You expect me to do WHAT?...

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Combat pilots are sometimes said to have been made of something entirely different from the rest of us...Bomber crews are composed of individuals with a calmer disposition who can focus on a single purpose without diversion from a predetermined target...Pilots of bomber crews in particular are chosen for, among other qualities, the ability to maintain awareness of all events around them without wavering from the single intent of reaching their objective, and releasing their payload...

Differing greatly from the bomber pilot flying in his tight formations sometimes consisting of thousands of aircraft, is the fighter pilot, identified by his willingness, and even desire to fly beyond the design limits of his machine, acting as a lone agent in his duty, accepting sole responsibility for his achievement or failure...This aggressive behavior exemplifies and defines the reason great fighter pilots become notable figures in history...

One such pilot was my contemporary in service, although Robin Olds' career began in a war before I was born, and was not completed until after I was separated...His skill and daring in the air resulting in a long string of victories has been written of not only here, but innumerable other sources...But one assignment he accepted which I have seen nowhere else but the book he wrote co-authored by his daughter, is one that assuredly belongs in the "you-expect-me-to-do-what?" category...

As a 22 year old Captain, and already an ace in WWII, Olds found on a pre-flight inspection some new equipment had been installed in his North American P-51 Mustang, and on questioning his crew chief, was told it was a highly specialized camera...Later briefed individually, Olds found he had been "volunteered" to undergo a previously unheard of assignment...

Accustomed to duty as part of an escort provided for bomber formations striking targets deep in enemy-held territory, he was now assigned to forge ahead of the bomber attack group as an individual where he was to use the camera to gather intelligence to be used in bomb damage assessment...The unusual part of this mission was the requirement that he perform this duty three times in succession, not only before and after the operation, but during the actual bombing...

As if the pressure was not enough, he learned that the target was a railroad marshaling yard located in Stuttgart, Germany, and heavily defended by the Wehrmacht's deadly anti-aircraft artillery...To make his job even more challenging, he was assigned to take the pictures at an altitude of only 300 feet...In three separate passes...

Accepting the assignment, he spent some time in calculations involving weather forecasts, wind predictions, bomber altitude, bomb drop rate and time over target, then used maps and the speed of his own aircraft to determine his own ingress and egress points and precise times for all three passes...

Finding that flak from the AAA was anticipated as heavy, intense and accurate, his senses and awareness were sharpened as he figured his first "before" pass might come as such a surprise to the enemy they might not get off a shot at him, and the second "during" pass might catch them too busy shooting at bombers to bother a lone pilot dumb enough to be taking pictures at such a low altitude in the middle of an attack...But the third "after" pass worried him the most as he knew the enemy gunners would be throwing everything they had including their steel helmets at him...

As it turned out, Olds executed his "before" run as predicted drawing little fire, but alerting the enemy gunners for what was to follow...His "during" flight also went as planned as he ingressed the scene in a hailstorm of enemy tracer fire mostly intended for the high-flying bombers...But the bomber formation's aim was off and the ordnance was falling on the wrong side of his camera-equipped Mustang, completely missing the intended target...

Egressing the area, Olds quickly decided that since the target looked the same in the first two passes, a third run would be a waste of film, and likely the ruin of a perfectly good taxpayer-funded P-51 and its pilot, so he made the decision to turn for home without giving further target opportunities to an enraged group of AAA crews...In the debriefing, before the secret film had been developed, Olds reported that the "before" pictures were all that was necessary for analysis as all the bombs had been dropped on his own flight pattern instead of the intended objective...

Adding a postscript to his verbal report that whichever deskbound dreamer at Group HQ came up with this assignment could "kiss his ass," Olds returned to duty...It's the sort of behavior you can reasonably be expected to get away with when you're Robin Olds and the year is 1944...

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