Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (35 page)

“The pilot took evasive action,” Tech Sergeant George Parrish told Marion Havelaar for his history of the 91st, entitled
The Ragged Irregulars
. “One of the lower bombs in the rack didn’t release and others fell on it.”

With the bombs piled up inside the bomb bay, the crew debated whether to abandon ship or try to limp home. Deciding on the latter, they did what they could to try to lighten the aircraft in order to keep up with the other B-17s, which had been able to drop their loads.

“As we went over the water with the coast about twenty to twenty-five miles away, we continued to lose altitude,” Parrish recalls. “The No. 2 engine’s propeller could not be feathered and because of that, it was windmilling and beginning to fall apart. Lieutenant Frank Varva, the navigator, was giving the pilot instructions, saying the airfield was straight ahead. As we approached we were actually lower than the height of the cliff. With a lot of prayer that propeller froze, eliminating the drag, and allowed us to lift high enough to go over the cliff.”

Davis managed to get the plane down safely at the 91st’s home base at Bassingbourn.

Meanwhile, some of the 3rd Division Flying Fortresses did not even make it to Regensburg. As had been the case often during Big Week, the Luftwaffe began hammering the aircraft as soon as they entered German airspace, and kept at it. The deeper into the Reich a plane was headed, the longer the hammering went on.

Waiting for the Americans north of Fürth and Stuttgart were the aces of Jagdgeschwader 26 with their Messerschmitt Bf 109G-6s. Hermann Staiger, who had cost the Eighth Air Force a Flying Fortress over Münster on Thursday, downed another over Birkweiler, about forty miles northwest of Stuttgart, on Friday.

Waldi Radener, who had downed two bombers the day before, claimed two more, although one was a
herausschuss
, a bomber merely knocked out of formation. Klaus Mietusch, the
Gruppenkommandeur
of Jagdgeschwader 26’s III Gruppe claimed two heavy bombers, although one of his claims was a
herausschuss
.

“Near the German town of Saarbrücken, on the French-German border, suddenly there were three bursts of flak, right at our altitude,” recalls pilot Merlin Chardi in the history of the 447th Bombardment Group compiled by Doyle Shields. “With this I started evasive action, a slow right turn. The next group of flak bursts were on target with one right in our number three engine setting it on fire and disconnecting the propeller from the engine drive. This increased the noise level considerably. With some panic we tried without success to put the fire out. Within seconds, the wing panel right behind the engine began to buckle up and melt down.

“One more look out the window and I quickly gave the order to abandon the good old ship…. With the plane still in a dive and steep right bank, I looked back only to find the radio compartment door closed so I had no idea if the crew was out.”

Chardi bailed out at ten thousand feet, worrying that Sergeant Magruder, the ball turret gunner, would not have had enough time to get the turret rotated up so that he could escape.

“I started counting chutes and got to nine knowing we had a crew of ten,”
Chardi continues. “I said, cursing, ‘he didn’t get out of the ball turret.’ I had failed to count myself…. No one was seriously hurt except for bad backs due to hard parachute landings and small flak wounds…. We spent the next fifteen months as guests of the German Government.”

Several of the units flying with the 3rd Division on Friday had been bloodied in the first Eighth Air Force mission against Regensburg back on August 17 and were going back for a return visit. These included the 96th and “Bloody Hundredth” 100th Bombardment Groups.

“As we began our bomb run on Regensburg at about 26,000 feet, the German fighters pulled back and the flak became very heavy,” recalled Sergeant Bill Cook, the tail gunner aboard the 100th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress
Mismalovin
. “Just after we had dropped our bombs we received a hit in the left inboard engine and lost oil pressure immediately. The propeller began to run away and vibration became very severe; to the point that we thought we might have the engine fall off. We finally were able to feather the prop and stabilize the plane. As you would expect, we lost altitude rapidly; the rest of the Group formation had left us, and we were faced with returning to base alone. As you know, Regensburg is deep into Germany, and the crew debated on whether or not to fly to Switzerland or try to make it back to England alone. Obviously we made the decision to try for England.”

Unable to gain altitude,
Mismalovin
flew very low and came under frequent fighter attack as the pilot, Lieutenant Stewart McClain, pushed the B-17 toward the home of the Bloody Hundredth at Thorpe Abbotts. Though the Luftwaffe failed to bring the plane down, several men were shot and killed during these sporadic attacks.

