Mission Bizerte: A very long day at the office

My grandfather, Ervin C. Ethell, wrote this piece for Flight Journal magazine many years ago. Unfortunately, it isn't available anywhere online, so I've decided to post it on my site so it isn't lost to history! This is a very detailed recollection of the day he shot down five German planes and destroyed many more on the ground in North Africa. If you love history and airplanes, this is for you!

BY COL. ERVIN ETHELL, USAF (RET.) It was mid-morning 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 mission 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. I didn't need 15 minutes in the airplane before I knew it was everything I had hoped it would be—smooth and powerful; I simply became one with the airplane. Although we often heard stories about how bad it was on one engine and that it could kill you this way or that, I never had a moment's concern. When the 14th was to go to Britain in August 1942, the USAAF decided to fly the airplanes across the Atlantic instead of shipping them as cargo. We flew across as a group divided into four-ship flights, each with a B-17 as formation lead for navigation. We sat there, glued to the bomber, determined to keep it in sight and worrying that something in our shiny new airplanes might quit working. Two engines or not, it's very disquieting to sit in a single-seat airplane with nothing but frigid water stretching to the horizon in every direction. It certainly makes you feel small.

In England, we did some transition training, and I was treated to a real privilege: one fighter pilot from each squadron was selected to go to a special British gunnery school, and I was selected from the 48th. My instructor was the legendary "Sailor" Malan—a Battle of Britain ace and a terrific gunnery instructor. Flying my P-38, I fired more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition against target sleeves towed by a British bomber. On my last flight, I put more than 90 percent of my rounds into the sleeve; Sailor really made a gunner out of me!

Then I found myself in North Africa, and it was time to launch the recon mission to Bizerte. There were four of us from the 48th FS and four from the 49th. I would be flying wing on my good friend Lt. Carl Skinner. He and I talked about the mission, and neither of us had a good feeling about it, but there wasn't much we could do. As the famous quote by Tennyson went, "Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die." The only good news was that it hadn't rained, so we would be able to fly off the middle part of the pasture. When wet, the entire field turned into foot-deep mud, and so instead we had to taxi up a hill that had a long, rock slope down one side. The slope was only 1,700 feet long, but it was a hard surface, and when the rest of the ground was a quagmire, it looked very inviting. I volunteered to make the first landing on it to see whether it could be done, and it wasn't as difficult as it looked—as long as I landed uphill. It wasn't long before we were pretty good at taking off downhill and landing uphill. Our "runway" was entirely too short for a fully loaded P-38, and we always staggered off the end with only a few feet to spare. We figured that if the Germans didn't get us, sooner or later, the "runway" would. But, I was lucky; neither got me.

A short time after takeoff, two of the 49th FS airplanes had to turn back because they couldn't get their drop tanks to feed; that left six of us. We knew the Germans at Bizerte would be looking for a serious strike against the airfield, but we figured they wouldn't expect us to come ripping across the field right on the deck. We only had to cross the field one time, and then boogie home at full throttle and tell command how many airplanes we had seen parked there. I don't know how they expected us to count airplanes as we flew at 400mph at treetop level, but we just did as we were told. I was flying Tangerine II (I had lent my first Tangerine to a pilot who didn't return), and the group was flat out on the deck. We knew Lake Bizerte was just on the other side of a low rise, and the aerodrome was a little past that. What we didn't know was that there was a helluva surprise waiting for us over that hill.

Flying low at 400mph, the landscape streaks by, so as we roared over the hill, the lake popped almost instantly into view. We then saw something scattered over the water, and for a second or two, we couldn't figure out what it was. Then my brain said, "Junkers!" A long string of 20 to 30 Junkers Ju-52s droned across the lake no more than 30 feet above it. They were sitting ducks and were directly between us and the airfield. The logical thing to do in that situation was to center one in a gunsight and let him have it.One of the P-38's nicest features was that its guns were directly in front of the pilot; unlike with wing-mounted guns, you didn't have to worry about where their fire converged. It was like sitting astride a lethal fire hose: to destroy the target, you just pointed your nose at it. I pressed the gun button, felt the characteristic shake and smelled the familiar odor as the four .50-caliber Brownings and the one 20mm cannon hammered away directly in front of my feet. The effect on that first Junkers was devastating; a 2-second burst had two engines smoking, and it coasted into the water.

