Vanished Hero: The Life, War and Mysterious Disappearance of America’s WWII Strafing King

by Stout, Jay

  A few seconds passed and a flare arced skyward from the control tower. The flagman posted at the edge of the runway pointed at Reeves’s ship and whipped his flag over his head with a dramatic flourish. Reeves and his wingman advanced their engines and started down the runway together. The prop wash from the two aircraft rocked Righetti’s fighter as he pushed up his own throttle and rolled onto the runway.

  Carroll Henry, Righetti’s wingman, taxied into position next to Katydid, raised a thumb and flashed a smile. The rumble of Katydid’s engine grew into a popping roar as Righetti eased the throttle forward. At the same time he stepped on the right rudder pedal to counter the powerful torque that tried to swing the aircraft left and off the runway. More power produced more torque but Righetti reflexively kept it under control and soon he and Henry were accelerating down the runway.

  At just more than a hundred miles an hour the tails of the two aircraft lifted clear of the ground and seconds later they were airborne. Righetti and Henry raised their landing gear simultaneously and climbed straight ahead after Paul Reeves. Behind them the group’s other aircraft chased each other down the runway and into the sky. As the distance between him and the airfield grew, they looked to Righetti like a long stream of silvery-green minnows.

  Several miles out, he followed Reeves and his wingman into a gentle turn back toward the airfield as the last elements of the group got airborne and joined the formation in three distinct squadrons. Righetti, with Reeves, headed the 338th, while the 38th and 343rd followed in trail. With the airfield a few miles ahead, the pilots tightened the formation and accelerated in a gentle descent. This low pass over the airfield not only made it easy for the 55th to pick up an exact heading from Wormingford to the first point on the assigned route, but more importantly it was a morale booster for the men who maintained the aircraft and otherwise made it possible for the group to fly.

  Those same men squinted into the sky as the 55th’s aircraft roared overhead. The noise from so many powerful engines rattled their chests and thundered for miles across the East Anglian countryside. Don Downes was among those men. As the last of the group’s P-51s passed and started a climb to the east, he set off to find his boss. He wanted to take a three-day furlough, starting immediately.

  Nearing Freiberg, over eastern Germany, Righetti leaned forward and peered past his gunsight and through the aircraft’s windscreen. Straight ahead, at 24,000 feet, he spotted a series of specks at the head of a great carpet of white, fluffy contrails. The specks were nearly indistinguishable from the tiny nicks and bug carcasses and motes of dirt that spotted his windscreen, but they grew in size as he led the 55th closer. Finally, he recognized the bright white squares that were painted on the tails of each of the big B-17s—the squares marked them as 3d Air Division bombers. The 55th had made the rendezvous a few minutes early, but he suspected that the bomber crews wouldn’t mind.

  In truth, however, the early rendezvous probably wouldn’t make much difference as it was doubtful that the much-beleaguered Luftwaffe would make an appearance. Still, regardless of whether the enemy showed or not, Righetti and his fighter group had a job to do. He checked to see the 38th and the 343rd separate from him and the rest of the 338th to take up their assigned positions. Spread apart, the 55th’s three squadrons—flying a few thousand feet above the bomber stream—could provide better coverage than if they stayed together in one huge, unwieldy formation.

  At the same time, Reeves’s aircraft arced up and away toward Wormingford. Righetti watched a second aircraft follow Reeves. He knew this was Frank Birtciel who, like Reeves, was flying his last mission. Birtciel had arrived in England with the 55th in September 1943 and completed one combat tour flying P-38s before the group made its transition to the P-51 during July 1944. “I really liked and respected Righetti,” Birtciel said. “He might have saved my life during that last mission. We had lost two other guys during the previous week who were also flying their last missions. Righetti didn’t want to see that same thing happen, so he ordered me to go home as soon as we rendezvoused with the bombers.”3

  Through the occasional breaks in the clouds below, Righetti checked his chart against his position over the ground and his fuel gauge. Likewise, he glanced at his engine instruments every minute or so; a sour engine so deep over enemy territory was no small matter. And, as did every other pilot in the 55th, he scanned the sky for enemy fighters. But he gave no thought to the actual act of flying his aircraft. After so many years of experience his hands and feet directed it automatically.

