To Kingdom Come (13 page)

His ideas were initially met with widespread skepticism and largely ignored.

On November 22, 1942, Connie Mayer was appointed commander of the III Group of Jagdgeschwader 2. One day later, he decided to put his new theories into practice. A mixed bomber force of B-17s and B-24s was attacking the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire when Mayer’s staffel intercepted the lead bombers and attacked them head-on as they approached their bomb run.

He led the first of several waves of Fw 190 fighters, all flying three abreast. In their initial pass, the first wave of fighters shot down four bombers. Mayer himself accounted for two Fortresses and a B-24 Liberator before the action ended.

In the following weeks, Connie Mayer perfected his frontal pass techniques and trained the pilots in his group to master each maneuver. He quickly discovered that the ideal attacking path was from twelve o’clock high. Coming in on a slightly downward approach enabled him to better judge the distance between himself and his target as the planes closed at 600 miles an hour.

“Twelve o’clock high” quickly became the awestruck cry of B-17 pilots as they called out the compass heading of the attacking German fighters on the intercom.

As the victories in Mayer’s group mounted, General Adolf Galland, commanding all Luftwaffe fighter forces, issued a memorandum to his groups. “The attack from the rear against a four-engine bomber formation promises little success and almost always brings losses. The attack from the front ... is the most effective of all,” he wrote.

In 1943, Connie Mayer became the premier Flying Fortress killer in the Luftwaffe, having shot down sixteen B-17s, along with four more Spitfires, an American P-47 fighter, a B-24, and three Hawker Typhoons. On June 26, he and his group destroyed five Fortresses in less than three minutes with the now patented head-on attacks.

He was promoted to command the Jagdgeschwader 2 a week later.

His skill in the air often astonished the American bomber crews who witnessed it.

On July 14, the 305th Bomb Group had been returning from a bombing run near Paris when two Fw 190s appeared ahead of them.

One of the B-17 navigators recalled what happened next. “Whoever it was gave a riveting display of aerobatics in front of our entire 102nd Combat Wing before slashing in to fatally damage the leading ship of the 422nd Squadron in the low slot.”

The machine gunners in the other B-17s in the box then cut loose at the Fw 190. The American navigator reported that he had never seen such a tremendous volume of tracer go after one plane, but they hit nothing but air.

The Fw 190 pilot was Egon Mayer.

By the end of August, the Luftwaffe’s fighter forces were delivering one brutal beating after another to the Eighth Air Force, which saw its losses rise on long-range missions to Hannover, Kassel, Gelsenkirchen, Schweinfurt, and Regensburg. The goal of the Luftwaffe was now simple: to force the Americans to suspend their air offensive against Germany.

To defend the Reich, twenty-nine staffeln, each consisting of about a dozen fighters, had been spread out at airfields across France and Germany along the corridor the bombers had to fly through to reach most of their targets. In the wake of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid, the Luftwaffe brought back two additional fighter groups from Russia to help meet the threat.

When an American bomber force was on its way, the fighter staffeln were scrambled from their fields as the formation approached. After completing their attacks, the fighters would return to their bases for more ammunition and fuel, and the next group of staffeln along the corridor would come up to take their place. After the B-17s bombed their target and finally turned for home, they would meet the same squadrons on the way back, now refueled and rearmed.

On September 6, dawn gave way to a sun-drenched sky over Normandy. At his headquarters in Tricqueville, Connie Mayer waited for orders to arrive from the Luftwaffe air defense command.

The day became confusing at the outset.

At 0710, Luftwaffe air controllers reported a large formation of bombers headed toward the Dutch coast, accompanied by an escort of twenty-four Spitfires. It was the American force of sixty-nine B-24 Liberators undertaking the first diversionary raid staged by the Eighth Air Force to divert German fighters away from the Stuttgart force.

Two staffeln from JG 2 were scrambled to intercept the B-24s, but by the time they located the formation, it had already turned back from the Dutch islands to return to England. The staffeln were then ordered to patrol over northern France.

At 0725, German air controllers reported that a separate force of B-26 Marauders with escorting Spitfires had crossed the French coast and was attacking the marshaling yards at Rouen, along the Seine River northwest of Paris. Four more staffeln in Mayer’s group were sent up to intercept them.

Minutes later, another bomber force was monitored over Dungeness across the English Channel. The staffeln of JG 2 were ordered to divert from their positions near the Seine and fly north toward the Somme River, where they circled while waiting for further orders.

At 0745, yet another formation of light bombers was reported to be attacking Boulogne Harbor. It was the last of the diversionary raids planned by the Eighth Air Force, and it drew off another staffel of Mayer’s Fw 190s.

His staffeln began running short of fuel.

At 0752, the German air controllers, now aware of the magnitude of the heavy bomber force heading for France from Dungeness, ordered Mayer’s JG 2 to return for refueling and rearming.

Most of the fighters were about to land when several hundred Fortresses thundered across the sky above them. For those under their flight path, it sounded like the continuous rumble of a vast freight train.

The Luftwaffe air defense command had no idea where the bomber force was going, but the Americans would soon have to show their hand. Once the target region was determined, they would mobilize their fighter groups in Germany to destroy it.

For Connie Mayer and the pilots of Jagdgeschwader 2, one thing was certain. The Americans would have to come back through western France to reach England. He would be waiting for them.

Into the Valley

Cayeux, France
306th Bomb Group
First Lieutenant Andy Andrews
0807

A
s
Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti
crossed the French coast, Andy Andrews was leading an element of the 306th’s high squadron. He was part of the sixty-two-plane combat box that included the 92nd and 305th groups, and flying at seventeen thousand feet. The formation was maintaining a cruising speed of 180 miles an hour.

