Tumult in the Clouds

by James Goodson

  The flair didn’t only apply to attack. Anyone else operating as much on his own as Hofer did wouldn’t have lasted more than one mission, but the Kid survived what would normally be fatal situations time and time again, and I don’t believe it could be entirely attributed to luck, or even to the fact that he was always attacking.

  For instance, when D-Day finally came, the Fourth Group flew three missions, mainly concerned with preventing German reinforcements from coming up to attack the landings. Most of us were strafing the roads up to the beach-heads, and finally virtually nothing could move during the daylight hours.

  The Luftwaffe didn’t come up in strength. During the three missions, I saw no enemy planes at all. Nevertheless there were some concentrations. Kid Hofer was leading a flight of four. Although he was only a first lieutenant, he had Captain ‘Big Bernard’ McGrattan under him as number three. Handsome Mac was due for rotation to the States after a long and brilliant tour of duty. His bags were packed, but he insisted on being in on the big show for which we’d all been waiting so long, so he joined Hofer’s flight, with Lieutenant Hal Ross as his wingman flying in number four position.

  The flight was jumped by fifteen German fighters. They broke into the first attack, but there were always more coming, in waves. Mac probably shot one or more off Ross’ tail, but then got it himself. Ross went down next as they came in one after the other. In the same way the Kid lost his wingman. Somehow, out of the mêlée, Hofer, alone, got home. It was the only time he ever came back from a sortie without his happy smile.

  But he was on the next mission making his presence felt – and heard – as usual.

  For five days, we flew sortie after sortie, strafing every road south, east and west of the beaches. When nothing more was moving on the roads, we sprayed alongside the roads where we knew the Germans were hiding under cover waiting for dark when they could start to make their night-time move. A few days before, at Debden, Eisenhower had asked me if I thought we could keep the German reinforcements from moving up in force. I said, ‘During daylight hours, yes.’ And that promise was kept. Even the powerful Panzer Lehr Tank Force, which was deployed around the Le Mans area ready to rush to any landing site, didn’t get up in time. All the Germans could do in the daytime was drag their damaged and burnt-out vehicles and material to the sides of the road, where it lay rusting like an almost continuous wall, for many long months: impressive evidence of the awesome weight of air power.

  On D-Day plus six, the Fourth were strafing in front of the American forces advancing down the Cherbourg peninsula. Kid Hofer was with 334 Squadron and was gaily pouncing on anything that moved. Suddenly, he reported to Deacon Hively, who was leading the squadron, that he’d been hit, was losing oil pressure, and would have to go down. While strafing, a shot, possibly from an infantryman’s rifle, had punctured an oil line. This was not as improbable as it may seem. As soon as Allied fighters appeared overhead the Germans would leave their vehicles and dive for safety in any protection they could find at the sides of the road. From their cover, they would shoot at the low strafing planes with rifles, light machine-guns, and heavier machine-guns which they could mount on tripod stands in seconds flat. As a result, we were often flying into a cloud of small-arms fire.

  Hofer headed for the beach-head where one lone Allied airbase had just been established. Later, those who didn’t know the Kid as well as some of us, marvelled at his luck in finding himself right over this lone airfield when he broke out of cloud on his way down. I remembered seeing a Mustang low over the beachhead when coming out from the last mission the day before.

  Anyway, the Kid was greeted by the ground troops like a hero. They had seen the effectiveness of their air umbrella, and wanted to show their appreciation. Major-General Ralph Royce of the Ninth Air Force was on the base and from him Hofer obtained a jeep ride to tour the battle area, while the mechanics repaired his oil leak.

  That evening, he was back at Debden proudly displaying a German helmet and a copy of Mein Kampf, as souvenirs of his escapade.

