Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  The Ninety-seventh lost a B-17, Shirley Our Girlie, with three men killed. One of the passengers was a Mustang crew chief.

  Coming off target, the task force set course east-northeast, droning above the vast Ukrainian flatness to the last major navigation checkpoint, the Dnieper River. Once there, navigators began to relax; Mirgorod and Poltava lay sixty and eighty miles beyond.

  That left Chet Sluder, a thirty-year-old Texan and former Doolittle staffer from North African days, leading the fighters. When the B-17s motored on to Poltava and Mirgorod, he herded his Mustangs for Piriatyn.

  Easier briefed than done. The Checkertail group commander had his hands full as lead navigator. Sluder relied on three maps, each with a different scale and topographical scheme, and a low cloud deck forced him to rely on dead reckoning. When he could see the ground, it was of little help. “That part of Russia is flat and featureless so I had to fly strictly by compass,” he recalled.24

  Sluder shouldered a large responsibility: a major mission, sixty-eight other pilots, and 3.5 million dollars’ worth of airplanes (the equivalent of 41.5 million dollars in 2012). Realizing that he had probably overflown his destination, he reversed course and felt much relieved when he recognized the Dnieper, then headed for Pyriatyn fifty miles northeast.

  At Poltava, Eaker inspected the camps, hospital, and mess halls with a group of Allied reporters in tow. But he was needed elsewhere. Eaker’s reputation and rank lent weight and prestige to AAF dealings with the Soviets, allowing him to address the senior officers on equal terms. He spent ten days in Russia, but much of his time in Moscow was largely wasted in diplomatic receptions and fruitless conferences.25

  Fraternization between the Americans and the locals began almost immediately, including pickup volleyball games, often with mixed-nationality teams. On at least one occasion, airmen gawked at the balding middle-aged player with three stars on his collar: Ira Eaker.

  The general described a warm welcome from citizens of Poltava and Mirgorod. “The local people were very friendly, particularly at first. They were kindly and cordial and the young girls especially, who worked on the base, were friends toward our crews.” By the third day, however, more officials from Moscow made themselves felt, to the point that some Yanks heard of irate females taking clubs to the commissars. But socialist doctrine was reinforced: accepting a magazine from an American was cause for discipline.26

  Local tours were arranged for those visiting airmen interested in seeing the sights—such as they were. Though the Fifteenth was accustomed to seeing destruction, Poltava impressed the Ninety-ninth Group: “The town had taken the full brunt of the war. There was hardly a building left intact. When the Germans overran this part of the country, the Russians retreated and left behind only ‘scorched earth.’ Every building, every bridge, power line and water main was totally destroyed. Only shells of buildings remained.”27

  Some of the Americans got over their initial reluctance to dance with Ukrainian women, but the cordiality of their hosts was limited. The Soviets, xenophobic to their marrow, were suspicious of so many Americans on the Rodina’s soil, and ample vodka ensured fights and arguments. Meanwhile, the Yanks brought all manner of desirable items from candy bars to nylons, contributing to a ready-made black market.

  There were not enough American maintenance men at the Ukrainian bases, so the AAF had to use Soviet personnel. One bomber crew, which received five Russian technicians, was fortunate to have a B-17 crew chief who spoke fluent Polish and some Russian. Captain Harry Miller of the Second Group wrote, “Those Russkies worked like hell! They laughed and joked constantly. They were extremely careful about everything. I think all the careless ones had already been shot. . . . They did not strip any threads or lose a single nut or bolt. They changed the engine in almost as little time as my prize engine change crew in Italy. They left us with a good feeling about the Russian GIs.”28

  It wasn’t all boredom. Four days after arriving, the task force attacked the airfield at Galati, Romania, a seven-hundred-mile mission just across the Ukrainian border. Bombing results were judged good to excellent, though a one-time attack could inflict little permanent damage. The Checkertails claimed six kills, losing two Mustangs with one pilot captured. Group commander Chet Sluder said, “I clobbered an FW 190, and Captain Roy Hogg nearly got himself killed shoving six more off my back.” The Clan crowned three new aces that day: Hogg, CO of the 318th Squadron, along with Lieutenants Cullen Hoffman and Bob Barkey.