  The mission was a grueling one not because of enemy action but simply because—at more than five hours—it was so long. Protracted flight at high altitudes in an unpressurized cockpit was exhausting. It numbed the senses and the bitter cold often overpowered the cockpit heating system and worked its way through the layers of clothing that the men wore. At a minimum the missions were boring and frigid. At their worst—when beset by enemy fighters and heavy flak—they were terrifying.

  On this particular mission, up to that point, it was the former. Bored and cold, Righetti and the rest of the 55th took the bombers across the target and started them on their way back to England. Below them, under attack by more than a thousand bombers, Dresden’s citizens were anything but bored and cold. The bombs bounced and burned the rubble that their city had already become after a number of previous raids. Those raids killed more than twenty thousand. On this day more than five hundred additional civilians were killed.

  The responsibility for escorting the bombers was passed to another fighter group on schedule and the 55th’s individual squadrons descended to look for targets of opportunity. The weather through the entire region was poor, and heavy cloud cover and haze made formation-keeping difficult. Consequently, the men tightened their formations as they dropped through the clouds.

  Righetti, with Henry still on his wing, took the 338th down to just a few thousand feet and trolled the area to the north and west of Dresden. The pilots looked for whatever merited killing—aircraft, trucks, troops, trains or anything else that might be useful to the Germans. As they motored through the poor visibility, calls over the radio made it apparent that other elements of the 55th were heavily engaged with enemy fighters.

  There is little doubt that this information sharpened Righetti’s lookout. Competitive and chronically keen for a fight, there were few missions during which he didn’t fire his guns. He spotted an airfield near the town of Riesa, about twenty miles northwest of Dresden. There were a number of enemy aircraft parked at various points around the airfield and Righetti ordered the flight to stay at altitude while he dropped down to check for antiaircraft fire. Henry asked for, and received, permission to follow him. “He wanted me to stay up there with the other guys,” Henry said. “But when I requested, he let me go.”4

  Righetti dove almost to the ground and leveled off to set up for a firing run from the east. He cranked in a touch of rudder trim to center the ball in the fluid-filled tube of his turn-and-bank indicator; an aircraft that was out of trim sprayed bullets everywhere but where they were aimed. Next he twisted the gunsight’s rheostat to adjust the brightness of the aiming pipper that was projected onto its small glass plate. Too bright and it would wash out whatever he aimed at. Too dim and he couldn’t see where Katydid’s guns were pointed. Finally, he checked that his gun switch was set to “Guns, Sight & Camera.”

  With Henry on his wing, Righetti spotted an Me-109 parked at the edge of the airfield. He banked slightly left and lowered the aircraft’s nose until the gunsight’s pipper rested on the fuselage just below the canopy. He held it there with slight forward pressure on the control stick as Katydid swiftly closed the range.

  Righetti squeezed the trigger at the front of his control stick. The six, .50 caliber machine guns—three in each wing—responded with a bucking roar that actually slowed his aircraft. Each of the guns sent armor-piercing projectiles toward the enemy fighter at a rate of eight hundred rounds per minute.

 
Righetti released the trigger after only a couple of seconds. An instant passed before great clots of earth and grass erupted from the ground around the German fighter. The rounds which found their mark twinkled and flashed and tore pieces from the Me-109 before turning it into a fireball just as Righetti passed overhead. He looked up and immediately caught sight of an FW-190 approaching to land. Henry was closer to the enemy aircraft than he was, and Righetti called out its position and told Henry, “Go get it.”

  “He had eyes like an eagle,” Henry said. “I didn’t see it.” A few seconds of frantic searching later, Henry spotted the enemy aircraft and made a quick heading correction. Slow as he was—and with his landing gear extended—the German fighter pilot was virtually helpless. Henry framed the FW-190 in his gunsight, fired his guns, and watched his rounds knock the hapless German out of the sky. “I killed him I guess, because he just hit the runway and rolled over. The plane was on fire when he hit the ground.”