  As Deacon Hively and I walked into the mess, Hofer put on the German helmet and saluted. There was an incongruous contrast between that grim-looking head-piece with the eagle of the German Reich on the side, and the laughing, boyish face underneath it. The Kid handed the helmet to the Deacon who passed it on to me. From the inside came the strong acrid sickly-sweet smell of stale sweat. To me, it brought home in a flash the dirty side of war, which we never really felt in the clean, clear air. The war on the ground was something unreal and far away. Even when we saw the flashes of bombs bursting and the towering palls of black smoke; even when we strafed and saw vehicles and bodies smashed by our guns, it was like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope, or perhaps in a film. But that stinking helmet was real. It was the trenches, the Poor Bloody Infantry, Verdun, Flanders’ fields, and a million crosses. I thought of the neatly made bed in my room which hadn’t been slept in since D-Day, when Mike Sobanski, who was so much more than just a roommate, had been shot down. I thought of all the happy warriors who weren’t around any more – and I passed the helmet back to the Kid.

  ‘It smells of piss!’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘It smells of Death!’ I said.

  Hofer’s position by now was unique. In the ‘scores’ charts, he was jockeying for pride of place with Godfrey, Gentile, Beeson and myself, all of us having close to thirty victories. The difference was that the rest of us had years of experience as squadron leaders or deputies and carried the rank of major. The Kid was still a lieutenant.

  His lack of experience showed up in his navigation, which might not have been so serious if he had always stuck with the rest of the outfit, but his tendency to ‘goof off’ on his own meant that he had to rely on his own dubious talents of navigation.

  On 21st June the Fourth Group was given the task of escorting bombers on the great Shuttle raid: England to Russia, Russia to Italy, Italy back over Europe to England. In his briefing, Don Blakeslee had stressed discipline and said ‘No landing errors. The Russians shoot people who make mistakes.’ Moreover the available maps of Russia were almost bare of any details, and it was obvious that beyond the Russian frontier only dead reckoning could be relied on. There would be no landmarks to go by. During the battles over Germany, Hofer got separated, and finally landed in Kiev, while the rest of the Group were at Poltava. It took a telex from Kiev to Debden to check his identity.

  This prevented the Kid from joining the rest of the Group before they left Poltava for Foggia in Italy. Nothing daunted, he took off, but this time he not only missed the air base he was headed for; he didn’t even hit the right country! He landed in Malta, but still got to Foggia in time to join the Fourth’s next mission.

  This was the famous mission to Budapest in which the Fourth tangled with JG52. The Kid was probably in on the main battle, in which the Fourth scored seven for a loss of one and may well have scored himself; but, true to form, he must have followed the scattered German planes as they turned back northwards.

  His course was converging with that of another ‘Kid’, but when his friends called him ‘Kid’, they used the German Bubi. He, too, at first was a happy youngster, not very amenable to discipline or spit and polish. His officer’s hat was as crushed down as Hofer’s, and his ways were free and easy, and his buddies loved him.

  But his grey 109 carried the black crosses and swastikas of the Third Reich. Under the cockpit was his insignia of a bleeding heart pierced with an arrow, and the word Ursel, for his wife Ursula. Fortunately their devotion was mutual. At the end of the war, he burned what was left of his planes and led JG52’s remaining personnel on foot to surrender to the Allies. In the worst sell-out of the war, the Allies turned the heroes of Germany over to the Russians to be treated as criminals, only to be released after ten years of hell. But when he came back, Ursel was still waiting, and so was an elite of devoted and admiring friends from both sides. For this was Erich ‘Bubi’ Hartmann, the gr
eatest of the fighter pilots.

  So, if the Kid had to be shot down, I’m glad it was by the best, and I know the Kid would agree. They were about the same age, but Hartmann’s enormous experience and cool technical proficiency had to tell.

  Back at Debden, they knew before anyone else. And they knew the exact time. Duke, the big Alsatian, leaped up and let out a series of doleful howls and then went and lay down in the empty revetment where the ‘Salem Representative’ would never be parked again.

  They identified his body from his dog-tags – and the lucky snake ring. They buried him in Hungary, between Budapest and the Czech border.

