From the Vaults: Air Combat

    Back in April of 2025, we presented some highlights of General Chuck Yeager’s exploits from his West Virginia childhood up through his historic flight that broke the sound barrier for the first time (FTV:  Chuck Yeager 4-23-25).  This condensed version of his story touched on his time as a fighter pilot and at the time, I promised to come back and mine his biography for more information about that part of his life.  In his book, (Yeager – Bantam Books, 1985), many of the men he served with (from enlisted to top brass) repeatedly said he was the best pilot they had ever seen PERIOD!  It did grind on some of the other pilots that he was singled out to perform some of the most prestigious flight test programs and they were not.  Yeager rose up through the ranks without the educational background many of them had and throughout his Army Air Corp and Air Force career, he always seemed to have a target on his back.  Let us go back to his time in World War II when he really was a target and explore what made him such a great fighter pilot.

     Yeager’s fighter pilot career in Europe started in promising fashion when he scored his first kill over Berlin on Saturday, March 4, 1944.  On that mission, he described the weather as ‘stinking’ but he happened to spot a Messerschmitt Me-109 flying below him.  He dove on it and ‘blew him to pieces’.  If he toasted his first kill with ‘mission whiskey’ to celebrate, it may have crept into his mind that this was just the first taste of victories to come.  Ironically, his next mission almost proved to be his last air combat mission of the war.

     On March 5, 1944, Yeager took off with a squadron of eighteen P-51 Mustangs.  Their mission that day was to escort a formation of B-24s to their target and then fly cover for them on their bombing run.  Yeager was one of two ‘extras’ with the formation.  When one of the P-51s experienced engine troubles over the English Channel and turned back, Yeager took his place in the ‘tail-end charlie’ slot.  Chuck described what happened next:  “Germans attack from above and behind, and it’s the last tail that gets hit first.  I saw the three Focke-Wulf fighters diving at me, and radioed a warning to [flight leader] Captain O’Brien. ‘Cement-Green leader, three bogies at five o’clock.  Break right.’  We turned sharply to meet them head-on.  As I turned, the first Focke-Wulf hammered me.”

     It was only Yeager’s eighth mission and he was about to be ‘missing in action’.  He described the aftermath of his encounter with the F-W 190:  “The world exploded.  I ducked to protect my face with my hands, and when I looked a second later, my engine was on fire and there was a gaping hole in my wingtip.  My airplane began to spin.  It happened so fast there was no time to panic.  I knew I was going down.  I was barely able to unfasten my safety belt and crawl over the seat before my burning P-51 began to snap and roll, heading for the ground.  I just fell out of the cockpit when the plane turned upside down – my canopy was shot away.”

     As he slowly descended to the French countryside below, he could hear the dog fight raging above and he could see the ground ‘was crawling with Germans’.  Working his shroud lines, he was able to land in a stand of pine trees.   Yeager grabbed one as he passed by and it lowered him within six inches of the ground.  Yeager’s leg and head were bleeding as he gathered his parachute and moved deeper into the woods.  He treated the shrapnel puncture wounds in his feet and hands knowing the Germans saw him come down and were searching for him.  The silk map sewn in the lining of his flight jacket showed he was about 50 miles east of Bordeaux near the town of Angouleme – the location of a German airdrome that was bombed just before he was shot down.  His best hope was to find members of the French underground to hide him and help him escape over the Pyrenees into Spain.  Yeager’s plan to evade capture took many weeks to play out, but this is a longer story than we need to tell here while discussing his air combat experiences.

     Yeager described flying as a wingman for Col. Henry Spicer whom he described as, “A daring pilot with a bristling mustache, who loved to dogfight and could care less about the personal risks.”  It was Col. Spicer’s habit to drop below 12,000 feet on the way home from missions.  At that altitude, he would unhook his oxygen mask and light his beloved briar pipe.  After one mission, they were over Paris when the pipe ritual began as the German flak guns began to pound the sky around them.  Yeager suggested they climb to avoid being shot down, to which  Spicer replied from his cloud of smoke, “Relax, laddie, those (expletive deleted) couldn’t hit a billboard.”  On a later mission, Col. Spicer was brought down by white flak while lighting his pipe near the French coast.  He was forced to bail out over the Channel and was picked up by the Germans.   

