Since EDDIE is an “Airdale” aboard the aircraft carrier USS JOHN F. KENNEDY, it is understandable that his interests also lie in the ‘Wild Blue Yonder’. Here’s another historic story.

“The Fourth Fighter Group is going to be the top Fighter Group in the 8TH Air Force. We are here to fight! To those who don't believe it…..I would suggest transferring out now because I'm going to fly the arse off each one of you. Those who keep up with me…..good! Those who don't, well - I don't want you anyway!”

--Don Blakeslee 1 January 1944 upon assuming command of his Fighter Group.

Let’s understand the Fourth Fighter Group, how it went from a middling-successful unit with a reputation bigger than its accomplishment to the top-scoring American fighter group of aviation history. From a score of 150 enemy aircraft destroyed by 1 January 1944…..to a score of 650 by 1 May 1945 is to confront the phenomenon that was Donald James Matthew Blakeslee who was called, by one who knew him, ‘GEORGE S. PATTON . . . IN A P-51 MUSTANG.’

Don Blakeslee was born in Ohio to a family who were among the original pioneers of the Ohio River Territory in the late 1700's. As a teenager, he went wild over airplanes at the National Air Races held every year in Cleveland. In 1939 he and a friend bought a Piper Cub, which his friend quickly crashed. In 1940, Blakeslee went to Canada to join the RCAF. He relieved his mother's anxiety by telling her he would always be just a flight instructor, and maintained her illusion even after he destroyed his first German plane.

Blakeslee arrived in England 15 May 1941, where he was assigned to a fighter squadron at Biggin Hill. By following summer, he was a flight leader who had completed his first combat tour of 200 hours with 3 victories. When told he would now become the instructor he had promised his mother, he instead volunteered for the 133 Eagle Squadron, as the only way he could stay in combat.

Blakeslee had studiously avoided being part of the Eagles, claiming, “ They played one another's sister in making claims of their combat kills.”

EDITOR NOTE – To the uniformed, that means that they inflated their claims of combat victories and backed one another’s stories.

When the Eagles switched over to the USAAF, fellow pilots with less combat experience were commissioned as Majors, while he was taken in as a Captain, an event that further jaundiced his opinion of the unit. In his autobiography, Tumult in the Clouds, James A. Goodson, the top-scoring ace of the 4th Fighter Group, remembered Don Blakeslee: “ While no one questioned his talent in the air, many in the Top Command had less confidence in his attitude and behavior on the ground. At the time of transfer, he had established his reputation with the brass by choosing the very night before General Hunter's base inspection to entertain two female WAAF officers in his quarters. Early the next morning, when the General started his inspection tour, the two WAAFs just had time to scramble out the window…..but unfortunately, right into the path of the General's staff. When Staff members suggested that Blakeslee be demoted and transferred out, General Hunter remarked, ‘For one, maybe. But for two…..perhaps he should be promoted’.”

Blakeslee would eventually be recognized as one of the two finest combat fighter commanders in the history of the United States Air Force. The other was Hubert “Hub” Zemke, Commanding Officer of the 56th Fighter Group, “The Wolfpack.” The two leaders were as different as night and day. Blakeslee was the great exponent of the P-51 Mustang, while Zemke was the man who tamed the P-47 Thunderbolt.

Zemke died in 1994, but to this day both men are the center of awe and respect among those still alive who flew with them during the great daylight air battles over Germany in 1943 and 1944, air battles that determined whether the Allies would be able to mount the critical invasion across the English Channel and lead to a final victory.

Both Zemke and Blakeslee were aces themselves, but they commanded men with higher scores. While Zemke was stiff as a pilot, Blakeslee couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. He used to laugh at the other aces saying that, “ You dead-eye shots take all the fun out of it. When a guy like me is motoring along then starts hosing them down to see where the bullets are going…..that's when it’s fun.”

Both men shared the uncommon knack of leadership in combat. And Blakeslee could actually maintain control of the unit once a melee began. He might not have been a good shot, but he was capable of playing championship three-dimensional chess at speeds of 400 mph. He was also rapacious, explosive, easy to drink and jest with but difficult to understand. Where Zemke was a student of tactics, Blakeslee played by intuition. Zemke loved the Thunderbolt.

