Arthur Heiden flew combat missions with the 20th Fighter Group of the 8th AF in 1944. Art contributed to Bodie's excellent P-38 book and to Caiden's not to excellent P-38 book. He has also contributed to some of my magazine articles. Art and P-38J were depicted on a US Postage stamp, the first living American to appear on a stamp (Chuck Yeager claimed that he was first, but his Bell X-1 stamp was issued months after Heiden's).
Art lives in Memphis (Skyrock, if you're interested, I can give you his address and phone#). Art had a mild stroke about two years ago, and I haven't chatted with him in over a year... However, I'll rectify that shortly.
Over the years, I have accumulated many e-mails from Art on his war-time experiences, and in particular, his combat experiences.
I have knitted together portions of his e-mails. Here they are:
_____________________________ ____________________________
Fighter Formations: Take-off and landing formations were damned
tight, especially when you only had wing-tip visibility, you can imagine, same on climbouts and descents. The later two, were an unbelievable challenge, and required great skill. Flights of four would pick up a heading to cloud top where the Group was formed up with those flights in sight of one-another. Low cloud tops were prayed for -- from 5K' to 10K'. A mortar-flare was fired through the cloud to form on, hopefully!
Formed-up and free of cloud, the Finger-four Combat formation was used.
Meaning, a flight spread out, like a quarter mile, so each could look around and guard each others tail. Flight integrity tactics were to be maintained at all
cost. Each element of two, within the flight positioned so they could turn onto
the tail of the other and cross-over in a break when they were attacked, going the opposite direction. Same within the element of two.
RE: Low Level FLAK, strafing and bombing airfields, marshaling yards,
shipping, trains and other transport, general military targets around battle front.
First, the Ruhr Valley complex was, the most heavily defended area on the face of the earth. Industry and many German Fighter units were concentrated here. The times we accidentally stumbled across it every one took hits. I don't
remember ever being dispatched there. Our Fighter Bombers had to take it on after December 44' with horrendous losses. German claims were that they lost more of their own aircraft there from their own flak that to any other causes.
My experience in general was as follows: Airfields in general were heavily
defended with Flak-Towers all around and lighter 20 and 40mm guns stuck wherever a place could be found, also, any amount of machine-guns around the perimeter. I have strafed airfields where not a gun shot was seen, but usually the longer you stayed the heavier it became. Remember on airfield where the flak was so intense that I was so busy dodging it that I never fired a gun. All four of our flight took heavy hits and the Squadron Commander and his wing man from another Squadron were both killed. Here a black cloud blanket of flak bursts were laid down interlaced with the white and red golf balls of lighter stuff. This blanket would follow you up, down and around, and believe me, I was doing some control stuffing. Thinking I would have escaped if I could clear some perimeter trees and get down in the weeds, wrong again for the place was surrounded by what appeared to be machine gun emplacements.
Trains were an exciting target, with that great cloud of steam which we
thought we were causing. After the war we learned that the Engineers had
deliberately released the steam to save their engines. These trains could be carrying hundreds of troops, munitions, or anything else. They often were flak trap decoys, and generally pulled their own flak-car defenses so we tried to look for that first thing. That was usually some sort of boxcar with sides that could be lowered to expose an 88mm or two. Jack Ilfrey got clobbered by the beautiful scene of a locomotive beside a station house letting off steam. Problem was, that it was in the center of a hayfield covered with haystacks which opened up to expose a dozen or so 88mm's.
During daylight, munition trains would try to hide in marshaling yards or even in some town. Touching those off could be thrilling and might blow you or the town to pieces. All the above generally had some sort of flak defenses, even troop trains. Germans were tricky, troop trains would often have a car or two of French Civilians which they would prod off when we came in sight. While we thought about this, their GI's would make for the ditches and intermingle with the French. To reduce the rickisheys flying around, we would drop our partially filled belly tanks on the train, and strafe the fumes -- forerunner of napalm.
Intelligence always assured us that 88mm's couldn't cut fuses below 8K' and
20 and 40mm's were ineffective above that altitude. All false! Those 88mm' were an amazing weapon, mounted on every conceivable location and their gunners were capable of hitting any target, ground or air. Their gunners were often 15 yr old boys or 60 yr old men. So I guess, a tanker never dared to miss.
BTW, for your info, In a previous Email I mentioned that April 29, 44'
debacle. A German Staffel Commander Heinz Knoke, in his book, "I Flew for The Fuhrer" mentions that battle from his viewpoint.
RE: Mission issues:
You can't take a simple analysis. You have to take the situation in that instance. The mission, the plane you're flying, your altitude, and what the
opposition is doing a that instant, for just a few. Wouldn't be any fun if it
was simple, would it? Now go back to my last letter. I'm in a P-38 unit
before July 44', if I were in a Mustang or Jug unit the situation would be very
different. Say it's an escort mission, at 30K', to extrema endurance, you have
only three squadrons of 16-planes ea., spread out and separated over 20-miles, seldom in visual contact, responsible for a Combat Division of three or four Combat Wings (boxes), you have several Combat Divisions in a single bomber stream of over 1000-bombers and 700- fighters who have all taken off from this tiny island called England, wing-tip visibility on TO, climb out and assembly on instruments, Cloud tops maybe 20K', any extra circling to get formations together will delay that particular formation by at least 5-minutes, there will be several of these delays which strings out the Combat Wings with separations of as much a 20-minutes, now, just visualize that for a bit, the German Radar already has and are looking for these weaknesses and deciding how many planes to hit it with and where. If a clear day, with perfect formations, which seldom happens, the Germans will go back to bed and not bother anyone.
Believe me, weather was the biggest thing to worry about and sapped your
energy. Would you be able to see your check points and even find the target or would you become further separated and become lunch for the Luftwaffe?
A fighter pilot feels a deep compassion and responsibility for those bomber
crews. He has seen them drive through clouds of flak, seem them explode and unable to get out, seen them crippled and pounced on by German fighters, he knows many of them, through school years, home town, roomed with them in flying school, he can't see the flak before it hits. However, most fighter pilots made a secret pact with himself that he would do everything possible to get between any German fighter and any of the bombers. He would not leave them undefended and chase off for glory. Most wanted to be a Jim Howard!
At briefing, you got all the pertinent info: mission type, penetration, target or withdrawal; order-of-battle; all the numbers, location and time of rendezvous, time of escort relief, safe-course-home headings and time of start engines and TO; of course the Chaplain had the last word for those feeling the need. The weather was always the sweat, it was squeezing your mind and in your
bones, the wing men had their prayer, "Please don't let me fall out of formation on climb-out, Commanders had their's too, "Please, make it a good rendezvous with all the bombers in good formation. That's all God, my boys will do the rest."
Remember now, here we talk of the P-38 situation before the flood of
P-51's and crews arrived in the 8th AAF and when Zemke's brilliant idea spread and we didn't have those "B" and "C" groups. Just imagine what could have been done with just one more squadron in each unit. Hell, our field at King's Cliff was so small that one squadron operated from another airfield over 10-miles away.
_____________________________ _____________________________
My regards,
Widewing