     When Yeager returned from Spain in May, 1944, he was classified as an ‘evader’ – one who escaped capture by the Germans.  This stamped his ticket home and while the idea of going home to marry his girlfriend Glennis appealed, he felt like a bug-out artist.  He sat in his room looking at the empty mattress for his roommate, Mack McKee who had been shot down a couple of weeks after Chuck.  He made a decision.  Yeager bucked the ‘evader’ policy all the way up to the top, eventually meeting face to face with the Allied Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower.  Chuck and a bomber pilot named Fred Glover were in London on June 1st to meet with a two star general the morning the first V-1 buzz bomb landed a few blocks from their hotel.  A two star general told them, “I will see what I can do,” and the next morning, they were ushered in to see Ike.  General Eisenhower told them, “I just wanted to see the two guys that think they are getting a raw deal by being sent home.”  He went on to explain that the War Department would have to rule on their request but in the meantime, he told Yeager and Glover they could keep flying in England to train new recruits.

     In typical Yeager style, he was training new pilots in the art of dogfighting when he managed to get a royal chewing out.  While training over the base, he was ordered to take their four plane formation over the North Sea to provide air cover for a B-17 crew who ditched and were in a dinghy waiting to be rescued.  They got over the site and spotted a Junkers JU-88 approaching, probably on the way to strafe the downed crew.  The JU-88 turned to run and Yeager instinctively ‘cobbed his engine’ to chase him down.  Dodging flak, Yeager shot the German down over the coastline of occupied Heligoland.  His squadron commander  yelled, “Yeager, can’t you do anything right?”  The gun camera film was given to another pilot who was able to claim it as his fifth kill (making him an ace) and the airtime was logged for the new pilots.  Yeager was grounded.  Two days later, Eisenhower’s office informed him his request was granted and he could return to his squadron.

     Up at 5:30 a.m., the flight day began with the group leader running down the schedule followed by intelligence and a weather briefing.  Suiting up meant layers of wool socks and undergarments beneath a flight suit that was topped off with a Mae West life jacket over a leather flight jacket.  As glamorous as Hollywood tries to make air combat, it is anything but.  After breakfast and a trip to the latrine (which was important when flying in the high altitudes where the temperature is well below zero – the pilot’s elimination tube would usually freeze solid.  They would take off at 8 a.m. and head to the rendezvous point.  Heading toward 28,000 feet, they would strap on their oxygen masks and in the non-pressurized cabin, pilots fatigued easily.  At 60 below zero, the small cabin heater kept the pilot’s right foot warm while the left foot was numb.  A typical bomber escort deep into Germany could last more than six hours.

     Yeager was flying as wingman for Capt. Charles Peters P-51D (named Daddy Rabbit) on bomber escort over Germany on what was to be Peters’ last mission.  One of the bombers took a flak hit and blew up in a fireball, going down with the crew still aboard.  The squadron commander ordered the fighters to drop their wing tanks before they encountered German fighters.  Rabbit Daddy dropped his tanks and immediately fell out of formation when his engine quit.  Yeager followed him down and as they neared the ground, he and Peters talked through the problem.  Chuck told him to hold off on bailing out:  “I’m gonna ride in that thing tomorrow.  Let’s figure this out.”  The P-51D was an improved version of Yeager’s P-51 and Yeager had already planned on painting over Rabbit Daddy with Glamorous Glennis III the next day when Peters went home.  “Hey, what about your fuel mixture?  Go to emergency rich and see what happens,” Chuck radioed Peters.  The engine came alive and he headed up and homeward-bound:  “I must’ve accidentally knocked back my mixture control when I pulled the wing tank release cable,” he called back in a shaky voice.  Chuck, equally shaken by how close Rabbit Daddy had come to plowing into the Earth on Peters’ last mission, told him, “Daddy, you park that thing and hand over the keys.”

     By the summer of 1944, the Germans fighter squadrons were few and far between which, as far as Yeager and the other fighter jocks were concerned, was frustrating.  They much preferred mixing it up with the German fighters than alternative missions.  As Chuck’s new roommate (and the best fighter pilot Yeager had ever seen) simply pointed out, “Chuck, if we don’t see ‘em, they just ain’t there.”  This said a lot as Bud Anderson, like Yeager, had exceptional eyesight, an asset greatly appreciated by other squadron fliers in the days before on board radar became a pilot’s best friend.  Yeager was frustrated by the lack of air combat because he still only had one certified kill, far from the five needed to gain the status of being an ‘Ace’.

