t an owl.
The Joker was crouched in the blackness of its revetment looking 200 mph standing still, so clean she was. I crawled from the wheel to the slippery wet wing and slipped into the narrow cockpit and my good crew chief helped strap me in place. He lit up a smoke and tucked it into my mouth and I waited while the sweat trickled, and then from the control tower a red rocket squirted up into the overcast. And now it was all business.
A fumbling of switches and levers and knobs to bring forth a comforting snarl from my engine, and the prop disk reflected the orange glare of the exhaust stacks. The field had come magically alive with a horde of dim red and green wing lights that flowed bobbing and twisting toward the takeoff funnel. In the ensuing long minutes of extremely difficult taxiing in total darkness, the entire outfit of some fifty ships became royally fouled-up, and I—an eager type—found myself, along with two other similarly confused pilots, in the lead takeoff position. By the darting flames of their engine exhausts I could make out the dim identifying letters painted on the fuselage of each ship. So Pappy Gignac and McKibben and I were together, and we three were hogging the slot reserved for the Colonel’s flight. That, however, was tough titty, because it was too late now to monkey around trying to get organized. We ran up our engines and it was time to go, and I didn’t want to push that throttle at all. My instruments glowered greenly at me like the winking, blinking, luminous eyes of a whole pack of pussycats racked up in a blacked-out bookcase.
We held brakes and poured on the coal until our ships quivered, released brakes and shoved throttles full forward, and we accelerated fast on a tight-formation instrument takeoff for what I sincerely hoped to be the opposite corner of the field and thence its black sky. Rolling mighty fast, Pappy’s ship careened violently away to the left and he was out of the race. Mac and I held our course and when my ship felt light I sucked the wheels out from under her and hauled back on the stick and waited to find out whether or not an oak tree would try to stuff itself into the cockpit with me. Now airborne, I started breathing again, got the engine controls squared away, and slid in close on Mac’s wing.
We banked into an easy turn to port and I glanced back to the field, and all of a damned sudden a horrible, billowing explosion half-blinded me, and I knew automatically what it was: a Mustang, a maximum load of high-octane, and one of the boys, all gone to glory in a puff of flame. I didn’t know who’d bought it, but I did know that it was a pilot of my squadron. Mac and I circled the runway at 500 feet, just beneath the weeping overcast, and we watched the flaring mess die away to glowing redness.
With their pilots taking full advantage of the grisly beacon, Mustangs shot from the blackness of the takeoff position to gleam momentarily in the crash flames and disappear again as they became safely airborne. Radio silence had gone all to hell and my earphones were full of frantic chatter. We circled a couple of times in an effort to pick up the rest of our ships, but after barreling through a couple of flights which were at our altitude but traveling in the opposite direction, we gave up and struck out on the briefed course, with Mac flying instruments and me jockeyed in tight on his wingtip. Then up through the overcast and out into a lovely, lonely moonlit sky, and below us the clouds shone frosty and silver.
On up to twenty thousand, and as we neared the French coast the undercast began suddenly to take color. Almost like a sunrise it was, with a spreading scarlet glow diffusing through the clouds to then slowly diminish in intensity: the naval bombardment, preliminary to the landings, was under way. Moments later, our two-ship squadron attracted accurate, heavy flak—spectacular stuff bursting with a red flash and a lusty thud, with each burst followed by a chain of lesser explosions extending vertically downward: a signpost to announce our arrival over the city limits of Cherbourg.
After a lonely hour of sucking oxygen, we peeled down to thirteen thousand, whereupon I ripped off my mask and lit up a smoke and chased Mac around the sky. Now a fantastically beautiful sunrise boomed up through the jumbled cloud formations, and—half-hypnotized by the sight—I found it difficult to realize, in the midst of such splendor and absolute solitude, that I was flying six machine guns and five tons of hot airplane, with death and destruction the goal.
Nothing to shoot at up here, but I knew quite well that two or three miles below the beaches were a nightmare of bloody action, and I felt a bit guilty about sitting on top of a cloud acquiring another layer of calluses, when down below the walking army was getting knocked off about as fast as it was being dumped ashore. After a few hours of futile cloud-hopping, we rolled into a fast dive through a long, vertical tunnel in the soup and went shopping around on the deck, a scant few feet off the water.
