Germans CAPTURED 2 American Pilots — They Squeezed Into a 1-Seat P-51 and Flew Home Together

It was the 18th of August, 1944, and the wheat in northern France was gold and flat and waiting. A P-51 Mustang came down out of a clear sky with its left side torn open, trailing a thin gray smear, and it slid onto that field on its belly with a long tearing groan that no man forgets.

The pilot who climbed out of it was Major Bert Marshall, a Texan, the commander of a squadron of American fighters, and he was now on the ground in country the Germans still held. He pulled the pin on a small burning grenade and pushed it into the cockpit to destroy the aircraft, and then he stood in the open with nothing at all, no rifle, no cover, no way out.

Above him, the war went on. Somewhere close, a German patrol was already moving toward the smoke. And then a second Mustang came around low over the trees, and it did not strafe, and it did not climb away for home. It lined up on that same rough field, wheels down, throttled back, and it landed. There was no rescue plan in the world that said this could work.

There was no room in that little airplane for two grown men. There was no reason on earth for the second pilot to give up his one clean way home and trust his life to a wheat field behind enemy lines. He did it anyway. His name was Royce Priest, and he was a very young lieutenant, and in the next 4 minutes, he was going to try something that the generals afterward said no sane man would attempt.

I am Arthur Hinton, and for 40 years, I kept the records of war. I read the diaries, and I sat with the last veterans before they passed. On this channel, I tell the Second World War as it actually happened, from the documents, not the myths. If that is your sort of thing, subscribe. It is free, and you can change your mind later.

Now, I want to be honest with you at the very start, because that is the only way I know how to tell it. The story you may have heard has the Germans capturing two American pilots, and the pilots then squeezing into a one-man fighter and flying home together. The truth is simpler, and to my mind, far braver. The Germans captured no one that day.

One American was shot down and stranded on the ground, and one American landed a single-seat fighter beside him and carried him out on his own lap under one canopy with German soldiers closing in. That is the real thing. Two men, one seat, one engine, and a takeoff run across a field that was never meant for it.

Let me tell it to you the way the records tell it. The two men at the heart of this belonged to the 354th Fighter Squadron, part of the 355th Fighter Group in the Eighth Air Force. By that summer, the Eighth was the great American air weapon over Europe. Thousands of bombers and fighters flying out of England day after day. The 355th flew the P-51 Mustang, and if you know your airplanes, you will know why that matters.

The Mustang was long-ranged and fast and beautiful, a fighter that could escort the heavy bombers deep into Germany and fight all the way there and all the way back. It was also, and this is the whole of the problem, a single-seat aircraft. One man, one cockpit, one narrow bucket of a seat under a bubble of clear canopy.

It was built for one and only one from the first rivet to the last. Major Burt Marshall was the squadron commander, a man from Texas who had come to the fighting later than some. He had spent a long stretch back in the United States as an instructor teaching younger men to fly before he finally got his own combat squadron and took it to England.

He arrived to lead the 354th in the early summer of 1944 in the weeks after the Normandy landings when the Allied armies had broken out of the beachhead and were pushing hard across France. Royce Priest was one of the young ones. They called him Deacon, and he too had come to the squadron only that June.

On the 18th of August, he was flying as one of Marshall’s own flight, four Mustangs together with the commander leading and the lieutenant close by. You have to understand where the war stood on that day to understand why they were down so low in the first place. By the middle of August of 1944, the German army in the west was coming apart.

The allies had landed in Normandy in June, held on through weeks of brutal hedgerow fighting, and then in early August they had broken out and begun to swing east and to close a great trap around the German forces near a town called Falaise. Tens of thousands of German soldiers and their guns and vehicles and horses were caught in that pocket and trying to escape through a narrowing gap.

The roads and the rail lines east were jammed with them. And so the Allied Air Forces threw everything they had at those roads and rails because a beaten army that gets away can turn and fight you again in a month, and a beaten army that does not get away is finished. The 354th Squadron flew into the middle of that on the 18th of August to help make sure the Germans did not get away.

The job that day was not glamorous. It was the hard, low, dangerous work that wins ground armies their victories. The German army in Normandy had been shattered and was trying to pull back east, and everything it needed, fuel, ammunition, food, reinforcement, moved by rail. So the fighters went down low to hit the marshalling yards and the trains and the roads to cut the arteries and keep the enemy from feeding the front.

