IN HIS OWN WORDS

Years later, recalling his service with the 50th Fighter Bomber Wing, as commander of the 417th Fighter Bomber Squadron, in Germany and France, General Charles Yeager, had this to say: "I wasn't much on spit and polish or running around with a clipboard. I had thirty pilots, twenty-five airplanes, and five hundred ground and support personnel under my command. A good squadron can run itself only up to a certain point; the commander must stay on top of things, but I wasn't about to chain myself to a desk doing it. And, man, I learned fast that if one of my people got into trouble, so did I. Both of us landed in front of the wing commander, Col. Fred Ascani, a West Pointer who hadn't served as General Boyd's deputy without a lot of strict discipline rubbing off.  My first weekend as squadron commander he called me at home at two in the morning. "Chuck, what in hell is going on with your people?"  God, I wondered if there was a riot.  But he called me because the German police in Lautzenhausen had called him. Two airmen from my squadron were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. I crawled out of bed and drove into town to get those guys out of the can. The next time I got such a wake up call, I went straight to the barracks and woke up my first sergeant. I told him to wake up every man in the barracks. I said, "If I have to get up, so do you. This is our squadron and our guys." We all marched downtown to the jail and picked up the airmen.  After that, I never got any more late night calls about my airmen." "At Hahn, we were only minutes of flying time away from possible combat with the Russians and their allies. We'd barely get our wheels up before reaching the East German border.  Czechoslovakia was a half hour flight.  A week seldom passed in the 1950s when East German or Czech pilots didn't invade our air space and cause us to scramble to intercept. They knew our Sabres could never catch up with their MiGs before they scooted back over the border.  Often they staged their sweeps to coincide with our end of the day beer calls, but there was more to it than just harassment. They were testing our reaction time.  We were constantly on alert and kept at maximum readiness."  "About ten months after I arrived at Hahn, life became more complicated and dangerous for all of us. The wing received new airplanes, a bigger and more powerful version of the Sabre, called the H model, which gave us much faster acceleration. The MiGs discovered that fact when a couple of them wandered over our small gunnery range at Furstenfeldbruck, outside of Munich." "The new Sabres had greater range and could carry heavier loads, and our mission was suddenly changed from air defense to 'special weapons.'  We became fighter bombers carrying nuclear weapons." "Base security was increased to guard the bombs that were stored in special underground bunkers, and we began to train in techniques for dropping them.  We just hoped to God we would never have to really prove the effectiveness of those techniques." "During the 1956 Hungarian uprising, when Russian tank divisions began moving all over Eastern Europe, our wing went on the highest priority alert.  Not many guys dozed off that night; it was as close to the real thing as any of us ever wanted to be."  "The wing now had a big intelligence section that supplied each pilot in all three squadrons with his own personal target in Russia and East Germany. Each pilot kept his flight plan folder stashed in his cockpit until he had it memorized and practiced flying his profile so often that he could do it in his sleep.  Our Sabres could not be refueled from airborne tankers, and we could keep flying only for a couple of hours before our tanks ran dry.  All of our targets were deep inside the Soviet sector and included radar and other communications sites. Our attack was meant to pave the way for the main strike force of long range Strategic Air Command bombers, but unlike those guys, we had no way of making it a round trip mission.  To get to the target and back would take longer than our fuel supply.  So, a big part of our training was E and E classes - escape and evade - because all of us would be forced to parachute down in enemy territory.  Man, missions didn't get more serious than that, but the guys just accepted it as their job.  "In 1956, the 417th and the rest of the wing was moved to Toul-Rosiere AB, France, just across the German border, in order to disperse targets of potential Soviet attack.  God, none of us wanted to go from our comfortable brand new base into a make ready strip just across the German border in Toul - Rosiere that was little more than a 'sea of mud,' with some trailers and Quonsets huts.  Glennis and the kids got there a week after I did and just rolled their eyes. It was the pits. Just miserable. Everyone hated every minute being there, and to make it worse, the strategic move became a joke when General de Gaulle decided that no American nuclear weapons could be stationed on French soil.  At that point we should have packed and gone back to Hahn.  Insead, we just sent our bombs back there; now if there were nuclear alerts, we would fly to Hahn to load our bombs, then take off and fly to the target. Whoever approved that plan deserved to be stationed at Toul for life. To make it worse, tensions were really high with the French. We were limited to flying in a narrow corridor around our base, and Mirages flew real aggressive against some of our flights. On one occasion, the French actually dropped their wing tanks and our guys did, too, usually a sign of aerial combat. In the mood I was in, if I had been in the sky that day, I might have started a war." The wing was to stay there until 1959, when it was ordered back to Hahn. Yeager, "...we suffered more than a year in the mud at Toul, France." "But in spite of the bad conditions, I commanded the best performing squadron in the wing. I had come to Germany as a green and untried major and left France as a light colonel with good marks as a TAC squadron commander."  "Glennis wasn't thrilled going back to the wind and sand again."  "Make it short and let's get back to Germany," she said.  I agreed. But neither of us would bet on our hances."                                                                     

GENERAL CHARLES YEAGER                                BACK