January 11, 1944 German Pilots Mocked the P 51 Mustang – And Couldn’t Escape

20,000 ft above central Germany on the 11th of January 1944. The men inside the American bombers watched death climb toward them. More than 30 German fighters were closing on their formation. Their escort was nowhere in sight. The gunners knew how this ended. They had heard what happened over Schwinfort. Bombers torn apart.

Whole crews of 10 young men gone in a single breath. Then something dropped out of the sky above them. One fighter, one American Mustang with two strange words painted on its nose. It did not circle. It did not call for help. It dove straight into the German formation alone. For the next half hour, the bomber crews watched something none of them could fully explain.

The lone Mustang attacked again and again, even as its guns jammed one after another. German pilots who had spent a year hunting American bombers suddenly found themselves hunted by an enemy they had never expected to meet this deep inside their own country. Who was the man in that cockpit? Why was he alone? And what did the German fighter pilots begin to understand that day when they looked over their shoulders and saw an American fighter that simply would not turn back? Make yourself comfortable with your favorite drink. Then check the time and

tell us exactly what your clock says right now. We’d love to know what time people around the world are joining us. On the afternoon of October the 14th, 1943, the sky over the German city of Schweinfort filled with smoke that did not come from the factories below. It came from American bombers. 291 B17 flying fortresses had been sent that morning to destroy the ball bearing plants of Schweinford.

Ball bearings were the quiet heart of the German war machine. Every tank, every truck, every aircraft engine in the Reich spun on them. Wreck the bearings, the planners believed, and the whole machine would begin to seize. The bombers reached the target. Many of them never left German airspace.

60 flying fortresses were shot down. Each one carried a crew of 10. Roughly 600 American airmen were killed or captured before the sun went down. Other bombers staggered home to England so badly shot up that they would never fly again. On the airfields of Eastern England, ground crews stood beside empty hard stands long after dark, waiting for aircraft that were never coming back.

The men of the Eighth Air Force gave that day a name. They called it Black Thursday. At 8th Air Force headquarters in a former girls school at High Wickham, northwest of London, Lieutenant General Ira Eker read the loss reports. Ekker was 47 years old, a Texan, a stubborn and careful man who had spent more than a year defending a single idea.

He believed American bombers could fight their way through Germany in broad daylight without fighters to protect them. It was a very American idea. A flying fortress bristled with heavy machine guns in the nose, the tail, the waist, the top turret, the ball turret slung beneath the belly, put dozens of those bombers into tight, stacked boxes, and any German fighter that came close would fly into a storm of crossing fire.

The bombers would protect each other. They would drop their bombs with precision using the famous Nordan bomb site, and they would come home. Schweinffort was not the first warning. In August, the first raid on Schweinffort and Reagansburg had also cost 60 bombers. Twice now, the answer had come back written in wreckage.

The young men in the barracks did not need a staff officer to explain the arithmetic. A bomber crew had to survive 25 missions before it could go home. Losses like Schweinford repeated even a handful of times meant that most of the men sleeping in those huts would never finish their tour. They knew it and they climbed into their bombers anyway.

After Black Thursday, deep unescorted strikes into the heart of Germany were quietly put on hold. The Eighth Air Force had not been defeated, but it had been stopped. The problem was not courage. The problem was fuel. The Americans had good fighters in England. The Republic P47 Thunderbolt was a massive, rugged machine with eight heavy machine guns and an engine that could take a terrible beating and keep turning.

But it drank fuel at a staggering rate. Even with drop tanks slung beneath its belly, the Thunderbolt could shepherd the bombers only so far before its pilots had to turn for home. The Lockheed P38 Lightning had longer legs, but in the autumn of 1943, there were only a handful of Lightning groups in England, and their engines struggled in the brutal cold of high altitude.

And so, somewhere over western Germany, on every deep mission, the same thing happened. The little friends, as the bomber crews called their escorts, waggled their wings and peeled away to the west. The bombers flew on alone. The Luftwaffa understood this perfectly. German fighter controllers watched the escorts on their radar and waited.

Their fighters circled beyond the reach of the American escort, patient and unhurried. When the Thunderbolts turned back, the Germans came in. Twin engine Messers BF-110s and Mi410s stood off beyond the range of the bombers guns and fired heavy 21 cm rockets into the formations. The rockets rarely hit directly, but they did not need to.

A single explosion inside a tight bomber box could scatter it. Pilots flinched. Formations loosened, and the moment a bomber drifted away from the protection of its neighbors, the single engine fighters struck. Faulkwolf FW190s came straight at the bombers from the front where the defensive guns were weakest.

Messers BF 109s picked off the cripples. It was methodical. It was efficient. And through the autumn of 1943, it worked. What the Americans needed was a fighter with the speed to fight a fwolf at high altitude and the range to fly all the way to the target and back. Many experts doubted such an aircraft could be built. The answer had already been flying for 3 years.