Low work of that kind is where good pilots die. Up higher fighter fights other fighters and has room and speed and choices. Down on the deck at a few hundred feet, there is flak. There are guns you cannot see until they open up, and by then you are already inside their reach, and there is very little you can do about it.

The Germans knew the fighters would come down after the trains, and they set a trap for exactly that. They hid anti-aircraft guns inside an ordinary looking railway car, the sides built to fall away. As Marshall’s flight came in low over the yards, those sides dropped and the guns came up, and a storm of 20-mm and 40-mm shells tore straight up into the formation. It was point-blank.

Marshall’s Mustang took the worst of it. The aircraft was hit hard and hit fatally, the engine failing, the controls going, and there was no nursing at home. He was too low and too far inside enemy country to bail out with any hope. His only chance was to put the crippled fighter down on its belly and take whatever came.

He found a field, a stretch of open wheat, and he brought the Mustang in wheels up. A belly landing in a fighter is a violent thing, a long grinding slide with the propeller folding and the airframe screaming, but Marshall walked away from it. And walking away in that place was almost the worst news of all. He was down, alive, in a country crawling with German troops who were themselves retreating through it in their thousands.

He did the drill. He set the thermite grenade to burn the aircraft so the enemy could not learn from it, and then he stood there in the field with the smoke rising, a squadron commander with nothing left to command, waiting either for capture or for something worse. A downed airman on the ground in August of 1944 could expect a prison camp if he was lucky, and there were men who were not lucky.

Now, here is where the impossible thing begins. The rest of Marshall’s flight was still overhead, circling, watching their leader stand helpless in the wheat. Any of them could have marked the spot, radioed it in, and turned for home with a clear conscience. There was nothing in training, nothing in orders, nothing in reason that told them to do otherwise, but Royce Priest looked down at that field and at that lone figure, and he decided he was not going to leave him. He called it out.

He was going to land, and the orders came back at once, firm >> [snorts] >> from above him, telling him not to. It was madness. To land a fighter on unprepared ground behind enemy lines was to risk a second aircraft, a second pilot, and very likely to hand the Germans two prisoners instead of one. Priest disobeyed.

He said afterward, in his own plain words, that he was very concerned about his own fate having disobeyed a direct order in combat, and not once but twice. Twice he was told no, and he did it anyway, and the weight of that stayed with him for a long time after. But in the moment he throttled back, put his wheels down, and committed a fast, fragile, single-seat fighter to a wheat field he had seen only from the air, he got it down.

That alone, on rough ground he had never surveyed, at the speed a Mustang lands, was an act of flying that most pilots would not care to try even on a good day with no one shooting. He rolled to a stop near Marshall, and then came the part that no one had ever really planned for, because who plans for it? Two men, one seat.

Priest was not going to leave his own parachute and his dinghy in the way, so he pulled them out and threw them clear of the aircraft, out onto the field. Some who tell it say he did that to make room, others say he did it to show Marshall, and to show himself that there was no changing his mind now, that he was all the way in, and there was no half measure, and no backing out.

Both things can be true at once. Then they worked out how two grown men could fit where one was meant to sit. There was no second seat to take. Marshall climbed in and got himself down into the cockpit with Priest, one man more or less on the other, folded together in a space built for a single body, with the control column and the throttle and the rudder pedals all somewhere in among the tangle of them.

There was, by the account of it, barely enough room to pull the canopy closed over the two of them. Picture that for a moment. A fighter cockpit is snug for one man in a flying suit. Now put two in it and shut the lid, and understand that one of them still has to fly the thing, has to reach the controls, has to see out, has to take off across a field and climb away and navigate home and land again, all with another man pressed against him and over him the whole way.

And they were not alone in that field. As they struggled to get set, German infantry were coming. This is where the other two Mustangs of the flight earned their place in the story, because Priest could not have done it without them. The remaining fighters stayed low and covered the field, and when a truckload of German soldiers came on toward the two men on the ground, the covering pilots rolled in and opened up with their guns.

A P-51 carried six heavy machine guns, and even a short burst from a fighter at low level is a terrible thing to be under. They caught the enemy truck and its soldiers and stopped them, and they kept stopping whatever came, buying Priest the seconds he needed. It was close. By the accounts, they got the aircraft moving and off the ground just in time, only barely ahead of a second German patrol coming for the field.