  Righetti saw the German aircraft crash in flames. He wrenched his own ship around in a sequence of sharp, treetop-level turns while enemy gun crews, fully alert now, tried to shoot him down. Puffs of light antiaircraft fire burst around him as he lined up for another run. More antiaircraft fire crisscrossed his flight path, and smoke from the aircraft he and Henry had already set ablaze drifted skyward. Notwithstanding the efforts of the German gun crews, Righetti set several more aircraft afire.

  This wasn’t the artful, twisting, aerial ballet that was air-to-air combat. That sort of fighting demanded superb gunnery and a deft touch on the controls. Indeed, the skill required to cause a stream of bullets fired from an aircraft moving in three dimensions to arrive at the exact same point in the sky—and at the exact same instant—as another aircraft moving in those same three dimensions, was not easily acquired. Very few pilots were good at it. Righetti was one of them and had proven it during the previous months by single-handedly downing seven German aircraft.

  But strafing parked aircraft was different. The targets didn’t move and consequently the physics necessary to achieve a satisfactory firing solution were relatively simple. A pilot only had to hold his aircraft steady and put the gunsight’s pipper on the target until he flew into range. Then, just a few seconds on the trigger delivered enough rounds to tear any aircraft apart.

  But it took big guts. Indeed, there was no more dangerous mission for a fighter pilot. This was a fact borne out by the records as many more fighters over Europe were lost to ground fire than to enemy fighters. This was primarily because an aircraft flying a straight, predictable flight path low to the ground was vulnerable to the batteries of guns that typically protected important targets. The enemy gunners needed only to shoot far enough ahead of an attacking aircraft to stand a reasonable chance of hitting it. Or—together with other gun crews—they could simply create a curtain of fire through which an aircraft had to fly. These types of concentrated barrages became especially deadly as the Germans retreated into an ever-shrinking area and brought their antiaircraft guns with them. Indeed, as the war drew to an end, the concentration of antiaircraft guns on the Luftwaffe’s remaining airfields was devastating.

  Righetti and Henry made their attacks at speeds that were considerably less than what their aircraft were capable of flying. “If you flew too fast you didn’t have time to see anything,” Henry said. But slower speeds made them more vulnerable. So did making repeated passes against a well-defended airfield. It was a practice that went against common sense and tactical dictums, but it was perfectly consistent with Righetti’s outsized ferocity in the face of enemy fire.

  Indeed, by the time he started his third run, the gun crews at Riesa were fully ready. He picked out another enemy aircraft, lowered the nose of his aircraft and held it down. Finally in range, he squeezed the trigger and saw his bullets arc over the airfield and into the German fighter.

  An instant later Righetti heard a loud bang and felt Katydid shudder.

  Don Downes finished packing his bag. It was a cinch that he’d be off the base before Righetti landed back at Wormingford.

  “I NOW HAVE CANCER”

  I love to hear from people who have read my books. Truly, we history writers never get the attention we think we deserve. Who does? So, naturally, I was gratified upon reading the first line of the e-mail: “I am a big fan of your outstanding work on USAAF fighter pilots and have read and reread your books, Fighter Group, and The Men Who Killed the Luftwaffe.” And then, the bombshell. “I now have cancer and want to find someone to whom I can donate my library and research archive.”

  This admirer I didn’t know, Tony Meldahl, was dying. An Army veteran and German linguist, he was a researcher rather than a writer and had worked with renowned authors Iris Chang and Joe Galloway. And for more than two decades he had been fascinated with the Elwyn Righetti story. He had conducted interviews, collected stacks of obscure books, translated dozens of documents, collaborated with aviation experts around the world and visited with the Righetti family. The products of all those efforts were boxed into an enormous stack of cartons and additionally captured on two, massive hard drives.

