Mission Bizerte

Flight Journal, Jun 2002 by Ethell, Ervin

A very long day at the office

It was mid-mornign on November 28, 1942, and as I sat in the briefing and listened to the plan for the mission, a little voice in my head said, "Ethell, this is about as close to a suicide misison as you'll ever go on. It'll be a miracle if any of us survive." I didn't know how prophetic that voice would be.

We were to fly eight P-38s out of the little Algerian cow pasture known as Youk les Bains (the USAAF flattered it by calling it an airfield) and cross a sizable piece of North Africa to fly to Tunisia. Once there, we were to sneak up on the German aerodrome at Bizerte (on the Mediterranean coast north of Tunis), count the fighters based there and report back about enemy activity. Rommel was in full retreat and was trying to salvage as many of his men and as much of his equipment as he could, the airfields at Bizerte and Tunis were his primary evacuation points.

It was to be a "simple" recon mission. Fly over, take a look and return home-no big deal. Today, one satellite pass or a single U-2 flight would accomplish the entire mission with a single click of its high-speed camera. What made it decidedly not simple for us was that Bizerte was the Luftwaffe's most important fighter staging area. The Germans wouldn't take kindly to our peeking over the fence and counting noses.

Our briefing included an implicit warning: expect heavy flak and fighter opposition. As a rule, when briefers were that clear about what we were to expect from the Germans, it would be really bad. They had a tendency to downplay target protection, but not this time. The briefer said that the aerodrome was ringed with "many" (how do you define "many"?) antiaircraft guns of large and small caliber-in addition to what was probably the largest concentration of enemy fighters in North Africa. It was a beehive of bad guys, and the route marked on the map ran right to their front door. I thought that this probably would not be a fun flight.

I was a 22-year-old lieutenant in the 48th Fighter Squadron, 14th Fighter Group. We were among the first groups operational in the P-38 and had been flying them for more than a year. I had about 700 flight hours and 50 to 75 of them were in the P-38. Today, that sounds like a ridiculously low flight time to be qualified to fly such a new, high-powered airplane, but then, even those relatively few hours qualified us as fairly experienced pilots when measured against many of the pilots who came into combat later.

I loved the P-38-absolutely loved it! After the War, I spent the rest of my Air Force career flying fighters and was lucky enough to strap on just about everything we ever had in inventory. Still, I think back to the P-38 with fond memories and remember it as probably the best airplane I ever sat in. Of course, those memories are undoubtedly colored by the fact that I came of age in the Lightning, both as an aviator and as a person.

I started flying in 1940 while in college in Lawton, Oklahoma, and earned my pilot's license there. In 1941, I joined the military as a way to continue to fly without having to pay for it. As cadets, we heard stories that the U.S. would soon be in a war, but I'm not certain that any of us took those stories too seriously. My flight class, 41-I, soon took it very seriously, as we graduated flight school only two days after the bombing at Pearl Harbor. Our world, like everyone else's, changed on that Sunday morning; we were now pilots with a purpose.

Most of my class was assigned to fly P-40s; the rest of us went to the 14th Fighter Group that was eventually based at North Island in California. We flew a mixed bag of P-64s, P-66s, P-43s and P-40s. We flew just about anything with a big engine and a single seat because they wanted us to be familiar with high-powered airplanes before we were assigned to some of the first P-38s to come out of Burbank.

I remember walking up to my first P-38 as if it were yesterday. It was more than beautiful! It was breathtaking. The instant I saw it, I was awestruck, and something about the airplane told me that we would be great friends.

All of us at North Island were trained as fighter pilots, but we had been trained as single-engine fighter pilots because that's all we had at the time. None of us had as much as a single hour of multi-engine instruction. Then, there we were, preparing to fly an airplane with 1400hp on each side, and we had only been trained to handle a single throttle. This was an entirely new ball game for all of us. But, hey, no problem; we were fighter pilots, right? And, we were young fighter pilots, which meant we thought we were invincible.

When it was my turn to strap it on, I climbed into the cockpit, and a check pilot sat on the left wing. He showed me which toggle switches to flip to start the engines. I asked him at what speeds I should fly on climb and landing, and he just shrugged his shoulders; he didn't know. The airplane was so new that no one knew much about it, and that contributed heavily to the early horror stories attached to it.