The sea was rough and of a cold green color, and great waves crashed at the base of the jagged rock cliffs of the peninsula. We buzzed the Channel Islands and ran in and out of the harbor at St. Malo; but the only sign of life was a pair of coastal trawlers with their square, patched sails bellied tightly out by the wind. Nobody took a crack at us and we saw no Jerry aircraft so, a pack of smokes later, we set course for England and landed at the first airfield we could find, with a cupful of fuel between us and a crash-landing. Wedged for eight hours in the tiny cockpit, my legs were completely paralyzed and my back permanently kinked. A quick refueling and we clipped the treetops for two hundred miles back to our home base, where we learned that it had been friend Scotti who hadn’t made it off the ground on takeoff. He’d taken off just a trifle off-course and had driven his Mustang “Umbriago” squarely through a brick control tower at 120 mph. Surrounded by assassins . . .
More fuel, a cup of coffee, a pair of 500-pound bombs apiece, and we went out to seek targets of opportunity down behind the beachhead. A string of Jerry trucks on a highway outside of Paris came into our gun-sights and was destroyed. Home again, and out again twice more, and then I peeled off into the sack for a couple of hours’ sleep. And that was D-Day for the 486th Fighter Squadron.
At three a.m. on the 7th, the orderly again caught up with me for briefing. Now the weather was completely fouled up: zero ceiling and half-mile visibility made the whole lousy mess a flier’s nightmare. Only it wasn’t a nightmare: it was there. We were obliged to fly. At half-past four in the morning we got into the air, with Pappy Gignac leading eight ships. That old renegade, sharing our hatred of instrument flying, led us well: winding us up through many narrow, dark corridors in the fog and up through a dozen evil little cloud decks, and we headed for France on-top, on-course and on-time, and at our estimated time of arrival peeled off through a hole and went hunting. Unable to spot any live game, we vented our rage on a small-town railroad yard and on a highway bridge—in the center of which Pappy laid a 500-pounder with neatness and precision. We clobbered a couple of lone trucks and went home for breakfast.
Not being slated for the next flight, I slept in a chair in the pilots’ hut, and as I snoozed Pappy led his last squadron to France—or to anywhere, for that matter. Somewhere down around Paris, he took the boys in on a long truck convoy. They dive-bombed and then went in to deliver the coup de grace with 50-caliber guns, and Pappy strafed an ammo truck that exploded as he zoomed over it. He pulled up into a steep, climbing turn and told his lads that his ship was afire and that he was going to jump. But at the top of his chandelle, Pappy’s Mustang blew to smithereens and no ‘chute was observed. It was hard news to take, for Pappy was indestructible. He’d been shot down twice into the jungles of New Guinea while flying rickety old P-39s against the Japs. But there is a bottom to one’s bag of luck.
June 8th. D-plus-2. The weather still foul, but most of us had by now run out of sweat. A briefing at two a.m. to which no one paid much attention, as the mission was to be just another freelance hunt south of the beachhead. We’d revised our tactics to match the Jerries’ change of pace. Constant fighter attacks had forced him from the highways during daylight hours, so he now moved his convoys by night, masterfully camouflaging his equipment at the crack of dawn. So our plan was to get into Jerry territory at night and to nail his trucks and tanks just at sunrise, before they could be concealed. We’d outfox and clobber ‘em, but good.
Briefing at two in the morning and takeoff at three: so with an hour to goof around, somebody built a cheery, snapping fire and brewed up a pot of strong coffee, which lowered the goose-bumps a bit. Sipping on a bottle of good ale, I wandered about the pilots’ hut and chanced to observe on the mission scoreboard that I’d flown 99 missions to date, and that this night’s flight would make it an even 100.
A certain uneasiness is developed around that 100th trip. A jinxy sort of thing. But I told myself that such superstitions were a lot of crap. You bet! But then again . . .
So I shuffled past the flight surgeon and sniffed and dragged a leg, but he wouldn’t take notice at all.
“Hey Doc,” I squeaked, “I got a terrible cold, as any fool kin plainly see, and why not ground me until a later date?”
To which plea he remarked coolly that I was, no doubt, the healthiest peashooter in the whole damned squadron.
“Tonight I don’t want to fly any more,” said I, “and if you make me go you’ll be sorry.”