Almost nobody had noticed. In the spring of 1940, with France collapsing and the Battle of Britain about to begin, a British purchasing commission arrived at North American aviation in Southern California. Britain needed fighters and it needed them immediately. The commission asked North American to build Curtis P40s under license for the Royal Air Force.

North American’s president, James Kindleberger, a blunt former army pilot everyone called Dutch, made a bold counter offer. his company would not build someone else’s fighter. It would design a better one from scratch. The British agreed. North Americans engineers worked at a furious pace, and the prototype airframe was finished in just over 100 days.

It had a slim, clean fuselage, a new laminer flow wing designed to slip through the air with less drag, and a radiator tucked beneath the belly behind the pilot. On October the 26th, 1940, it flew for the first time. The British named it the Mustang. It was a beautiful aircraft with one serious weakness. Its Allison engine ran beautifully close to the ground, but it had only a single stage supercharger, and above roughly 15,000 ft, it began to gasp for air.

At low altitude, the Mustang was faster than almost anything in the sky. Up where the bombers flew, it was ordinary. The Royal Air Force put it to work flying low-level reconnaissance and ground attack missions over France. The United States Army Air Forces bought versions of it as a dive bomber and as a lowaltitude fighter, but no one thought of it as the aircraft that would win the high altitude war over Germany.

That changed on April the 30th, 1942. That day, a Rolls-Royce liaison pilot named Ronald Harker visited the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Development Unit at Duxford and took a Mustang up for a test flight. Harker flew many fighters as part of his job. He knew what good handling felt like, and he came down from that flight convinced that the Mustang’s airframe was something special.

It was fast, clean, and surprisingly economical with fuel. The only thing holding it back was the engine. Harker made a recommendation that would echo across the entire war. “Put a Rolls-Royce Merlin in it,” he suggested. The Merlin 61 with its two-stage supercharger built for high altitude. Engineers on both sides of the Atlantic took up the idea.

In Britain, Rolls-Royce fitted Merlin into several Mustangs for testing. In America, the Packard Motorcar Company was already building the Merlin under license, and North American designed a new version of the Mustang around it. The American prototype flew in late November of 1942. The results were astonishing.

The new Mustang could reach roughly 440 mph at high altitude. It could climb with the best German fighters. And because the airframe was so clean and the engine so efficient, a Mustang carrying drop tanks could fly deeper into Germany than any Allied fighter had ever gone, fight there, and still come home.

The aircraft nobody had wanted was suddenly the answer to the most urgent problem in the American air war. Production of the new model, the P-51B, began at North American’s plant in Englewood, California, in the summer of 1943. By late that year, the first of them were crossing the Atlantic. Now, they needed men to fly them.

One of those men had been born about as far from California as a boy could be. James Howell Howard came into the world on April the 8th, 1913 in Canton, China, the city now called Guangha. His parents were American. His father was an eye doctor who had gone to China to teach eye surgery. The boy spent his early childhood surrounded by the sounds and languages of a country that was tearing itself apart through years of revolution and civil war.

In 1927, when he was 14, the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri. Howard finished school there and went west to Pomona College in California, graduating in 1937. Then he chose the sky. In January of 1938, he reported to the Naval Air Station at Pensacola, Florida. And in 1939, he earned his wings as a Navy pilot.

He was assigned to the aircraft carrier Enterprise, flying from the waters around Pearl Harbor. In the summer of 1941, before America was at war, Howard made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. He resigned from the Navy and joined the American Volunteer Group, a unit of American pilots recruited to defend China against Japan.

The world would come to know them as the Flying Tigers. He was going back to the country where he had been born. Howard flew the Curtis P40 with the second squadron of the Flying Tigers over Burma, Thailand, and China against a Japanese air force that outnumbered them badly. He flew 56 missions.

He was credited with six victories, a total that included Japanese aircraft destroyed on the ground during a strafing attack in the first days of 1942. He learned what every surviving flying tiger learned. Never fight on the enemy’s terms. Strike hard, strike fast, and keep moving. When the American volunteer group was disbanded on July the 4th, 1942, Howard came home.

He accepted a commission as a captain in the Army Air Forces. By 1943, he was a major and he was given command of the 356th Fighter Squadron of a new outfit called the 354th Fighter Group. He was 30 years old, older than most of the young pilots he led, and he had already seen more combat than nearly all of them. The 354th was commanded by Colonel Kenneth Martin, a 27-year-old officer known for drilling his pilots relentlessly on tactics.

The group had trained in the western United States. In the autumn of 1943, it crossed to England and settled at Boxed, an airfield near Colchester in Essex. There, the pilots learned they would be the first American fighter group to take the new P-51B Mustang into combat. They would soon be known as the Pioneer Mustang Group.

But there was a strange twist to their assignment. The 354th did not belong to the eighth air force, the command that flew the heavy bombers and needed long range escorts more desperately than anyone. It belonged to the 9inth Air Force, a tactical command being built up to support the coming invasion of France. On paper, the most valuable escort fighter in the American arsenal had been handed to a unit meant for close support of ground troops.

