My beginnings back in West Virginia tell who I am to this day. My accomplishments as a pilot tell more about luck, happenstance, and a person's destiny. But the guy who broke the sound barrier was the kid who swam the Mud River with a swiped watermelon, or shot the head off a squirrel before school.
TAKING WING
You're whipping through a desert canyon at three hundred miles an hour, your belly just barely scraping the rocks and sagebrush your hand on the throttle of a P-39 fighter. It's a crystal-clear morning on the desert of western Nevada, and the joy of flying-the sense of speed and exhilaration twenty feet above the deck-makes you so damned happy that you want to shout for joy. A hillock rises ahead, and you ease back, skim over the top of it, dropping down above cottonwoods lining the bank of a stream. You feel so lucky, so blessed to be a fighter pilot. Nearly one hundred of us are testing our skill and courage by leaving prop marks on the dirt roads, stampeding grazing cattle (a few angry ranchers even take pot shots at us) and raising the shingles off ranch houses. Swooping over the desert like a horde of metal locusts, we practice for strafing runs, the most dangerous missions that will eventually kill many of us. Our instructors warn us to get down on the deck as low as we can, staying below the beeline, where enemy machine guns can't target a clear shot.
That was Tonopah, where thirty fledgling pilots began six months of intensive training to become a combat fighter squadron-the 363rd. We lived surrounded by Nevada sand dunes in tarpaper shacks belching black smoke from the oil-burning stoves that only warmed themselves on cold desert nights. The wind never stopped blowing and the chow was awful, but none of us complained. We flew from dawn to dusk, six flights a day, six days a week, dogfighting, buzzing, and practicing gunnery. We crawled exhausted into the sack at ten and straggled to breakfast at 4:30 A.M., taking off on our first flight of the day just as dawn broke. I logged one hundred hours of flying that first month. Hog heaven.
No matter what happened later, the war had already changed my life forever. Unlike others in the squadron I had never dreamt of being an aviator. Even as kids, guys like Bud Anderson and Jim Browning used to hang around airports and wash old Boeing tri-motors to get a free ride. Me, I was a pool hustler from the West Virginia hollers. I saw my first airplane close-up when a Beechcraft bellied into a cornfield on the Mud River, and I went to look at it to see what all the excitement was about. I was fifteen, and stopped by on my bike to see the wreck before heading out to the county poor farm where I helped out on Saturday afternoons, giving shaves to the old codgers. Between running chores, playing kelly pool in the poolhall or poker under a covered bridge at the edge of town, and catting around with three or four different gals, there wasn't a helluva lot going on in my life in the summer of 1941. I had my diploma from Hamlin High School tucked in a drawer somewhere, and I fished it out, together with my birth certificate proving I was eighteen, when an Army Air Corps recruiter came to town. I enlisted for a two year hitch. I thought I might enjoy it and see some of the world. Dad never preached at us, and I can recall him giving me only two pieces of advice: never buy a pickup truck that wasn't built by General Motors and, much later, on the day I left for the service, he said, "Son, don't gamble." He hadn't been pleased with a job I had had sweeping up and racking the balls at the poolhall for ten bucks a month, and especially he hadn't liked it when I picked up side money hustling games.
I became an airplane mechanic. Growing up around truck engines and drilling equipment generators, I was one of the few kids in town who could take apart a car motor and put it back together again. Dad was an expert mechanic, and I just understood motors-a natural ability, like having exceptional eyes and the coordination to be a crack shot. Hand a rifle to a hillbilly and he'll hit a bull's eye every time. So, without knowing or even caring, I had the talents needed for flying in combat. But after taking my first airplane ride, I'd rather have crawled across country than go back up. I took off for a spin with a maintenance officer flight testing a ship I had serviced, and I threw up all over the back seat, staggering out of that damned thing as miserable as I'd ever been. But teenagers blot out the past when the present seems appealing. I saw a notice announcing a "Flying Sergeant" program. I'd take my chances with trying to become a sergeant. Three stripes and you were out of pulling K.P. and guard duty. I applied.
The war was only a few months old when I was accepted. There were only a few of us enlisted men; the rest were college boys, cadets who would become commissioned officers when they received their aviator's wings. At first I worried about keeping up with guys who were a little older and a whole lot better educated than I was, but once we took off in a trainer, we were all created equal. I got sick the first few flights, but quickly overcame it. Because I was well coordinated, I had less trouble than most handling a stick and rudder. But it was hard work learning to fly, and like everyone else, I sweated through my first solo and bounced in for a landing in one piece. But rather soon, the differences between students began to show. After fifteen hours of flying, an instructor complimented me by assuming I had flown a lot in civilian life. He was damned impressed when I told him I was just a learner.
Flying became fun. I knew what I was doing in the cockpit and understood the airplane. In only a month, I graduated from being air-sick even while flying level to actually enjoying spins and dives. I was lucky; some cadets never made it past the airsick phase. Being cocky and competitive, I began bouncing other students and staging mock dogfights. I could line up on air or ground targets before others in the class even saw them. My instructor knew who was best in the group, and in the end, I was the one he recommended to become a fighter pilot. I was thrilled.
Dad and my kid brother, Hal, Jr. came to Arizona to see me get my wings, but I didn't report to the 363rd Fighter Squadron as a flying sergeant. By then, the regulations had changed, and those of us receiving our wings as enlisted men were made noncommissioned flight officers, wearing blue bars instead of gold. I didn't care. In fact, I felt damned lucky that because of the war mobilization, my military records had not caught up with me. Otherwise, I would have probably been bounced from flight school when they discovered I had been court-martialed as a corporal for shooting a horse with a thirty-caliber machine gun. On guard duty one night, I showed a guy how to fire the gun by shooting bursts out into the desert. I saw the horses grazing, but thought I would fire short; I didn't, and an angry rancher demanded that the Air Corps pay for his dead horse.
In Nevada, we trained in the Bell Airacobra, the P-39, a compact tricycle-geared fighter, with the engine mounted behind the cockpit and a 37-millimeter cannon barrel protruding through the prop shaft. You entered the cockpit through a car-type door, which made you wonder how quickly you could get out if the ship spun in. But I was excited to be flying in a real fighter plane. I remember my first morning there, Bill "Obie" ' O'Brien, one of the squadron leaders, with three hundred hours more flying time than the rest of us, checked me out in the ThirtyNine. Obie was tough and demanding. I sat in the cockpit while he explained all the switches. "Okay, Yeager," he said, "when you take off, raise the nose-gear at sixty miles an hour-it'll get airborne about ninety or one hundred. Then, raise your landing gear and keep the son of a bitch wide open until you get out. Then, cut the power back. Same way on landing. Hell, it's no problem." Then he slammed the cockpit door and signaled for me to fire up my engine. Instruction over.
There were three squadrons in our fighter group, and among all those pilots, I was one of the few who loved the Thirty-Nine and would have gladly flown it off to war. The British refused it, and so did our own Air Corps, except for instruction, so we gave P-39s to the Russians to fight in. Our guys even sang a song about it: