Situation Normal

SITUATION NORMAL...

BY LT. BERT STILES

359th Fighter Group, 8th Air Force

Ever wondered what it's like to ride a Mustang to Munich and back? Well, it's a lot like this...

The overcast was five miles or ten miles thick, and it started at the ground. So the bombers didn't go.

We were supposed to shoot up a certain railroad sitting down near Munich where there were supposed to be oil cars.

There was much mud on the field, and much on my windshield before I got off the ground. The visibility was lousy. We almost ran into a Sterling.

The clouds broke up when we hit the coast and we went up. There were strings of 51s and 47s in back of us and on the sides and probably up ahead.

The relay station came in with, "There are bandits operating in the Cologne area." All bandits are in the Luftwaffe.

There was a high overcast at maybe 25,000 and no low clouds. The ground looked peaceful, but it probably wasn't. We flew over the line somewhere just south of Aachen.

Somebody called in two planes up at two o'clock high. Somebody else called in four planes at two-thirty high. I saw them.

They were coming right for us. I flicked up all the switches and got ready to drop my tanks and turn into them shooting.

In two seconds, I'll break, I decided. I shook with anticipation. I guess it was that.

"Little fat friends," somebody sang out.

"They're Jugs," somebody else said in a relieved voice. P-47s, he meant.

They swung off maybe a mile out, showing that big slice-of-orange wing and went off to look for something else.

There was sweat on my hands and sweat on my legs and everywhere else.

We were fanned out in battle formation. We were looking around. We were ready for the Luftwaffe.

"Bogies at nine o'clock," somebody called in. Bogies are unknown planes.

Somebody else called them a little louder.

"They're 109s."

I flicked the switches on again. There was a bunch of planes up high at nine o'clock.

"Dog tanks in 15 seconds. White flight." That was us. I let mine go in about three and was tied for last.

We went into a screaming turn right. I jacked up the rpm's to the firewall and gave it full throttle.

There were 51s all over the sky in a big fight. I kept switching around. 51s on my tail. 51s at every hour on the clock.

"We turned the wrong way," somebody said.

They were at three o'clock, not nine.

Twenty or forty of them skidded through. Green flight climbed on the tail-end man. He climbed up. They outclimbed him. He did a half-roll. They watched. He went into a shallow turning dive, and the lone and three men pulled up his tail and clobbered the hell out of him. (I got all this later.)

"He bailed out," somebody yelled.

"Eeeeeeeeyowwww!!!"

Our flight did five or ten more turns and saw lots of 51s.

"We'll go down here," Red leader called in. "We haven't got enough gas to go all the way."

So we started down and we started looking. We flew over some hills and some trees and some towns and some railroad roads and we finally saw a town and a railroad in some hills that must have pleased Red leader.

And we went down. We went down in a woozy spiral, and we strung out. We clapped in over the spruce tops doing 400.

I was flying on my element leader. I went where he went. Once we went almost the same place. I slid under his tail, and over the top of a church steeple with 12 inches to spare.

It was Germany and it was pretty and peaceful and we didn't see anything to shoot.

We skimmed over a hill and there was a train. We didn't shoot it either, because we were already past.

We circled into a 90-degree bank and got into string and went back around. Everybody was there. I lined up on a hunk of train and flicked my gun switch... then I kicked into a turn and jerked back on the stick when a 51 moved up in front of me.

When I grabbed the stick I grabbed the trigger too. The 51 didn't get it, for some reason, but a big-eye location of the house did. The top story got a burst of tracers and then we were past again.

We went round and round. There were enough 51s to shoot up ten towns that size. Somebody got the engines on the first pass. There were two trains and we shot the hell out of them.

There was an oil tank, I guess. It had black smoke and it burned nice. Several other things burned and blew up. Then somebody went in. The whole works blew when he first hit the ground, and the engine went shooting up over a little hill into the trees.

There were two kids and a bike out in the middle of a street watching. Some people somewhere were shooting flak at us.

I saved one burst till I was really down on the train and saw somebody else had already burned out that car. I horsed back and made it over the hill with an inch or two to spare and went into my turn.

There was a guy down there about ten feet off the end of my wing, shooting at a double-barreled shotgun at my element leader. He didn't give a damn. When we came back he was gone, prudently.

Then everybody was gone. I was all alone in the haze dusting over hill tops, looking for somebody, looking for anybody.

Then I saw a ship.

"This is Red leader, I'm going up," came over the radio.

There was a guy going up, so I went up too. Then there was another guy.

I checked my tail and there were two jokers right on it. I broke left.

Little friends.

We went up. We went way up and everybody joined in.

"Where's White four?" somebody said. There was sorrow in the voice.

"I'm up here in Red flight," I said happily.

I cut my throttle back and put down flaps and faded back to White four position.

I flew in close and thumbed my nose at the element leader.

So we flew home. And nothing else happened to us. But plenty was going on. Everybody else was still down there talking loud and incoherently, jamming up the radio.

"Don't shoot me, I'm your leader," somebody else said.

"TS" somebody consoled him.

"I'm out of oil," the same guy said. "I'm out of everything."

We waited.

"I'm OK," he said a minute later. "I'll make it OK."

We relaxed. He bailed out ten seconds later, maybe in Germany, maybe in France.

"Look at them barrage balloons."

"The lousy bastards..."

There was no telling what was going on. Somebody got hit.

"I'm hit." Chaos on the radio.

"You got him."

"EEEEEEEEEYOWWOWOW!"

"Attaboy."

France was pretty. We let down to get under the front of clouds coming up. I did three rolls going down.

Four hundred men were moving up along a line from the Dutch Coast to Switzerland. A couple of trains were lying back there, dead and smashed. A little village was shot up and scared and still there.

I sat still. Then I did another roll, then I looked down at the soft green world. There wasn't any sense to it all.

This is war, I thought. This is war in the air.

Situation Normal

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