'Ace' fighter pilots spin tales of World War II

Four World War II fighter pilot aces recalled dogfights over Europe and victories in the air Sunday before a rapt audience at the Aerospace Museum of California.

All octogenarians now, the men were in their late teens and early 20s when they engaged German pilots in harrowing air-to-air combat.

To qualify as an ace, a pilot had to shoot down at least five enemy planes. Of the hundreds of thousands of individuals trained as military pilots, only a tiny percentage of pilots have ever achieved that exalted status.

Col. Bud Anderson, Lt. Col. Don Bryan, Col. Barrie Davis and Col. Art Fiedler, who together destroyed a total of 43 enemy planes in the Second World War, were seated before a P-51 Mustang restored to a high polish.

Fiedler recalled his days living in a tent in Italy and flying missions escorting B-24 bombers.

On one mission, Fiedler said, he spotted two German Messerschmitt 109s. He followed one down as it went into a vertical dive, hit the German plane with machine-gun fire, then watched it crash.

Pulling out of the dive, he suddenly found himself flying side by side with another German fighter, he said.

They were so close, Fiedler said, that he could see the the enemy's red helmet and his oxygen mask.

"That's all I saw was his face," Fiedler recalled.

Neither pilot could fire their front-facing machine guns, so they flew next to each other – only about 40 feet apart – for what seemed like hours but was probably less than a minute, Fiedler said.

Fiedler said he unholstered his .45-caliber pistol and aimed it at the German pilot. He hoped the other man would break away, and "I'd go home," he said.

Instead, he said, the enemy pilot suddenly jettisoned his canopy and bailed out. Fiedler said he took a photograph of the man parachuting to safety.

When he got back to base, he said, he was nicknamed Art "Svengali" Fiedler.

"He hypnotizes them into bailing out," Fiedler said as the audience laughed and applauded his tale.

Fielder had eight confirmed "kills" during World War II.

Anderson led the group with 16. Bryan destroyed five enemy planes in one day and ended the war with more than 13 combat victories.

Davis shot down at least six enemy aircraft during the war – and was nearly shot down himself.

He remembered a raid on June 6, 1944, D-Day, when he mistook an enemy plane for an American. He was hit, lost consciousness and came to with his plane flying level at 20,000 feet.

The canopy was gone, and Davis said he was freezing. His shoes, still wet from walking through grass at the airstrip, had frozen to his feet.

He managed to land, but found that his plane's wing had been shot up "like Swiss cheese" and a portion of the tail was gone.

Fragments of metal had to be extracted from his head, he said.

All the men were born in the early 1920s.

Fiedler, now 84, said they considered themselves "hot pilots," but were in fact just "overgrown teenagers."

A pilot at 19, Fiedler said he got married at 20 and had to have his mother come with him to sign off on his marriage license.

"I look at 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds and say, 'God, we were never that young,' " he said.

Davis, 84, wore a white suit and has a shock of white hair.

He said he and Fiedler "came strutting back (from the war) as 20-year-old captains."

They thought their 31-year-old commander was too old to fight, he said, laughing.

"It was a young man's war," he said.

The event at McClellan Park was sponsored by the Northern California Friends of the American Fighters Aces Association.

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