Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  The mission inflicted a heavy blow on the Fifteenth—nearly 20-percent losses over the primary target, despite good withdrawal cover by 146 fighters. The defenders counted nineteen losses, a dozen of those to Eighty-second and Fourteenth Group Lightnings south of Steyr. It was becoming obvious that the Fifteenth badly needed long-range escort fighters capable of breaking up Luftwaffe groups before they concentrated against the bombers. Though two Mustang groups had recently gone operational in Britain, the Mediterranean would have to wait.

  BIG WEEK FRIDAY

  At the end of the week, the weather finally took a favorable turn for the Americans. Unusually clear skies permitted planners to select any European targets in range of Britain or Italy.

  Spaatz’s commands concentrated northern and southern task forces against Regensburg. The Fifteenth dispatched nearly four hundred bombers to targets in Germany, Austria, and Italy, but only 176 flew against the primary target, which once again was Regensburg. Mission planners timed the southern prong to arrive over the target one hour before the northern force, hoping to catch the defenders on the ground rearming and refuelling.

  The 450th Group sent twenty-nine Liberators against the Messerschmitt complex, and the defenders struck early, beginning three hundred miles out. Two white-ruddered “Cottontails” were victims of the Luftwaffe’s Herrausschutz tactic—forcing a bomber out of formation so it could be hounded to destruction individually. As if that weren’t enough, on the journey home the group encountered impenetrable weather—a huge cloud bank that forced a descent almost to wave-top level over the Adriatic en route to Manduria. Pilots sweated their way home beneath lowering clouds.

  Hardest hit was the 301st, which lost a dozen B-17s. One was piloted by First Lieutenant Chester Koch, who bailed out his surviving crew, then set the doomed ship on autopilot. He parachuted onto the 7,300-foot Mount Kasereck, near Salzburg, where he spent a bitterly cold night. The next morning, as Koch was making his way downhill, he encountered a German pilot. Master Sergeant Hermann Stahl had downed a B-17 before abandoning his shot-up Messerschmitt, losing a boot in the process. The two fliers reached an accord, the American offering the German one of his flying boots worn over regular shoes. Together they continued their snowy descent until met by a civilian Volkssturm unit.24

  Colonel Herbert E. Rice’s Second Group rang up another stellar mission, receiving an unprecedented two Distinguished Unit Citations in two days.

  Bombing was judged better than good. The 449th’s mission summary concluded, “The Prufening works were completely wiped out. Not a building was left standing. The destruction was complete as happened in any heavy bombardment attack of the war.”25

  Operating beyond the range of Lightnings and Thunderbolts, the Forts and Libs had to shoot their way in to the targets and then shoot their way out. Some waist gunners stood amid growing piles of .50 caliber brass cases. The loss rate nearly matched the bloodletting of the day before: thirty-three of 176, or almost 19 percent.

  In all, the Fifteenth lost forty-three planes that Friday—one-fourth against Regensburg—including four P-38s. It was more than twice the loss of the previous day, contributing to a record monthly toll of 131 planes, nearly double January’s figure. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe quartermaster crossed off thirty-seven fighters, nearly as many as were lost to the Fifteenth in the previous three days.26

  BIG WEEK: DEBRIEF

  During Big Week, the Fifteenth launched about five hundred bomber sorties, as against 3,300 by the Eighth. In all, the Americans dropped nearly ten thousand tons of bombs (40 percent of them on aircraft factories). Using the visible destruction to roof areas, Allied intelligence officers determined that the bombing campaign had damaged or destroyed 75 percent of the buildings in the targeted plants.27

  But aerial photos could not reveal what lay beneath the rubble or remaining cover. The machinery and tools used to produce aircraft and engines often survived with little or no serious damage, and Germany’s unusually efficient dispersal plan usually diluted the damage. Over the previous year, Albert Speer, the Reich’s thirty-eight-year-old organizational genius, had optimized the armament industry. Operation Argument, therefore, targeted a network that was still expanding, taking up previous slack. For instance, Hitler had not permitted women to work in armament plants until early 1943.28

  Throughout most of the war, air commanders were reluctant to return to targets that had already extracted a heavy price. A “restrike” policy—bombing through the holes in factory roofs—might have achieved greater results, but aircraft, crews, maintenance, and the eternal weather problems often prevented optimum damage. The increasing dispersion and efficiency of Germany’s industrial plant, moreover, allowed the Third Reich to accelerate its aircraft production through most of the war.