The eighth air force protested and a compromise was reached. The 354th would remain part of the 9inth Air Force, but it would fly escort for the eighth air force’s bombers. The first Mustang Group in Europe was in effect on loan. The group flew its first combat mission in early December of 1943. Its pilots battled engine trouble, frosted canopies, and jamming guns.

They learned fast. Howard had two words painted on the nose of his Mustang. Dinghao. It was a Chinese expression he had carried home from the Flying Tigers. Roughly translated, it meant very good or number one. On January the 6th, 1944, the 8th Air Force changed hands. Ira Eker was sent to command Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, a move he fought bitterly and could not stop.

His replacement was Major General James Doolittle, 47 years old, a former air racer with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the man who in April of 1942 had led 16 B-25 bombers off the deck of the carrier Hornet to strike Tokyo. Doolittle was not a man who waited, and the Allied airplane had one priority above all others.

The German aircraft industry had to be crushed before the invasion of Europe could safely begin. 5 days after Doolittle took command, the bombers would be sent back into the heart of Germany. The main target lay about a 100 miles west of Berlin, far deeper than any Thunderbolt could follow. A small town called Ashers Leen, home to a factory that built the very faul of Wolf fighters that had been slaughtering American bombers all year.

The men who would fly there did not yet know that over the target, the only American fighters to reach them would be a single group of Mustangs. The morning of Tuesday, January the 11th, 1944, began in darkness, the way every mission morning began. At Dinaththorp, a bomber base carved out of the farmland of Northamptonshire.

A flashlight swept across the rows of CS in the Nissen huts of the 4001st bomb group. Men groaned and swung their feet onto cold concrete floors. The huts were made of curved corrugated steel, and in January they held the cold like an ice box. A small coke stove in the middle of the room glowed dull red and warmed almost nothing. Breath hung in the air.

Somewhere a man coughed. Somewhere else a man said nothing at all and simply sat on the edge of his cot for a long moment, staring at his boots. The 4001st was a young group. It had arrived in England only a few months earlier. Its crews had flown enough missions to know fear intimately, but not enough to have grown numb to it.

They dressed in layers, long underwear, wool shirts, and trousers. electrically heated flying suits that plugged into the bomber’s power system because at bombing altitude the air outside could fall to 40 degrees below zero, cold enough to freeze bare skin to metal in seconds. Then came fleece lined boots, heavy gloves, and leather helmets.

Then came the briefing. The crews filed into the briefing room and settled onto wooden benches shoulderto-shoulder, the air thick with cigarette smoke. At the front of the room, a curtain hung over a large map of Europe. Every man in the room watched that curtain. What lay behind it would decide whether this was a milk run or the kind of mission men wrote letters home before.

The curtain was pulled back. A long ribbon of red yarn ran from England out across the North Sea, over the coast of Holland, and on into Germany. It did not stop at the ruer. It did not stop at the Rine. It kept going deep into the center of the country until it ended at a place most of the men had never heard of. Asher’s Laben.

A low sound moved through the room. Not quite a groan, more like a single long breath let out by a hundred men at once. The intelligence officer explained the targets. The Eighth Air Force was sending three bombardment divisions against the German aircraft industry. One force would strike the AGO aircraft plant at Asher Leen which built FaulVulf FW190 fighters.

Others would hit aircraft factories at Halbert and in the area around Brunswick. These were the very plants producing the fighters that had torn the bomber formations apart over Schweinford. It was a mission that made cold sense and every man in that room understood what it meant. They were being sent to destroy the enemy fighters at their source and the enemy would throw everything it had into the sky to stop them.

Then someone asked the question that mattered most. What about escort? The answer was better than it would have been 3 months earlier and still not good enough. Thunderbolts would cover the bombers on the way in and on the way out as far as their fuel allowed over the target area itself. The plan called for long range fighters, among them the new Mustangs.

There would not be many of them. The man leading the 4001st that day was Major Allison Brooks. He would fly at the front of the group’s formation, and he would see more of that day than he would ever want to remember. Nearly a 100 miles to the southeast at Boxed in Essex, the pilots of the 354th Fighter Group sat through a briefing of their own.

Their task was simple to describe and brutally hard to carry out. They would fly across the North Sea, across Holland, across hundreds of miles of German territory, and meet the bombers in the target area at the deepest and most dangerous point of the entire mission. The group would put 49 Mustangs into the air, and it would divide them to cover the bombers over the target areas.

Leading the group into the air that day was Major James Howard. He listened to the briefing the way he did everything, quietly taking it in. 49 fighters to protect hundreds of bombers, over targets deep in Germany, against a Luftwafa that would be fighting over its own homeland, close to its own airfields, with every advantage of fuel and numbers.

Howard had flown against long odds before over Burma when the Flying Tigers had been outnumbered nearly every time they took off. He knew what those odds felt like from the inside. He also knew the Mustang still had problems. Its engine could be temperamental. Its canopy frosted over in the cold, and its guns were a worry. The P-51B carried four heavy 50 caliber machine guns, two in each wing, but they were mounted tilted inside the thin wing, and the ammunition belts had to feed to them at an angle.