And think, while they scrambled, about how much had to go right and how little of it was in anyone’s hands. The engine of the second Mustang had to keep running while it sat there idling in the open with the enemy coming. The ground had to be firm enough and long enough. The two men had to get themselves arranged, and the canopy shut in seconds, not minutes, because every second the covering fighters spent shooting up German infantry was a second closer to the moment their ammunition ran low or a heavier gun found the field. There was no radio call that

could hurry any of it. There was only the two of them wedged together in that cockpit, and Priest’s hands finding the controls somewhere under Marshall, and the flat golf field ahead, and the smoke of the burning first Mustang still rising off to the side to mark the whole business for any German who cared to look. Then Priest had to fly.

A Mustang is heavy at the best of times, and now it was carrying two men and had to unstick from soft uneven ground with a load and a balance it was never built for. He got the tail up, got the wheels off, and dragged that overloaded fighter into the air with the field running out beneath him.

He climbed away west, out of the flak, out over the lines, and set course for England with his commander crammed into the cockpit against him in the North Sea, and home still a long way off. Consider what that flight was. It was not a quick hop. It was the long haul back across France and out over the water, more than an hour of it, maybe closer to two, with two men locked together in a space that punished one man’s back on an ordinary mission.

There was no shifting to ease a cramped leg, no room to stretch, no way to take the weight off. Marshall could not help fly, and could barely move, and Priest could not rest his arms or his hands for a moment because he was the only thing keeping them both in the air. It was cramped past any comfort, and it went on and on, but the engine held, and the wings held, and the two of them held, and in time the coast of England came up under the nose, and Royce Priest brought his overloaded Mustang down and taxied in with two men aboard where there

should have been one. They had done the thing that could not be done, and I will tell you what happened next because it is part of the truth, and it says something about how the high command saw it. When the story reached the top, all the way up to General James Doolittle, who commanded the Eighth Air Force, Doolittle did not quite know what to do with it.

On the one hand, it was one of the bravest things a young pilot could do. On the other hand, if the Air Force made too much of it, if it handed out its very highest honor, the Medal of Honor, then every hot-blooded young pilot in England might start landing fighters in fields to pull out down friends, and most of them would die trying and lose their aircraft in the bargain.

Doolittle is remembered as saying of the whole idea words to the effect that anyone would have to be out of his mind to try it because what Priest had done was crazy even to think about. So, Priest was not given the Medal of Honor. He was given the Distinguished Service Cross instead, which is a very high award for gallantry, but a step below the highest, and that step was deliberate.

Marshall, the commander who was carried home, received the Silver Star. I have always found that a very human ending. The Air Force honored the courage, and in the same breath, made sure not to turn it into an example other boys would follow to their deaths. Both of those instincts came from the same hard arithmetic of war, where even a miracle has to be weighed against how many men it might cost the next time.

I want to be careful, as I always am, about what we actually know and what we do not. We know the two men and their squadron and their group. We know the date and the aircraft and the flak trap in the rail car. We know that Priest threw out his own parachute and dinghy, that the two of them barely got the canopy shut, that the other Mustang strafed a truckload of German soldiers to keep them off, and that they got airborne just ahead of a second patrol.

We know the awards and we know Doolittle’s reasoning. What the neat retellings often smooth over, and what I will not, is how thin the margin was. Priest could have bounced that landing and wrecked both the aircraft and their only way out. The German gunners could have found the field a minute sooner. The overloaded Mustang could have failed to lift from soft ground.

Any one of those things, and instead of a rescue, we would be talking about two names on a list of the missing. It worked, but it was never safe and it was never sure, and the men who were there knew that better than anyone. That, in the end, is the whole of it. Not two prisoners breaking out in a stolen fighter, which makes a fine title, but never happened, but something quieter and harder and truer.

One man down in a wheat field with the enemy coming, and one man who would not leave him, who threw away his own safe passage home, and landed beside him, and carried him out on his lap under a single canopy, while his friends held the Germans back with their guns. Loyalty is an easy word to say. On the 18th of August, 1944, in a field in France, Royce Priest showed us exactly what it cost and exactly what it is worth.

So, tell me, in the comments, which moment stays with you? Is it Priest throwing his parachute out onto the field so there could be no turning back? Or is it that overloaded Mustang clawing off the ground just ahead of the second patrol? And tell me who you would like me to cover next, whose story you think has been forgotten and ought not to be.

I read them and I take them to heart, and many a film on this channel began as one line from one of you. If you have come this far with me, you might as well subscribe and we can go on telling these stories together, lest we forget the whole of it.