Despite being the first American fighter pilot to score an aerial victory in the P-47 (after diving down to destroy a FW-190 off the coast of France) Blakeslee hated the airplane. When he was later congratulated for proving that the Thunderbolt could out-dive the Focke-Wulf, Blakeslee replied, “ It ought to dive because it certainly won’t climb!”

The normal tour for a fighter pilot in the ETO was 250 combat hours but no one really knows how many hours Blakeslee finally totaled because he would often log combat time as ‘training’ and he would ‘forget’ to log missions where nothing constructive happened. The best estimate is that between his first combat operation on 15 May 1941 and his final combat flight three and one-half years later, Don Blakeslee flew roughly 1,200 combat hours. Most fighter pilots played to the crowd, crushing their hats in the ‘50 Mission Crush’ look and putting their girl’s name on the nose of their plane beneath their enemy ‘kill’ scores. Blakeslee did none of this. His hat was ‘G.I.’ and so were his airplanes, none of which ever wore a personal name or carried ‘victory’ crosses under the cockpit. His official number of aerial victories is 15. But those who flew with him think his score was actually much higher…..perhaps double that.

EDITOR NOTE – When I joined the US Air Force a long time ago, our hats were issued with a steel band inside to keep them properly formed. We were told that we had to remove these steel bands as they could sometimes be used as weapons in fights – but we still had to keep that ‘fresh out of the box’ look, but definitely, no 50 Mission Crush!

Aviation artists have painted of a particular ace’s ‘finest moment’, usually something having to do with aerial combat. The only painting Don Blakeslee has ever officially approved is one that shows him standing in front of his airplane pointing to his watch while talking to a Russian officer. That moment commemorates the day Blakeslee led his Fighter Group from England to Poltava in the Ukraine by using only his watch and a map on his knee to find and land at a remote location at exactly his Estimated Time Of Arrival. Anecdotally, this is perhaps the most revealing insight as to of the kind of person Blakeslee really was.

In December 1943, Blakeslee found ‘his’ airplane - the day he led the 354 th Fighter Group on their first mission, a sweep over France. The unit was the first fighter group to take the Merlin-powered P-51B Mustang into combat. After Blakeslee led that group on two more ‘practice’ missions, he became convinced he had found the airplane he had sought since being turned out of their Spitfires a year earlier. Two months shy of his 26th birthday, Blakeslee took command of the Fourth and made it his job to get them the Mustang at the first opportunity.

By early 1944, the 8th Air Force had enough bomber groups to make the large-scale, sustained raids necessary to confront the Luftwaffe and create air superiority. Jimmy Doolittle had assumed command of the 8th AF, and initiated ‘Operation Pointblank’, the destruction of the Luftwaffe through bombing of aircraft factories, and also the destruction of German aircraft in combat in the air and on the ground.

During the unescorted deep-penetration daylight raids of 1943, the Luftwaffe had badly bloodied the Eighth and it was forced to call off the raids. For example, on the ‘Bloody Thursday’ raid on Schweinfurt in October 1943, sixty of two hundred ninety bombers were shot down by defending German fighters. In addition, so many bombers were damaged that fewer than 100 were able to take-off the next morning.

The magnitude of this defeat has never been publicly admitted by the American Air Force, inasmuch as they were ‘saved’ by poor weather over Germany, preventing large-scale deep-penetration raids until 17 December 1943, by which time the first group of long-range tanked Mustangs was ready to support the bombers over the target.

The maximum-effort raids during February 1944 are known to history as ‘The Big Week’. With the P-47 Jugs now equipped with two fuel drop tanks instead of one, effectively doubling their range, plus another fighter group switched over to 8th Air Force and other ‘Jug’ groups converting to the Mustang, the Americans entered a battle of attrition over Germany.

Additionally, this successful effort would result in practically no German fighters attacking our troops when they invaded Normandy's beaches. In this series of air battles over Germany, the Luftwaffe began to hemorrhage’ its experienced veterans, and they suffered more senior fighter pilot losses in 30 days than during all of the daylight raids during 1943.

The Fourth Fighter Group put in such a fine ‘Big Week’ performance that Blakeslee was able to argue convincingly that his group should be given higher priority for re-equipment with the new Merlin-engined Mustang, inasmuch as his former RAF pilots had so much experience with Merlin-powered Spitfires. He promised General Keper, “General, in twenty-four hours, I’ll have them operational!”

