Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (32 page)

“When I next looked up I saw three B-24s coming down out of control from the ‘B’ section. The Germans were shooting rockets and 20 mm cannon with telling effect. The attack continued from that point up to the target. In the low section we were not getting the brunt of the attack until inexplicably the formation leader of the lead group decided to turn off course, without notice, and head back. We had not reached the IP so we continued on alone and that is when we were hit by rocket and cannon fire from attacking planes.”

“As we had no fighter escort, all crews were very alert for signs of enemy aircraft,” Major Harry Gillett, commander of the Liberandos’ 512th Bombardment Squadron, recalls in James Walker’s anthology. He was flying right seat with Lieutenant Gerald Brown, 512th operations officer. “After passing Klagenfurt the first Bf 110s, with their rockets, started attacking the [other] formations. Although intelligence information indicated they carried only two rockets, I saw four fired by a Bf 110 into the 98th Bomb Group on our right from about 1,000 yards. Several aircraft were hit and blew up. On some of their attacks they were not too accurate, as the rockets exploded ahead or behind the formation. None attacked our formation but you had the feeling you would be next. Time went by and we survived the attacks.”

Lieutenant Harry Hanson, a 376th Bombardment Group navigator, recalled in Walker’s anthology the terror of the Steyr mission. He wrote that “it was about enough to discourage a guy. Our flight of five aircraft lost three. Bf 109s were coming right through our formation and split us all over the sky. Just before the IP one B-24 parallel with us, was all afire, and several guys jumped out the waist window without chutes. None of our crew was injured. I figured I wouldn’t last a month. Sunday I went for a long walk alone and thought about my Dad mostly, and realized I had to finish the job. I never had a problem with missions after that, however they never got that tough again.”

Meanwhile, tail gunner Staff Sergeant Glynn Hendrix agrees that the missions never again got as tough as Steyr, adding that “never before or since did I see the enemy so wildly aggressive, pressing their attacks in
very close. I could actually see debris fly from the nose and cowl of a Bf l09 as I fired point blank. Thought he might collide.

“I recall thinking, ‘If I don’t get this b
_****
d he’s gonna kill me.’ His fire was just above my head right up the fuselage and I think he hit the top turret. The enemy this day attacked, almost to a man, from the rear and not too high and they just lined up on you and bored on in. We were in a good position, formation-wise, but three or four planes behind us were shot down so we [became] ‘Tail-end Charlie’ and getting a drubbing when the attack broke off.”

As Ben Konsynski led his section into their bomb run over Steyr, the Luftwaffe fighters backed off, leaving the Liberators at the mercy of the flak batteries, who could fire at will, knowing that the Americans would not take evasive action until they had dropped their bombs. However, Konsynski noticed a single Bf 109 flying level and parallel to his B-24D, just out of the range of the .50-caliber guns aboard the bomber. Suddenly, he accelerated far ahead of Konsynski’s aircraft.

“He then made a 180-degree turn and came straight at us,” Konsynski continues. “We could see his guns blinking as he approached, Lieutenant Ferber, copilot, slid to the floor, Sergeant Glove, engineer, got behind the armor plate in back of the pilot’s seat, and I scootched down as low as I could and still see to fly the plane. As if the instrument panel would protect us if the enemy aircraft would have hit us!

“Lieutenant John Konecny, navigator, took the .50-caliber gun in the nose of the B-24D we were flying and started firing; it was point-blank shooting. I thought the enemy aircraft was going to ram us, but he flipped to his right, our left, exposing his bottom and Konecny kept on firing. The Bf 109 blew up. It is difficult to understand the German pilot’s actions, except that we were flying the only ‘pink’ [desert-camouflage color] B-24 left in the [Mediterranean] Theater and it was in the lead position of the formation. He may have thought that there was some significance to the combination.”

“It appeared that we were slowly falling behind our formation,” recalls John Pizzello, the nose gunner aboard
Harry the Horse
. “Before getting into the nose turret I asked John Byrne [the bombardier] to be sure to check the doors of the turret if we had trouble and I was not out. I made
sure to put my chute where it would be out of the way and I could get to it if I had to. I then entered the turret.