But all I got was a nasty laugh. My pal, the Doc. Finally I told him that if it was all the same to him, I’d settle right now for that after-mission likker ration. And my fellow pilots cheered me on with wild stories and vicious propaganda about various jinxed and fateful 100th missions they’d known. As a matter of record, one of our finest pilots, Bobby MacKean, had simultaneously acquired a Silver Star and a tombstone while strafing an airdrome in southern France—on his 100th mission.
So I drifted over to the booze locker to refuel my silver flask with a full charge of Channel Oil, and while I was at it, I took a quick nip. I stuffed a half-carton of cigarettes into my flying suit and announced to the motley crew that nothing mattered now: I was ready for whatever cards I might be dealt. Despite the gay line of chatter, I still thought it to be a helluva night for getting over the hump.
I wandered toward my ship, feeling the rain on my face and sniffing the soggy night wind and not giving much of a damn for anything. Good Sergeant German was slumped in the cockpit, snoring lustily. I pounded on the canopy until he came crawling out guiltily, and I swapped places with him. Came the time and I wound ‘er up, but that Merlin engine wouldn’t kick over: the prop ground around and around and I thought, while mentally rubbing my hands together: “Ahhhh . . . Kismet! Maybe the bastard will never start, I hope!” But my overly expert crew chief, blast his eyes, coaxed fire into the engine with a hot-shot from a handy battery cart, and the flames boiled back from the stacks. I taxied fast to catch up with the squadron and slid into position. And we poured on the coal and were airborne, four abreast in nice tight formation.
The tight sixteen-ship squadron arrowed up through low scud clouds into a dense and turbulent overcast. On top at ten thousand in the predawn light, the cloud scenery was desolate and bleak and as cold-looking as Little America. We slid out into a loose, line-abreast formation. Sixteen ships, and each little Mustang looked sleek and dangerous and mean, and we were doing a thousand miles an hour as we streaked along through jagged cloud valleys, clipping hummocks and tufts and pulling up and over turbulent cloud hills.
Somewhere west of Paris we let down through the stuff and throttled back, cruising at a thousand feet, and our morning hunt was on. A loose formation, with every pilot straining his eyes in the faint dawn light, searching for targets along the roads and in the forests: Mustangs weaving and rolling and occasionally skidding gently away from the showers of tracers that would lob up from hidden gun emplacements.
The weather in France was excellent, with a thin overcast at 4,000 feet, and when the brilliant edge of the sun peeped up, the countryside was rosy and objects on the ground cast long, clean shadows. And it was just a moment after sunrise when we hit the jackpot: a long column of thirty or forty trucks crawling around the right-angle turn of a gravel road, quite obviously headed for the safety of a large patch of forest a mile from their present position.
Spaced evenly, rolling slowly, this was a target of rare quality. One of the boys, whooping bloodthirstily into his microphone, peeled off to lay a pair of bombs directly in front of the lead truck, which obligingly burst into flames. The column was stopped dead.
Cold turkey, it was, and the radio livened up with savage cries. Taking interval, we raced into a big Lufbery circle just below the overcast, and one by one our ships rolled over into their dive-bomb runs. I watched the passes and saw the strikes, and they were effective. My turn now, and a deliberate approach panned out nicely. I chandelled, kicking the tail aside so I could observe my hits.
A dandy disaster below! Trucks afire, long parallel banners of black smoke drifting across the fields, and the road all shot to hell with bomb craters. Now some of the boys were down on the deck beating things up with machine guns, and the traffic pattern was out of this world, with Mustangs streaking in fast from every point of the compass, tracers crisscrossing, ships chandelling up all over the sky and at all angles. Fighter pilots huddled in a smoky old barroom couldn’t have dreamed up a tastier target than this!
Having no particular desire to plunge into that reckless rat-race, I went shopping around the perimeter of the target area. A couple of miles back down the road I spotted six or eight heavy trucks, untouched and half hidden by low hedges. With a waggle of wings, I gave my wingman the word and we pounced down onto our own private shooting gallery, coming down in trail for our first pass. My first squirt smothered the rear of the last truck with a dancing, flickering mess of incendiary strikes. Pulling out of my dive I held down the trigger, laddering my fire away the hell and gone up the road, getting a few strikes on assorted vehicles and spraying the ditches liberally. With an evasive, skidding wingover we went in broadside to the column, flying nearly abreast, each flaming our targets. My guns seemed to be perfectly harmonized, coming to a sharp focus some three hundred yards ahead of my ship; and any target caught in the focal point was automatically a dead duck.
