Tumult in the Clouds

by James Goodson

  Red Dog wanted Green transferred out of the squadron, and Mac was inclined to agree. It was the classic dilemma for a squadron commander: how to deal with a keen, aggressive and capable pilot who was not amenable to squadron discipline.

  Mac, perhaps thinking of Kid Hofer, or Don Gentile in his early days, decided to give him one more chance. He put him on his own wing on 18th March 1945, on a mission which ended up strafing Prenzlau airfield near Berlin. This time the flak got McKennon. He was able to pull up to 4,000 feet and managed to bale out, fighting his way out of the stricken plane. He parachuted down into the same field in which his plane had crashed.

  Green had stuck close to his leader, and now saw him on the ground disentangling himself from his parachute. Green now made a typical decision. He would land in the rough field and pick Mac up. He knew it had been tried before, but only once successfully, and that by a P-47 with its roomy cockpit, and from a smooth field. He also knew that, as a result, it was automatically a court-martial offence. There could be only three possible results of his action: court-martial and disgrace, captivity in a German POW camp, or death. Green didn’t hesitate.

  He judged the wind direction from the smoke coming up from the burning plane. As he started in with wheels and flaps down he saw German soldiers and dogs heading for Mac.

  ‘Take those Germans out,’ he yelled.

  One of the circling Mustangs came in, guns flashing. The surviving Germans scrambled back to cover.

  Green came around again, dragging the plane in with full flap, and dropped it over the fence into the bumpy field. Mac ran to meet him, and clambered onto the wing. Green put on the parking brake, clambered out onto the other wing to get rid of his flying gear and parachute. It was the only way they could both squeeze into the tiny cockpit. Mac squeezed his 6 feet 2 inches frame into the seat. Green climbed in and sat on his lap. To get the canopy closed, Green’s face was pressed against the gun-sight. Mac’s face was pressed against Green’s back.

  Green had to do the flying. He took the plane back to the far edge of the field, stood on the brakes, opened up the engine to maximum power, and released the brakes.

  The plane sprang forward and bounced and lurched over the rough field. He dragged it off after only about 300 yards. It fell back down, bounced hard, staggered back into the air, and wobbled over the trees at the end of the field. They had made it!

  They still had plenty of problems. Mac was in agony from the weight of Green’s body which pressed his legs against the sides and bottom of the cockpit.

  They ran into fog, and, since neither of them could see the instrument panel, Green had to take it up to 15,000 feet. He was able to plug in his own oxygen tube, but Mac didn’t have one. Finally Green felt Mac’s body go limp. Squeezing his head around, he saw that he’d passed out. Taking off his mask, he placed it over Mac’s nose and mouth. When he came to, Green took the mask back to keep himself from passing out.

  They somehow made it back to Debden and landed. Now Mac was confronted by a worse problem: he had to have Green court-martialled.

  I was never able to check with Mac as to what happened. When I got out of prison camp, he’d made the final flight when his luck had run out. I do know that there was no court-martial. I asked a high-ranking friend of mine in Headquarters, how come.

  He said: ‘Yeah! I heard that story, but everyone knows it’s impossible for two pilots to get into a P-51 cockpit.’

  ‘Sure it’s possible,’ I said. ‘It happened.’

  ‘Whose side are you on?’ he asked.

  We had good generals.

  When they asked Green why he had done it, he shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I figured I owed the guy a favour.’

  Meanwhile Gentile and Godfrey’s free-wheeling heroes’ tour of the United States was running out of steam, and they were posted to training assignments. Don Gentile seemed to enjoy the publicity and adulation, but Johnnie Godfrey became more and more frustrated. He requested to be transferred back to the Group to continue his combat career, and pestered everyone until it was granted.

  Johnnie was delighted to get away from the States and back to Debden. Just before leaving he gave an interview in which he expressed his feelings about Stateside training restrictions.

  The story read in part:

  Capt John T. Godfrey, Rhode Island’s leading fighter ace, is ‘burned up’ by what he calls America’s present policy of ‘spoon-feeding’ its thousands of future pilots.