  Nevertheless, the combination punch delivered by the Eighth and the Fifteenth achieved results. Between the missions of the twenty-second and the twenty-fifth of February, Regensburg’s and Augsburg’s Messerschmitt plants were considered “utterly destroyed,” with nearly every building struck. Aircraft deliveries plummeted from 435 fighters in January to 135 in March, a drop entirely attributable to the bombing. Regensburg did not achieve normal production until June. Augsburg, however, was up to speed in just five weeks, and other factories took up much of the slack.29

  Postwar analysis determined that Argument deprived the Luftwaffe of perhaps two months of production—some two thousand fighters destroyed in their nests, and more than three hundred downed in combat. The heaviest damage was done to factories producing twin-engine fighters, which posed a lesser threat to bombers. Though no one could appreciate it at the time, the attack on the Messerschmitt factory at Augusburg delayed completion of the Me 262 jet fighter, which did not appear until that summer.

  In retrospect, Allied commanders failed to appreciate “the phenomenal recuperability of the aircraft industry, especially its airframe branch.” They estimated the monthly production of German single-engine fighters in the first half of 1944 at 655, whereas 1,580 were actually delivered.30

  Ball bearing production also proved exceptionally resilient, partly because of its physical nature and Germany’s astute policy of keeping the “pipeline” full. Thanks to Speer’s remarkably efficient dispersal scheme after the Eighth’s two Regensburg strikes in 1943 and imports from Sweden, the “antifriction-bearing” industry survived and even flourished.

  Argument cost the Army Air Forces 226 bombers and twenty-eight fighters, totaling some 2,600 airmen. The 6-percent bomber loss rate was heavy (four was considered sustainable), but some planners had anticipated losing more than a hundred bombers in one day. During Big Week, the Fifteenth lost eighty-nine bombers (forty-two B-17s) and nine fighters, two-thirds of the February toll of 131. The increasing pace of operations had naturally produced greater attrition, from fifty-three planes (twenty-one fighters) in December to seventy (thirty-four fighters) in January.31

  In January 1944, the German Air Force had lost 307 day and night fighters in the west and nearly three hundred pilots—a 12-percent attrition. February losses remain uncertain, but they probably reached 355 day fighters with 225 aircrewmen over Germany. Disastrous losses among German twin-engine fighter groups forced their withdrawal to the east.32

  Big Week permitted the Fifteenth Air Force and the Luftwaffe to take one another’s measure. Twining’s bombers proved that they could inflict telling damage on vital targets, but they paid a price for every success. Ambitious young Teutons in Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs, with thousands of other Germans manning flak batteries, exacted a toll that clearly was unsustainable even for the Americans. The very foundation of U.S. airpower was called into question: Could the self-defending bomber survive against determined fighter opposition?

  WORSENING WEATHER

  Not only did Twining have fewer aircraft than the Eighth, but his effort was degraded by worsening weather. For instance, the 456th Group went operational at Stornarella on February 10 but dropped no bombs on six o
f its first ten missions until March 8.33 The 451st reported that Gioia “became a sea of mud and water as the weather continued to go from bad to downright unbearable. The steel matt runway had almost sunk out of sight.”34

  Individual units’ problems fit the larger pattern. The Americans had anticipated more operating days in sunny Italy than in Great Britain, but nature decreed otherwise. In the first quarter of 1944, nearly 40 percent of the Fifteenth’s bombing missions were marred by poor visibility around Foggia and over intended targets.35

  Excluding aborted missions, the Eighth Air Force operated heavy bombers on 303 days in 1944. The figure for the Fifteenth was 251—a startling 20-percent discrepancy. But whatever the numbers, aircrews frequently flew in marginal or poor weather. Years later, many pilots reflected that instrument flying was the weakest part of their training.36

  While veteran groups recovered from Big Week, reinforcements arrived. The 461st Group “Liberaiders” settled in at Toretta on a field constructed on private property. The “landlord” was a nobleman, Baron Pavoncelli, who occasionally visited his tenants. Some of the Americans spoke Italian, permitting a personal relationship, though the group’s main translator, Lieutenant Philip J. Caroselli, was shot down a few weeks later.

