Fightingest

He had turned down desk jobs time & again. But despite his deep devotion to flying and fighting, modest, easygoing Colonel Hubert Zemke, of Missoula, Mont., finally decided that this would be his last combat mission before going on noncombat duty. Leading his fighter group in an attack on Hamburg, he ran into weather trouble, disappeared into a cloud. Last week the "fightingest" U.S. pilot commander in Europe was reported to be a prisoner in Germany.

When he went down, 30-year-old Hubert Zemke was the leading U.S. ace operating in Europe, with 19 1/2 air kills.* They included almost every type of German aircraft, even a jet-propelled plane. He bagged at least one of his total with each major type of U.S. fighter plane used in the ETO--Thunderbolt, Mustang, Lightning.

"Follow Me." But Colonel Zemke was at his best as a group leader. Like all good commanders, he tirelessly roamed his base, knew and supervised it from the messhalls to the flying line, never tired at the job of training good crews and airmen. Heading into battle, his invariable command was "Follow me." Among his many ace proteges (at one time there were 30 in his group) were Lieut. Colonel Francis S. Gabreski (28 enemy planes), Major Robert Johnson (27), and Major Walker Mahurin (21), all of whom became more famed than the man who showed them how.

A forester by training (on his father's ranch and at Montana State University), Zemke turned to the Army Air Corps soon after graduation in 1936 and became a Regular Army officer. After his marriage (he now has a two-and-a-half-year-old son) and before Pearl Harbor, he went to England to demonstrate Lend-Lease Tomahawks, did the same in "Russia before being put in command of one of the first U.S. fighter groups to go to England.

A lightweight boxing champion in school, he had one outstanding qualification for his job: a contagious fighting spirit. To Colonel Zemke, one of the truly great fighter commanders of World War II, there was only one unforgivable mistake: "To let a Hun get away is a criminal offense. It's a worse blunder than getting shot up yourself."

*Three days later, Major George E. Freddy, of Greensboro, N.C., boosted his total to 23 1/2.

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