  ‘I stood six days of their constant silly restrictions … then I said to hell with it and went back home,’ he told a United Press reporter.

  ‘They won’t let the kids fly when it’s cloudy … I can remember taking off in England when you jumped straight into overcast and stayed that way up to 30,000 feet or more,’ Godfrey added.

  He expressed the opinion that a kid-glove policy by ‘brass hats’ in this country is endangering the lives of all youngsters now in training camps …’

  If he had still been in the States when this hit the fan, he would probably have been court-martialled. As it was, he kept one jump ahead of them; or perhaps the ‘European brass’ protected him from the ‘US brass’. In any case, Johnnie flew every mission, and announced his intention to take his score to fifty.

  He started off on 5th August 1944 in style by blowing up a 109 when he was so close that the explosion damaged the prop and blackened the paintwork on his plane as he flew through the blast. He then destroyed three more planes on the ground, damaged another three and attacked eight locomotives – all in one mission.

  But by this time, the Battle of Germany had been won, and Johnnie had to find his victims on the ground. Freddie Glover was CO of 336 by now. As they searched for German aircraft in the Berlin area, they spotted 109’s on an airfield. Freddie took them down, and destroyed a taxiing 109. Godfrey took out another. As they zoomed low over the airfield, they flew through a curtain of flak. Johnnie’s windscreen was shattered and a glass sliver cut through his helmet into his forehead. Worse still, the glycol cooling system was hit.

  He pulled up to 2,000 feet, and saw his cylinder head temperature starting to climb. Glover heard him say, ‘Afraid I’ll have to bail out!’

  Freddie saw that Johnnie had been hit in the coolant system, but he remembered something else; he’d been on that mission when I had nursed my plane back to England by pumping the primer to flood the engine and keep the temperature down.

  ‘Don’t jump, Johnnie, don’t jump! Grab your primer handle and pump like hell!’

  The temperature stopped climbing. They started for home along the old trail: Hannover, Bielefeld, The Ruhr, dodging flak over each city; but Johnnie suffered the same agonies as I had. The constant priming wore through the leather gloves, and by the time he reached Amsterdam, his hand was a bleeding mess.

  ‘I’m not going to be able to make it across the drink. I’d better bail here.’

  ‘Don’t give up, Johnnie, we’ll stick with you. Give it a try.’

  But finally Godfrey could continue no longer. He figured that even if the engine didn’t seize up through over-heating, he would run out of gas before reaching the English coast. He went over to the emergency channel and called for Air-Sea Rescue: ‘Mayday, Mayday, I’ll have to jump!’

  ‘Just keep sending so we can get a fix on you,’ they replied.

  ‘Sorry, I have to get out before I get lower.’ He had lost too many friends who had left it too late, and died in the fall into the sea before their chute could open.

  His canopy had already been blown off by the flak. He disconnected his oxygen tube and his earphones, undid his sea harness, and stood up in the cockpit. Just before he dived out he took one last look ahead – and there it was: the low-lying East Coast of Essex!

  Even Johnnie’s luck couldn’t hold indefinitely. By August 1944, the long-range fighters of the Eighth Air Force, were encountering fewer Luftwaffe planes in the air. That month, for instance, the Fourth shot down only 28 against 207 in April. They
therefore stepped up the destruction of the German Air Force on the ground.

  On 24th August 336 Squadron spotted a number of Ju52 transport planes on an airfield deep in Germany. Godfrey destroyed four on his first pass, bringing his score to thirty-six, at that time the highest in the US Air Force. But he had made too long a run. As he pulled up at the end of it, he heard the deadly ‘crump’, felt his plane knocked sideways, and smelt the cordite of the explosion. He knew that the plane had had it. He continued to attack, trailing a plume of black smoke from his dying engine. Finally the plane stalled out and crashed in a field. Johnnie was knocked out, but not badly hurt. He joined the thousands of us already in prison camp.

  In ancient Greek tragedies, the hero’s own pride or ‘Hubris’ leads inevitably to his own destruction. When we returned from the last mission Gentile flew before going back to the States, there was an incident that should have been a warning.