Under the heavy forces of a hard turn, those belts could bind, and the guns could jam. Pilots in the group had already experienced it. It was a problem that would take time to cure. For now, there was only the hope that it would not happen when it mattered. Out on the dispersal areas, ground crews had been working through the night.

They warmed engines, loaded ammunition, topped off fuel, and hung drop tanks beneath the wings. When the pilots arrived, bundled in their flying gear, their crew chiefs helped them up onto the wings and into the cramped cockpits. On the nose of one Mustang, the words, “Dinggha,” stood out against the olive paint.

Howard settled into the seat and ran through the checks. he could have done in his sleep. Fuel selector, mixture, propeller, oxygen. He pulled on his mask and felt the rubber press cold against his face. The cockpit of a P-51B was narrow, and its framed canopy cut the view behind him into panels of glass and metal. A fighter pilot’s life depended on what he could see over his shoulder.

And in this aircraft, he had to twist hard in his harness to see it. The Merlin caught with a cough and a burst of blue smoke, then settled into a deep, even rumble that shook the whole airframe. It was a sound pilots never forgot, smooth, powerful, and hungry. All across eastern England, the engines began to turn. It is hard for anyone who was not there to imagine the scale of what rose into the sky that morning.

663 heavy bombers, 525 B17 flying fortresses, and 138 B-24 Liberators, taking off from dozens of airfields scattered across the English countryside. Each bomber lumbered down its runway heavy with fuel and bombs, lifted off with agonizing slowness, and began to climb into the gray winter overcast. Assembling that armada was a feat in itself.

The bombers had to climb through cloud, find their own groups, and slot into position. Hundreds of aircraft circling in the same crowded sky. Collisions during assembly were a constant fear. Slowly, the formations took shape. Group by group, wing by wing, the great bomber stream turned east and headed out over the North Sea. Over the water, the gunners test fired their weapons.

Short hammering bursts shook every aircraft and filled the cabins with the smell of burned powder. The waist gunners stood at their open windows in the roaring freezing wind. The ball turret gunners folded themselves into their tiny spheres beneath the bellies of the fortresses. The tail gunners knelt alone at the back of the aircraft, watching the sky behind them.

At the altitude where the bombers flew, the oxygen masks became the difference between life and death. The men checked each other constantly over the intercom. A man whose oxygen line froze or disconnected could slip into unconsciousness without ever realizing anything was wrong. Cruz called out by position. Tail, ball, waste, radio. Anyone who did not answer got a visit from someone crawling back through the fuselage with a portable oxygen bottle.

Far behind the bomber stream, the Mustangs of the 354th crossed the same gray water on their own long route to the target area. For a fighter pilot, a mission like this one was mostly waiting, hours of it, sitting strapped into a tiny seat, his legs cramping, his hands stiff inside his gloves, listening to the steady drone of the engine, and watching the fuel gauges.

Every gallon mattered. The pilots flew on their drop tanks first, saving the fuel inside the wings for the fight and the long flight home. Every few minutes they scanned the sky. Left, right, above, below, behind, the endless rhythm of a man who knows that the enemy he fails to see is the one who kills him.

Below them, the North Sea stretched away in every direction, flat and cold and the color of lead. A pilot who went down in that water in January would live only minutes. Every man in the formation knew it, and none of them spoke of it. The Dutch coast slid by beneath them. Then Germany, and the weather began to turn against them.

The forecasts had not been good to begin with. Now, as the morning wore on, conditions over England and over the continent grew steadily worse. Clouds thickened and spread. Commanders in England began to fear that returning bombers would find their bases buried in weather with hundreds of exhausted crews and damaged aircraft trying to land blind. A decision was made.

The recall went out. Across the bomber stream, formations began to wheel around and head back toward England. But not all of them. The groups of the first bombardment division and one combat wing of the third division were already closing on their targets. they were allowed to continue. The consequences of that decision rippled across the sky in ways no one on the ground could fully see.

Many of the fighters assigned to protect the bombers were also affected by the weather. Of the three fighter groups that had been assigned to cover the bombers in the target area, only one pushed on all the way, the 354th, 49 Mustangs. Now the bombers that pressed on toward Ashers Leen and Halberstat were flying deeper and deeper into Germany while much of the massive force that had been meant to overwhelm the German defenses turned around behind them.

On the ground in Germany, the Luftvafa’s controllers watched it happen. The German air defense system was one of the most sophisticated in the world. Radar stations along the coast had tracked the bomber stream since it formed up over England. Observers on the ground called in the heading and altitude of every formation.

In command bunkers, officers pushed markers across enormous plotting tables and watched the picture take shape, and the picture was a gift. Part of the American force had turned for home. The part that remained was flying on deep into the heart of Germany toward targets the Luftvafa was absolutely determined to protect. The German controllers could concentrate their fighters against it.

They could send squadron after squadron from airfields across northern and central Germany against a single part of the bomber stream. On airfields across the Reich, German pilots ran to their aircraft. Engines coughed and roared to life. Faulkwolf 490s and Messersmidt BF 109s rolled out of their revetments and climbed into the winter sky.