I spotted one truck parked smack against the wall of a small farmhouse at a crook of the road and managed to get a short burst into the truck without seeing too many strikes on the poor Frenchman’s house—never thinking that if the truck burned, the old homestead would go up along with it.
Streams of tracers were pestering me now, but about the only chance the Jerries had of scoring was during the six or eight seconds of accurate, coordinated flying necessary when actually firing my guns: at all other moments, during the approach, pullout, and getaway, slipping and skidding evasive action was in order.
I felt mean and ornery, hungry and tired, and I hated the lousy guts of the whole damned Wehrmacht. A roaring lust for destruction was with me now, but I was about fresh out of ammunition—and I wanted a bit to travel on. But untouched below sat the great grand-daddy of all Jerry trucks, so I thought I’d better shoot it up, just a little.
Barreling in, I concentrated on one long and accurate squirt, and a devastating stream of 50s ripped into my target. I held down the trigger until the range was point blank and the Joker was clipping the weeds with her prop. At the last possible split second I jerked back the stick. Whereupon my luck ran out.
As I crossed over the truck, the son of a bitch blew up—it having been packing an overload of ammunition. A mighty thud and a mightier surge skyward, combined with what sounded to my ear like a whole belt of machine-gun slugs pounding into the belly of my ship. A split second later I found myself to be some five hundred feet up, inverted and climbing. Half-rolling, I kept going upstairs, using my initial velocity of some 375 mph to gain a lot of altitude in a hurry. Leveling out at 4,000 feet, on course for England, I took hasty inventory.
I had control of the ship and the engine instruments were normal. My wings were bent and beat up a bit: the skin was wrinkled and a lot of odds and ends from the disintegrating truck had holed through. There was a smoke trail behind me. I thought about how Pappy had gotten it the day before, in exactly the same circumstances, and I felt lucky. My wingman slid in alongside to radio that he’d stick with me on the way home.
Having been preoccupied in cleaning my fingernails during briefing, I didn’t know just where in the hell I might be, but figured that a course of due north would be as good as any. For a minute I cruised smoothly in that direction. The Jekyll-Hyde transformation induced by every good strafing attack was fading, and now all I wanted out of life was to be back at the field, to have a bit of breakfast, and to then log a little solo sacktime. I was glad that I’d not been forced to bail out in the target area, for we’d strafed unmercifully and I didn’t suppose that the Jerries remaining alive on the ground would have been inclined toward kindly treatment of fighter pilots. But now the green forests and meadows of Normandy were sliding along below, very nicely. And as I was patting myself on the back, my engine instruments began to shout bad news right in my face.
That vital little coolant-temperature needle began a slow crawl across its dial toward the red danger line. I throttled back to minimum cruise and opened the oil and coolant shutters. The needle dropped back to normal temperature, then started back up again: whereupon I eliminated from my mind all thoughts of England and steered more westerly, figuring to try for friendly territory on the beachhead. The engine got hotter and nothing I could do would bring her back to normal.
The roughness of the engine could be felt first in the stick, and then the whole ship was trembling violently. I was in bad trouble, and my wingman had to circle and “ess” in order to stay back with me. I tried like hell to keep her going—at least long enough to reach the Channel—now figuring to make it that far and then to sit in my fancy rubber dinghy while waiting for Air-Sea Rescue to fish me out. But the engine commenced to run very roughly, and quickly rougher, and I jazzed the controls in a frantic effort to find a smooth spot. The Joker was pounding violently now, with airspeed dropping away rapidly: 140 mph and 3,500 feet indicated altitude, and the ship was just staggering around the sky.
Then the whole damned engine froze up and the tired old prop, with ironic finality, stuck up in front of me like a V-for-Victory symbol. Streaming back from the cowl, white smoke turning to black with gusts of flame flashing back on either side of the cockpit. Fearing a cockpit explosion, I snapped the oxygen mask over my face, flipped my goggles down over my eyes, unbuckled the safety belt, cleared myself from the tangle of shoulder harness, and retrieved my cigarettes from their slot alongside the gun-sight—all done in a moment.
