Lt Al Boch. 362nd Sqn, P-51
"Gash Hound" G4-D.What sticks in my mind is my second mission. It was a radio relay mission, my element leader was on one of his last sorties before going home. We were supposed to loiter over Brussels while the rest of the Group went deep into Germany or Czechoslovakia.
After takeoff we entered overcast at 500 feet and we kept on climbing, at 37,000 feet we reached the top of the clouds. The Mustang was indicating 150 mph and that was at full rpm and manifold pressure with a very severe angle of attack just to maintain altitude. It was very cold at that hight but otherwise comfortable, without pressurization, when speaking to our "mission control only about two words would come out before you would need a deep breath again.We flew for half an hour in one direction and then did a 180 and flew half an hour in the other, after 5 hours of this you would think that we knew what we were doing and were great navigators, Oh no, there was a jet stream of 100 to 150 mph that had blown us of course to the south. As it was not a good day, the bombers and fighters that had strayed were all trying to contact Colegate, the fixing station in England that could more or less pinpoint your position through triangulation, I finally reached Colegate and they gave me heading of 355 degrees and 95 miles to base. Several minutes before we got under the clouds, the DFat Leiston had given us a heading of 355 degrees. Yes we had drifted south.After what we calculated to be 95 miles we broke out of the cloud at 500 feet, there was the shoreline and the North sea, but it looked different. After flying up the coast line and seeing strange territory and an airfield full of bomb craters we were still unsure of our position, by now we were down at 300 feet because of the weather, I looked over at my element leader and for an instant I thought I saw flames coming from his engine, but I Immediatly realized that there were tracer bullets and other nasty things flying around.
I yelled to my partner to hit the
deck,which we both did wondering who in England was shooting at us, were we flying up the
Thames estuary?.Getting low on fuel at this point, made the bombed out airfield we had
seen earlier seam pretty good. We now flew North still pondering when I saw a large
billboard advertising Dubonnet wine, well this gave us a big clue to where we were,
FRANCE. The call sign for the emergency field in France was either "Domestic" or
"Messenger" and I remember that it would be shear luck to be able to contact
them at 300 feet. Much to my surprise they came booming through giving us a heading of 90
degrees left. I was a bit wary as I had heard that German controllers had talked enemy
planes into landing and then being captured. I looked to my left and they were firing
morters from the emergency field so that we could find them in the bad weather. A few B17s
and B24s were in the landing pattern so that reassured us a bit.We were at Merville and it hadn't been terribly long since the field was occupied by the Germans, there were graphics on all the walls all in Deutsche. With such a large amount of aircraft using the emergency field, it took 3 days before our home base at Leiston was reached to inform them of our status. Just as soon as they would let us go we were off , back to Leiston making a detour around the bad guy's at Dunkirk, that would have liked to have another shot at us for sure.When we arrived back at Leiston the guys were not too happy to see me, as they had to give me back some of my uniforms and my mattress which were a rare commodity. Our Intelligence Officer didn't rest until he raised a Colgate contoller from bed to find out what had happened, it was here that we found the discrepancy, he claimed that he told us 95 miles from the French coast. WHICH NEVER HAPPENED...