Twin engine BF-110s and MI410s, heavy and slow, lifted off, carrying their deadly rockets beneath their wings. Junker’s J88s joined them. It was the largest force the Luftwafa had thrown against the first bombardment division since October. For the German pilots, the plan was the same as it had been all autumn. Climb, wait, let the escorts reach the limit of their fuel and turn back, then fall on the bombers.

It had worked over Schwinfort. It had worked over Reagansburg. It had worked over city after city through the long, bloody months of 1943. Many of these men were skilled, battleh hardened pilots. They had learned the American escorts limits the way a hunter learns the habits of his prey. The Thunderbolt could not follow them this far east.

They knew that it was as solid a fact of their war as the ground beneath their runways. They were about to meet an American fighter that did not play by those rules. The attacks on the first bombardment division began and did not stop. German fighters came at the bomber boxes from every direction. The Fakavuls attacked headon, closing at a combined speed of more than 500 m an hour, firing their cannons in the few seconds before they flashed past or rolled beneath the formation.

From the cockpit of a flying fortress, a head-on pass was a nightmare that lasted no longer than a heartbeat. A row of winking lights appeared on the leading edge of an approaching wing. Then the fighter was gone, and the windscreen of the bomber beside you might be gone, too. The twin engine Messers stood off at a distance and fired their rockets.

Streaks of smoke arked toward the formations and exploded in flashes of orange and black. Bombers lurched and shuddered in the blasts. Over the intercoms, the calls came one on top of another. Fighters 12:00 high, two coming in low at 4. He’s burning. He’s burning. Get out. Get out. A fortress slid out of formation with an engine on fire, trailing a long black ribbon of smoke across the sky.

Men in the neighboring bombers counted the parachutes as they blossomed. Sometimes they counted 10. Sometimes they counted far fewer. Sometimes the bomber simply came apart before anyone could get out, and there was nothing to count at all. The gunners fired until their barrels smoked. Spent shell casings piled up around their feet and rolled across the floors.

The bombers held their formations as tightly as they could because they all knew the lesson of Schwinfort. A bomber that fell out of formation was a bomber that died. And into this from above came the Mustangs. The Luftwaffa pilots who had been waiting for the escort to vanish suddenly found single engine American fighters diving on them over central Germany.

The shapes did not match what they expected. These were not thunderbolts, huge and barrelchested. They were slimmer, sleeker fighters, and they were here deep in the heart of Germany where no American fighter was supposed to be able to reach. The 354th tore into the German formations. At the head of the group, James Howard led his fighters down against the attackers.

He picked out a twin engine Messersmid BF-110 and went after it. He closed the distance, held his fire until he was sure, and then pressed the trigger. The heavy guns hammered, pieces flew off the German fighter, and it went down. It was a clean, fast kill, but combat at those speeds scattered formations in seconds.

When Howard pulled up out of the attack and looked around, the other mustangs of his flight were gone. His wingman was gone. The sky that had been full of his own fighters a minute earlier was suddenly empty of them. This was one of the most dangerous moments a fighter pilot could face. alone over enemy territory, far from home, with enemy fighters everywhere and no one to cover his tail.

Every instinct and every rule of fighter combat said the same thing. A lone fighter is a dead fighter. Find friends, rejoin, or head for home. Howard knew those rules better than most. Over Burma, the Flying Tigers had survived by flying in pairs, by never lingering, by never letting the enemy pull them into a fight they could not control.

He had seen what happened to pilots who forgot. He had watched men he knew go out and not come back. He scanned the sky. Contrails crossed and recrossed above him in white tangled lines. Far off, a dark smudge of smoke marked the place where an aircraft had fallen. The radio crackled with fragments of voices, calls from other flights, warnings, curses, all of it too broken to make sense of.

None of it told him where his own men were. Howard began to climb, trying to get back up to the altitude of the bombers. When he reached them, he saw a sight that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Beneath and ahead of him flew the B17s of the 4001st bomb group, and the 4001st was under attack.

German fighters were swarming around the formation. Single engine fighters and twin engine fighters lining up for passes, circling, diving in, pulling away, and setting up again. Howard tried to count them and stopped. There were more than 30. There were no other American fighters anywhere in sight.

Inside the bombers, the crews had seen fighters closing in, and they had seen no escort coming to meet them. They knew what came next. They had heard the stories. They had seen the empty CS in their own huts. Howard had perhaps a few seconds to decide. He could not call for help. There was no help within reach. He could stay above the fight and wait for other mustangs to arrive and they might never arrive.

He could turn back toward England and no one would ever question the choice of a lone fighter pilot far from home facing 30 enemy aircraft. Or he could go in. Howard pushed his stick forward and dove into the German formation alone. The first German pilots probably did not even see him coming. a single Mustang diving from above out of a sky they had thought was empty of American fighters.