Once past the French coast, the group turned onto the predesignated compass heading that would take them on a southeasterly path toward the city of Saint-Quentin, eighty miles inside the French border.

Within moments of entering French airspace, the Luftwaffe’s 88-millimeter flak batteries along the bombers’ flight path began opening up, pumping hundreds of the twenty-pound cannon shells into the crowded sky. Compared to the intense umbrella barrages Andy Andrews had endured over Germany, these salvos seemed meager and uncoordinated.

As the first black puffs of greasy smoke reached up toward him, Andy again noted the fact that there was no sound to the explosions when the shells detonated in and around a formation. With his helmet and earphones on, it was impossible to hear them over the deafening roar of the plane’s four supercharged engines.

Unless it was a direct hit.

Even if he couldn’t hear the shells explode, he could definitely feel their impact when one came close. The burst would concuss the air so violently that
Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti
would leap upward like a bucking stallion.

At 0815, one of the Fortresses in the 92nd group received a direct hit, and dropped away from the formation. Five men were able to bail out of the stricken bomber before its wing sheared off at sixteen thousand feet. One parachute failed to open. Another was on fire.

Two minutes later, another B-17 in the 306th’s combat box absorbed a direct hit. A large red burst suddenly lit up the center of the plane’s fuselage. On fire and out of control, it disintegrated while falling earthward.

Death was purely a matter of fate in a flak barrage. The fickle finger. Andy took comfort in the fact that
Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti
had come back with plenty of flak holes, and no one in his crew had been badly wounded. A pilot could only steel his nerves and keep going. Andy took his mind off the carnage by keeping his plane in formation and retreating into his imagination.

From seventeen thousand feet, the beautiful landscape below them looked like a lot of places back home, blue-green fingers of rivers coursing through a fertile landscape of farmland and forest, interspersed with towns and cities, all lying placid in the sun.

He knew the placid landscape was deceiving. They were flying over ancient Gaul. In 58 BC, Julius Caesar had invaded the places they were now flying over, and had conquered nearly all of them. It struck Andy that there were probably more horses in the four Wright Cyclone engines of his single B-17 Flying Fortress than all the mounts in ten Roman legions.

It was 0825.

Eight miles ahead of the 306th in the lead combat box of the sixteen-group bomber stream, Ted Wilken glanced out of the pilot’s window in
Patricia
at the left edge of the 388th’s formation and saw several dozen fighters approaching from the northwest.

He was relieved to see that they were P-47 Thunderbolts from the 56th Fighter Group, rendezvousing with the lead combat box to provide air cover across part of France. A few minutes later, forty P-47 Thunderbolts from the 355th Fighter Group arrived from the southwest and took up positions along the formation’s right flank.

A few staffeln of Fw 190s and ME-109s came up to intercept the striking force near Cambrai, but so far the attacks weren’t mounted with the ferocity that characterized the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission. After dueling briefly with the P-47s, they disappeared. At that point, all fighter attacks abruptly ceased.

It was 0844.

Where were they? Had the Germans changed their tactics after Schweinfurt? It was an ominous sign, and seemed to indicate that the Germans were marshaling their forces for an all-out attack after the formation reached Germany.

This fear was strengthened when the bomber train thundered past the fortified city of Metz, the headquarters of the Luftwaffe’s Jagdivision 3, which controlled the movement of all enemy fighter units in that sector. No fighters came up to contest them.

When the 388th reached Le Châtelet, the flight leaders of the P-47 fighter groups signaled that their fuel supply had reached the critical point and they were turning back. The groups would fly back along the length of the bomber train, providing air cover for the trailing groups.

From now on, the Fortresses were on their own.

In conformance to the operations order, Major Ralph Jarrendt, the lead pilot of the 388th, slowly climbed to twenty-three thousand feet. The rest of the bombers followed suit. Air temperature inside the planes quickly dropped to 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. As the 388th neared German airspace, the cloud layer beneath them began to grow progressively thicker.

In
Patricia
, Warren Laws was making routine oxygen checks every fifteen minutes, asking each crew member to confirm over the intercom that he was okay. A few minutes later, Ted’s replacement navigator, Vic Sandes, reported that they were over German airspace. He estimated they would reach the initial point of the bomb run near Stuttgart at about 0930.

Glancing down, Ted saw that the weather was continuing to deteriorate. In France, the big puffy stratocumulus clouds had left plenty of ground visibility around them. This was a large front of stratus clouds, which were layered horizontally with a uniform base. Ted could only hope that the front didn’t extend farther south along their designated flight path.

Flying 150 feet above
Patricia
in the second element of the lead squadron, the Greek glanced down at the same pristine white landscape and wondered how the lead bombardier in their group was going to find the target.

A few moments later, the white landscape was no longer pristine. As he watched, dozens of Luftwaffe fighters burst through the top of the dense cloud layer like winged swords.

The planes bore so many different unit markings and war paint that the Greek knew they had to have come from all over Germany. Some had yellow checkered noses, others red and white noses. Although most of the ME-109s were black and silver, one was silver with a red cross instead of a swastika, and another had orange stripes with black borders. Many of the Fw 190s were painted light green and equipped with belly tanks for additional range.

Every type of fighter in the Luftwaffe arsenal had apparently been summoned into the battle, at least two hundred aircraft or more. In addition to the Fw 190s and ME-109s, there were twin-engine Bf 110s and ME-210s, along with Ju 88 heavy fighters and Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers.