Not until I went to close the African front did I realize what our fighter pilots had been through and what they were doing.  Somehow or other we didn’t hear much about them, but they were the sponge that was absorbing the fury of the Luftwaffe over here.  They were taking it and taking it and taking it.  An everlasting credit should be theirs.

In England, the fighters of the RAF got the glory because of the great Battle of Britain in 1940.  But in America our attention had been centered on the bombers.  The spectacular success of the Flying Fortresses when they went into action made the public more bomber-conscious.

There was still rivalry between the fighters and the bombers, as there always had been.  That in itself was probably a good thing.  But after a time it had sort of slipped out of the category of rivalry—it had developed into a feeling on the part of the fighter pilots that they were neglected and unappreciated and that they were taking a little more than their share on the nose.  Their ratio of losses was higher than that of the bombers, and their ratio of credit was lower.

There had been exaggerations in the claims that the Fortresses could take care of themselves without fighter escort.  Any number of the bomber pilots told me they were deeply grateful for the fighter cover they had in Africa, and that if they had to go without it they would feel like very naked men on their way to work.

Our heavy bombers then were always escorted by Lockheed Lightnings (P-38s).  It was their job to keep off German fighters and to absorb whatever deadliness the Nazis dealt out.  It meant longer trips than fighters had ever made before.  Sometimes they had to carry extra gas tanks, which they dropped when the fight started.  They mixed it with the enemy when they were already tired from long flying at high altitudes.  And then if they were crippled they had to navigate alone all the way home.

The P-38 is a marvelous airplane, and every pilot who flew it loved it.  But the very thing that made the Lightning capable of those long trips—its size—unfitted it for the type of combat it faced when it got there.

If two Lightnings and two Messerschmitt 109s got into a fight, the Americans were almost bound to come out the little end of the horn, because the Lightnings were heavier and less maneuverable.

The ideal work of the P-38 was as an interceptor, ground strafer, or light hit-and-run bomber.  It would have been a perfect weapon in the hands of the Germans to knock down our day bombers.  Thank goodness they didn’t have it.

Convoying bombers was monotonous work for the fighter pilot who lived on dash and vim.  Those boys sometimse had to sit cramped in their little seat for six hours.  In a bomber they could move around, but not in a fighter.  The bomber had a big crew to do different things, but the fighter pilot was everything in one.  He was his own navigator, his own radio operator, his own gunner.  When I heard the pilots tell of all the things they had to do during a flight I was amazed that they ever found time to keep a danger eye out for Germans.

Although our fighters in North Africa accounted for many more German planes than we lost, still our fighter losses were high.  I chummed with a roomful of five fighter pilots for a week.  By the seventh night two of those five were gone.

[. . .]

Our fighters waited in groups with the bombers, ranging the sky above them, flying back and forth, watching for anything that might appear.  But if they sawe some Germans in the distance nobody went after them.  That would have been playing into the enemy’s hands.  Our fighters stuck to their formation above the bombers, making an umbrella.

The Germans had two choices—to dive down through them, or to wait until somebody was hit by flak and had to drop back.  If anyone dropped back, they were on him in a flash.  When that happened the fighters attacked but still in formation.  Keeping that formation always and forever tight was what the flight leaders constantly drilled into the boy’s heads.  It was a great temptation to dash out and take a shot at some fellow, but by then they had seen too many cases of the tragedy of such actions.

One group leader told me, “If everything went according to schedule we’d never shoot down a German plane.  We’d cover our bombers and keep ourselves covered and everybody would come home safe.”

The fighter pilots seemed a little different from the bomber men.  Usually they were younger.  Many of them were still in school when they joined up.  Ordinarily they might be inclined to be more harum-scarum, but their work was so deadly and the sobering dark cloud of personal tragedy was over them so constantly that it seemed to have humbled them.  In fact, I think it made them nicer people than if they had been cocky.

[. . .]

When they first arrived, I frequently heard pilots say they didn’t hate the Germans, but I didn’t hear that for long.  They lost too many friends, too many roomates.  Soon it was killing that animated them.

The highest spirits I saw in that room were displayed one evening after they had come back from a strafing mission.  That was what they liked to do best, but they got little of it.  It was a great holiday from escorting bombers, a job they hated.  Going out free-lancing to shoot up whatever they could see, and going in enough force to be pretty sure they would be superior to the enemy, that was utopia.

That was was what they had done that day.  And they really had had a field day.  They ran onto a German truck convoy and blew it to pieces.  They laughed and got excited as they told about it.  The trucks were all full of men, and “they flew out like firecrackers.”  Motorcyclists got hit and dived forty feet before they stopped skiddin.  Two Messerschmitt 109s made the mistake of coming after our planes.  They never had a chance.  After firing a couple of wild bursts they went down smoking, and one of them seemed to blow up.

The boys were full of laughter when they told about it as they sat there on their cots in the dimly lighted room.  I couldn’t help having a funny feeling about them.  They were all so young, so genuine, so enthusiastic.  And they were so casual about everything—not in a hard, knowing way, but they talked about their flights and killing and being killed exactly as they would discuss girls or their school lessons.