One-Man Airforce [Illustrated Edition]

By Major Don Salvatore Gentile

Illustrated with 14 photos of the Author and the Aircraft he flew.
Gentile was born in Piqua, Ohio. After a fascination with flying as a child, his father provided him with his own plane, an Aerosport Biplane. He managed to log over 300 hours flying time by July 1941, when he attempted to join the Army Air Force.
The U.S. military required two years of college for its pilots, which Gentile did not have, so he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was posted to the UK in 1941. Gentile flew the Supermarine Spitfire Mark V with No. 133 Squadron, one of the famed "Eagle Squadron" during 1942. His first kills (a Ju 88 and Fw 190) were on August 1, 1942, during Operation Jubilee.
In September 1942, the Eagle squadrons transferred to the USAAF, becoming the 4th Fighter Group. Gentile became a flight commander in September 1943, now flying the P-47 Thunderbolt. Having been Spitfire pilots, Gentile and the other pilots of the 4th were displeased when they transitioned to the heavy P-47. By late 1943, Group Commander Col. Don Blakeslee pushed for re-equipment with the lighter, more maneuverable P-51 Mustang. Conversion to the P-51B at the end of February 1944 allowed Gentile to build a tally of 15.5 additional aircraft destroyed between March 3 and April 8, 1944. After downing 3 planes on April 8, he was the top scoring 8th Air Force ace when he crashed his personal P-51, named "Shangri La", on April 13, 1944 while stunting over the 4th FG’s airfield at Debden for a group of assembled press reporters and movie cameras. Blakeslee immediately grounded Gentile as a result, and he was sent back to the US for a tour selling war bonds. In 1944, Gentile co-wrote with well-known war correspondent Ira Wolfert One Man Air Force, an autobiography and account of his combat missions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781782894483

Major Don Salvatore Gentile

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 This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.picklepartnerspublishing.com

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Text originally published in 1944 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2013, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

One-Man Air Force

BY Captain Don S. Gentile

As told to Ira Wolfert

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

FOREWORD 5

CHAPTER 1 6

CHAPTER 2 8

CHAPTER 3 15

CHAPTER 4 18

CHAPTER 5 20

CHAPTER 6 26

CHAPTER 7 30

CHAPTER 8 32

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 35

FOREWORD

Captain Don Salvatore Gentile, a Piqua, Ohio, boy, twenty-three, the only son of parents who emigrated to the United States from Italy, has been called by General Dwight D. Eisenhower a one-man air force. Coming from the Commander-in-chief of the Allied forces, this is something can put on his chest and strut behind for the rest of his life.

When the general said this to his face, Don blushed and looked as embarrassed as his military posture would permit. This boy who has destroyed thirty German airplanes—more than any other American in two wars so far, and the equivalent of two whole Luftwaffe squadrons—is called Gentle by his mates at the Eight Air Force Fighter Base in England. He is soft-spoken and self-effacing, a rather naïve and quite unworldly boy, who has never done anything much or cared to do anything except fly. I moved in with him sometime in April about two weeks before he got his thirtieth plane. In those two weeks before he lived a tragic, harrowing, prodigiously dangerous climax to his life. It was the peak few men ever attain and even fewer, once attaining, survive.

At such a time one can get to know a man very well, and this, I think, I managed with Gentle We spent our evenings and nights in beds separated by a radio whose soft music he turned on to soothe the banging his beaten-up nerves take. He spent his days among the enemy's bullets, sometimes killing the enemy and sometimes seeing the enemy kill his friends.

Then he returned to the sheets and the mattress and the windows that faced the night of a quiet English countryside and the radio that softly brought music from home. The music led him on, and the quiet of the night outside and the terrible excitements of the day and the thoughts of what awaited him next day or surely the day after—they all led him to talk more, he told me, than he had talked in all his twenty-three previous years.

He talked about his life to me, and I have tried to set it down within the limits of space as truly as

Reviews for One-Man Airforce [Illustrated Edition]

[D Montgomery · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good but far too short. Much left unwritten. Need more.