We were so close to the front lines we could base permanently in our own camp and still get to the firing lines in half an hour.  German raiders came over daily, but our air superiority was so great that oftentimes we didn’t even look up.  All night the artillery rumbled, and the ground quivered.  When I first arrived I couldn’t sleep because of it, but I got used to it.

Unaccustomed as I was to air superiority, I must say that after an even brief association with that notorious stranger I found him one of the pleasantest companions.

With air superiority on his side a man could sit down in his tent and just keep on sitting, without running out for a cautious check-up every time he heard a plane.  With air superiority a man could drive along in his jeep and not hit the ditch every time he saw a bird soaring in the distance.  With air superiority on his side a man could hear great droning formations approaching and know automatically that they were his, not theirs.  We got so we didn’t even fuss if we saw a German plane, because we knew the skies were so full of our patrolling Hawks that they would get him before he could do much damage.

We had air superiority in Tunisia those days, and how!  Shortly before we were supposed to have a five-to-one advantage, and the odds were growing every day as the Germans withdrew some planes and others bit the eternal dust.

Our ground troops at last knew the exalting experience of fighting all day without a single Stuka diving on them.  As our air strength grew and the enemy’s dwindled we almost began to feel sorry for the poor troops on the other side who were then tasting the bitter brew from the skies.

For a time there I lived again with some of our American fighter pilots, and I found that the shift in balance had done as much for them as for our ground troops.  They flew themselves punch-drunk in that big push, yet they flew with a dash they had never known before.  For at last they were on the upper end of things.

We made great hay while the sun shone.  The ground crews worked like fiends keeping the planes flyable.  Pilots were going at a pace they couldn’t possibly have stood very long.  Some fighter pilots flew as many as five missions a day; formerly one was tops.  The fighters did all kinds of work—escorting, ground sweeping, dogfighting, and even light bombing.

Let me tell you how that air superiority worked.  In the old days we had sent a cover of fighters along with the bombers, but there were hardly ever enough of them.  When we came into our own, we not only sent an enormous cover but we sent a second layer to cover the cover.  A sort of double insulation.  We didn’t even stop there.  We sent out groups of fighters known as “free lances,” far out of sight of our bombers, just to intercept anything that might be wandering around.  And to wind it all up we sent out fresh planes to meet the bombers just after they left the target, in case the regular cover of fighters might have trouble or ran low on gas.  They were called “delousing missions,” and they scraped off any pests that got tenacious.

Both sides had kept constant airdrome patrols in the air all winter—from two to half a dozen planes circling each airdrome constantly from dawn to dusk, to be already in the air if enemy planes appeared.  After we got the upper hand, we still patrolled, but we also took on a little extra work, and this I think is the ultimate in air superiority: we patrolled the German airdromes too!

Our fighters actually patrolled one whole afternoon over a big German drome, just flying back and forth and around, and prevented every single German plane from even taking off.  Of course that was an isolated case, and I’m not trying to make you believe that we patrolled all the German dromes all the time, but the fact that it could happen at all was practically phenomenal.

Yes, air superiority was a wonderful thing.  It was one of life’s small luxuries to which I was eager to become more accustomed.