A P-38 and a Reporter: Richard Tregaskis Takes Flight

Reporting from northern Europe during the late summer and early fall of 1944, International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaksis took a break from covering combat with the Third Armored Division, an experience he recalled could give “a man gray hairs, and possibly the worst scares of his life.” While resting at the resort town of Spa, Belgium, he heard news of a mission he had been trying to be a part of since his return to combat—hitching a ride on a “droop-snoot” Lockheed P-38 Lightning during a bombing mission into Germany.

Although Tregaskis had nagged General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, commander of the Ninth Tactical Air Force, about being allowed on a mission with the Lightning, which had the guns in its nose replaced by a transparent Plexiglas cap so a passenger could peer out, he had believed that the odds were about five to one against hearing anything more about his request.

Surprised to hear that his flight had been approved, Tregaskis ended up flying with Captain Wayne G. McCarthy of the 367th Fighter Group, 39th Fighter Squadron, which was headquartered at the time at A-71 Clastres Airfield, located south of Saint Quentin, France. The late-September mission had the American planes attacking a rail line beyond the Moselle River in the German Rhineland. “If we were lucky, we might catch a freight train on the track,” Tregaskis remembered. “Each aircraft had two thousand-pound bombs.”

As he climbed into McCarthy’s P-38, Tregaskis, wearing a backpack parachute, noticed that the droop-snoot compartment in which he would travel had been equipped with a new, bright yellow cushion for him to sit on; an intercom system to communicate with McCarthy; and an instrument panel on which he could monitor the twin-engine fighter’s airspeed, altitude, and other vital readings.

The correspondent neglected, however, to check out one item he might need for the long mission—a relief tube if he needed to urinate. “Another item I should have checked, but didn’t, was the oxygen system for me, the passenger. There wasn’t any,” Tregaskis noted. “But I didn’t realize that until a much later and more critical juncture.”

Passing over the Moselle, Tregaskis caught sight of small villages and farms as they entered Germany. “Then everything was happening at once,” he recalled. “We were at ten thousand feet, over railroad tracks like a set of silver threads over rolling hills. And we were diving, diving on the track, in a great roaring and whistling, with our nose down, and in the rush and scream, I saw that there was a toy freight train puffing below us on the metal band of the track.”

As McCarthy pulled up after releasing his bomb, Tregaskis’s vision grayed over and he almost passed out from the g-force. As he strained to see where the plane’s bombs had hit, the pilot informed him over the intercom that his bombs had failed to release and he had to make another attack, climbing up to twelve thousand feet and causing the correspondent to worry about his condition in the thin air. “Down we went again,” Tregaskis reported. “It seemed to be straight down. I glimpsed the airspeed meter. It was reading around three hundred [miles per hour]. I gulped for air.”

Straining, he glimpsed out of his window in time to see an explosion on one of the train cars, which “slowly keeled over and fell off the track.” As McCarthy zoomed up toward the clouds, Tregaskis heard through radio static other planes in his flight report seeing “five bandits at angels eighteen, six o’clock.” German Messerschmitt 109 fighters had joined the fray and were after the reporter’s P-38, which had no machine guns due to the droop-snoot.

McCarthy maneuvered his craft into a tight spiral to lose altitude to escape his attacker, causing his passenger to believe that his pilot had been shot and they were in danger of crashing. It also marked, Tregaskis believed, the first time during the war that a fighter aircraft carrying a reporter had been involved in a dogfight with the enemy.

Relieved to hear from McCarthy that they were heading back to the American airfield, Tregaskis, after surviving another scare, a near hit by antiaircraft fire, began to worry about another problem—he needed to relieve himself. He proved unsuccessful at holding his bladder and realized “something vital had to be done. I looked at the magnificent, lemon-colored cushion which was my seat in the droop-snoot, and I felt creeping qualms of a schoolboy conscience. I hung on a few minutes more. Then I could hold on no more.”

After landing and struggling out of the nose compartment, Tregaskis remembered that McCarthy climbed out of the plane’s cockpit and bounced over to ask what he thought of the mission. “I had to tell him the truth,” Tregaskis noted. “‘You scared the p___ out of me,’ I said, ‘and if you don’t believe me, look at my cushion.'"