  The fighters did their job: a 463rd Group Fortress went down over Yugoslavia but the other bombers got off lightly.

  Twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Ion Dobran flew one of the yellow-crossed Bf 109s that scrambled from Tecuci, near the wooded hills of Moldavia fifty miles northwest of Galati. Vectored onto the intruders by radar controller Albatross, he engaged at nearly twenty thousand feet. Dobran latched on to a Mustang and opened fire, scoring hits. But almost immediately the American’s three partners were after him. He stuffed the nose down, trying to escape in a screaming dive—generally useless against the sleek Mustang. Despite his maneuvers, one persistent Checkertail pilot stuck with him, forcing the Romanian into an emergency landing in a barley field. He opened the “coffin lid” canopy and scrambled out, expecting to be strafed. He heard only the receding sound of a high-performance engine. Then silence. Dobran recalled, “Then from inside, like a huge river, an unspeakable joy—the joy of a man who can see again the sky, the sun, and the grass. The wind is caressing me. Oh God, how beautiful is life when you start from broken pieces. We are modern gladiators—one of the two fighters should die. Who pointed the thumb up for forgiveness?”29

  Upon return to Poltava the men in the Mediterranean Theater learned of events sixteen hundred miles northwest. Recalled one officer, “Everyone was excited by the news of the Allied invasion on the beaches at Normandy. It was reported that this operation was to hold German fighters from the invasion landings.” Closer to home, the Fifth Army entered Rome two days before D-Day, signaling a further decline in Axis fortunes.30

  RETURN TO PLOESTI

  While Frantic bombers hit Galati, half a dozen groups based in Italy went after transportation targets across Romania. The heavy losses suffered in May prompted the Fifteenth’s operations staff to come up with a new strategy for June 6. The goal was to spread enemy fighters across as broad a front as possible, preventing them from concentrating on one or two formations. Both phases of the plan were intended to reduce the opposition faced by three wings attacking both Ploesti and petroleum storage and transport facilities at Giurgiu, a Danube shipment port.

  Liberators from the Forty-seventh, Forty-ninth, and Fifty-fifth Wings flew against Romana Americana, Xenia, and Dacia. Thirteen bombers of the 310 dispatched were lost, five from the 464th Group alone. They encountered 120 enemy fighters and another effective smoke screen, and their seven hundred tons of bombs produced disappointing results. The loss rate of 4.6 percent would have been acceptable if the results had been better, but in this case the results were not worth the cost.

  RETURN FROM THE UKRAINE

  During the June 11 return leg from Soviet territory, more than a hundred B-17s bombed Focsani, Romania, receiving an enthusiastic response from flak gunners on both sides of the front lines. German fighters attempted to intercept, but the 325th intervened, claiming three Bf 109s downed. A Ninety-seventh Group Fortress was lost on the return to Italy, as the Fifteenth completed its only shuttle-bombing mission to the Soviet Union.

  The Americans continued pressing for approval to attack strategic targets, but the Russians refused, limiting targets to airfields and rail yards. Eventually the Soviets relented for an Eighth Air Force mission, but weather canceled the operation.

  FIGHTERS OVER PLOESTI

  The heavies weren’t wrecking Ploesti.

  Although the oil campaign had been in full swing since April, its seven high-altitude bombing missions had left much of the refinery complex intact or reparable. With ample warning o
f approaching B-17s and B-24s, the defenders invariably obscured the targets with heavy smokescreens.

  Frustrated with the meager results of the original plan, Twining decided to try something unorthodox. He would send P-38s to divebomb Ploesti. The Lightnings could fly low, avoiding enemy radar, then pop up to altitude and deliver their bombs with precision.

  It seemed worth a try.

  The first target was the Romana Americana refinery, which had escaped serious damage and reportedly was producing nearly 15 percent of all Axis oil. Two P-38 groups were assigned the mission: the Eighty-second to do the bombing, with the First providing escort. Both units would provide forty-eight aircraft, launching at sunup on June 10.

  The fighter-bombers carried extra-large drop tanks on one pylon and a thousand-pounder on the other. Flying low under radio silence, navigating by map and dead reckoning, the Lightnings crossed the Adriatic into Yugoslavia. At this point nearly twenty planes aborted—an unusually high number—including a dozen from the Eighty-second. The strike force was reduced to thirty-six bombers and thirty-nine escorts. Still, the lead squadron, the Twenty-seventh from the First Group, hit its final landmark within five minutes of ETA—excellent work nearly six hundred miles from home.

