Free falling. Flat on my back. Spinning from 16,000 feet. Velocity doubling each second. Hold off. Get below clouds where Krauts can’t see your chute. Yank that cord now, you’re dead. Germans strafe guys floating down. Clouds whisk past. French countryside filling horizon. Even so, wait goddammit. Ground rushing up. Occupied territory.
Two fingers grip chute ring. A cannister of carbon dioxide hooked to my Mae West bangs close to my head. It’s tethered to the dinghy we sit on in the cockpit, and the dinghy which the CO2 inflates if we go down in the English Channel, flaps in the wind like an enormous doughnut. I unclip the cannister and the dinghy and they fall away.
Corner of my eye – ground closing in. Smell forests and fields below.
Now!
I yank the ripcord ring.
The parachute blossoms, barking my fall, and I’m rocking gently in the winter sky. Below me, the hills and fields are crawling with Germans. I see black smoke from my airplane wreckage and seat the slow ride down. I’m easy target practice from the ground.
I hear a dogfight raging far above me – the chattering machine guns and roaring engines of dozens of fighter planes spinning across the sky above a dull gray cloud deck. I’m dropping down over southern France on a deceptively peaceful countryside. I work the shroud lines toward a pine forest.
Trees rush up at me. I reach out and grab on to the top of a twenty-foot pine. I bounce a couple times on that limber sapling, leaning it over to the ground, just as I did as a kid in the hollers of West Virginia, when we’d ride pines for miles through the woods. In only seconds, I’m six inches from the ground I sept down, gather in my parachute to use later as a shelter and limp off into the woods. There’s blood on my pant leg, blood on my torn leather gloves, and blood dripping down the front of my flying jacket from my head.
The woods are dark and still, but even as I move deeper into them, I hear the distant rumble of army vehicles and the sounds of voices shouting in German. They pick you up fast in occupied territory before the locals can hide you. The bastards saw me coming down. (Victoria & I found later the one German tower it seemed in all of southern France. It was perfectly situated to see my descent.)
It is slightly past noon on Sunday, March 5, 1944 and I’m a wounded, twenty-one-year-old American fighter pilot, shot down and on the run. After only eight combat missions, I’m now “missing in action”. World War II shot out from under me by the 20mm cannons of the FW-190. The world exploded. I ducked to protect my face with my hands, and when I looked a second later, my engine was on fired, and there was a gaping hole in my wingtip. The 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.
(Note from Victoria Yeager: The first time General Yeager sat me in the cockpit of the P-51, it was difficult to get in and out of. As I was struggling to get out of the stationary P-51 on the ground, I asked General Yeager: “How did you get out when you were shot down?” He responded, “I didn’t have to – it was falling in pieces around me.”)
I just fell out of the cockpit when the plane turned upside down – my canopy was shot away.
I treat my wounds in the deep brush. There are shrapnel punctures in my feet and hands from the shells that hit around my cockpit: I’ve got a hole in the lower part of my right calf from a fragment that tore through my fleece-lined boot, and a gash on my forehead from banging against the CO2 cannister when I fell out of my dead airplane. I sprinkle sulfa powder on the leg wound and bandage it, then study a silk map of Europe that is sewn into our flight suits. I’m about 50 miles east of Bordeaux, near the town near Angouleme, where our bombers had blasted a German airdrome five minutes before I was shot down.
Man, I can’t believe how fast luck changes in war. Just yesterday, I landed back in England after scoring my first kill over Berlin. The weather was stinking, but I spotted an ME-109 below me, dove on him and blew him to pieces. Today, some kraut is drinking mission whiskey, celebrating hitting me.
(Note from Victoria: Gen Yeager and I learned that that kraut was not celebrating – US flight leader, Obie O’Brien saw the German that had shot down Flight Officer Yeager was heading for Yeager to kill him in his parachute and Obie chased him, shot at him, and most likely shot him down. There are several versions. One is his plane was crippled. The other is the German jumped out and his chute didn’t open. His plane crashed in a field that ultimately swallowed it up.)
Flying tail-end Charlie I didn’t have much of a chance. Our squadron of 18 Mustangs took off from our base on the British coast to escort B-24s on their bombing run. 16 Mustangs, 4 flights of 4, provided air cover, the two extras joining the mission only if there were aborts. I was an extra and when a Mustang from Captain O’Brien’s flight of 4 turned back over the Channel with engine problems, I pulled in as the 4th plane – the tail-end Charlie. Krauts 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 O’Brien. “Cement-Green leader, three bandits at 5 o’clock. Break right.” We turned sharply to meet the bastards head-on. As I turned, the first Focke-Wulf hammered me.
(Note from Victoria Yeager: The bombers were headed to bomb a German munitions factory in Bordeaux, but the weather was stinkin’ – the cloud cover was so thick the bombers could not see the city, let alone where the factory was. The lead bomber pilot broke silence and told the group to head east to Bergerac airport, a secondary target. By breaking silence, the Germans, monitoring radios, heard the US bombers were there and sent a few fighters up one of which shot down F/O Yeager.
The French below could hear the aerial combat above – couldn’t see it because of the cloud cover. Two kids had just left the service at their father’s church and saw F/O Yeager’s plane heading towards the ground and Yeager jumping out and pulling his chute. Another two kids, age 4, Christiane, and 6 – Etienne Labardin saw the parachute and thought it was a bomb so ran and hid. Their father found the window from General Yeager’s canopy and kept it. The six-year-old, Etienne, offered it to General Yeager 64 years later and became a good friend.)
I study my escape map, trying to figure my best route across the Pyrenees into Spain. The deep mountain snows should be melting by late spring; if I can stay clear of the Germans, I might be able to contact the French underground for help. There would be no help if these were German woods, I’d wind up a POW or worse fall into the hands of angry farmer who’d rather use axes and pitchforks than take prisoners. All of us carry 45 caliber automatics; mine gripped in my right hand.
Even now, in shock from being shot down, cold and scared, I figure my chances are good for coming out of this alive. I know how to trap and hunt and live off Mother Nature. Back home, if we had a job to do, we did it. And my job now is to evade capture and escape.
c. GCYI