American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffeâ??s Secrets

3. Jet Encounters

[ 29 ] JET ENCOUNTERS Although over a thousand Me-262 jet fighters were built by the Germans, fewer than half were ever delivered to combat units, and fewer still were committed to actual combat. Although American airmen heard of these German jets, actual encounters were infrequent considering the thousands of American aircraft that roamed across German skies on a daily basis. Yet when they occurred, they were very different experiences for fighter pilots and bomber crews. Captain Frederic B. McIntosh, a gung-ho fighter pilot if there ever was one, flew P-47s. Like many other Americans, his heritage was German. “My stepfather’s name was Heinrich Warnholz,” Fred reminisced . “I was born on June 8, 1918. I don’t remember when my mother married Heinrich. I was still very young. She changed her name; I kept mine. People and things in my life were pretty much German. Eleanor Vollmer, my twenty-some-year-old high school German teacher, was from Berlin. I picked up her accent.Years later in 1945 when I was retrieving captured Luftwaffe aircraft, Germans frequently asked me if I was a Berliner. After high school I went to work for the Pacific Gas & Electric Company in Oakland. I graduated on Friday and on Monday night I was digging ditches for the gas company for fifteen cents an hour. I worked nights and went to school during the day. In college I took Navy ROTC with the idea of becoming 3 a naval aviator. When I applied for flight training the Navy recruiter told me that a junior certificate just wouldn’t do. I had to have a college degree to get into naval aviation. I went across the street to the Army recruiter, who didn’t care what my educational pedigree was, and signed up with the Army Air Corps, class 43C. “I reported to Santa Ana in southern California, no more than a wheat field then and a bunch of tents. Next came Thunderbird II, again a new airfield near Phoenix with few amenities. But there at least we didn’t have to sleep in tents. After graduation in March 1943 I went to Williams Field near Tempe, Arizona, where I spent a year as an instructor pilot in the P-38 Lightning. Whoever set the date for the invasion of the Continent must have foreseen the need for replacement pilots. Four hundred of us from training command were picked to ‘volunteer.’ When we arrived in Florida we were introduced to the P-47. Hell, you could just look at that airplane and tell it wouldn’t fly. We all signed up for P-38s. We got about four hours’ flying time in the P-47 and then were sent to New York and put on a seventy-two-ship convoy, mostly tankers, heading for Europe. Sitting on the tankers were fighter planes. We didn’t see any P-38s, but we saw lots of P-47s and P-51s. When we got to England, we second lieutenants were met by several ‘bird colonels,’ commanders of P-38 fighter outfits. Some of us thought this kind of odd and we trotted over to the intelligence section to take a look at some mission summaries for different types of combat aircraft. What fell out of it for me was that for every P-47 lost, they lost two P-51s, in round numbers, that is. And for every P-51 they lost two P-38s. You didn’t have to be a blackjack player to figure out the way Jimmy Doolittle [who commanded the 8th Air Force] was running the air war, the first airplane to stay out of was the P-38, the second the P-51. I didn’t know what they were doing with the P-47, but I decided that airplane was for me after all.1 “I arrived at the 56th Fighter Group at Boxted, near Colchester, on June 5, 1944. I was assigned to the 62nd squadron. They had been in Jet Encounters [ 30 ] England almost a year and a half by that time. The 56th Group was the most successful fighter group in the 8th Air Force. It had more aces than any other outfit - Gaby Gabreski, Hub Zemke, Dave Schilling, Walker Mahurin, Fred Christensen, Gerald and Bob Johnson, Joe Powers, Paul Conger, Leroy Schreiber, Jimmy Stewart—not the actor and bomber...