  A farmer, Baron Pavoncelli maintained a barn and stables and did not object when some tenants appropriated hay to stuff their cotton mattresses. Occasionally the baron loaned one of his horses to equine-minded officers, including the group commander. Redheaded Colonel Frederick Glantzberg took advantage of the offer, and sometimes locals doffed their caps to him with “Buon giorno, barba rosa.”37

  Glantzberg was a thirty-nine-year-old MIT graduate who had been flying since 1928. In 1932 then-lieutenant Glantzberg was struck in flight by a twenty-pound trailing antenna from another aircraft. Despite a fractured skull, Glantzenberg recovered from a graveyard spiral at just five hundred feet, aided by the rear-seat pilot. Surgeons removed four square inches of his skull, but he refused to have a plate installed. Amazingly, he not only remained on active duty, but continued flying for eleven thousand hours, including a full tour of fifty missions. He frequently nudged his troops with, “Let’s not stand around on one foot.”38 His group logged its first missions in April, and the crews appreciated Glantzberg for his leadership in the air.

  Colonel Marden Munn brought the 459th Group to Giulia in February. He had been an American Airlines pilot before joining the army, where he flew attack aircraft and bombers. Upon assuming command of the 459th he already had 2,200 hours of military time. Munn led his group on its first eleven missions and nearly one-fourth of the first ninety, “including the bad ones.” In contrast, his successor, previously stationed in the Panama Canal Zone and Galapagos Islands, logged only eleven of 172 missions in the last nine months of the war. That man, a West Pointer, retired as a major general, Munn as a colonel.39

  Senior air force officers, unlike many ground commanders of comparable rank, frequently had to expose themselves to enemy action. Casualties among infantry and armor colonels were rare in comparison with their airborne counterparts, but fliers had the option to sit out the rough ones. The fact that so few did, preferring to emulate the likes of Glantzberg and Munn, inspired their airmen who shared identical risks.

  With more groups arriving that spring, the Fifteenth was emerging from accelerated adolescence into early maturity. Doolittle and Twining had been forced to bring the command along quickly—probably faster than any numbered air force. Nearly every level learned much of its trade on the job, and Eaker, who had built the Eighth under similar conditions, was objective in his assessment. In March, after the trauma of Big Week, he described the Fifteenth as “a pretty disorganized mob.” But he knew talent when he saw it. He trusted Twining and generally approved of his subordinates. Unit commanders were “perfecting the reorganization and training of their groups pretty rapidly.”40

  Training was a perennial topic and a common problem. When the 484th Group arrived at Torretta in April, many of Colonel William B. Keese’s men recognized the situation. Upon reflection, the unit diarist wrote long afterward:

  In training during the war due to the expediency of getting troops into battle quickly, grades often were not given at the end of classes. If one hoped to survive and return home after the war, the soldier had to pay close attention to what was being taught. A flier had to learn his aircraft and weapons like the back of his own hand. There was no cheating or use of crib sheets in combat. It was best to get the information stuffed between your ears for instant recall, or your butt and those of your aircrew buddies will be put in doubt.41

  TARGET: MORALE

  Following Big Week, the Allied air chiefs resumed “morale attacks” against Balkan population centers, hoping to sow enough discontent to cause cracks in the Axis dike.

  The goal was based on theory rather than reality. Two decades earlier, the Italian airpower theorist general Giulio Douhet had posited that strategic bombing could avert another Great War by compelling enemy civilians to demand their government’s capitulation. The strategy had not worked because Douhet missed an essential point: bombing civilians into submission could succeed only against an industrial democracy, if then. In the 1930s and 1940s, the only conceivable rivals within range of each other were France and Britain. The despotic regimes in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, and elsewhere were immune to public opinion.

