Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (34 page)

As had occurred on Monday, clouds over the target prevented the bombers from dropping their bombs. Despite Hitler’s impression of the scope of dominions, the United States still considered this to be Poland, and there would be no bombing unless the Luftwaffe complex was visually identifiable.

With Tutow also under cloud cover, the entire force diverted to strike nearby Rostock, home to Heinkel Flugzeugwerke facilities.

As had also been the case Monday, the unescorted 3rd Division strike force met spirited but limited Luftwaffe resistance and was able to withdraw over open water—first the Baltic, then the North Sea—rather than having to battle its way across the German landmass for hours, as did the other divisions.

The Fifteenth Air Force would attack Steyr as they had on Wednesday, though their specific “target for today” would be different. Today it would be the factory complex of the big industrial corporation Steyr-Daimler-Puch. Formed in 1934 through a merger of carmaker and gunmaker Steyr-Werke AG and Austro-Daimler, a former subsidiary of the German
Daimler company, Steyr-Daimler-Puch had been a major manufacturer of high-end automobiles before World War II and was now manufacturing weapons, military vehicles, and aircraft components. The latter earned it a place on the Operation Argument target list.

The Fifteenth launched 114 bombers, of which only 87 continued all the way to Steyr, because of the weather. The others, becoming separated from the main formation, diverted to secondary oil refinery targets in the Italian Adriatic port city of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia).

As had occurred the day before, the bombers that reached Steyr were subjected to merciless and effective mauling by the Luftwaffe. Not only were they attacked at close range by Bf 109s and FW 190s, they were targeted by twin-engine fighters firing rockets at longer range and even air-to-air bombing attacks, which had become rare over northern Germany since 1943.

The Luftwaffe went after the 2nd Bombardment Group, which flew last in the formation, with particular ferocity. The total losses for the Fifteenth Air Force that day totaled seventeen aircraft, or 20 percent of those that had reached Steyr. Ten of the seventeen losses represented the
entire
complement of the 2nd Group. Every last one.

Despite relentless Luftwaffe interference, Friday’s major Eighth Air Force attacks on Gotha and Schweinfurt took place under ideal visual conditions and yielded the kinds of results that men from Tooey Spaatz to Fred Anderson to Dick Hughes had craved.

At Schweinfurt, clear skies prevailed, and bombardiers were confident in their work. George Shackley, leading the 381st Group that day aboard
Rotherhithe’s Revenge
, observed that he could see for miles. At his later debriefing he colorfully reported that “bombs were slamming down on factories and other targets in the city for at least half an hour. Our own bombing was one of the best. This was one hell of a lot different from my first two Schweinfurt missions.”

Patting the group leader on the back, Lieutenant Thomas Sellers, the pilot of
Little Duchess
, wrote in his own after-action report that the Schweinfurt mission was “the best coordinated mission of any of the 20 I have flown. It showed careful, detailed planning. Major Shackley did a perfect job of
leading the wing. Bombing was perfect. The town and target were plastered both by us and the wings ahead.”

Also aboard
Rotherhithe’s Revenge
, the 381st’s lead bombardier, Captain Lawrence Potenza, confirmed that “the bomb run was beautiful. I could see hits from our bombs right in the factory area. Heavy smoke was over the town from bombs dropped by the group ahead of us and fires were everywhere.”

Potenza had even more to be pleased about. Thursday marked his twenty-fifth and
last
mission with the Eighth Air Force.

While the Schweinfurt attack effectively hit and destroyed many of its intended targets, the Strategic Bombing Survey would later rank the October 14, 1943, mission to the ball bearing capital as having done more damage to the overall bearing industry, simply because it took place before major efforts were made to decentralize the industry. For example, in the four intervening months, Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken had moved 549 machines, or 27 percent of its manufacturing equipment, out of Schweinfurt.

“Nevertheless the bearing plants suffered heavy damage in the raids,” Arthur Ferguson writes, “especially in the departments processing rings; and the ball department, already half-dispersed, lost another ten percent of its machines.”