A glance at the ground, and France assumed an extremely personal aspect. I pushed the mike button and yelped out a fond farewell to the squadron in general. I hated to get out into the long tongues of smoke and those wicked little jabs of flame, but I had to make tracks in a hurry. Without debate, and automatically following a long-prepared plan of action, I pulled up to a stall, jettisoned the canopy, and jumped.
I was damned near clear of the wing when the Joker snapped off on the left wing into a quick spin, which treacherous action on the part of my aircraft scooped me neatly back into the cockpit. My right leg was wedged well up under the instrument panel while the rest of my carcass dangled outside, streamlined back alongside the fuselage, and I caught a flash of green trees coming up fast. With what seemed to require no effort, I hoisted myself back into the flame-filled cockpit and yanked my leg free. In a very few seconds I’d either be dead or alive and I knew it, but Time gave me a break and paused where it was—each fractional second seeming to allow minutes in which to think and act. I recall figuring angles and judging odds and at the same time feeling interest in one’s ability to think analytically under the pressure of such intricate circumstances. Arriving at a final plan, and with no indecision, I crouched on the bucket seat and launched a desperate leap straight upwards from the ship: on up and over the top of the cockpit and over the tail. And upon seeing the vertical fin slice past beneath me, extreme elation was experienced.
Falling head down, I could see my ship close below, silver and blue against the dark forest, spinning fast, with a trail of smoke behind her. My body had too great a velocity for a comfortable ‘chute opening, but I was low to the ground and I gave the old ripcord a mighty tug and felt the beginning of a powerful jolt.
Upon regaining vision, curious and simultaneous impressions were noted: I saw the unfortunate Joker strike the ground in a little clearing, to explode with a terrific orange flash; then there came the fascinating and amusing sight of a profusion of little gadgets all about me in the air—bits of rope and colored cloth, tin cans and tiny packages, as though a bomb had burst in a junk-peddler’s cart below me. My dinghy had burst open, ripped from my ‘chute harness by the shock of the opening, spilling into thin air all of the many interesting little emergency equipment items with which it had been packed. And I saw my red-painted ripcord falling away beneath me.
With the pounding of machine guns and the powerful hum of the Merlin engine still echoing in my ears, this complete silence was bewildering. So utterly peaceful and still it was that I actually wondered whether or not I was still alive. I peeked up overhead and thar she was! A tightly rounded-out hemisphere of snow-white nylon: no rips, rents, or runs visible to the naked eye. And then just plain, old-fashioned joy of living filled me to the bursting point. I didn’t give two hoots in hell for anything and I dug out my silver flask and took a long swig of bourbon by way of celebration.
I looked down between my dangling feet and it seemed awfully high to be minus an airplane: some five hundred feet of nothing between toe and treetops. I was drifting fast—about 25 mph, I judged—but damned if I was losing any altitude . . . just drifting quietly along like a big-assed bird. Then, in the direction of my drift, I saw a camouflaged German airdrome upon which I calculated I’d land, whether or not I wanted to. It seemed quite logical to assume that every trooper in the entire Wehrmacht was observing my downfall with sanguinary glee: the least I expected was a reception committee equipped with muskets, fixed bayonets, and a set of leg-irons. But I still appeared to be holding my altitude, and the comforting thought came to mind that perhaps I’d float right on over the airfield, a hanging target for one and all. I fished out a cigarette and lit up, feeling oddly pleased that my Zippo should function so nicely in this strange perch.
Watching the trees flowing under me, I knew suddenly that I was losing altitude, allright, and losing it fast. Indeed, I was dropping like something going through a tin horn. I dropped my cigarette and grabbed a double handful of shroud lines and tried to crank myself around so as to land facing the direction of drift, but I only succeeded in acquiring a dandy pendulum effect. I skimmed over a row of tall trees, just cleared the ridgepole of a farmhouse, careened down past the eaves of a large stone barn, and landed hard in the center of a narrow gravel road behind a big hangar at the edge of the airdrome.
A bounce and a roll and I got up running, to dive headlong into my ‘chute, collapsing it. I scrambled out of the harness, bundled my ‘chute with frantic haste, and looked around, wild-eyed.