     The ‘alternate missions’ alluded to above sent them ‘down on the deck’ to find ‘targets of opportunity’ like trains, barges, and motor convoys.  This was dangerous stuff:  “We lost Ed Hiro in early September.  He was strafing German positions in support of the airborne invasion of Arnheim, Holland when he was shot down on his last mission.  We lost Eddie Simpson when he collided with another Mustang on the deck over France.”  After one particularly ‘hairy strafing run’, “We climbed on the wing of Col. Don Graham’s (the wing commander) Mustang . . . [Graham] stopped and stared at his propeller blades.  One of them had a bullet hole the size of a silver dollar.  We also lost Stuffy Gambel that day and with each loss, there were now only a handful of us original guys who joined the 363rd the day it originated.  We drew so close, it was as if we were flying in our own separate squadron.”

     On September 18, 1944, Yeager led two squadrons in support of airborne landings in Holland.  Their orders were to stay at 5,000 feet but it was a helpless feeling watching the slow flying C-47s towing troop filled gliders through the heavy German flak and small arms fire.  Many of these Waco CG-4A gliders were assembled at the Ford Motor Company plant in Kingsford, Michigan.  Yeager remembered. “Ten of them were blown out of the sky in minutes, and the ground was littered with smashed gliders.  It was a bloodbath and part of me ached to get down on the deck and strafe the hell our of those German guns;  but our orders were to stay at 5,000 feet, well above the murderous flak, and escort the surviving C-47s out of there.”    

     There were more than twenty aces in the 357th Fighter Group, and Yeager still wasn’t one of them.  He was shocked when group headquarters picked him to lead the entire group on a mission.  Only a 21 year-old second lieutenant at the time, the group noticed his ability as a pilot and his keen eyesight:  “Being out there in front, your job is to see the enemy ahead of anybody and there was nobody in the entire group who claimed they could outsee me.”  On October 12, Chuck said a quick prayer (“Lord, just don’t let me screw up”) before leading the group on a bombing escort mission over Bremen.  Not only would he become an ace that day, he made five victories to become the first ‘ace in a day’.

     Yeager says he, “Takes credit for being plenty lucky,” that day, but flying a hundred miles ahead of the bomber group, his ‘combat vision’ gave his fighter group the edge:  “I spotted specks about fifty miles ahead.  We were at 28,000 feet and coming at the German fighters from out of the sun and closing fast.  I was able to count twenty-two Me-109s just sitting up there waiting for our bombers.”  The German squad leader either did not see them coming or thought they were additional Me-109s as they took no evasive action.  “I was in the lead and came in behind their tail-end charlie when he suddenly broke left and collided with his wingman.  They both bailed out and it was almost comic, scoring two quick victories without firing a shot.”

     All the aircraft had now jettisoned their wing tanks and were fully engaged 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.”  The front page headline in Stars and Stripes summed it up in one neat package:  FIVE KILLS VINDICATE IKE”S DECISION and the group commanders recommended Yeager for the Silver Star.

     In the end, Chuck Yeager would make his uneventful last flight with Bud Anderson.  They were the extras on that day and when no other Mustangs had trouble, they did a little sight-seeing by air.  Chuck showed Anderson where he had been shot down and spent time with the French underground.  They dropped their wing tanks and used all their ammo trying to blow them  up (successfully (Yeager) or unsuccessfully (Anderson) depending which one you asked).  His 11 victories included one Me-262 jet aircraft – planes that had a 150 mph speed advantage over the P-51s.  The German pilots were terrified of having one of these captured so they usually took a quick run at the Mustangs and high tailed it away from danger.  Yeager was returning to the Channel and spotted one Me-262 on landing approach.  He dove at it and recorded a rare kill of this elusive prey.   

     Space dictates the end of this FTV, well short of telling all of the tales of General Chuck Yeager’s outstanding career.  By the time this goes to print, the book will be at the Ontonagon Township Library if you are interested in more fascinating tales about this great American flyer. 

Top Piece Video:  Iron Maiden – Aces High from 1984 – Spitfires, not P40 Mustangs, but still appropriate to Chuck Yeager’s war experiences.