The Catalina came on straight from the eye of the sun, and the pilot of the Albatros, intent on the business of destruction, did not see it. A sardonic grin spread on Pitt's face as the fight drew near. He cursed the fact that there were no guns waiting for his command to spout from the nose of the PBY. He applied pressure to the rudder pedals and sideslipped to give Giordino a better line of fire. The PBY thundered in, still unnoticed. Then, abruptly, he could hear the crack of Giordino's carbine above the roar of the engines.

They were almost on top of the Albatros before the leather helmeted head in the open cockpit spun around. They were so close Pitt could see the other pilot's mouth drop open in shocked surprise at the sight of the big flying boat, boring down from the sun—the hunter became the quarry. The pilot recovered quickly and the Albatros rolled sharply away, but not before Giordino drilled it with a fifteen shot clip from the carbine.

The grim, incongruous drama in the smoke-ridden sky over Brady Field reached a new stage as the World War II flying boat squared off against the World War I fighter plane. The PBY was faster, but the Albatros had the advantage of two machine guns and a vastly higher degree of maneuverability. The Albatros was lesser known than its famous counterpart, the Fokker, but it was an excellent fighter and the workhorse of the German Imperial Air Service from 1916 to 1918.

The Albatros twisted, turned and zeroed in on the PBY's cockpit. Pitt acted quickly and yanked the controls back into his lap and prayed the wings would stay glued to the fuselage as the lumbering flying boat struggled into a loop. He forgot caution and the accepted rules of flying; the exhilaration of man-to-man combat surged in his blood. He could almost hear the rivets popping as the PBY twisted over on its back. The unorthodox evasive action caught his opponent off guard, and the twin streams of fire from the yellow plane went wide, missing the Catalina completely.