  He was the happiest of all those happy warriors. He was twenty-one.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Millie

  But there were the others. Some had natural flair; some had to make it the hard way. That was Millie’s way. It started way back in Malvern, Iowa, where his father’s heavy drinking and Irish temper kept the family desperately poor. College was out of the question. Millie had to work to support the family. What free time he had he spent developing his talents for baseball, which he studied with the same intensity he later brought to flying; because flying was what he was determined to do. Probably no one ever aspired to become a pilot with more strikes against him than Willard W. Millikan. All he had was iron determination. He gradually overcame every obstacle through enormous personal sacrifice. One of the last hurdles to be overcome before he could qualify as an aviation cadet was the expense of dental work to repair the damage done during fist fights with his father, and in the ball games of those rough days. He had to borrow $350 to get his teeth fixed, but the worry of paying back the money, and Millie’s own intensity, made him another victim of Lindbergh Field’s elimination process. Like Peterson before him, Millie was washed out for ‘lack of inherent flying ability’. He headed straight for Canada and the RCAF. Again through sheer determination, he got his wings, but his instructor recommended that he become a ferry pilot, since he would certainly kill himself as a fighter pilot.

  At first it looked as if Lindbergh Field and the RCAF instructor had been right. Millie flew fifty-two missions before he made his first kill; but during those missions, he was probably the most effective and reliable wingman in the squadron. Only one or two of Millie’s fifteen victories were scored while we were flying P-47’s, but he was always around. I remember an early mission to Kiel, which brought home to me again the dependability of the P-47. It also showed something of the dependability of Millikan.

  The bombers were hitting the German U-boat and naval base. As usual, we were giving them close escort over the target area. Suddenly the heavy flak opened up, and almost immediately there were black woolly clouds with bright flashes in them floating by. One hit my engine, rocking the plane and filling the cockpit with the acrid smell of cordite. I heard the crump. Black oil hit the windscreen and I started losing power. Fortunately I was at 25,000 feet and already heading for home. I followed the Kiel Canal to the coast of Schleswig-Holstein and had to face the miles of North Sea. I was still at 20,000 feet, but I saw the cylinder-head temperature gauge had gone up to the red danger point. I remembered how Blakeslee’s plane had made it back to Manston covered with oil. I also remembered that a rich fuel mixture made an engine run cool. On the instrument panel was a primer level which we used to pump a squirt of straight fuel into the cylinder for starting. I pushed it in and out, and, after a number of shots, I saw that I was able to get the temperature down a bit, but the moment I stopped the needle started up again, and I had to start pumping again. Soon my arm was aching, and my hand was in agony. I always wore gloves; I knew what fire could do to bare hands; but under the leather, the skin of my fingers, and then of my palm was being rubbed raw. I kept the speed just above a stall to maintain as much altitude as possible. The squadron were weaving over me, but when I figured they would need their remaining fuel to get home, I told them to leave me.

  There was some argument. I heard Millikan’s voice: ‘Millie here. I’m staying with you.’ – He was probably my closest friend, and not easy to argue with. He had married an English girl, Ruby, and had just had a daughter, Patsy.

  ‘Go home to Ruby and Patsy. I’ll be OK. I’ll call Air-Sea Rescue if I have to get out and walk,’ I said.

  ‘You think you can walk on water?’

  ‘Why not? It’s been done before!’

  I looked down at the expanse of sea. It looked flat, but I could see the white flecks of the wave caps and knew that down on the surface there were towering waves making rescue almost impossible.

  Millie was now close on my wing. He slid underneath me and came up on the other side. ‘How’s it look?’ I asked. There was no answer. I flicked over to the emergency ‘May Day’ channel. As I suspected, he was talking to them. He was giving my altitude and heading, and added, ‘He’ll never make it. He’ll have to bale out soon.’

  ‘Can he give us a long transmission so we can get a fix on him?’ said an unemotional English voice.

  ‘No problem!’ I said, but it wasn’t easy. The RT button was on the throttle on the left. My left hand was busy on the primer so I had to take my right hand off the stick and reach over. I sang the words of a popular song: ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll get along!’

  ‘Damn fool!’ said Millie.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said the Air-Sea Rescue.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve been on to Him. He doesn’t want to cramp your style.’

