A-26 in WW II..."The best airplane I ever flew"

Flight Journal, Feb 2000 by Benson, Arnold

About once every decade in the 50-odd years since WW 11, someone hears that I flew combat in that War and asks me what kind of plane I flew.

"A-26," I say and get a blank look. Nobody I've met in all that time has ever heard of the A-26 Douglas Invader. They've heard of the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-25 Mitchell, the B-24 Liberator, the P-38, the P-47, the P-51, but the A-26? You might as well say you flew autogiros.

But the A-26 was the best airplane by far that I ever flew and the only plane I truly liked to fly, and when a friend told me that a documentary about the A-26 would be shown on TV on the Discovery Channel, I tuned in and watched, unbelieving.

I saw and heard that the A-26 had come into operational use in only the last months of WW It-that much I knew; I was therebut it flew, too, in the Korean conflict, when it was designated the B-26 (confusing it with the old B-26 Martin Marauder, long gone by then, but a murderous aircraft that had given me insomnia for the year I flew it before the A-26 came along).

The Invader was also used in Vietnamagain as the A-26-for ground support and for any other operations that no other airplane was suited for. I sat back and felt good after watching that documentary. A lot of people now knew what I had known for a long time: the A-26 was one hell of an airplane.

But an announcer's footnote in the film got to me. He informed his TV audience that the A-26 had reached Europe in the late fall of 1944, but a long time had elapsed before the plane became operational because it took quite a while to train crews. Crews? A pilot flies an A-26 with a gunner in a turret in back. Except for the glass-nose model that led every flight of six planes on combat missions, the WW If A-26 carried no copilot, no bombardier/navigator, no pure navigatoronly that one gunner in back who slept if he felt like it. At that point in the documentary, I laughed out loud. And I began to think of those days of long ago:

One gray March afternoon in Beaumont-sur-Oise, France, I was laying on a cot in the 16x16-foot pyramidal tent that I shared with four other pilots and a chubby bombardier. Someone pushed through the tent entrance and hunched his way in. In the gloom, I recognized C.C. Overton, the oldest pilot in my squadron-the 555th in the 386th Bomb Group of the 9th Air Force. C.C. was a balding 29year-old captain who was only seven missions away from the 65 B-26 missions he needed to finish a complete combat tour and go home. But now, the B-26 Marauders were gone from the field or grounded, A-26s had come in, and only yesterday an A-26 mission had gotten off the ground with the most veteran B-26 pilots flying the new planes. I had flown only a few missions with my crew in the B-26 and could see no chance of ever flying the A-26. There were too many B-26 pilots in the squadron with more combat flying time.

"Want to check out in an A-26?" C.C. asked me.

"Damn right," I said and sat up to put on my shoes. I couldn't believe what was happening. Like all the other pilots, I had climbed into the cockpits of the new planes and gotten familiar with the controls while the A-26s were sitting on the hardstands, but I didn't think I had a chance to ever fly one.

We walked to the operations shack and got into back chutes and went out to a silvery new A-26 nearby. I expected C.C. to climb in first, but he thumbed me up ahead of him into the pilot's seat and followed me up to push down the metal jump seat and folded himself down into it. C.C. was a big man and didn't look comfortable perched there. I felt guilty. I fastened the seat belt, set the brakes, fixed the prop controls, cracked the throttles, set the cowl flaps and started the engines-the same R-2800 2,000hp Pratt & Whitney engines that hauled the B-26and sat, watching the instrument panel while the engines warmed. When everything looked right, I taxied to the downwind end of the asphalt runway-[ remember only one runway at Beaumontsur-Oise-talked to the tower while holding a thumb and forefinger against my throat mike, set the prop controls, shoved the throttles forward and took off. Man, what an airplane!

"Brinq it in at 140 on the final approach," C.C. said into my ear. I flew around the field once in the standard traffic pattern and landed. Nothing to it. I thought I was dreaming, except for G.C.'s big feet on the floor beside me.

"Shoot another one," C.C. said. I took off and landed that A-26 one more time.

"That's enough," C.C. said. "You got the idea."

After I cut the engines back at the hardstand, C.C. got out the Form One, asked me my serial number and filled in that I'd had three hours of stick time and four landings. Back in the Operations shack, he picked up a piece of chalk and went to the blackboard where the pilots' names for the next day's mission were scrawled in their places in the formation. C.C. was leading that mission in the usual Plexiglas-nose A-26 that carried a bombardier and a navigator, and now he chalked my name in on his left wingnumber-three position-in the lead flight of six planes. (I had always taken pride in my formation flying, flying as tightly as I could, but had no idea that anyone had ever noticed. I believed that I flew a good tight formation in the B-26. Put it another way: I flew formation better than I did anything else in the B-26.)