World War II triple ace Col. Leonard “Kit” Carson, 18.5 air-to-air victories over the Luftwaffe, wrote one of the most comprehensive accounts of flying fighters over Europe. “Pursue and Destroy” not only describes in great detail Carson’s experience flying P-51 Mustangs with the 357th Fighter Group, but also that of any pilot who occupied a single-seat cockpit – on either side. His description of strafing trains is a prime example:

“The ground fire was brutal, and we lost a lot of pilots to it. I had my canopy shot off on a train-busting mission, and that was another day I might have become a statistic. More precisely, as I pulled up and turned to the left after blowing the boiler tubes of the engine, a slug came out of nowhere and hit the canopy lock on the left side of the cockpit. The

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