Carl Skinner was only a few yards off my right wing, and after gunning the Junkers I glanced over and could almost hear him yell, "Hey, I was going to shoot at that one!" We had had similar conversations in the past, so I just grinned. He responded by peeling off after another Junkers. That was the last time I ever saw my friend. The Junkers formation was doing barely 100mph, and when they saw us, they scattered like quail. Where there had been an orderly in-trail formation were now dozens of three-engine turtles all over the lake at low altitude. I sawed through two more in quick succession, turned, got a fourth and was working on a fifth when I glanced around looking for more. As I looked up to clear my tail, a gaggle of Messerschmitts and Fw 190s fell out of the sky; only by pure chance had I seen them. To this day, I'm still amazed that no one in our formation said anything about them on the radio.

It was hard to tell how many there were—between 30 and 40. It looked as if most of the fighters we were supposed to count on the Bizerte airfield were above us and diving. I can't explain the thoughts that raced through my mind, but the one at the top of the stack was to pull my nose around and into them. As I turned, I spotted one of our P-38s running hard with a 109 glued to its tail. I never knew who the pilot was. I rolled in behind the 109 and hammered it hard enough to make it disappear over a hill, losing pieces and on fire; confirmation on that one would have made me an ace.

Glancing around, I realized there wasn't another P-38 in sight. I was by myself and in a bad position for a fight; it seemed like half the Luftwaffe was itching to get me. I was in the same situation that the Junkers had been in when we jumped them, but this time it was the Germans who were shooting. I was low and had slowed down to stay on target with the slow-moving Junkers. I'm certain the other P-38s were in the same position. Any fighter pilot will tell you that there's no worse place to be than low and slow. Climbing and turning into the Germans would be a waste of time; there were just too many, and they had the advantage of altitude and speed. There were German crosses everywhere I looked, and it seemed that most of them saw me at the same time. I began to think more about flying defensively than offensively at that point; I was much more worried about saving my own skin than getting theirs.

I can't convey how scared I was. It seemed obvious that I was about to die. I couldn't look at the sky without seeing an increasing number of German fighters trying to get into position to fire on me. Most people thought the P-38 was too big to turn well with 109s or 190s, but that wasn't the case; it could dogfight with the best of them.Desperation can make you creative, and when they began to make runs on me, an idea popped into my head. I pulled hard into a right turn, chopped the power on the right engine and rammed the throttle on the left engine to the stop. The asymmetric thrust literally caused the airplane to pivot on its right wingtip, which, at that moment, was right down in the waves of the lake—and I mean literally touching the whitecaps. I had reasoned that most fighters couldn't follow me because when a single-engine fighter turns left, it turns with its engine torque—not against it. Going right with full power to maintain energy, the airplane works against the torque, and it stands a greater chance of suffering a high-speed stall. When you're down there pulling hard G within spitting distance of the surface, as we were, most single-engine pilots would be cautious. If they tried to turn their planes, they would snap over the top of the turn and go into the water so fast that they wouldn't have a chance to recover. Fortunately, the Germans knew that as well as I did, and I think it helped to save my life. I wracked the airplane around as hard as I could in an effort to keep them off my tail.

The dogfight had drifted toward the airfield and, to make matters worse, ground fire was eating up the sky around me. It was everywhere. They didn't seem to care who they shot down—their buddies or us. They shot at everything. I cranked Tangerine II around and headed for the lake at full power. At least, out over the lake, all I had to worry about was fighters. I know I wasn't straight and level for more than a few seconds at a time for the entire 30 to 40 minutes of the fight, which seemed to last forever. Forever! I was exhausted by the exertion and scared pea-green pink. A dogfight is hard work; you constantly try to look over your shoulder while G-force squeezes you into the seat-pack parachute, and in only a few minutes, your neck muscles scream with the pain. You breathe oxygen through a mask that's slippery with sweat, and you feel as if you're breathing artificial, rubber air. Neither your brain nor your body can relax for an instant, and most of your muscles hurt. Most dogfights last five minutes—10 on the outside—but this one went on and on. Somehow, I managed to stay out of a gunsight long enough to avoid taking rounds through my airplane, or me; miraculously, not a single bullet hole was later found on my machine. I can't explain that because they had plenty of chances to put holes in me!

Then, with absolutely no warning, it was all over. The Germans packed up and flew away; I didn't see them leave; I just looked around and saw that they had gone! German fighters were notoriously short-legged (carried little fuel), so maybe they had almost run out of gas (dogfights are always at full throttle); or maybe they went back to escort the Junkers because Rommel's primary concern was that the men and equipment return safely across the Mediterranean. Maybe to them, one P-38 didn't matter much. Whatever the reason, I was so thankful that I felt my muscles twitch in relief. I was definitely ready to go home—if I could only figure out where home was.

This was great. I was within sight of a German air base, and I didn't have the foggiest idea which heading to take back to my own field, or back to anything friendly for that matter. There wasn't another P-38 in sight; I was totally alone and scared out of my mind. I thought of the British ADF (automatic direction finder) at Böne, just north of the route we had followed to Bizerte. I punched in the frequency, keyed the mike and hollered "Mayday, mayday." I was so shaken up that I know my voice was several octaves higher than usual. I'll never forget the British voice that answered, "Don't panic, ol' chap. I have you. Give me a piper" (transmit on the radio for a fix).

Following the directions given to me by this incredibly calm voice, I flew a beeline to Böne. As I got in sight of the airfield, I couldn't believe what I saw: a bunch of German fighter pilots had picked that moment to strafe the field! They took turns diving, and Spitfires were burning all over the place as tracers erupted from gun emplacements trying to knock them down! I thought that this day would never be over. Why couldn't the Germans just go away for a little while and let me get some peace? I milled around for a minute or two while waiting for a lull in the strafing and then aimed right at the runway. At the time, I think my fear and desperate need to be on the ground clouded my understanding of what a juicy target a landing P-38 would be for circling fighter pilots. For some reason, they didn't try to shoot me down, but I didn't take any chances and got my bird on the ground as quickly as I could. I didn't know that I had blown a nose tire during takeoff, and the second it touched the ground, I felt the nose bounce. "Just great!" I thought, "What else can go wrong? Here I am in a P-38 with a flat tire, low on gas, lost and with a bunch of Luftwaffe fighters somewhere overhead and ready to dive on me."

I leapt clear of the airplane before the Messerschmitts could come around again, quickly inspected the nosewheel (boy, was it flat) and dashed over to the command tent. I burst into it babbling about fuel and maps, but the air marshal cut me off. In no uncertain terms, he told me to get the hell off his airfield, as I was yet another target to attract more Germans, and no, they didn't have time to give me fuel or fix my tire. All I got from them was a compass course back to Youk les Bains.

I scrambled back into Tangerine II, fired up the engines and wobbled my way to the end of the runway—constantly looking for Messerschmitts. I knew how vulnerable I would be on takeoff, but I didn't see enemy fighters. I stood on the brakes and pushed the throttles against the stops (about 65 inches of manifold pressure) while holding the yoke in my lap. I wanted to get the flat nosewheel off as quickly as I could. At almost the same instant as I released the brakes, the powerful blast of the engines across that big elevator rocked the airplane up onto its main gear, and I held it there until I was off the ground. Once in the air, I began to worry about fuel.

I had no idea if I had enough fuel left in the tanks to make it back across the desert, and my only navigation was to hold the compass heading, guess at my ground speed and keep an eye on the clock. I set up economy-cruise power settings and mentally calculated how many miles I had covered, and how many I still had to go. After so many minutes, my rough calculations told me that I should be home, but there was no airfield in sight; all I could see was desert. It seemed that I would have to belly the airplane in on the edge of the desert in front of me, and I knew that my chances of survival without water were not good.Just as I was setting up for a belly landing, providence decided to shine on me—literally—in the form of a distant reflected flash. I knew immediately what it was. At Youks, all we had were one-man pup tents, but there was a small Arab building with a corrugated-metal roof, and that's what had flashed in the sun. It couldn't have been a better beacon home if it had been a neon light on a 200-foot tower. Although I had only a few miles to go, I kept my ears glued to the sounds of my engines; I thought they would start to cough, but they didn't.

I taxied to the flightline but had to sit in the cockpit for a few minutes to stop shaking. I didn't want to make a fool of myself by falling off the little ladder at the back of the fuselage pod. Even though I was home, the gods hadn't finished laughing at me. I had been gone so long that my squadron mates decided I had bought the farm, and they had already divided up my stuff, including my little tent, air mattress, razorblades—everything! It took me almost a week to track it all down and get it back. But I really didn't care because I was back; out of the six of us who went, I was the only survivor! And, I had shot down four planes and had one probable.To this day, if I think too much about that mission the adrenaline starts to flow, and my muscles begin to twitch. Some things you just never forget. God works in mysterious ways.

(The video clip below is of my late father flying in a P-38 for the “Roaring Glory” series. It was Dad’s lifelong dream to fly the same plane his father had flown with such distinction in WW2.)