  And although he had once planned to write a book on Righetti, he now wanted to give the material he had collected to me. “My first choice is you. Your depth of understanding, quality of research, and extraordinary writing skills make you, in my opinion, the best writer in this field. I feel you have the right stuff to write a mainstream book [about Righetti] on par with Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once, and Young.”

  I felt simultaneously prideful and guilty. Such praise! But life was leaving Tony and there was little hope that he would see his dream of a Righetti biography realized. Still, I reminded myself to be wary of gift horses. I didn’t know Tony and wasn’t exactly certain what he wanted. I responded very tentatively, but with compassion for a dying man whose interests were so similar to mine.

  I offered this stranger a few lines filled with words of comfort but he hadn’t contacted me for solace and I soon turned to the subject at hand. “Do I understand correctly that you are suggesting this because you simply want to see the story brought to light? Because you’ve done so much work and you don’t want to see it go to nothing? I ask because I’ve had no experience with collaborative writing or sharing of work that has worked out well. Collaborative writing is just not something that works for me.” It was mostly true. Aside from working with Hamilton McWhorter—the world’s finest gentleman—to write The First Hellcat Ace, all my other attempts at collaboration had produced nothing.

  “I do not want to do a collaborative book,” Tony replied. “I’d just like to give you everything I have with no strings attached … if you would consider some day to write on the Righetti topic.” There it was. Tony wanted to pass his work and material to me.

  But the very real question remained. Tony’s passion and heartbreaking situation aside, did I want to start this project? I had a passing familiarity with Righetti but wasn’t certain if there was enough of a story to justify a book. Although he had earned his commission and wings before the war, Righetti arrived late to the fighting and had missed many of the most famous battles. But after arriving in England during the fall of 1944 he threw himself into the war like a star athlete who had been kept on the bench until the final few minutes of the game. He flew and fought like a banshee and quickly became an aerial ace, while also destroying more aircraft on the ground than anyone else.

  Sadly, despite his spectacular accomplishments, he has been largely overlooked by history—not often mentioned in the ranks of great fighter aces and leaders. This is curious as he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest military honor the nation can bestow. And he shot his way to aerial acedom during a time when many men never even saw an enemy aircraft.

  Most impressive was his ground strafing record. Aside from a couple of dozen or more locomotives and a multitude of other important ground targets, he set the Eighth Air Force record by destroying 27 German aircraft in straf
ing attacks. It was incredibly risky work, recognized to be more dangerous than the type of aerial combat popularly known as dogfighting. But perhaps the most noteworthy of his achievements was the spirit of professional aggressiveness he imparted to the 55th Fighter Group. After languishing in near-anonymity since starting combat operations, it emerged as one of the Eighth Air Force’s “hottest outfits.”

  Why he faded into relative obscurity is difficult to determine with certainty. However, one reason is that the number of aerial victories he achieved did not match up with the tallies of the highest scorers. But what those lists don’t take into account is that Righetti scored them when the “hunting” was lean. That he scored as highly as he did—7.5 officially credited aerial victories—so late in the war is remarkable. In fact, no one during the entire history of the 55th Fighter Group knocked down more enemy aircraft while flying as part of the group.1

  There were other reasons why his celebrity faded. Although his achievements and those of the 55th were much celebrated during the closing months of the war in Europe, the public’s attention shifted to the Pacific and Japan after Germany surrendered. And once the fighting was over altogether, the nation busied itself creating a postwar society. People were weary of war and the talk of war.

  But perhaps the most important reason for the gradual forgetting of his achievements was the way in which he was lost. He was alive after his aircraft was shot down during the mission of April 17, 1945, but was never heard from again. For years, no one knew if he was alive or dead. Live men can’t be memorialized and men aren’t generally declared dead without substantive proof of their demise. And for its part, Righetti’s family didn’t beat the drum of his fame. Rather, they prayed for his safe return. As they did, the nation turned to other things. Righetti, and what he accomplished, gradually disappeared from America’s collective memory.