  “Morale bombing” was the Allied euphemism for what the recipients termed “terror bombing.” Some airmen, from bombardiers to generals, were uneasy with the practice, both for ethical and practical reasons. Nonetheless, the RAF returned to Sofia twice in March, setting more fires. Then at month’s end a two-day Allied blitz created a firestorm that incinerated facilities as varied as the city arsenal, the national theater, and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod.

  Sofia was no stranger to war. It was razed by the Huns in the fifth century AD and captured by Czarist Russia in 1878. But as in the bombings of Coventry in 1940 and Hamburg in 1943, the super-heated air caused the spontaneous combustion of materials and buildings. The remaining population ran short of food, and weeks passed before civic services fully resumed. Despite the civilians’ misery, however, strategic results proved elusive.

  The Allies faced a serious contradiction. They had condemned the German bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, and other population centers, but they themselves found it necessary or advisable to target enemy civilians. In fairness to the airmen, often lost in the postwar argument was the technical limitation of 1940s bombardment, when the AAF expected at least half of its bombs to fall outside a thousand-foot radius of the target in daylight. The RAF, flying at night, expanded its target size from factory complexes to city centers.

  Nevertheless, Hap Arnold and some of his subordinates tried to have it both ways. In his study of the ethics of bombing, the historian Ronald Schaffer writes, “American flyers were expected to terrorize Balkan civilians without appearing to use terror tactics.”42

  By March 1944 some senior American planners concluded that morale bombing was not going to succeed independently; it needed to be integrated into missions against hard targets. The doubters included the influential Major General Frederick L. Anderson, Arnold’s strategic air operations officer. They argued that the Mediterranean air command lacked sufficient resources to force Bulgaria to capitulate while meeting other assignments, especially in Romania. Morale bombing therefore needed to be part of a broader Allied strategy including battlefield victories in Italy and Russia while razing more cities in Germany.

  Politically, morale bombing pulled in two directions. It prompted civilian resentment of the pro-Axis regimes but also hatred of the Allies for killing civilians and reducing some historic cities to smoldering rubble. The raids also played into Soviet hands, as Balkan Communists disingenuously noted that the Russians seldom bombed cities, ignoring that the Red Air Force was a tactical organization possessing nothing like the Anglo-American strategic capability.


  That capability was about to be turned in a new direction, thanks to a startling new airplane.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ITALIAN SPRING

  MARCH–JUNE 1944

  Big Week had proved that the Fifteenth Air Force badly needed long-range fighters. Beginning in April, Twining got them.

  The three P-38 groups could seldom provide more than penetration or withdrawal support to distant targets such as Vienna and Regensburg, and the 325th Group’s P-47s had even shorter range. Luftwaffe interceptors, consequently, exacted a steady toll of “heavies.” In its first seven months, the Fifteenth attributed 54 percent of its bomber losses to enemy fighters, a figure that peaked at 82 percent during February.1

  Concentrating on targets closer to home after Big Week, the Fifteenth’s bombers enjoyed better escort coverage. Bomber losses dropped from 131 in February to eighty-two in March, when most targets lay in Italy and Austria. A two-day mini-blitz against enemy airfields on March 18 and 19, however, cost twenty-five bombers and three fighters, while the 454th Group lost nine Liberators in one day over Graz.

  With his bomber strength growing—eight more groups arrived from January through March—Twining made his case for more fighters. Three groups from the Twelfth Air Force were transferred between April and June: the Thirty-first and Fifty-second with Spitfires and the 332nd in P-47s. But before the new units could join the Fifteenth, they needed to change horses.

  Their new mount was the Mustang.

  North American’s P-51, originally intended for Britain, began life with the same Allison engine as the Lightning. It performed well up to fifteen thousand feet, but thereafter speed fell off unless sufficiently supercharged. The problem was solved by installing the British Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, which thrived at high altitudes. The result was not only better performance, but greater range.