Issue 23.13
During World War2, thousands of recruits were trained by the Army Air Force to be flyers. This included pilots, navigator gunners, bombardier gunners, radio operator gunners, armored gunners, mechanic gunners and gunners. Nearly all pilots if given their choice would be fighter pilots. Who wants to be in a lumbering heavy four engine bomber when all you can do is fly straight ahead? Heavy bomber pilots watch the fighters cavorting out of range of those “heavy enough to walk on” FLAK barrages. Heavy bomber crews thought the 3,500
FLAK guns of “Big B” (Berlin) was tough until we encountered twice that many FLAK ground guns of the synthetic (coal to oil) refinery at Mersburg, in Eastern Germany. That was a tough enough target that we lost 68 bombers in one day’s mission. Fighter pilots are chosen because they are cut from a different type of cloth. A fighter pilot needs to make an enemy kill so bad that he can taste it. Even while in advanced training in the States, fighter pilots are known to make dumb and dangerous maneuvers. They have been known to scout out bridges and measure them to see if there is enough room for them to fly under without hitting something solid and lethal. I doubt if there were any bridges within flying distance that hasn’t been flown under. Many potential fighter pilots were either killed or courts marshaled for taking dumb chances. When I was flying my missions over Germany as a lower ball turret gunner in B-17’s, we were happy to see our “Little Friends”. They stayed out of range of our bomber machine guns because they knew that in the heat of battle, it was very easy to make a mistake and shoot at a friend instead of a “Bandit”. If a pilot of a P-51 wished to come in close to a bomber formation, he would give us a good slow side view and maybe do a barrel roll to make sure some trigger happy gunner did not make a mistake. Once a P-51 pilot was on the tail of a German FW-190 and he wanted a kill so bad that he followed his enemy right through our bomber formation. Some in our squadron fired at the “Bandit” but a short distance behind was a P-51″Little Friend”. That little friend could have easily been shot down but he wasn’t. He stayed on the “Bandit’s” tail and within sight of all of us he did shoot his adversary down. He got credit for the kill. It took five confirmed kills to become an “Ace”. I once witnessed a huge dog fight in which perhaps five hundred American and five hundred enemy fighters were engaged in this fight. Perhaps the most dangerous thing a fighter pilot can do is to get right down close to the deck and strafe targets on the ground. They are down low enough to encounter point blank ground fire. Even hand held rifles are effective if there are enough of them. Fighter pilots often strafe locomotives and other targets that can blow up. Many P-51 pilots have been downed by their own good shooting as when a locomotive explodes.
No, shooting up an enemy plane on the ground does not count toward being an Ace.