'It didn't make any difference to me whether the airplane would go faster than sound. I was assigned as a test pilot on it, and it was my duty to fly it.' -- Chuck Yeager
'I'm still wearing my ears and nothing else fell off neither.'
-- Yeagers first words after the flight in which he broke the sound barrier.
An example of Yeager's unique attitude toward combat took place in the skies over East Germany and Poland. His squadron was mistaken for a group of unescorted bombers and the Germans scrambled every plane on the ground for an attack.
"God Almighty!" squadron leader Bud Anderson exclaimed. "There must be a hundred and fifty of them."
Yeager's reaction? "We couldn't believe our luck. We plowed right into the rear of this enormous gaggle of German fighters. There were sixteen of us and over two hundred of them, but then more Mustangs from group caught up and joined in. Christ, there were airplanes going every which way. A dogfight runs by its own clock and I have no idea how long I was spinning and looping in the sky. I wound up 2,000 feet from the deck with four kills...the ground was littered with burning wreckage. It was an awesome sight. That day was a fighter pilot's dream. In the midst of a wild sky, I knew that dogfighting was what I was born to do."