“We went over the target, dropped our bombs and were on our way back. We were falling behind more now and I had lost contact as the intercom system in my turret was not working, I tried to call anybody but no luck. I tried for some time to get my doors open but couldn’t. I now started to pray. I just sat back and relaxed while praying. I was at ease, I can’t understand that at all, but my doors suddenly opened. Thanks, John.”

Exiting their bomb runs, the Liberators were once again pounced upon with full fury by the Luftwaffe. Aboard
Harry the Horse
, Max Rasmussen observed that “everything happened at once. A fighter passing from nine to three o’clock blew off our left elevator and rudder and instantly killed [fellow gunners] Hermann and Root. John Pizzello came out… and manned both waist guns. I was firing at some fighters coming in at nine bells when from out of nowhere a 20mm hit our number two engine and wing. You could have driven a tank through the hole in the wing. [This] engine ran away and the propeller tore off the shaft. The prop cut into the fuselage behind Grice and cut the control cables.

“Just then a shell came in past my head and exploded in my turret, knocking off my dome and finishing my guns. This numbed me completely although I felt a sharp twinge in my left shoulder. I felt like the whole right side of my face was blown away, but I wiped my hand over my face and there wasn’t any blood. The plane dropped out of formation and Grice tapped my foot as I looked down and saw him go out the bomb bay and hit the silk. I got down from my turret, helped the skipper and hit the silk also, not knowing the fate of the crew in the waist until we joined up with Pizzello after we landed.”

Pizzello, Rasmussen, and the other survivors of
Harry the Horse
’s crew spent the remainder of the war in German stalags.

“I remember the February 23, 1944, Steyr mission better than most,” writes Max Simpson, a waist gunner in Lieutenant L. V. Lockhart’s 376th Bombardment Group Liberator. “After a few minutes off the target, Bf 109s picked us up. They had yellow noses [and] wing tips, and pilots wore yellow helmets. We called them Göring’s flying circus. In a few minutes we had lost our wing planes on both sides. [It] seemed like we were by
ourselves. Tail turret malfunctioned and [probably tail gunner] Raymond [Dickey] called out each attack and the gunners would switch to the rear and try to keep them away. Bf 109s came in from every direction. After what seemed like an hour P-38s showed up and enemy took off. A B-24 trying to fly formation with us almost stuck his wing tip in waist window. I called the front and told the copilot to watch him. He was all shot up, top turret plastic was gone and he was in bad shape. With P-38s at our side we returned to home base.”

Eight of the 376th Bombardment Group Liberators were not so lucky, although the group claimed nineteen German fighters shot down, plus four probables. The Liberandos also lost a total of 84 crew members, either killed in action or missing and presumed captured on Wednesday’s hard fought mission.

Adolf Hitler’s war machine had also paid a price at Steyr on Wednesday, though by comparison to other places and other days during Big Week, the price had been less than exorbitant.

The Fifteenth Air Force knocked out 20 percent of the Steyr Walzlagerwerke, which could be extrapolated as about 3 percent of the antifriction bearing needs of German industry.

Looking ahead to Thursday, Dr. Irving Krick asserted that good weather was sure to be in store again, and Fred Anderson sent orders to Doolittle to prepare accordingly.

“For us, this was the ‘make or break’ of the whole air war,” Dick Hughes said enthusiastically, “and we were determined not to let a single Eighth Air Force bomber sit around as long as this fantastic freak of weather lasted.”

As Krick promised, the “fantastic freak” was back, and it was time to resume the maximum effort program.

For five combat wings of the Eighth Air Force 1st Bombardment Division, Thursday would be an opportunity to make up for its aborted maximum effort against Schweinfurt on Tuesday. When the curtain over the operations map came up, lines of red and blue yarn come together deep in the heart of Hitler’s Reich. It was like a metaphor for the pit of your stomach, which is where the crews took it, and took it hard.

For most of the men in the 1st Division, the idea of “making up” for the aborted Schweinfurt mission did not sit well. They would have been happy to have seen the mission scrubbed permanently. Even if they had not been in England in October, they all had heard of Black Thursday.
The mere mention of the word “Schweinfurt” conjured up a dark sense of foreboding.

The idea of two coordinated attacks in the southern part of the Reich, which had been planned but failed to materialize, on Tuesday was back on the agenda for Thursday. This time, as the Eighth Air Force 1st Division would attack Schweinfurt, the Fifteenth Air Force would return to Steyr, their objective of the previous day.

