Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (42 page)

Weather had been building from the noonday heat; like a field of mushrooms, the big, puffy clouds reflected sunlight bounced from the edges. Yellow beams slanted into countless shifting canyons, as the dark green Russian fighter sliced down to line up on the bombers. The tired, wounded pilot never saw two of the escorting Messerschmitts roll inverted and dive at her.

Orange tracers arced across the sky as nearly fifty aircraft swirled, twisted, and killed each other. Lilya’s wingman, Ivan Borisenko, was fighting for his own life, but he caught a glimpse of her turning back toward the Germans. As the three fighters clawed at each other they fell into the clouds and disappeared. As fast as it had begun it was over, and the survivors limped home, Borisenko among them.

But not Lilya.

Hours went by and the ground crews waited. Waited until night fell and the stars came out. Waited for word from somewhere that she’d bailed out or landed. But there was nothing. It was her 168th combat mission, and she never came back.

Thirty-six years later, in 1979, villagers near the town of Dmytrivka discovered the skeleton of a small woman. From the gold fillings in the teeth, the Soviet government identified the remains as those of Lidiya Vladirmirovna Litvyak. Eleven years later, during a celebration of the forty-fifth anniversary of World War II, the last premier of Stalin’s Communist Russia awarded Lilya a medal—she was at last a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Many people, experts and friends alike, don’t believe that she died that afternoon over the Ukraine. One very plausible theory is that she collided with, or rammed, one of the attacking Messerschmitts. Luftwaffe records confirm that Hans-Jorg Merkle, a twenty-nine-victory ace from JG 52, was credited with a kill against a Yak-1b on August 1, 1943, in the same area in which Lilya vanished. One of the surviving Germans also stated that Merkle had been rammed. In any event, he didn’t survive. Whether she rammed the Messerschmitt or her plane was too badly damaged to make it back, Lilya very well could’ve survived only to find herself behind the German lines again, and this time she was captured. Dr. Kazimiera Cottam, an expert on Soviet female combat veterans, is certain Lilya survived. If she’d been captured, then knowing what awaited her in Russia after the war may have convinced her that there was no going back. She would’ve faced a filtration camp, or worse, as would her family. Maybe, she thought, it was better to have them think she was dead, her reputation untarnished and her family safe.

Cottam also wrote that “Russian television featured a broadcast from Switzerland during which a correspondent introduced a former Soviet woman World War II pilot, a mother of three children who was twice wounded during the war and resided abroad since the war.” On a practical note, the village of Dmytrivka, where her remains were “discovered,” is more than 50 miles northwest of where Lilya’s final dogfight occurred. This was the wrong direction for a pilot trying to land a damaged plane, and she would have known that.

Lilya Litvyak may or may not have died that day in August 1943. Regardless of her end, in the end the White Rose of Stalingrad, and her legacy as an extraordinary fighter pilot, live on forever.

CHAPTER 10

MEATBALLS AND FLATTOPS

“
WHUMP . . . WHUMP
. . . whump . . . whump . . .”

The pilot’s eyes opened, red and unfocused, as the explosions jarred his teeth together.

“What the . . . ?”

Rolling upright, he blinked against the light slanting in through a crack in the curtains. Dust particles hung suspended in space, and he swallowed, his tongue furry and thick.

“Whump . . . whump . . .”

A glass of water bounded off the nightstand and shattered on the floor. He blinked again, lids scraping painfully over his dry eyes. God, but his mouth tasted horrible!

“Tukka tukka tukka tukka . . .”

That got him moving. On a military base, explosions could have a number of different causes, but a machine-gun burst? Groping for his pants, he tugged on a shirt and jammed on a pair of shoes.

There was screaming and yelling from outside now. Yanking open the door, Ken Taylor immediately shut one eye and held up a hand against the early-morning glare. The roar of aircraft engines floated over the trees, and a siren was wailing somewhere.