  Before the mission he asked me: ‘Goody, you’ve learned the knack of real low flying. That’s how you get away with your strafing missions. What’s your secret?’

  I should have told him it was nothing but experience. Foolishly, I tried to be funny. I said: ‘Well, Don, I guess you go as low as you dare, and then take her one foot lower.’

  Humour was lost on Gentile. He must have taken me literally. When we came back from the mission. I saw the reason for his questions. The press corps and their cameramen were lined up on the far edge of the field. Don decided to give them their money’s worth. He came zooming in low straight at the photographers. The field at Debden was slightly higher in the centre. Don came in low over the perimeter track, but didn’t pull up enough to clear the knoll. There was a horrified gasp from the onlookers as the propeller of his plane gouged into the ground and the plane crashed in the middle of the field.

  Don climbed out unscathed, until he was summoned by Blakeslee. The CO’s dressing down cowed even Gentile. He called him a spoiled show-off, and much more which hasn’t been preserved for posterity.

  Gentile was being built up as America’s greatest ace, so he got away with it. He and Godfrey went off to the States and were fêted as they deserved; but as the PR campaign ran out of steam, more and more often they ran foul of the flying restrictions and military discipline back home.

  Thinking it over much later, I guessed it might have been the way he would have wanted it. Above all else, he had to be the star, and like a shooting star he had a brief meteoric career. While doing an unauthorised aerobatic beat-up, he crashed and was killed.

  His old buddies were genuinely sad. We may have laughed at the euphoric press releases, but we admired him as a great natural pilot.

  And we loved him for himself. You couldn’t help it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Borrowed Time

  The scene was changing.

  There were very few of the old gang left, and in July 1944 most of the faces in the officers’ mess were strange to me. Don Blakeslee was still there, but I found myself leading the Group more and more often, as there were fewer and fewer of the experienced old-timers.

  Even the war was changing. The Air Force and the Russians were no longer fighting alone. The Allied armies were breaking out of the Normandy beach-head and making steady progress in the Mediterranean theatre.

  And the air war was changing. The air armadas were enormous. Sometimes the streams of bombers and escorting fighters seemed to stretch from the bases in East Anglia all the way to the target, which, now that the invasion beach-head had been secured, was often Berlin.

  The depleted Luftwaffe fighter force, stretched between the Russian front, the southern front and the Western or Home front fought as gamely as before, but their relatively small numbers couldn’t stop the growing overwhelming mass of aircraft. So, there were now missions where even we in the Fourth Group, almost always at the target end of the fighter escort relay, didn’t encounter any enemy fighters; but when we did see them, we still had to admire them. They had to run the gauntlet of risks, first from the umbrella of escorting fighters above, below and all around the bomber stream. Then from the criss-cross fire from the gunners in the bombers who sprayed out their stream of tracer bullets like firemen using hoses. Because of the formation of the bombers in their boxes, an attacking fighter could find himself in the firing range of twenty or more machine-guns. And, as the German fighter broke off his attack, added to the danger from the hail of bullets was the ever-present risk of collision as he cut in and out of the bomber stream.

  All these dangers were magnified when the fighters made a head-on attack. I once led the squadron down to break up a frontal attack by German fighters and found myself following a 109 through a bomber formation. The stately procession of bombers which usually seemed almost motionless, suddenly became a maelstrom of hurtling juggernauts. As soon as I slipped past one, another was rushing down on me, followed by another and another. When I thought I saw a gap, I simply jammed right rudder, and shoved the stick into the front right corner and prayed. When I opened my eyes, I was alone. I looked up and back and saw far above me, looking like little minnows in a stream, the last boxes of the bomber formations. I had been lucky.

  In his outstanding book Fighter Aces of the Luftwaffe Colonel Ray Toliver quotes from the report of Helmut Lipfert of JG52 on one of his missions against some 120 bombers with fighter escort. He led nine Me109’s in three head-on attacks on the bombers. After the first attack, he had five of his nine left; after the second, three left, and after the third, the only survivors were his wingman, Tamen, and himself. They returned to base only because they were out of ammunition. They each claimed one B-17 destroyed. I think this was no unusual episode, but typical of the Luftwaffe’s performance.