Howard lined up on a German fighter setting up to attack the bombers and fired. Then he pulled away, climbed, and came back down on another one. He was not trying to fight a traditional dog fight. He could not possibly win a turning fight against 30 enemies. He was doing something both simpler and far more dangerous. He was breaking up their attacks.

Every time a German fighter lined up for a firing pass on the bombers, it had to hold a steady course for a few seconds. And every time a Mustang might come screaming down on it out of nowhere. A German pilot who saw an American fighter diving on his tail had no choice but to break off his attack and turn away or die.

Howard kept coming over and over again. Major Allison Brooks leading the 4001st watched it from his cockpit. The bomber crews around him watched it through their turret glass and their gun windows. They saw a single fighter slashing back and forth across the formation, diving on a German attacker, pulling up, rolling over, diving again. It seemed to be everywhere at once, above the formation, across it, around it.

Little friend, we’ve got a little friend up here. Men who had been bracing themselves for death began to watch in disbelief. Inside those bombers, the fight looked different from every position. The ball turret gunner, curled in his steel and glass bubble beneath the fortress, saw German fighters flash beneath him, and then saw a lone Mustang flash after them.

The navigator hunched over his little desk in the nose, looked up from his charts long enough to see a fighter burning in the distance and could not tell whose it was. The radio operator, standing at his open hatch with a single machine gun, felt the whole bomber tremble as the gunners around him fired. The tail gunner, alone at the back of the aircraft, watched attack after attack form up behind the formation and then again and again come apart.

Nobody had time to talk about it. There would be time for that later, if there was a later. For now, there was only the cold, the noise, the thick smell of cordite, and the sight of one small fighter refusing to leave. For the German pilots, the fight was becoming something they had not planned for. They had come to attack bombers, not to duel with an escort.

Every time a formation of German fighters began to set up a coordinated attack, a Mustang would plunge into the middle of it. Pilots broke in different directions. The careful sequence of the attack, rockets first, then fighters pressing in, was being torn apart one pass at a time. Some of them had no idea there was only one American fighter.

In the confusion of a sky filled with aircraft, a single fighter attacking again and again from different angles could easily seem like several. Howard went after a Faka Wolf FW190 that was lining up on the formation. He opened fire and the German fighter fell away. He attacked twin engine fighters that were trying to set up their rocket runs. He went after a Messersmid BF 109.

He even attacked a Junker’s Jew 88. And then, as the fight wore on, his guns began to fail. The weakness that had worried the Mustang pilots all winter struck at the worst possible moment. Somewhere in the violent twisting and turning, the ammunition feeds began to bind. One gun stopped firing, then another, then another.

Soon, of his four heavy machine guns, only one still worked. A single 50 caliber machine gun is not much of a weapon against a sky full of German fighters. Howard knew it. His fuel was also falling, burning away with every hard maneuver at full power, and he was still hundreds of miles from home.

Any reasonable man would have broken off. His body was paying a price, too. Every hard pull out of a dive crushed him down into his seat. The blood drained from his head, and the edges of his vision narrowed into a gray tunnel before the pressure eased. Sweat soaked his clothes beneath his flying suit, even in air cold enough to kill. His neck achd from twisting to search the sky behind him.

Each attack demanded perfect concentration, and each one left him a little more exhausted than the last. Howard kept attacking. He understood something about the men he was fighting. The German pilots could not see inside his wings. They could not tell how many of his guns were working or whether any of them were working at all.

When a Mustang dove onto a German fighter’s tail, that pilot had to assume it was loaded and deadly. Anyone who gambled otherwise and guessed wrong would die. So Howard used the one weapon he had left in full supply, the threat of himself. He made pass after pass, diving at the German fighters, forcing them to break away, sometimes firing his lone gun, sometimes simply charging at them.

Each time an attacker scattered before he could reach the bombers, it was a few more seconds of life for the men in those fortresses. For roughly 30 minutes, it went on. 30 minutes is a very long time in air combat. Most dog fights are over in seconds. A few last a handful of minutes. For half an hour, a single American pilot kept throwing himself at more than 30 enemy aircraft over their own country with one working gun and a falling fuel gauge.

And he did not stop. In the bombers of the 4001st, men who had been sure they would not see England again kept firing, kept flying, and kept watching the little Mustang dart across the sky. ahead of them. Through the haze, the target appeared. The bomb run was the most helpless part of any mission.

For those long minutes, the formation had to fly straight and level, holding course so the bombarders could line up the aiming point in their Nordon bomb sites. No evasive action, no weaving, just a straight line through the sky directly over the enemy’s defenses. The Bombay doors swung open. Freezing wind howled through the fuselages.

The bombarders bent over their sights, making their final corrections. Bombs away. The bombers lurched upward as their loads fell free. Far below over Asher Slaben, bombs walked across the factory where Germany built its Faul of Wolf fighters. Then the formation began its long, wide turn back toward England. The hardest part of the mission was over.

