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How One Pilot's 'Crazy' Low-Altitude Attack Destroyed 50 German Trains In One Week

February nineteenth, nineteen forty-five. Dawn came cold and gray over Wormingford Airfield in England. Lieutenant Colonel Elwyn Righetti pulled his leather flight jacket tighter as he walked across the frozen tarmac toward his P-51 Mustang. The aircraft sat waiting in the predawn darkness, its natural metal skin beaded with frost, the green and yellow checkerboard pattern on its nose barely visible in the weak light.
Katydid. That's what he'd named her, after his wife Cathryn back in San Luis Obispo, California. The name was painted in neat script just below the cockpit, alongside a growing tally of kill marks. Seven and a half enemy aircraft destroyed in aerial combat. Twenty-seven more blasted on the ground. But those numbers told only part of Righetti's story.
Today's mission was different. No bomber escort this time. No lengthy formation flight deep into Germany to protect lumbering B-17s from Luftwaffe fighters. Today, the fifty-fifth Fighter Group would fly free. Hunt and kill. Their target? The arteries of the Third Reich. The rail network that kept German armies supplied with ammunition, fuel, replacement troops, and the machinery of war.
Righetti's ground crew was already swarming over Katydid, performing final checks. The crew chief saluted as Righetti approached, his breath forming white clouds in the frigid air. Everything was ready. Six fifty-caliber Browning machine guns loaded with four hundred rounds per weapon. Two thousand four hundred rounds total. Each gun capable of firing seven hundred and fifty rounds per minute. The math was simple and brutal. Twelve seconds of continuous fire before running dry.
But Righetti had learned something crucial in his short time commanding the fifty-fifth. You didn't need to destroy a locomotive with bullets alone. You just needed to understand what made them vulnerable.
The briefing three hours earlier had been straightforward. Intelligence reported massive German rail movements across central Germany. Troop trains heading east to slow the Soviet advance. Supply trains heading west to support crumbling defenses along the Rhine. Hospital trains carrying wounded back from both fronts. Ammunition trains, fuel trains, equipment trains. The entire German military apparatus moving by rail because the Luftwaffe could no longer protect ground convoys from American fighter-bombers.
General Doolittle's new policy had changed everything. After escort missions, fighter groups could drop down and attack targets of opportunity. The decision had transformed P-51 Mustangs from defensive escorts into offensive hunters. And no group had embraced this transformation more aggressively than the fifty-fifth under Righetti's command.
The other pilots were gathering now, their faces illuminated by the glow of cigarettes and the first hints of dawn. Righetti recognized the mix of expressions. Anticipation. Fear. The hollow-eyed fatigue that came from flying combat missions day after day with no end in sight. Some of these men resented him. He'd arrived late to the war, in October nineteen forty-four, a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant colonel who'd spent most of the conflict training other pilots in Texas while they'd been fighting and dying over Europe.

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