  Then things turned to hash.

  Flying low over rugged, unfamiliar terrain, some flights got separated. Approaching the target area, some First Group pilots sighted several German bombers and pounced on them. Six of the enemy went down in the melee, but the action stirred up the locals. About twenty Romanian IAR-80 fighters scrambled to intercept, and they tore into the dozen Lightnings. Given the defenders’ advantages of altitude, position, and numbers, the fight could only go one way. The big IARs, potently armed, mauled the P-38s, destroying nine. Apparently the only American to retaliate was Lieutenant Carl Hoenshell, who probably downed three but never returned.

  Meanwhile, the Ninety-fourth Squadron also encountered airborne Germans, shooting down seven bombers or trainers. All hope of surprise was now lost.

  The Romanians had time to spool up their smoke generators, and the antiaircraft gunners were loaded and ready. When the Eighty-second Group rolled in on Romana Americana east of Ploesti, the sky lit up with bursting shells and tracers. Seven Lightnings went down in the flak. The retreating P-38s had made direct hits on a cracking plant, storage tanks, and other facilities.

  The Lightnings had to shoot their way out. West of the target, the Twenty-seventh Squadron clashed with thirty or more Bf 109s, breaking even at four kills and four losses. Other P-38s strafed anything that looked worthwhile, exiting southwesterly.

  Flying in the Seventy-first Squadron was Second Lieutenant Herbert Hatch. He led his wingman Joe Morrison into a pack of radial-engined fighters that he identified as Focke-Wulfs but actually were IAR-80s. It was a churning, broiling, low-level dogfight, fought on the deck in a depression between the hills: “I cannot overemphasize what a melee that was,” Hatch reported. “There were at least twelve P-38s in that little area, all of them at very low altitude. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty 109s were also there. None of us was at more than two hundred or three hundred feet, and some were quite a bit lower.”31

  In that churning aerial fur ball, “Stub” Hatch gunned eight planes, claiming five kills. He was lucky to survive—one of his victims clipped his airplane, knocking three inches off his left rudder.

  When noses were counted, the First Group had lost fourteen planes and the Eighty-second eight more: twenty-two of the seventy-five that reached the target area. Most of the damage to the refinery was repaired in eight days. A 30-percent loss rate to deliver 18.5 tons of bombs was unsupportable. Fighters never attacked Ploesti again.

  Nevertheless, newspapers back home hailed the fighter-bombing operation as a success. “Last Ploesti Refinery Smashed,” ran a typical headline.32

  The antiaircraft gunners had a different view. An AAF summary noted, “Low level attacks were considered a good opportunity for flak areas to bolster their scores.”33

  THE FIRST PRIORITY

  Two days after D-Day in Normandy, Ira Eaker got the order he craved. Spaatz wired that the Fifteenth would “have as its first priority the complete destruction of the Rumanian oil refineries.”34

  By then, Twining’s bombers had partly damaged nearly half of the sixty-plus refineries within range of Foggia. But the Germans, experts at repair and reorganization, spared no effort or cost to restore the petroleum plants. Continuing photo reconnaissance allowed Allied intelligence officers to estimate the amount of time required to return a refinery to previous production, usually with some precision.

  The British had discovered that five-hundred-pound bombs were nearly as effective against refineries as thousand-pounders, and twice as many could be dropped per sortie. The concept had been reinforced by examining Luftwaffe results against English targets in 1940–1941. Because few Romanian facilities had protective walls around storage tanks, the thin-skinned receptacles were even more vulnerable to blast damage.35

  With the shuttle concept proved, the Eighth Air Force launched its first Frantic mission on June 21. The Germans tracked the Fortresses to Poltava, however, and that night Luftwaffe bombers dropped in. Forty-seven of the seventy-three B-17s were destroyed on the ground, and most of the others were badly damaged. The Russian defenses proved wholly inadequate, leaving the surviving Mighty Eighth bombers to return home by way of Italy on July 5.