The weather was so crystal clear over central Germany that day that the 1st Division Flying Fortresses over Schweinfurt could see the 2nd Division Liberators over Gotha in the distance. The lead navigator with the 384th Bombardment Group, Captain James Martin-Vegue, later recalled at his debriefing that he could see the B-24s, and “the smoke was piled up to 10,000 feet. We could see [the Gothaer Waggonfabrik factory complex] far off to our right, burning to beat hell. It must have been 50 miles away, but that’s how good the visibility was. It was a beautiful mission. Our target was covered by smoke from a preceding formation when we got there, and the smoke was right where the buildings were supposed to be. When we left, the whole area was on fire.”

Citing the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, Arthur Ferguson writes that the bombing at Gotha “was especially accurate, and probably more
important strategically than at Schweinfurt. Over 400 bombs, both high explosive and incendiary, fell in the target area, 93 of which hit buildings; this does not count the large number of fragmentation bombs (180 tons out of a total of 424) dropped also. Almost every building in the very compact factory area was damaged. The eastern half of the plant, where the aircraft manufacture was centered, was generally destroyed, although machine tools, the vital part of the production system, received surprisingly slight damage, considering the amount of damage to buildings. Most of the loss of machine tools resulted from fires…. Much time and labor had to be expended clearing heavy girders from the machines caught under them.”

The Strategic Bombing Survey went on to estimate that as a result of the February 24 attack, Gothaer Waggonfabrik lost about six to seven weeks’ production and compelled a dispersal of operations that placed a “heavy drain” on other factories in the Messerschmitt production network.

The damage
to
the Eighth Air Force in the February 24 Schweinfurt mission was nothing like the horrendous toll exacted by the Luftwaffe in October, but still, the mood was somber that night as airmen in the mess hall pondered the empty chairs of those who would never come back.

While the 1st Division had emerged from Schweinfurt with a loss rate of less than 5 percent, the Liberators of the 2nd Division had taken a hit of nearly 20 percent of their effective force.

Late Thursday afternoon, on the observation deck of the control tower at Tibenham, the home base of the 2nd Division’s 445th Bombardment Group, Colonel Robert Terrill watched and waited for his B-24s to return. Of twenty-five planes that his group had sent out, three had aborted early in the mission.

“Well, I guess this is the early bunch,” Wright Lee quotes him as having said when he had watched nine of the twenty-two Liberators land. “The others should be right behind.”

Lee reports that when Terrill was told that nine were
all
that remained of his group, “he almost died of shock.”

For the 1st Division, it may have seemed easy to look at the bright side and say that “it could have been much worse,” which Schweinfurt certainly
could have been—but it is hard to look at the bright side when you are looking at empty bunks.

“I think they better pay us more,” 92nd Bombardment Group bombardier Ralph Ballmer said to George Webster at dinner that night, trying gallows humor to bring some lightness to a gathering of shaken flyers.

“How you doing?” fellow airman Ken Tasker asked Webster.

“I’ve never been so scared,” came the reply. They had just heard that the 92nd had lost three bombers.

The crews of the 379th Bombardment Group, meanwhile, had gone off on Thursday morning expecting the worst, but for them, at least, this failed to materialize. The group lost only one man, a gunner who had been struck and killed by a flak fragment over the target. It was like a freak accident.

“Much to the surprise of nearly everyone on the base (to say nothing of the delight of the aircrews) the Forts [B-17 Flying Fortesses] roared in late that afternoon and landed,” Derwyn Robb recalls. “Most of the planes weren’t expected back, but they all came back. None lost! At [the debriefing] crews related ‘lots of flak, and our own fighter pilots took care of most of the Jerries.’ The P-38s and P-51s picked up the formations after the P-47s left and fighter attacks against our group were meager. With the comforting closeness of the ‘little friends’ and perfect bombing weather, not a cloud within miles of the target, the lead bombardiers Joe Brown and Ed Millson took full advantage of the situation and dropped the bombs ‘with the highest degree of accuracy.’”

Robb interprets the phrase as meaning that the bombers “plastered hell out of the target.”

Late that same night, 734 RAF bombers, using as their beacon the fires still burning from the American attacks, came over Schweinfurt and continued the rain of terror on the erstwhile capital of the German antifriction bearing industry.

Said General Fred Anderson, “We did a job that day.”

When the sun came out on Friday, and it
did
come out all across northern Europe, the bombers were already in the air. That phenomenon, which Dick Hughes had described as “one of the strangest freaks in February European weather,” had now delivered the fifth of five clear days in six.

