15. The American Fighter That Sealed the Luftwaffe’s Coffin
Once American bombers hit their targets and began their return trip, their P-51 escorts were free to leave the formations and “hit the deck” on their way back home. They descended from their high altitudes and tangled with any planes they came across. They strafed German airfields, attacked trains or road traffic, engaged any targets of opportunity they spotted, and otherwise provoked and dared the Luftwaffe to come out and do something about it. In the runup to the D-Day landings, some P-51 groups were released from bomber escort duties altogether, and unleashed on German airfields instead. Such aggressive tactics finally crippled the Luftwaffe. The P-51s proved such a success, and were such a marked improvement over the P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts, that by the end of 1944, fourteen out of the Eighth Air Force’s fifteen fighter groups had switched from those fighters to P-51s.
Perhaps the greatest compliment to the Mustangs came from the Luftwaffe’s chief, Hermann Goering. He reportedly said “I knew the jig was up” when he saw P-51s over Berlin. Even the arrival of futuristic German airplanes late in the war failed to wrest aerial supremacy from the P-51s. The most formidable of those planes, the Messerschmitt Me 262, was kept in check by a shortage of both fuel and experienced pilots. Also by the expedients of attacking their airfields and strafing them on the ground, or keeping fighter air patrols near their airfields to catch them at their most vulnerable as they took off or landed.