“Tukka tukka tukka . . .”

“Bastards actually did it!”

Taylor turned and saw his friend George Welch staring toward the plumes of smoke over the Wheeler Army Airfield flight line. Both men were wearing khaki uniform shirts over the tuxedo pants they’d had on the night before at the Officers’ Club. Neither noticed or cared.

“Son of a bitch . . .”

Japs.

Welch meant the Japanese had really done it. They were attacking. Wheeler for sure, which had to mean Pearl Harbor. They wouldn’t come all this way just to attack one base.

“Stay here,” Taylor said, then turned and jogged down the big, open verandah. The bachelor officers’ quarters had an enormous patio for impromptu barbecues and the occasional dance. It also had a telephone mounted on the wall.

“Tukka tukka tukka tukka . . .”

Much louder and much, much closer. He skidded to a stop and looked back long enough to see tufts of grass and dirt leap into the air.
Strafing . . . they’re strafing us
. Taylor’s brain processed it reluctantly. He knew exactly what it was because he’d done it, too. In practice, anyway. But Taylor had never expected to be on the receiving end. As he stared openmouthed, the wooden planks shredded when a long burst hit the verandah. Ducking around a corner, he waited till it passed, then made his way back to the phone to ring up his squadron.

Minutes later, he found Welch behind another corner, and the two fighter pilots looked long and hard at the parking lot. It seemed like every Jap over the field was strafing. Most of them were dive-bombers, Aichi D3s, which Americans called a “Val.” Big and slow, with fixed landing gear, the Val was the main dive-bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Not that the “meatball,” the big red circle painted on the fuselage, left any room for doubt.

Welch punched him on the arm. “Well, let’s wait till we hear the burst of machine guns, and then we’ll run. That way the bullets are already behind us!”

It made sense at the time, so that’s exactly what they did. Taylor’s brand-new Buick sat in the “officers only” parking area, and they jumped in, peeling away amid a spray of gravel. Driving north off the base, both men watched enormous smoke clouds billow up to their left from the Schofield Barracks area.

After a moment, Taylor said, “George, we heard the ones that were by us, but we didn’t hear the next volley that the guy fired at us. That was kind of silly.”

Welch shrugged. “It worked.”

Sometimes reaching 100 mph, they careened down the Oahu Central Valley for ten minutes, driving straight toward a beach on the north edge of Waialua Bay. Barely 200 feet off the beach, Haleiwa was a grass strip dispersal field that the 47th Pursuit Squadron used for gunnery training. Living there in tents since December 3, the pilots had welcomed the weekend to get back to the relative civilization that Wheeler offered. Poker, decent food, and nurses had kept them up all night, but now all was forgotten as Taylor swerved through the scrubby trees and skidded to a halt.

Two P-40s were up and running, their props spinning off tendrils of humid morning air. Ground crews swarmed over the six other fighters just in case they were needed. Several mechanics were pulling a dolly full of ammunition out of the way, and as the pilots appeared, the men squatting on the wings waved.

“Good to go, Lieutenant!” one of the ground guys shouted. “Fulla gas and thirty cal!”

There was no .50-caliber ammo at Haleiwa, so he’d have two empty guns. Taylor scrambled up along the wing root and jumped in. “I got it,” he shouted over the engine to the crew chief, who was trying to buckle him in. “Pull the chocks.” Pushing down hard to hold the brakes, he slapped the big yellow flap handle with his left hand, and with his right he opened the cowl flaps to keep the engine cool. Taylor eyeballed the fuel selector gauge and switched to the fuselage tank.

Running the red mixture knob to auto rich, he checked over the nose for the ground folks and smoothly eased the big throttle knob forward. As he taxied, Taylor quickly checked the magnetos, then cranked the canopy closed. For a tail dragger, the P-40 handled well enough on the ground. Eyes flickering around the cockpit, he scanned the fuel, oil pressure, coolant, and oil temperature, and ran a finger over the circuit breakers. Hesitating a moment while his right hand was there, Taylor flipped a switch and armed the guns—something he’d never done on the ground in peacetime.

