He enlisted in the Army Air Forces out of high school in September 1941, becoming an airplane mechanic. One day he took a ride with a maintenance officer flight-testing a plane he had serviced and promptly threw up over the back seat. But he joined a flight program for enlisted men in July 1942, figuring it would get him out of kitchen detail and guard duty. He received his pilot wings and appointment as a flight officer in March 1943 while at a base in Arizona, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant after arriving in England for training.
He possessed a natural coordination and aptitude for understanding an airplane’s mechanical system along with coolness under pressure. He enjoyed spins and dives and loved staging mock dogfights with his fellow trainees.
He flew P-51 Mustang fighters in the European theater during World War II, and in March 1944, on his eighth mission, he was shot down over France by a German fighter plane and parachuted into woods with leg and head wounds. But he was hidden by members of the French underground, made it to neutral Spain by climbing the snowy Pyrenees, carrying a severely wounded flier with him, and returned to his base in England.
Downed pilots were not generally put back into combat, but his pleas to see action again were granted. On Oct. 12, 1944, leading three fighter squadrons escorting bombers over Bremen, he downed five German planes, becoming an ace in a day. In November, he shot down another four planes in one day.
After the war, Yeager was assigned to Muroc Army Air Base in California, where hotshot pilots were testing jet prototypes. He was chosen over more senior pilots to fly the Bell X-1 in a quest to break the sound barrier, and when he set out to do it, he could barely move, having broken two ribs a couple of nights earlier when he crashed into a fence while racing with his wife on horseback in the desert.
The Air Force kept the feat a secret, an outgrowth of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but in December 1947, Aviation Week magazine revealed that the sound barrier had been broken and the Air Force finally acknowledged it in June 1948.