  When we first saw German fighters crashing into bombers as the result of a head-on attack, I thought they had been less lucky than I. There was even a B-17 that got back to England with its tail almost slashed off by a 109. It wasn’t until after the war that I met Colonel Hajo Herrmann. After piloting bombers against England in the Battle of Britain and elsewhere he organised and led the Wild Boar night fighters who flew through their own flak and used day fighter tactics to inflict terrible losses on the RAF night bombers, including fifty-six downed in one Berlin raid. He then organized JG300 ‘Rammkommando Elbe’, an élite corps of specially armoured FW190’s dedicated to stopping the four-engined US bombers even if it meant ramming them. This was no Kamikaze group. The pilots were trained to aim their planes at the bombers, and bail out at the last minute. This involved staying with the plane till the last split second, crouched on the seat, ready to be catapulted out when the plane plunged into its victim at a closing speed of close to 1,000 mph.

  However there were two much greater dangers to the Allied Air Forces during this crucial time in mid-1944. The first was the twin-jet Me262. At the briefing at which top brass and the intelligence officers told us about this revolutionary fighter, it was obvious that they were seriously worried. The jet era had started and we had no entry. The 262 was faster than any Allied fighter. It could outclimb them and outdive them. It could carry more armament and more protective armour plating; and its two jet engines were less vulnerable than the single glycol-cooled engine of the Me109, or Mustang.

  Hitler had another secret weapon even more potentially dangerous than the Me262. The Me163 was rocket-powered and therefore probably faster than the 262. It would be in and out of the bomber formation so fast, no fighter could touch it, and even the gunners in the bombers wouldn’t have time to concentrate their fire on it. Not only its speed, but also its diminutive size made it an impossible target. It was rocket-propelled up to the normal flying height of the bombers, between 25,000 and 30,000 feet; it would shoot down one or two and then, its rocket fuel expended, dive back down to land at its base. It was smaller than any other fighter, with short, stubby wings, so, in addition to being incredibly fast and hard to hit, it could be mass-produced much more easily, using less material, than the Me262. We estimated that, i
f the Germans switched their production lines from current production, they could produce 500 Me262’s and 500 Me163’s a month.

  Since each new fighter would be capable of shooting down at least one US plane per mission, we were looking at losses in excess of 1,000 planes per mission, and therefore the end of Allied air supremacy on which victory depended. We couldn’t know that Hitler was more concerned with revenge on the enemy than protection of the German cities and therefore gave priority to V-1’s and V-2’s, and the bomber version of the Me262. To us it seemed that Germany had an enormous technological advance over us, and was about to take full advantage of it long before we could catch up with them.

  By the beginning of July the Normandy beach-heads were firmly established and we had established air supremacy over France. The short-range Spitfires and Typhoons of the RAF, and the fighters and bombers of the US Tactical Air Force were giving air cover and ground support to the armies, and the roads of Northern France were lined with the wreckage of German transport and armour. So we of the strategic Eighth Air Force went back to the long-range bombing of targets deep within Germany.

  It was on a Berlin raid that we first saw an Me262. I had taken the squadron down on a gaggle of 109’s about to make a head-on attack on the leading box of bombers. We broke them up and dived after them. I was able to catch the last one and ‘clobbered’ him from about 200 yards dead astern. Like most fighter planes shot down on both sides, he never knew what hit him. We would have gone on down after the other 109’s, but that would have taken us away from our main task of protecting the bombers. I broke hard right and up, calling on the others to follow.

  We were just coming up to the level of the bombers and were swinging around to sweep past them and clear the way ahead over the target area when we saw it. It came from above and behind and sliced down and through the fighter escort and the bomber formations as if they were standing still. Without slackening speed, it lined up behind a B-17 which immediately fell out of formation, trailing smoke, as the Me262 raced by to disappear far ahead of us. It was all over in seconds. All any of us could do was gape. For all we knew, it knocked off another B-17 before it zoomed away, leaving us all far behind.