Swinging around into the wind, both fighters wobbled forward, picked up speed, and lifted off tail first. As the rudder bit into the air Taylor gently pulled the stick right to keep the wings level. Coming away from the ground, he went through the normal routine of getting the gear and flaps up above 500 feet, the left wheel turning sideways and retracting back into the wing followed by the right. Constantly trimming the plane, he cross-checked his gauges while keeping sight of George Welch.

Holding 140 mph, they came around south toward Wheeler. The sun was shining over the eastern ridges of Oahu, surf was breaking white off Puaena Point, and there were only a few white clouds scattered against an amazing blue sky. Taylor’s heart was thumping and he licked his dry lips, eyes darting upward and behind. The sky had to be full of Japs, but he couldn’t see any yet. Taking a deep breath, he swallowed again and wished he’d brought a canteen. The pilot forced himself to slow down and scan correctly, just like he’d been taught. Aft quarter high . . . left then right. Then low . . . then ahead, left and right.

At Wheeler Field, smoke and fire were everywhere. What, he wondered, had happened to the sixty-odd fighter planes down there? Surely someone else would get airborne, too.

Surely.

Everything up till now had been pure reaction. But as they climbed he could plainly see stacks of oily black smoke rising above the southern edge of the island and what was obviously the main Japanese target: Pearl Harbor. It looked destroyed, and Taylor whistled softly, slowly shaking his head.

It was fifteen minutes past eight on the morning of December 7, 1941.

USAAF PILOTS LIKE
Taylor and Welch went through a four-phase training program that lasted about a year, graduating them with more than two hundred hours of flight time. In the next four years of war, 191,654 students became pilots and 132,993 washed out, were medically disqualified, or died in training—a 40 percent loss rate. As in all air forces, some of those who washed out of pilot training were sent to navigator or bombardier schools. Formed in June 1941, the USAAF unified the Air Corps, which provided training and equipment, with the Air Force Combat Command, responsible for operational flying.

By early 1941 the Primary phase of pilot training was contracted through aviation schools of the Civilian Aeronautics Authority–War Training Service. In a course lasting anywhere from nine to twelve weeks, a student got about sixty hours in a variety of aircraft and learned takeoffs and landings, overhead patterns, and fundamental emergency procedures. If a student progressed to Basic, he’d acquire another seventy hours of formation, aerobatics, and cross-country navigation time. He’d also learn to fly at night and on instruments. More powerful aircraft such as the North American BT-14 or Vultee Valiant were used, exposing him to planes with a two-pitch prop and radio. The student’s skills and grades in this section of the training determined his path in the Advanced phase.

The final nine weeks were spent in a Texan or Bobcat. Those destined for fighters perfected their formation flying and instrument procedures and were taught aerial gunnery against towed targets. If they survived all that and had high enough scores, then they were usually commissioned as second lieutenants upon graduation. Those who were not commissioned officers flew as sergeants. In either case, with their new silver wings the young pilots were sent on to Transition training with the specific aircraft they’d fly in combat. This lasted another two months, and besides aircraft familiarization, new pilots were taught the very latest tactics by experienced line pilots.

West Point graduates had a different process after the war began. Given the choice of the regular Army or the Air Corps, almost half of each class chose to fly, and primary training was conducted during the summer prior to their fourth year. This was done at a civilian school such as Spartan in Tulsa, Oklahoma, under the supervision of Army officers. A good student pilot would solo with about six hours and finish the summer with nearly sixty hours. Returning to the Point, cadets would finish Basic and Advanced training at nearby Stewart Field. Due to the officer shortage, academy classes were pushed up to graduate in three years, and this included the flight training. When a cadet graduated from West Point he had his wings and his officer’s commission then went straight on to Transition training.