Twenty-four hours later, when Blakeslee's group flew its first mission, his pilots had on average one hour and ten minutes familiarization time in their fifty Merlin-powered aircraft. The early P-51 of this period had not been fully developed and were not mechanically reliable. The four guns were set in the wings at an acute angle, which made them prone to jamming under any level of g-force in maneuvering and the extreme cold at high altitude froze the weapons lubrication system.

As a result, the Mustang pilots were reduced to only one or two machine guns. So far as the Merlin engine was concerned, the U.S. produced Packard-Merlin engine had problems with the poor quality British gasoline until the fighter groups managed to scrounge the more efficient British spark plug. During the great battles of early 1944, all of these problems resulted in more P-51s being lost to mechanical failure than to combat action with the enemy.

Despite these problems, the Mustang changed the tide of the air battle. Interviewed after the war, Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring said that when he looked up at the first daylight raids on Berlin and saw the now long-range Mustangs escorting the B-17s and B-24s, “ I knew the jig was up.”

The Fourth Fighter Group began ‘Big Week’ (actually, every clear day for one month) with a score of 150 victories including 100 kills gained when the squadrons were with the RAF. By mid-March 1944, the group had scored its 400th victory and by the end of March - its 500th. In mid-April 1944, General Eisenhower visited the Fourth Fighter Group to personally award Don Blakeslee and fighter ace Don Gentile the DFC for their efforts in ‘The Battle for Germany’.

For Blakeslee, Eisenhower’s visit and the award were bittersweet, since in an attempt to gain publicity for their ‘Little Friends’ fighter escorts, the 8th AF instituted an ‘Ace Race’ to see who would be the first to equal Eddie Rickenbacker’s number of aerial combat victories. This scheme placed an emphasis on individual achievement that was detrimental to the team effort that Blakeslee believed in. Don Gentile became the leading Ace contender, but controversy surrounded his score because of ‘ground kills’ recognized only by 8th AF.

When Gentile buzzed the home base and crashed, he violated Blakeslee’s one standing order: “He who prangs his kite goes home.” But the Brass weren't about to send home their leading ace, and Blakeslee lost the first of many political battles that he would continue losing for the rest of his 30-year career.

By mid-April, the Fourth was closing in on 600 air and ground ‘kill’ victories over enemy aircraft. This achievement did not come without a price. Of the men who sat in the pilots briefing room to hear Blakeslee on that first morning of ‘Big Week’, one half would die or become P.O.W.’s within six weeks including two-thirds of the Fourth's aces. The majority of these losses came in ground strafing missions against embedded anti-aircraft placed around the German airfields. In early September 1944, the Allies had achieved air superiority over Germany. With its fuel supplies hit hard by the bombers and with its experienced core fighter pilots either killed or wounded so badly they could never fly again, the Luftwaffe could no longer meet the American fighters head on in the daily raids.

But now Blakeslee’s combat flying days were numbered. In September 1944, Hub Zemke was lost over Germany in bad weather and he became a POW. A day or so later, Blakeslee led the Fourth on an uneventful escort. When he landed, General Kepner, C.O. of 8th Air Force Fighter Command was waiting for him. Blakeslee couldn't believe it when he heard the General say, “I can't afford to lose both you and Zemke, so Blakeslee – you’re now grounded from further air combat.”

A couple of days later, Blakeslee went flying alone. His mind obviously not on his flying, he landed…..gear-up. The man whose only rule for his pilots was, “He who prangs his kite goes home!” was planning to follow his own order. Instead, the brass intervened once again. Blakeslee was transferred and promoted to a higher level position in 8th AF Fighter Command.

Don Blakeslee remained on active duty and spent thirty years in the U.S. Air Force. Not being the kind of officer who could play ‘politics’, Blakleslee never rose above the rank of Colonel. He led the 27th Fighter Wing, took the F-84 Thunderjet to Korea and served in Vietnam before retiring to Florida in 1972, where he has since lived in self-ordained obscurity.

More great history – thanks EDDIE. Remember, we encourage all Members to research and write about WW II history – primarily about U-Boats and submarines, but all aspects are welcome.