  The official AAF study of Operation Frantic concluded, “Altogether the experiment was of little importance tactically and early estimates that it had fostered better relations between the two allies were overly optimistic. Americans did learn something of the Russians’ genius for obstruction. . . .”36

  ON THE DECK

  Fifteenth fighters were unusually active on June 15, with five groups attacking airfields in southern France. The First and Fourteenth Groups lost five Lightnings, while the 325th got hammered. One squadron arrived over an airdrome near Avignon that had already been attacked but destroyed or damaged only four planes on the ground. First Lieutenant Hiawatha Mohawk, flying a Mustang named Blond Squaw, got the only aerial victory.

  Seven pilots from the 319th Squadron were killed or captured; three were flying so low to avoid flak that they struck the ground, water, or power lines. Another lost a dogfight with a Messerschmitt. Strafing was always more dangerous than air combat, and pilots groused that the mission results in no way compensated for the cost.

  BRATISLAVA

  The oil campaign was not limited to Ploesti, and on June 16 the Fifteenth attacked petroleum facilities in Austria and Czechoslovakia. As usual, oil targets drew a strong response, and more than two hundred enemy fighters opposed the six task forces. U.S. fighters claimed to have downed forty planes in the combat, the highest toll since the January 30 mission to northern Italy.

  The Forty-seventh Wing targeted the Apollo oil refinery at Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, one of the ten largest outside Romania. Led by the 376th’s Lieutenant Colonel R. C. McIlheran, the task force encountered forty single- and twin-engine fighters that rolled in from twelve o’clock high, striking “like Thor’s hammer.”37

  Subsequent passes were increasingly aggressive, “hitting from all angles at distances from 50 to 200 yards, and in some cases flying right through our formation.” One Messerschmitt struck a Liberator, destroying both planes. Meanwhile, Ju 88s lobbed rockets into the bombers from the flanks a thousand yards out, then continued with gunnery passes to three hundred yards. All the while the Liberators motored through “a terrific barrage of heavy caliber anti-aircraft fire before, during, and after the bombing run.”38

  The bombardiers put their ordnance on target, inflicting “grave damage to vital installations,” including storage tanks, the distillation and cracking plant, and a rail yard. On the egress, aircrews reported fires visible seventy miles away. The mission cost the 376th two B-24s among the thirteen bombers lost but resulted in the Liberandos’ second Distinguished Unit Citation with the
Fifteenth, their third of the war.39

  The interceptors were persistent, and in a 376th Liberator, bombardier Lieutenant George Crawford could stand it no longer. He belonged to a flying family from Breckenridge, Texas. His older brother Raymond flew B-24s in China, and Fred was a Fifteenth fighter pilot. After bombs away, George made his way aft to the left waist position, as the crew was one gunner short. In the narrow fuselage he was back to back with Technical Sergeant C. O. Schambacker.

  Crawford saw two Liberators explode and spiral to destruction under fire from Me 110s. He had passed gunnery school in New Mexico but had little opportunity to use his skills until now. Throughout the mission he fired more than two thousand rounds without much effect—mostly snap shots at fleeting targets. But at length a single 110 eased into range on the same heading, six hundred yards out, and Crawford drew a bead. “Using my tracers to judge where the bullets were hitting, I fired burst after burst and saw the tracers strike home. . . . I could see tracers hitting the cockpit and then walking their way down the fuselage. . . .” Encouraged by enthusiastic thumps on the back from Sergeant Schambacker, Crawford kept firing until the fighter dropped into the undercast.40

  One of the escorting Mustangs that day was flown by George’s brother Fred, of the Fifty-second Fighter Group. His squadron overflew the 376th formation, and Fred considered prospects for a personal escort on the way home.

  Following a “bounce” on some 109s, Fred noticed some P-38s bearing First Fighter Group markings. One of them pointed its nose at the Mustang—and opened fire. A 20mm shell tore a hole in the right wing “as big as Bulldog Field’s home plate.” With smoke in the cockpit, Fred pulled the canopy release, unfastened his belt, and stood up. Diving over the right side, he bounced off the fuselage as his radio and oxygen leads tore loose. His right ankle struck the horizontal tail, then he found himself in midair ten thousand feet over Hungary. Briefly he wondered if the Lightning pilot would come back to finish him off. Then he pulled the ripcord. His canopy blossomed and he alit with a painful thump.