“I was wounded on four separate occasions,” Bill Cook recalls. “In spite of the licking we were taking, we still managed to give a pretty good account of ourselves. The engineer shot down two fighters, the bombardier had one possible, and I shot down two of which I am sure. As we approached the English Channel, we flew over Calais, France, and as we passed the coast we again picked up heavy fighter attack. At one point we were close enough to England that we could see the cliffs of Dover, and still were being attacked by fighters.”

When the bomber began a gradual left turn, and Cook could no longer
raise the pilot on the intercom, he headed toward the flight deck, hoping to take control of the aircraft, much as Archie Mathies had done on Sunday with
Ten Horsepower
.

“I knew we were going to crash if something was not done to prevent it,” Cook recalls in Richard LeStrange’s anthology. “Since I had flown the plane on many occasions, I left the tail gunner’s position and headed for the cockpit. As I reached the main entrance to the plane, I saw Staff Sergeant George Knudsen, a waist gunner, jump from the aircraft. At this point we were only about 100–150 feet from the English Channel and I knew we did not have sufficient altitude for a chute to open. Our ball turret gunner, Staff Sergeant Lawrence Bennett, was standing in the door ready to jump. I reached for him, pulled him back into the plane, and told him to take off his chute because we were about to crash. He was having some difficulty removing his chute, and I was assisting him when the plane crashed into the Channel.

“I was knocked unconscious in the crash and woke up floating in the water. When I regained consciousness, I saw one other person (a spare gunner flying with us that day—he replaced Staff Sergeant John Walters, and I don’t remember his name) who had survived. We were picked up by some German Marines, taken to hospital in Calais, France, where we stayed for about three or four days, and I was then moved to an interrogation center in Frankfurt. I spent about twenty days in Frankfurt (in solitary) and was then sent to a prisoner of war camp.”

Of the crew of
Mismalovin
, only Cook and the “spare gunner,” whose name was Claude Zukowski, survived to see Saturday’s dawn.

Meanwhile, an hour from the target, one of the 96th Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses,
The Saint
, piloted by Lieutenant Bob Arstingstall, had been attacked by a German fighter head-on, killing copilot Curt Mosier.

“Out of that late winter sun, came a silver arrow with guns blazing,” recalls navigator Stan Peterson in his account in
Snetterton Falcons
by Robert E. Doherty and Geoffrey Ward. “There was a thickening thud. Then silence followed by the scent of cordite…. Bob Arstingstall, our pilot, asked me to come up to the cockpit where I saw that copilot Curt Mosier was dead, the main oxygen line was severed and the 30mm shell which had done the damage was still smoking on the flight deck floor
behind Arstingstall’s seat…. I remember hustling all over the bomber in an effort to find spare oxygen bottles to keep my pilot supplied for another four hours.”

For getting
The Saint
back to the 96th Bombardment Group base at Snetterton, Lieutenant Arstingstall was awarded a Silver Star.

The Eighth Air Force 1st Division lost thirteen bombers on the Augsburg-Stuttgart mission, while the 2nd Division lost a half dozen Liberators shot down and two later written off. More than three hundred Eighth Air Force airmen bailed out, most of them disappearing into the hellish world of the Stalag Luft system, the prisoner of war camps that were specifically established for captured Allied airmen.

As Arthur Ferguson writes of the Fifteenth Air Force effort at Regensburg that day, the Fifteenth “lacked escort of sufficiently long range to provide protection during the most distant phase of the penetration. It suffered also from the handicap of a relatively small force. Only bombers equipped for long-range flying could be sent as far as Regensburg, and, although the Fifteenth dispatched that day almost 400 bombers, only 176 were airborne on the main mission. The remainder hit yards and port installations at Fiume, the harbor at Zara, warehouses and sheds at Pola [on the eastern side of the Adriatic Sea], rail lines [in Austria] at Zell-am-See, and the airfield at Graz-Thalerhof [also in Austria].”

As the 3rd Division and the Fifteenth Air Force rendezvoused over Regensburg that day, they, in turn, were met by Jagdgeschwader 3, whose III Gruppe leader, Walter Dahl, had claimed four bombers the day before. On Friday, two more Flying Fortresses would fall to his guns in the space of twenty-one minutes.

