Oral Histories
of the 100 Hours
"Football War"

El Salvador - Honduras 1969

Civilian Reservist 1, Salvadoran Air Force

by David E. Spencer

I was mobilized for the war with Honduras as a pilot. All private pilots are reserve pilots as well, and I was mobilized. At that time I was a partner in a construction company with 20 million dollars worth of contracts in Honduras. These contracts were all over Honduras and because of this I was able to establish a large intelligence network throughout Honduras which was of great utility to the armed forces. I also participated in the first attack on the night of July 14th.

In this attack I flew a P-51 Mustang and directed the attack. It was a total disaster. We got lost en-route to the target and on the way back, the Salvadoran High Command got the bright idea of imposing a total blackout just before we landed. This meant that there were no landing lights and since all of the radios were run on electricity, there was no radio communication either. We were totally "in the dark," as you Americans say. We had to find the runway by using the few terrain features we could see and then one of us had to swoop down to see if we really had found the landing strip. After the first plane landed, the rest of us had to land by using the landing lights on the preceding plane as a point of reference. This was a long, drawn out process and some of our pilots could not see, while some of the planes began running out of fuel. One of the pilots called me desperately, asking what he should do, so I told him to fly to Guatemala, which he did. That's how we lost that plane.

The next day we launched another raid, and in the process two P-51s collided on the runway and bent up their propellers. That little accident effectively knocked out a quarter of our air force combat planes. After this I became part of the chief of operations for the air force. I also had my private plane, a Push-Pull which I flew on bombing raids. We modified it by removing the door and adding a rail system on which bombs could be pushed out the opening. I could carry six 100 pound bombs or one 500 pound bomb. On the last day of the war, I had the mission to bomb the oil storage tanks at Puerto Cortez in my Push-Pull. An American named Bruce Nixon was with me.

Just as we were on the runway, getting ready to taxi out, General Fidel Sanchez Hernandez arrived in his vehicle and told us that we needed to stop. I really wanted to go on this mission, so I told him to just "look the other way and pretend you were never here, or leave for three minutes!" He refused, so I got really upset and began swearing at him, calling him a queer and other things. I don't think he liked this very much.

Right after the war, the possibility of a renewed conflict was very real. Our priority was to build up our air force, as ours was much inferior to the Hondurans, and we had taken many losses during the war. We contracted mercenary American pilots to fly down old P-51 Mustangs. The way it worked was that we would give them money. They would buy the plane and fly it down from the United States, and we would fly them back in a private plane to the U.S. They would normally fly the planes from cotton fields in Southern Texas. Special fuel tanks were strapped on to the wings, so they could make the journey. Sometimes these fuel tanks were just modified fuel drums. I remember one tall American pilot who made several trips for us. He would write his flight plan on his bare leg, so the Feds. would never catch him with documents. In flight, he'd roll up his pant leg to check the plan.

Footnotes

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