On this day in 1923, Chuck Yeager is born. The legendary pilot is perhaps best known for being the first to break the sound barrier, but do you know about the time that he escaped German forces with the help of the French resistance?
It was March 1944, and then-Flight Officer Yeager was serving as a pilot with the 363rd Fighter Squadron, 357th Fighter Group. Our men had just departed on a mission to Bordeaux when three German FW 190 fighters launched a surprise attack.
They’d snuck up on the American fighters, approaching from above and behind.
“Three FW 190s came in from the rear and cut my elevator cables,” Yeager later explained. “I snap-rolled with the rudder and jumped at 18,000 feet.”
He didn’t deploy his parachute right away, though. He knew a slow descent would give the Germans too much time to find or target him. “I was whirling on my back and began to feel dizzy,” he described, “I pulled the ripcord at 8,000 feet.”
By the time Yeager made it to the ground, he was bleeding and in pain. It was a dicey moment. He needed to move quickly, but he couldn’t leave a bloody trail for the Germans to track, either. He later estimated that he walked four or five miles before finally reaching a place of relative safety.
The next day, Yeager came across a French woodsman carrying an axe. How could he determine if that woodsman was friend or foe?
“I decide to rush him from behind,” Yeager later wrote, “and get that ax. . . . he drops the ax, almost dead with fright. With eyes the size of quarters, he stares at the pistol I’m waving in his face. He speaks no English, so I talk at him like Tarzan: ‘Me American. Need help. Find underground.’”
Fortunately, the woodsman was no friend of the Germans, and he connected Yeager with members of the French resistance. It was the first step in Yeager’s long journey out of occupied France and into neutral Spain.
Yeager was hidden in a secret room in a hayloft, then given civilian clothes so he could move to a new location. For two weeks, he was passed like a baton from one French resistance fighter to the next. Finally, he was smuggled into the back of a van transporting other downed pilots like himself. The group was driven close to Lourdes, France.
The last leg of the trip home—across the Pyrenees—would have to be done on foot. Yeager paired up with Omar “Pat” Patterson, a B-24 navigator who’d also been shot down.
Trouble came a few days into their trip. The two men had found an abandoned hut and stopped to rest. Suddenly, German bullets began tearing into the wall. Patterson was hit in the leg as the two men scrambled out a back window, down a log flume, and into a freezing creek.
“I surface and so does Pat,” Yeager later wrote. “I grab him and paddle across to the other side. He’s gray. He’s been shot in the knee . . . . I tear away his pant leg, and I can’t believe it. . . . His lower leg is attached to his upper leg only by a tendon.”
There was nothing to do but finish amputating the leg, then bandage it up.
“Pat is unconscious, but still breathing, and we’re pretty well hidden from the Germans up above,” Yeager concluded. “I decide to wait till dark and then somehow drag both of us back up that mountain and get us into Spain.”
Yeager later couldn’t remember how long the remainder of the trip took, but he did remember his muscles “hammering at me” and that all he wanted was to “drop in my tracks—either to sleep or to die.”
Amazingly, though, he made it. Yeager had saved Patterson’s life, and he would receive a Bronze Star Medal for his action. He would also return to flying combat missions, even becoming an “ace in a day” on October 12, 1944.
Naturally, that’s a story for another day.
Primary Sources & Further Reading:
David Langbart, Chuck Yeager–Evader, March 1944 (Text Message: Blog of the Textual Records Division at the National Archives; Dec. 18, 2020)
Don Keith, Chuck Yeager: World War II Fighter Pilot (2022)
Edward Stourton, Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees (2023)
Eric Niderost, Chuck Yeager: Fighter Pilot (WWII History Magazine; August 2015) (reprinted HERE)
Flight on Foot: Downed Pilot Eludes Enemy (Chicago Tribune; July 29, 1985) (reprinted HERE)
Gen. Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos, Yeager: An Autobiography (1985)
John L. Frisbee, Always a Fighter Pilot (Air Force Mag., Feb. 1991)
Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (2008)
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