Buoyed by Thursday’s successes—albeit
costly
successes—the USSTAF planners planned big, and they planned bold. With weather and visibility no obstacle, they had the luxury of picking any targets they wished, and the decision was made to go deep, deeper even than Schweinfurt, and to go deep with the
entire
Eighth Air Force.

As the crews learned at their “targets for today” briefings in the predawn darkness on Friday morning, the 1st Bombardment Division was tasked with Stuttgart and Augsburg, 460 and 550 miles from East Anglia, respectively—and more than ten hours, round-trip. The 2nd Bombardment Division would send its Liberators 500 miles to Fürth, and the 3rd Division would be making the 570-mile trek to Regensburg.

More than 750 bombers moved south from England in a single stream, with all three bombardment divisions traveling together for mutual protection, with a coordinated fighter force of 73 P-38s, 687 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-47s, and 139 Eighth and Ninth Air Force P-51s. They would
fly together almost as far as Schweinfurt before peeling off in four directions. The 1st Bombardment Division would send 196 Flying Fortresses to Augsburg and 50 to Stuttgart. Of the 2nd Bombardment Division Liberators, 173 would head to Fürth.

At the targets in and around Regensburg, 267 of the 290 Flying Fortresses launched by the Eighth Air Force 3rd Bombardment Division would be met by 176 bombers from Nathan Twining’s Fifteenth Air Force. They would be making the nearly 600-mile journey from their fields around Foggia, across the Alps, to strike Regensburg from the opposite direction.

Friday was to mark the first time that the Eighth and the Fifteenth coordinated respective maximum effort attacks on the same city on the same day.

As missions went, those planned for Friday promised to be as challenging and dangerous as those on any day of maximum effort that the Eighth Air Force had ever flown. The weather and the growing availability of P-51s as escorts were the only things that the Eighth Air Force had on its side. Because of the extremely deep penetration, the bombers would be at the mercy of the Luftwaffe hours longer than on missions to northern Germany, and in those hours, anything could happen.

The major objective of the day was Messerschmitt AG, the originator of the Bf 109, the backbone fighter of the Luftwaffe. More than thirty-five thousand of these aircraft would be built, compared to around twenty thousand Focke-Wulf Fw 190s, making the Bf 109 the most widely produced fighter plane in history. Messerschmitt AG, Germany’s leading planemaker during World War II, originated in 1926 in Augsburg as Bayrische Flugzeugwerke AG (Bavarian Aircraft Works), but was renamed in 1938 after its founder and chief designer, Willy Messerschmitt, who was still at the helm of the company.

As Dick Hughes, Fred Anderson, and Glen Williamson spread out the map of northern Bavaria and began picking Messerschmitt targets, they naturally noted Augsburg, the firm’s home city, but their eyes also fell upon Fürth. Here, the firm of Flugzeugwerke Bachmann von Blumenthal assembled Messerschmitt’s twin-engine Bf 110, the Luftwaffe night fighter that was often pressed into service against the Eighth Air Force by day. However, when they thought of Messerschmitt, their greatest attention
turned to Regensburg, where the factories of the Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg subsidiary built most of the Luftwaffe’s Bf 109s.

Stuttgart, the fourth city in the crosshairs of the USSTAF on that sunny Friday, was an industrial city well known as home to Daimler-Benz, but also one of the locations where Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken manufactured anti-friction bearings.

“Bombing was very good,” Lieutenant Happy Hendryx, the lead bombardier of the 381st Bombardment Group, reported of his group’s mission to Augsburg. “We knocked out at least three-quarters of the factory. We had a good formation and made an ideal bomb run, laying our bombs in a tight pattern. All we could see was smoke when we turned to head back.”

One of the 1st Division Flying Fortresses that almost didn’t make it was
General Ike
of the 91st Bombardment Group, piloted by Lieutenant John Davis. Going into Augsburg, the 91st’s bombers entered their bomb run at twenty-eight thousand feet. Bomb bay doors came open, and the aircraft began dumping chaff to bamboozle the German radar. An unopened package of chaff about the size and shape of a carton of cigarettes impacted the number two engine of
General Ike
, rupturing an oil line and causing a fire.