George Webster of the 92nd Bombardment Group wrote in his memoir,
Savage Sky
, that when the intelligence captain at Podington pulled back the curtain covering a map of Europe, the crowd of flyers gasped and groaned.

“I see faces go pale,” Webster recalls. “A nearby flight engineer bows his head and begins to pray. The red line goes deep into central Germany to the city of Schweinfurt, a name that strikes fear in the flyers of the Eighth Air Force. The target is crucial because factories at Schweinfurt manufacture ball bearings that are vital to German military production. If we knock out ball bearings, we deal a big blow to production of planes, tanks, trucks, and machinery. The Germans know it and are ready to defend the city furiously.

“The Eighth Air Force fought its way to Schweinfurt twice before. In August of 1943, our bombers smashed the ball bearing plants, but the Germans shot down 36 of our bombers. Germany rebuilt the plants in record time, requiring a mission in October of 1943. Our bombers again destroyed the ball bearing factories, but at a cost of an astounding 60 of our bombers destroyed. That is equal to three bomb groups. Six B-17s from the 92nd Group were lost in that raid, so combat veterans fear a Schweinfurt mission. It’s a death sentence for some of us. Everyone looks grim. Some are obviously frightened. A fellow next to me covers his face and mumbles that he wishes he’d written to his wife last night.”

While most of the 1st Division aircrews had never seen Schweinfurt, Major George Shackley of the 381st Bombardment Group had been to Schweinfurt on the Black Thursday October 14 mission—
and
on the August 17 mission.

Today, he would be making his
third
trip to the capital of ball bearings and suffering. He would be leading 32 Flying Fortresses of the 381st out
of their base at Ridgewell, one of five groups tasked with the Schweinfurt mission.

Shackley was flying right seat to Lieutenant George Sandman, the pilot of
Rotherhithe’s Revenge
. A brand-new B-17G christened just ten days earlier, its namesake was an illustration of the hellishness of the war and why the Allies—especially the British—were so single-minded in pursuing the Combined Bomber Offensive.

Rotherhithe was a community in the London borough of Southwark, located on a promontory on the south bank of the River Thames, near the Surrey Commercial Docks. In September 1940, during the London Blitz, the fire that swept through the area was described by Peter Stansky in his book
The First Day of the Blitz
as the most intense single fire ever seen in Britain. Rotherhithe was bombed repeatedly by the Luftwaffe throughout the Blitz and the remainder of the war, losing its old town hall in the process. The commemorative bomber was christened by city fathers, using a bottle of locally brewed ale.

As the 1st Division bombers passed over the Netherlands, there were a higher than usual number of aircraft dropping out of the formation for mechanical reasons. Maybe it was nerves, or maybe they were hearing sounds inside those Wright Cyclones that made them worry about something other than the Luftwaffe emptying the bunks tonight.

Jesse Pitts called it “the point of no return. For those in our wing and in our division who had discovered deficiencies in their ships that made the mission a losing gamble, this was the time to turn back home.”

A couple of the gunners aboard
Penny Ante
told Pitts and the pilot, Herschel Streit, that they thought they heard something in the engines. The pilots listened but could not hear anything wrong.
Penny Ante
pressed on.

As they reached the Initial Point, five hours out of Kimbolton, the number three engine sputtered to a stop. It had prematurely run out of fuel. Pitts cranked up the other three so that
Penny Ante
could keep pace with the rest of the formation, as Streit started transferring fuel and scolding Pitts for not paying attention.

Penny Ante
would bring her crew home that day as she always had. The aircraft had gotten its name from a ritual that had been started by the
ground crew chief, in which he loaned the pilot a penny at the start of the mission, which was repaid upon the aircraft’s safe return. As long as the pilot carried the penny,
and
the responsibility of repaying the debt, the aircraft would always return. This gave the plane an aura within the squadron of being a “lucky ship.”

For three combat wings of the 2nd Bombardment Division, Thursday would involve a return to Gothaer Waggonfabrik in Gotha. The 3rd Bombardment Division, meanwhile, would send five combat wings to the FockeWulf complexes located in the northeast corner of the Reich.