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"THREE SECONDS TO FIGHT"BY: CAPTAIN NEWELL O. ROBERTS
94TH. UNITED STATES PURSUIT SQUADRON
 A new member of an old fighter group tells how our pilots worked their P-38s against all comers, from the ground to 35,000 feet into the Mediterranean sky. With three seconds to work, you have no time to correct mistakesI LEARNED one thing from the first Jerry I shot down. In a fight with a Messeschmitt, three seconds is all the time you have to live or die. The same goes for Jerry, too. People back home have the idea that fighter pilots zoom and dive and twist like a swarm of bees, spitting bullets right and left. It isn't like that at all! You take off in your twin-engine P-38 Lightning for a three-hour flight, patroling, strafing and escorting bombers. Altogether, you have about three minutes shooting in your guns, which pack the most concentrated firepower of any fighter plane. You hold your fire until you are a hundred yards from your enemy and let her go in three second bursts. In three seconds you can squirt 300 shells. You get him, or he gets you. � � My first Jerry was one of two Me-110s cruising over Gabes at the southern end of Tunisia. I was the leader of my flight. We were patrolling that part of the Mediterranean to keep the U-boats under water. We also had orders to strafe German field concentrations around Gabes from thirty feet above the ground. We call that buzzing. � � I saw two Jerries above us going the same direction as we were. We hadthe speed to overhual them. There wasn't anytime to maneuver. I gave my engine the blossom, pulled my nose up, got one Jerry in my sights, gave him a squirt and he burst into flames. The job took about as long as it takes to tell it. A buddy of mine (Jack Ilfrey) got the other one. � � Air warfare is a percentage game. You fight in teams or you're dead. They'll shoot you down any time you go into acrobatic maneuvers. It takes a few seconds to go into a roll or a spin and the other fellow gets you in the first second. � � There isn't any room for grudge fighting. Almost all pilots we lost were fellows who let themselves be sucked out of formation. The Jerries used to send one of their planes out in front and down low as a decoy. If one of our men dived on the decoy a whole team of Me's invariably dived on him. If our whole team took the bait, the Me team usually stayed out of it. We could outfly and outshoot them. � � Our squadron was a Pursuit. We still used the Hat-in-the-Ring insignia that Eddie Rickenbacker and his men used in the first World War. Ours was one of the first fighter groups to reach Algeria. We took off from England, flew nine hours and fifteen minutes with a B-26 as a mother ship to guide us. Sitting that long strapped into the seat of a P-38 is bad enough. But in this flight an even worse strain was not knowing if we would have to shoot our way into the airfield at Oran where we were to land. � � Fortunately, the field had surrendered to our troops, but that didn't make it much better because Junkers Ju-88s had just bombed the field and we had to dodge the holes that pocked the runway. The Colonel's ship hit one and smashed up as flat as a pancake. He crawled out unhurt. � � Winging that far overseas set a record for fighter planes, but it was duck soup for us after flying the North Atlantic in mid-winter. Ours was the first squadron of fighters to wing across the ocean. After Pearl Harbor we had been rushed to San Diego and Long Beach to guard the Southern California coast. Everybody thought Tojo would be sending a carrier over to blast our aircraft factories. Our task was to head the Japs off at the sea if they came. This was a break, because the P-38s were so new that nobody knew how to fly them. We had to work out an entirely new system of battle tactics. � � Looking back, I would say this was the most dangerous flying I have done. Once in a formation so tight that our wingtips were only three feet apart, another pilot jammed his wing into my rudder. It was my first collision in the air. We got down alright -- Robert's luck. Another time I saw two P-38s below me fold together, back to back, and plunge into the ocean. Once, in another fog, a pilot came up under me, knocking both my engines out. He bailed out, but I like to stick with a ship. I pancaked in a small field without a scratch -- more Robert's luck. |
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� � One day they gave us new P-38s equipped with belly tanks, and the rumor spread that we were going overseas. By that time we knew what the P-38s would do -- or we thought we did. Our squadron flew from Southern California to Maine, and day after day we practiced long flights through the soup over the Atlantic. Next we flew a base to Labrador. It was lost in the overcast. Every day the Flying Fortress carrying the navigator who was to get us to Greenland flew out and looked over the situation. The best weatherman in the world couldn't predict what we would find out there. � � After several false starts, we took off again, hovering around the Fortress. Our flight made a tiny runway in Greenland. There were mountains all around and icebergs in the water. Our flight got down all right. But another. which started the same day, heading for another Greenland runway, landed on the icecaps and stayed there a long time before being rescued. We pushed on to Reykjavik, Iceland. � � The next flight still gives me dreams more terrible than any fight I have ever been in. We took off in thick, soupy weather for Scotland with a Fortress for each four Lightnings. As the soup became thicker and thicker, we jammed ourselves closer under the wings of the Fortress. We were flying so tight that our wingtips almost touched. We flew like that for five hours. It seemed like fifty. � � By the end of that time we had no idea whether we were over Scotland or Germany. Once we saw land through a hole in the clouds. It flashed by so fast that we still didn't know our whereabouts. Finally we made radio contact with a station in Northern Ireland and also with one in England and asked them to give us homings. They gave them but we couldn't understand them. � � When we cussed them out, they called back: � � "Don't worry, old chappies, stay up there and we'll have you down in a jiffy!" � � They sent up a Beaufighter and he got us into an airfield in the nick of time. I had enough gasoline for thirty minutes' flying. � � They sent us to train with the hottest combat squadron in Britain, the 303rd. Polish Pursuit Group. They were flyint Spitfires. Those Polish kids taught us everything they had learned in combat over Europe. Then we went along on seven combat operations over France. on none ofthese were we jumped by any Jerries. By the time we reached Africa, we knew how to sweep the skies of Jerries and Eyties. The Poles were the best sky fighters I saw anywhere. � � Our squadron's first base in Africa was a place called Youk-le Barnes. It was supposed to be an airfield. Actually it was a pasture. When it rained, we had to land without using the front wheel of the tri-cycle landing. If we did, it would bury itself in the mud and we would flip on our backs. � � For the first week we were our own ground crew. We flew all day, then worked six or eight hours at night cleaning and laoding our guns and filling the gas tanks from five-gallon cans. You haven't any idea how many five-gallon cans it takes to fill a P-38. There were so many of them that later when the ground crews arrived, we filled them with earth and stacked them up to make the walls to live in. � � Up to that time we had only pup tents for shelter, rain or shine. For the first week in Africa, I lived on chocolate bars and emergency rations. Something had happened to our supplies. I landed in Africa weighing 175 pounds and left four months later weighing 135. � � The idea, when our squadron was sent to Africa, was that the Lightning was to do the high-altitude work. They were built to fly and fight at 30,000 feet and above. Ourmain task was to escort Flying Fortresses at high level on bombing forays over Italy, silcily, Sardinia, Tunisia and Tripoli. At that time, nobody had any idea that the P-38s were good for any job from ten feet off the ground up to the ceiling. � � When I say ten feet off the ground, I mean ten feet, too. That's how low we flew at Faid Pass. One morning our GHQ assigned our squadron to a special mission, clening out the Nazi's gun positions in the pass so that our troops could push through. � � There were only four of us. We flew abreast. The canyon had steep walls on both sides and there was barely room for the four planes to fly with the wingtips almost touching. My flight consisted of Mac Whorter, Jack Ilfrey, Bill Lovell and myself. The order said we were to do the job between 7:20 and 7:25 a.m., not earlier, not later. |
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