  ‘You’re a long way out and the weather conditions are bad, but we’ll do our best!’ Then somewhat despairingly, ‘Good luck!’

  When I figured I was halfway across, I was down to 9,000 feet. My left hand was in agony, and I could feel the sticky blood around my fingers.

  I was heading for Martlesham Heath airfield by Ipswich on the East Coast. When I calculated I should be sighting land, I was down to 2,000 feet and nothing but sea. I opened the canopy, undid the harness and started to struggle up ready to bale. I got my feet on the seat, crouching behind the windscreen. I pulled my goggles down and started to straighten up. As my head came above the oil-smeared windscreen, I found I could see better.

  There it was: the low line of Orfordness, the sandy marshland on the other side of which was the airfield. I clambered back into the cockpit. I tried to stretch the glide but she was going down fast. Suddenly she shuddered on the point of a stall. I eased the stick forward and dropped five degrees of flap. By now I was under 500 feet still over marsh and streams. I was preparing to belly in, wheels up, when I saw the edge of the airfield ahead. I dropped the undercarriage and prayed it would get down in time. I eased the stick back and plopped her down on the grass just inside the field. The wheels must have locked down during the stall just before touching down. I switched off and rolled to a stop. A P-47 roared over me and landed. It was Millie.

  I climbed out onto the wing and looked at the smoking, shattered engine, covered in oil. The top of the front cowling was torn to bits and two cylinders were completely blown apart!

  Like most of the Group, Millie really got going when we got our Mustangs, but he was one of those guys that always got things the hard way. The Group’s first Berlin mission was a case in point. I rated Millie, along with Beeson, as the most capable and dedicated tactician and deflection shot in the Group. They weren’t natural pilots like Gentile and Hofer, who simply had the flair to be able to aim their planes – or themselves – rather than their guns. Millie had to develop his talents by constant practice in attack and shooting. By 3rd March 1944, Millie’s determined dedication was beginning to pay off, and his score was beginning to build up. So naturally I put Millie’s name up, as number three in Gentile’s section.

  But, although our red-nosed Mustangs were the first Allied fighters over Berlin, it didn’t happen until 4th March: 3rd March was a bust; and very nearly eliminated Millie, and eight other top pilots of the Fourth Group, including two of its leading aces, Godfrey and Gentile.

  The weather was foul when we
took off, and got steadily worse. As the cloud got thicker, I called the squadron in closer to me. I knew that the newer pilots didn’t have much experience of instrument flying, and in those storm clouds, the violent turbulence was making it ten times tougher. I figured it would be better if the two planes next to me flew formation on me, and the others formated on them, and so on. Then only I would have to keep staring at the instruments, as I tried to keep the plane right side up.

  To make matters worse, the weather people had told us to expect icing, particularly in cloud, and we heard the short transmissions from pilots aborting because their engines were running so rough they couldn’t stay in the formation.

  I think almost everyone expected Blakeslee, leading the Group, to call it off, but I knew he would never let the bombers down; so we stuck it out, cursing and fighting the controls, expecting at any moment that the turbulence would hit so hard that the artificial horizon would topple and we’d spin out, or collide with the other planes.

  Then we heard it. ‘Cobweb Green section to Horseback. Bandits all around. Sixty plus. Are you receiving me, Horseback?’ It was Millie.

  Blakeslee didn’t reply. Neither did I. There was nothing we could do. We were due to rendezvous with the bombers in a few minutes. In any case, there was little chance of finding the others among the could banks in time to help them.

  Apparently the two sections being on the far right of the Group had lost contact, and been forced to fly blind on their own course which had taken them into a comparatively open space where the massed German fighters were waiting. The nine Mustangs were immediately bounced by about thirty Germans. They turned into the attack. The Germans took their usual evasive tactics by diving away, and the Mustangs followed. This was the signal for the rest of the German fighters to peel off and follow them down. Glenn Herter from Detroit, a relatively new pilot who had been separated from his section and had attached himself to the others as tail-end Charlie was hit by three 109’s and blown out of the sky. The others broke into the new attack, and a general mêlée ensued.