|
|
. . . . The French began to call us up and tell us about tanks and trucks they saw on different roads. We'd go out and look for them--sometimes we didn't find them. Gradually we became big operators.
I remember one of these operation in particular. One day Captain Levi Chase, my operations officer, went out by himself and destroyed eighty-four guns and a few trucks. Altogether we must have destroyed about three hundred trucks--we became so damn efficient in this type of work that the Jerries and Eyeties weren't able to move a truck anywhere in Tunisia by daylight.
After we had done that for a while, we got to know the country pretty well ourselves and began to cook up other things to do. For instance, we knew that the enemy had only about a dozen locomotives on all their little lines down there, so we got to blasting them--for sheer diversion, we went after their oil and munitions dumps. Chase, my "One-Man Wave of Terror," was the best man I've ever seen in spotting those things from the air. One time he strafed a lot of haystacks and they alll exploded, proving that he was right--the enemy had hidden ammunition under them.
We used to hunt light tanks all over southern Tunisia, and when we found them we would strafe them with our fifty-calibers. They would play dead, and then at night the crews would run them into Arab courtyards or dry gulleys and camouflage them. So we'd track them down and shoot more holes into them before they could be repaired. We didn't have armament to blast them, but our "fifties" kept them out of action. Often we would observe troop movements, report them to the French and then go back and strafe them, and the French would occupy one or more towns.
Finally, the people back at headquarters saw what a job we were doing and sent us a squadron of bombers to fool around with--we had lpenty of fun thinking up bombing missions and then escorting the jokers."
Return to Photo Gallery
Return to Main Page
© Thomas E. Chase, 1998