The most dangerous part might still be ahead. Hundreds of miles of German territory lay between the bombers and the sea. Howard stayed with them as long as he could. His ammunition was nearly gone. His fuel was running dangerously low. He was deep inside Germany, alone, with the long flight home still ahead of him. At last, with his fuel reaching the point where staying any longer would mean never getting home at all, he broke away and turned his Mustang west.

Behind him, the bombers of the 400 first flew on toward the coast. None of them knew his name. None of them had any way to reach him. All they knew was that for half an hour over the heart of Germany, a lone American fighter had fought for their lives as if they were his own. across the rest of the sky. The battle was far from over.

The German fighters kept attacking the first bombardment division all the way back toward the coast. More bombers fell. More parachutes opened over the frozen fields of Germany and Holland. More crews disappeared into the gray. And somewhere over Germany, a single Mustang with the words, “Dinggh how on its nose was racing for home, its fuel needle sinking lower with every mile.

The flight home was its own kind of battle. Howard crossed Germany alone, flying west over a landscape of frozen fields, dark forests, and small towns half hidden beneath cloud. He had no wingman to watch his tail. He had almost no ammunition. His fuel gauges were telling him a story he did not like. And he had to fly with the discipline of a man counting every drop, easing back the power, holding the most economical speed, resisting the urge to push the throttle forward and race for safety.

Any German fighter that found him now would find a tired pilot in an aircraft that could barely fight back. None found him. He crossed into Holland. Then the coastline slipped beneath his wings, and the gray North Sea opened up ahead of him once more. Out over that cold water, there was nothing to do but fly and watch the gauges and wait for the smudge of the English coast to rise out of the haze.

It was the hour when the body finally caught up with a fighter pilot. The rush that had carried him through the fight drained away and left behind a deep, aching weariness. His arms were heavy. His eyes burned from staring into the glare. The oxygen mask had rubbed his face raw. Every small shutter of the engine made him listen more closely, wondering whether the single hit his aircraft had taken had struck something vital.

A Merlin with a damaged cooling system could run for miles and then seize without warning, and there was no place to land between Holland and England except the sea. At last the English coast rose out of the haze. When Howard brought his Mustang down onto the runway at Boxed and taxied back to his dispersal area, his ground crew hurried out to meet him.

They had heard nothing about what had happened. As far as they knew, their pilot had flown a long escort mission and come home. They climbed up onto the wing, helped him out of his harness, and started going over the aircraft the way they always did after a mission, looking for damage. They found one bullet hole. One. After roughly 30 minutes fighting more than 30 German aircraft, the Mustang called Dingha had come home carrying a single hole.

Howard climbed down stiff and exhausted and went to be debriefed. He did not come in with a dramatic story. By the accounts of the men around him, he was remarkably reserved about what he had done. He reported the fight. He was cautious about his claims. He did not describe himself as having saved anyone. To Howard, it seems he had simply done his job over the target the way he had been sent to do it.

The rest of the story would not come from him. It would come from the bombers. Across Eastern England that afternoon, the bomber bases waited for their aircraft to come home. Ground crews stood out on the hard stands in the raw wind, stamping their feet, scanning the eastern sky. Ambulances and fire trucks idled beside the runways.

When the first formations appeared, men counted the specks. Then they counted again. Bombers came in with feathered propellers and shredded tails, firing red flares to signal wounded aboard. Some crews climbed out and knelt on the frozen ground. Others simply sat beneath the wings of their aircraft and lit cigarettes with shaking hands.

The final count for the mission was devastating. 60 American bombers had been lost. It was the same number the Eighth Air Force had lost on each of the two terrible Schwinfort raids. Hundreds more young men would not be coming back to their huts that night. for their determination in pressing on to their targets and bombing through such fierce opposition.

The units of the first bombardment division that flew that day would later receive the distinguished unit citation. At Dinathorp, the 4001st bomb group had lost four of its B17s. Every one of those losses was a tragedy. 40 men missing, each of them with a family somewhere that would soon receive a telegram.

But the men who had come home knew how much worse it could have been. They had seen the German fighters gathering around their formation. They had been sure they would not survive it. In the debriefing rooms, they talked about the Mustang. Crew after crew described the same thing. A single American fighter alone attacking the German fighters again and again, staying with their formation, refusing to leave.

The reports moved up through the chain of command, and it did not take long to identify the pilot. The Mustang with Dingho on its nose belonged to Major James Howard of the 354th Fighter Group. Major Allison Brooks, who had led the 4001st that day, put what he had seen into words that would be quoted for decades.

He was all over the wing, across it and around it. For sheer determination and guts, it was the greatest exhibition I’ve ever seen. The story spread quickly. For Americans at home, it was exactly the kind of story they wanted to hear during a winter of grim news from the air war. One pilot, one Mustang, more than 30 enemy fighters, and the bombers had come home.

Before long, Howard found himself facing a room full of war correspondents, around a hundred of them, all wanting to hear the story of the lone American who had taken on the Luftwafa. He was a quiet man who did not much enjoy talking about himself. And now the whole American press corps in England wanted him to do nothing else.

