COLD WAR HERO

Air Classics, Mar 2005 by Pahl, Gerard

THE AIR ZOO HONORS USAF PILOT MICHAEL SMOLEN

Redhead, I'm taking my flight down. Two bogies way low. Two o'clock. You stay with the bombers. (My) airspeed built up fast - 350-mph, 375-mph, 400-mph. I'd only been that fast a few times before. The stick was getting difficult to move. I took a hurried glance behind me. McCandliss was glued to my wing, but I couldn't see McCoppin anywhere."

There were two swept-wing craft moving down the runway below, flames shooting from their wings. High above, in a near vertical dive, the three P-51D Mustangs were approaching compressibility as they built tremendous speed. "The dive had started at 15,000-ft and by the time I got down on the deck, I was doing about 450. The controls were as stiff as hell. Part of my brain was worried about the tiny corrections I'd need to shoot well, but mostly I just wanted to get in close. I knew that once the jets had a chance to accelerate, my chances would go way down - I leveled just over the tree tops, going like hell. The second Me 262 had just lifted off and was straight, no deflection shot. I was closing so fast that overrunning was a worry. I waited until he was huge in my windscreen - I squeezed off a good burst and it was right on." The six .50-cal Browning machine guns came to life. Puffs of white smoke and flame were beaten back over the leading edge of the laminar wing. Tracers went right into the target - there were four other unseen bullets for each tracer striking the swallow-shaped craft.

"He exploded in a tremendous fireball. I went right through the cloud of smoke and debris. Swearing at not being able to see the German leader, even for a few seconds. My left wing was thrown up by the violence of the burst. 1 had to fight, to get the wing down and turn for the leader.

"The leader was harder to kill. A lot harder. He made a mistake or I never would have got him. It was still a tough shot - he turned. To this day I don't know why. We all made mistakes in combat. It was the difference between life and death. Sometimes you got away with it, sometimes you didn't. He didn't."

It is a natural thing to do when a fighter pilot meets his opponent - when attacked you try to turn into your attacker and perhaps this was the enemy pilot's reflex action, especially since he had been a Me 110 pilot before. His Me 262 could go 100-mph faster than a Mustang. He could have just pulled away but instead, he hammered the 262 into a steep climbing turn in an attempt to defend himself.

"He laid the jet over on its side, going faster each second. It was the toughest shot I ever made - I needed lots of lead. Lots of lead. I pulled harder and harder trying to lead the jet. We were at better than 60-degrces angle off - my wings must have been close to vertical. I didn't give a damn. 1 was going to get him. The throttle was through the gate a long time before. Temps must have been way over redline. Didn't know; couldn't look down to check. Didn't care. All I cared about was the yellow pipper - I had it on his fuselage.

"The Mustang's controls were stiff. The exertion of flying was tremendous. Us dragged at me. My arms were heavy. I kept grunting - tightening my gut and grunting. The edges of my vision were going gray. Didn't care. It was clear in the middle, clear where the pipper was. Clear where he was. I pulled more to get the lead angle. My advantage was 1 had airspeed, lots of airspeed. Airspeed equals G. G equals turn. Turn equals lead - his wingtips grew farther apart - farther until they hit the far rings on my gun sight."

For a second time the Mustang pilot depressed the trigger on his stick and his guns came to life. He started shooting from about 300-yards and his bullets were just hitting the tail section of the enemy aircraft. He kept horsing back on the stick. "(1) was vaguely aware of the shudder as all six .50s began to fire. My bullets were hitting his empennage. I pulled the pipper along his flight path. The flame tracks walked up his fuselage and I could see the high explosive shells twinkling on his fuselage as they hit. I held the trigger down. (Author's note: .50-cal shells were not high explosive.)

"Wham, wham. His canopy came off in two chunks. I was close - real close. Tweaked the nose to go over and outside. Set up for a re-attack." But there was no need to attack again. "The Messerschmitt (flopped) over and was spinning inverted. It smashed into the ground. Two! I'd gotten both of them!"

This was Ben Drew's description of his downing of two Me 262 German jets while flying his Miss Detroit during a mission to Achmer, Germany, on 7 October 1944. Drew became the first American to shoot down two Me 262 jet fighters in one mission. He found out years later that he indirectly destroyed or at least badly damaged a third Me 262 in the attack - coincidental to his attack on the two airborne planes, the shell casings from his .50-cal machine guns littered the German airfield runway. They punctured the artificial rubber tires of another machine when it was on high-speed takeoff, blowing out the main tires, causing the gear to collapse and the Jumo engines to ingest copious amounts of dirt, destroying them! Though Drew got "three," the Me 262 still presented a real threat to Allied bomber fleets then penetrating to the heart of Germany.