The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (The Liberation Trilogy Book 2)

by Rick Atkinson

The Warhawks heeled over in a compact dive, each pilot firing short bursts from his half dozen .50-caliber machine guns. “I saw a Focke-Wulfe 190 and jumped directly on his tail,” Lieutenant Willie Ashley, Jr., later reported. “I started firing at close range, so close that I could see the pilot.” Flames spurted from the enemy fuselage, then from another and another. One Luftwaffe pilot dove to the treetops and fled toward Rome only to clip the earth in a flaming cartwheel. Bullets raked a fifth Focke-Wulfe from nose to tail until the plane fluttered in a momentary stall, then fell off on one flaming wing. “The whole show lasted less than five minutes,” Major Spanky Roberts said. “It was a chasing battle, as the Germans were always on the move. We poured hell into them.”