When the reporters pressed him, he reached for an old foly line. I seen my duty and I done it. The line made the papers. So did Howard. His photograph and his story appeared in newspapers across the United States. Andy Rooney, then a young reporter for Stars and Stripes, later called Howard’s fight the greatest fighter pilot story of the Second World War.

But even in the middle of all that attention, one question was never fully settled. How many German aircraft had Howard actually shot down that day? The bomber crews who watched the fight believed he had destroyed as many as six. When the claims were reviewed and the evidence weighed, the official record credited him with three. Two Messersmidt BF-110s and one Faka Wolf FW190.

Some accounts over the years have given other numbers. The gap between what the bomber crews believed they saw and what the official records confirmed has never been fully closed. And in a way, it did not matter. Howard’s real achievement that day could not be measured in German aircraft destroyed.

It was measured in the attacks that never reached the bombers, in the rocket runs that fell apart, in the German pilots who broke away, in the crews of the 41st who came home. Exactly one month later, the war took another turn for the 354th. On February the 11th, 1944, Colonel Kenneth Martin, the group’s commander, was in combat over Germany when he collided head-on with a German Messers Schmidt BF 109 near Frankfurt.

It was the kind of head-on attack he had long taught his pilots to press home. Martin survived the collision with several broken bones and was taken prisoner. He would spend more than a year as a prisoner of war until he escaped during a forced march from Nuremberg toward Munich in the spring of 1945. The Pioneer Mustang Group needed a new leader.

On February the 12th, 1944, James Howard, now a lieutenant colonel, took command of the 354th Fighter Group. By then, the whole shape of the air war was changing. That same winter, Jimmy Doolittle had visited the headquarters of the Eighth Air Force’s Fighter Command. On the wall hung a sign. It read, “The first duty of the Eighth Air Force fighters is to bring the bombers back alive.

” Dittle ordered it taken down. A new sign went up in its place. The first duty of the eighth air force fighters is to destroy German fighters. It was a small change on a wall and an enormous change in the sky. American fighters would no longer be chained tightly to the bombers they protected. More and more they would be free to range ahead, to hunt the German fighters wherever they could find them, to catch them as they assembled, and to chase them all the way to the ground.

The bomber crews did not always like it. They wanted their little friends close where they could see them. But Doolittle understood that the only way to truly protect the bombers was to destroy the force that was attacking them. And now with the Mustang, the Americans had a fighter that could do it anywhere in Germany.

In the last week of February 1944, the Americans and the British launched a massive sustained assault on the German aircraft industry. From February the 20th to February the 25th, bombers struck factory after factory. History would remember it as big week. The Luftvafa had no choice but to rise and fight. And every time it rose, the American escort fighters were there waiting.

In March, American bombers struck Berlin and American fighters flew with them all the way to the German capital. The German fighter force began to bleed in a way it could not survive. Adolf Galland, the Luftvafa’s commander of fighters, reported that between January and April of 1944, the German day fighter force lost more than a thousand pilots.

Among them, he warned, were many of its best squadron and group commanders. These were men who could not be replaced. Germany did not run out of fighter aircraft. In fact, German fighter production would reach its peak later in 1944. What Germany ran out of were pilots experienced enough to fly those aircraft and survive.

The veterans were dying and the young men sent to replace them were thrown into combat with far less training than the American pilots who met them. That was the true meaning of what the German pilots had discovered over Asher’s Leen on January the 11th. The rule that had protected them for so long had been broken. There was no longer a line on the map beyond which American fighters could not follow.

The sky above Germany from the coast all the way to Berlin was no longer a safe place for the hunters. On June the 5th, 1944, on the eve of the invasion of Normandy, Lieutenant General Carl Spots presented James Howard with the Medal of Honor. His citation told the story in the plain language of the military.

It described how alone had attacked a formation of more than 30 German aircraft. It spoke of his utter disregard for his own safety, and of the determined attacks he pressed home for some 30 minutes, even after three of his four guns had stopped working, and his fuel was running low. James Howard became the only fighter pilot in the European theater of operations to receive the Medal of Honor during the Second World War.

He finished the war credited with six aerial victories in Europe, a fighter ace in two different theaters of war. In 1945, he was promoted to colonel. After the war, he stayed connected to the air force, rising to the rank of brigadier general in the air force reserve before retiring in 1966. He served as director of aeronautics for the city of St.

Lewis overseeing Lambert Field and he founded a successful engineering company. He did not spend his life telling the story of January the 11th. In 1991, near the end of his life, he finally wrote a memoir. He called it Roar of the Tiger. James Howell Howard died on March the 18th, 1995 in Bay Pines, Florida. He was 81 years old.

He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The boy born in China had gone back to fight for that country’s skies. The Navy pilot had become a flying tiger, and the quiet major from St. Louis had flown one Mustang into the heart of Germany and refused to leave a formation of American bombers alone. For more than a year, the German pilots had known exactly where the American escorts would turn back.

On a cold January day in 1944, over a small factory town a 100 miles from Berlin, they met an American fighter that did not turn back. And after that day, more and more of them never