Attacking the Fifteenth Air Force contingent as they were between the Alps and their targets was Jagdgeschwader 27, based at Wiesbaden, which had taken a heavy toll of forty-five Eighth Air Force bombers during the deep penetration mission to Stuttgart on September 6, 1943.

Werner Schroer, who led the
geschwader
’s II Gruppe, and who had personally downed four American aircraft during the September debacle, now claimed two more toward his eventual total of twenty-six four-engine bombers. One of these was near Altötting in southeastern Bavaria, and
the second was over the Chiemsee, the lake that lies on the Austro-German border between Rosenheim and Salzburg.

The 3rd Division lost a dozen Flying Fortresses getting in and out of the target area at Regensburg, a loss of just 5 percent. However, before it was over, the unescorted Fifteenth Air Force contingent took the worst punishment of the day, losing thirty-nine bombers, or nearly a quarter of the force that it sent to Regensburg. In Arthur Ferguson’s words, “It was another proof of the fact, long since conceded by American strategic bombing experts, that a daylight bomber force without full fighter cover could not hope to get through an aggressive enemy without excessive losses, especially when, as in this instance, the enemy chose to concentrate on the weaker and more poorly protected force.”

The men flying the missions did not need “another proof.”

Unlike previous days during Big Week, every bombardment group from the Eighth Air Force was able to bomb its primary target, and the clarity of the weather meant a higher degree of accuracy than had been the case on other missions.

As Ferguson writes, “The main Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg underwent drastic treatment. Blast and fire from over 500 tons of bombs destroyed approximately thirty buildings. Production capacity was reduced by about 35 percent. Almost one-third of all machine tools were damaged, and 70 percent of stored material destroyed.”

“Our bombs made a hell of a hole in the place and black smoke shot up thousands of feet,” recalled Staff Sergeant James Fisher of the attack on Augsburg. He was a waist gunner aboard the 384th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress known as
Loose Goose
. “Visibility was excellent. I saw a B-24 [of the force that attacked Fürth, sixty miles to the north] knock down two of three enemy fighters attacking it and then one of our fighters came in and shot down [the third]. On the ground we could see the Focke-Wulfs taking off to come up at us. We passed by Stuttgart before our other planes got there and fires were still burning from the RAF raid of a couple of nights ago.”

At Regensburg, which had now been bombed twice by the Fifteenth Air Force and once by the Eighth Air Force during Big Week, every
building in the target areas had been damaged and many were destroyed. By Messerschmitt’s own reckoning, monthly output fell from 435 aircraft delivered to the Luftwaffe in January to just 135 in March.

Despite the frightful losses suffered by the Fifteenth Air Force, Friday’s Regensburg mission was regarded as having been their most successful mission across the Alps to date.

On Saturday, General Ira Eaker, commanding the Mediterranean Allied Air Force, cabled General Twining his congratulations on the success enjoyed by the Fifteenth. He noted that the photoreconnaissance images “for the second successive day have given us an example of precision bombing at its very best. Being engaged in one of the greatest air battles in history yesterday your force fought through the heaviest opposition it has encountered. The Air Force’s record of reaching the objective and accomplishing the assigned task was maintained with distinction. Aircraft factory destroyed by you in this attack is estimated to produce at the rate of 250 per month. When considering the losses sustained, this fact should be borne in mind.”

General Spaatz, now back at Bushy Park in England, sent his own telegram, writing that “Strike photographs of the Regensburg attack [have been] examined and I consider that superior results were obtained. The Fifteenth Air Force accomplished a superior job of bombing and vital destruction to enemy installations in the face of heavy air attack, without fighter support and with heavy losses. Even without consideration of the 93 enemy fighters shot down by our bombers, the results far outweigh the losses.”

The same might have been said about the entirety of the results of the six days that came to be known as Big Week.

Walt Rostow wrote half a century later, “Looking back, I can see again the faces of Hughes, Anderson, and Spaatz, as well as the key figures in British intelligence, on whom the American effort was based—as able, imaginative, and dedicated a group of men and women as was ever assembled…. The German single-engined fighter force never recovered from its unlikely defeat by the American long-range bombers. [Big Week] was the week that, in effect, a mature US Air Force emerged.”