Submitted by: Guy Claybourn
On 3 November 1944, I was flying a Piper L-4 (43-29215) with 1Lt. John C. "Jack" Davidson as observer. We were assigned to the 935 Field Artillery Battalion, VI Corps Artillery, Seventh U.S. Army.
We had taken off from our airstrip near Grandvillers in eastern France and were heading toward St. Die under a cloud deck at about 2500 feet with mildly hazy conditions below the overcast. All of a sudden I spotted two
single-engined fighter aircraft below us and to the right. (I instantly recalled a statement made a Staff Sergeant Grandy during a bull session in Italy about a year before.
Grandy, a liaison pilot veteran of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy told us, "If you look down and see what you think is a P-40 or a P-51, it probably isn't--it's a
Messerschmitt.")
I saw that we had two
Messerschmitt Me 109Gs in a left turn . I pointed the nose of the L-4 directly at the Mes and dived at red-line+ speed toward them. They made a climbing left-hand turn to make a firing pass at us. I saw the flash of the wing-mounted guns as well as the flash from the cannon firing through their propeller hubs.
By the time that they had made their turn back toward us, I had the L-4 at--as the Brits would
say--"nought feet" in a small valley. When they made a pass down the length of this valley, I turned up one of the branching ravines so as to be below the ridgeline which prevented them from getting low enough to shoot at us. This went on for several cycles-- they came down one depression and I was in either a branch depression or the main valley and each of their passes were foiled by the intervening ridge lines.
Something on the ground caught my eye and I saw a 2 1/2-ton truck proceeding down grade on a road in the main valley, and tracers were observed coming from the cab-mounted .50 caliber machine gun toward the enemy. Their inability to get any lower plus the sight of tracers going very close past them must have
prompted them to be on their way and they flew off to the southwest.
I was never able to confirm reports that one of the Me 109s was shot down by ground fire not many minutes later. I was, and am, of the opinion that the German pilots probably were relatively inexperienced due to manpower situation in the German forces at this stage of the war.
When we got on the ground we found bullet holes in the fabric of the under side of the right wing and through the fabric of the vertical
stabilizer. [10 March 2001]
