Stranger to the Ground

Stranger to the Ground, above all else, is an insight into the character of a man whose great compulsion is to measure himself against storm and night and fear.

On the surface it is the tale of a memorable mission of a young fighter pilot utilizing his skills in a lonely duel with death. Yet between the lines emerges the portrait of the airman as a breed, probing outward, but even more significantly, inward.

To be written, this book had first to be flown! Whoever reads it will find himself locked in a cockpit with Dick Bach, not for a single flight but for a thousand preceding hours in which professional skills were polished to combat competency, and a philosophy of life was matured.

It is rarely realized—and this may be as appropriate a place as any to point it out—that in the achievement of flight men have perhaps had to call more deeply on resources of heart and mind than in any previous reach of experience.

There is nothing in man’s physical nature which prepares him for flight. Countless generations have rooted human instincts in earth-bound habits.

Everything pertaining to flight has had to be invented—the aircraft; the instruments; the engines; the guidance systems; the communications; the airports—everything. And beyond this, men have had to meld myriad scientific discoveries into workable compromises, lending themselves in the process to unprecedented experiments.

As I contemplate all this after a lifetime of intimate association with it, I marvel at the depth of man’s spiritual and intellectual resources more than at the altitudes and speeds of his flight.

Our modern triumph in reaching toward the stars is as much an extension of the human spirit as it is a breakthrough in science. Science is the servant. Spirit is the master.

This is the message of Stranger to the Ground, gleaming through the love of a pilot for his plane, the dedication of an officer to his country, the determination of a young man to pay his debt to freedom in combat with storm and night and fear.

GILL ROBB WILSON

CHAPTER ONE

The wind tonight is from the west, down runway two eight. It pushes gently at my polka-dot scarf and makes the steel buckles of my parachute harness tinkle in the darkness. It is a cold wind, and because of it my takeoff roll will be shorter than usual and my airplane will climb more quickly than it usually does when it lifts into the sky.

Two ground crewmen work together to lift a heavy padlocked canvas bag of Top Secret documents into the nose of the airplane. It sags awkwardly into space normally occupied by contoured ammunition cans, above four oiled black machine guns, and forward of the bomb release computers. Tonight I am not a fighter pilot. I am a courier for 39 pounds of paper that is of sudden urgent interest to my wing commander, and though the weather this night over Europe is already freakish and violent, I have been asked to move these pounds of paper from England into the heart of France.

In the bright beam of my flashlight, the Form One, with its inked boxes and penciled initials, tells me that the airplane is ready, that it carries only minor shortcomings of which I already know: a dent in one drop tank, an inspection of the command radio antenna is due, the ATO* system is disconnected. It is hard to turn the thin pages of the Form One with gloves on, but the cold wind helps me turn them.

Form signed, gun bay door locked over the mysterious canvas bag, I climb the narrow yellow ladder to my dark cockpit, like a high-booted mountain climber pulling himself to a peak from whose snows he can stand and look down upon the world. My peak is the small cockpit of a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak.