Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  On July 7 more than 550 bombers left their Foggia bases for Blechhammer, Odertal, and transport targets in Yugoslavia. There were twenty-five losses that day (seven of them at Blechhammer), but the most remarkable feat of airmanship took place not in hostile skies but back at the base. Returning to Castelluccio, First Lieutenant Frank McQuaid’s Liberator, Calamity Jane—part of the 451st Group’s Forty-ninth Wing task force—experienced the fuel-feed problems that had plagued a previous mission. Number three engine, the right inboard, abruptly quit with zero fuel pressure. Then number two, on the left side, also quit.

  A mile from the runway and nearly out of fuel, McQuaid and copilot Robert Nelson feathered the windmilling propellers, pulled out of formation, and began dealing with a rare crisis. McQuaid called over the intercom, “Crew to crash positions!” Then he keyed his mike and called in to the base, “Hiccup Tower, this is 665, emergency landing! I’m out of gas! Approaching from the east at 1,500 feet, coming straight in!”

  The control tower replied, “Six-six-five cleared to land! Five-three-two, pull up and go around!”6

  The other incoming bomber, instructed to abort its landing, complied with the order. Calamity Jane’s crew could not see the other plane, and a collision loomed. Crews on the ground gaped at the sight of a Liberator dropping away, cutting ahead of 532, which abandoned its approach. Timing it nicely, McQuaid waited to lower wheels and flaps, controlling airspeed with available power and lowering the nose. Speed bled off from 140 to 120 to 110. Then he dropped the B-24 onto the runway between two bombers that had already landed. The crew chief found fifteen gallons remaining for the operable left engine and ten for the right: a few minutes’ air time.

  It was an eye-watering piece of flying that no one could be trained to duplicate. Colonel Robert Eaton, the group commander whose war had begun at Pearl Harbor, allowed that not even a movie aviator could accomplish McQuade’s feat.

  EXPECTED OF THE CAPTAIN

  On July 9 the Fifteenth returned to Ploesti as 222 heavies of the Fifth and Forty-seventh Wings struck Xenia and Concordia Vega.

  The Forty-seventh crossed the mountains north of Ploesti, turned down the east slope, and attacked on a southerly heading. The Libs maintained formation during the seven-minute run from the initial point to the target, losing one plane to flak. After bombs away, the formation veered almost ninety degrees right, headed out but still under fire.

  Guided by pathfinder radar, the Liberators landed nearly seventy hits on Concordia, reducing its already diminished output to less than one-third of its March level. Xenia, however, was well covered with smoke, and the Fortresses inflicted little damage.

  Only six bombers were lost, but that statistic was small consolation to the crew of the Ninety-eighth Group B-24G flown by First Lieutenant Donald D. Pucket, a twenty-eight-year-old command pilot with the Pyramiders who had been in Italy only three months. Over the target, his bombardier had barely released when the plane was struck by flak. With one man dead and six wounded, two engines out, and fuel and control lines damaged, the Liberator began losing altitude.

  Turning over command to his copilot, First Lieutenant Robert Jenkins, Pucket went aft to take stock. He found fuel and hydraulic fluid sloshing in the bomb bay and manually cranked the doors open to drain the liquids. Then he directed those who were still able to toss unnecessary weight overboard.

  Despite its efforts, the crew could not save the bomber. About 150 miles from the target, Pucket ordered a bailout. Accounts vary, but three men were either unable or unwilling to jump, so Pucket resumed his seat and nudged the burning Liberator toward the ground. Descending in their chutes, the other crewmen watched aghast as their plane struck a mountainside and exploded.

  Pucket was the second Ninety-eighth man to earn the Medal of Honor, after Colonel John R. “Killer” Kane in Operation Tidal Wave. Pucket’s devotion to his crew lived on in his widow, Lorene, who declined to receive his medal unless the citation was changed. The mention of hysterical crewmen, she believed, reflected poorly on those who died on that Balkan mountainside. “Don’s action in staying with his wounded crewmembers and crippled B-24,” she said, “was what was traditional and expected of the captain of the ship.”7

  Six days later, on July 15, the Fifteenth unloaded on Ploesti. All five wings launched 604 bombers in the greatest effort of the campaign. Only two previous missions had topped four hundred sorties. The Fifth and Forty-seventh Wings went for Romana Americana, while the other three wings targeted Creditul, Standard, and Dacia. More than 1,500 tons of bombs cascaded onto the refineries.

  As always, the defenders had ample time to prepare. The smoke generators were up and running before the bombers arrived, forcing bombardiers to rely on H2X again. Photo interpreters counted 168 bomb holes at the primary target, interrupting production for two weeks.

  As always, the larger picture was lost to aircrews, who counted seventeen missing aircraft. A 450th Group gunner, Hugh Jones, recorded thoughts far closer to heart: “The raid today was the clincher to this ever present enigma according to the intelligence officers. We probably will lay off the place for a whole week. As usual the flak was heavy and one of the bursts got Col. Snaith with a direct hit. He went down in flames without any chutes seen. . . . The fighter escort was beautiful. The MEs that were around couldn’t even get near us. Ship 205 bit the Italian dust too this afternoon. It cracked up coming in the landing leg. This means five of the old crew are gone.”8 Jones’s group commander, Lieutenant Colonel William G. Snaith, was the only survivor of his crew and was taken prisoner. And while the scuttlebutt about laying off Ploesti for seven days proved true, another chilling mission lay just ahead.

  THE BATTLE OF MEMMINGEN

  On July 18 four B-24 wings with fifteen groups were sent against airdromes, fuel, and armament factories in the Friedrichshafen area of southern Germany. The Fifth Wing’s four assigned groups went for Memmingen Airdrome. Mission briefings indicated 240 Luftwaffe fighters in the target area and thirty or more along the route through northern Italy.

  Two P-51 groups were delegated to escort the 112 B-17s: the 325th Checkertails and the 332nd Red Tails. The Mustangs were to take the heavies all the way to the target and back—further proof of the P-51’s exceptional range. Unaccountably, the Checkertails were recalled before the bombers reached Memmingen. That left Major Lee Rayford’s four Tuskegee squadrons with fifty-eight fighters after airborne aborts.

  Another Mustang outfit, the Fifty-second, was detailed to provide penetration support up to the bombers’ initial point at Kempten, eighteen miles south of Memmingen. It was a typical mission, requiring precise planning and execution—multiple formations from different bases aimed at merging in three dimensions at a specific point in time and space.

  Winging northward, the Tuskegee Airmen spotted thirty-plus Messerschmitt 109s over the Udine area of northern Italy. The bombers had not yet arrived, so twenty-one pilots from three of the four squadrons dropped tanks, rolled over, and dived to attack. One Mustang was destroyed when struck by a drop tank, but the 332nd pilots claimed nine kills, three by Second Lieutenant Clarence “Lucky” Lester, a twenty-one-year-old Virginian. He reported,

  I saw a formation of Me 109s straight ahead and I closed in about 200 feet and started firing. Smoke began to pour from the aircraft and a little later it exploded. I was going so fast I was sure I would hit some of the debris, but luckily I didn’t.

  As I was dodging pieces of the enemy aircraft, I saw another Me 109 to my right, all alone on a heading 90 degrees to mine, at the same altitude. I turned onto his tail and closed in to about 200 feet while firing. I noticed the aircraft began to smoke and almost stopped. I was going so fast I overran him, but noticed a blond pilot parachute from his burning plane.

  “I was alone and looking for my flight mates,” Lester continued, “when I spotted a third Me 109 flying very low about 1,000 feet above the ground.” He dived on the Messerschmitt, triggered his guns, and notched his third victory.9

>   Lacking fuel to continue the mission, the recently engaged Mustangs turned back for Ramitelli. The remaining thirty-six continued north, sticking with the Fortresses. The first two groups, the Second and 463rd, flew a tight enough formation to enable close escort, but the others were widely separated.

  Shortly after the Fifty-second’s Mustangs departed the initial point, the Luftwaffe arrived in strength. Seven fighter Gruppen were airborne, and four concentrated on an unescorted bomber formation. It was a nearly perfect interception, but a Bf 109 squadron assigned to escort the FW 190s got sucked into hitting the heavies. American fighters intervened but not before 127 Germans swarmed the bombers.

  Closing from the rear to point-blank range, the heavily armed and armored 190s chopped the 483rd Group to pieces. The unit reported, “The attack lasted twenty minutes and practically all passes were made from level rear and from five to seven o’clock positions. The fighter escort arrived about eight minutes after the initial attack, and was very effective from then on, despite the fact that they were heavily outnumbered.”10

  Fighting against the odds, the American fighters did what they could. While the remaining 332nd pilots went two and two, with one pilot killed and one captured, the other units in the area sped to the sound of the guns. The Fifty-second, already released from escort, reversed course and raced back to the bomber stream.

  The First Group’s Lightnings, awaiting the Forty-ninth Wing Liberators near Friedrichshafen, heard combat on the radio. They bent their throttles northwesterly, as did the Thirty-first Group’s Mustangs. Arriving at Memmingen, the P-38 pilots gasped at the sight. Some counted a dozen Forts plummeting out of formation, ganged by ninety or more 109s and 190s. The Germans were pros: they made expert use of the vertical, employing “yo-yo” tactics to hit, dive out, and zoom climb for a reattack.

  In a twenty-minute running fight, the two fighter groups claimed two dozen kills and probably got most of them. The Twenty-seventh Squadron’s P-38s were best positioned, and First Lieutenant Philip E. Tovrea claimed three kills. Fighter talent ran in the family. The Arizonan’s brother-in-law was Edward “Butch” O’Hare, a navy pilot and Medal of Honor recipient killed in a night interception in November 1943, for whom Chicago’s airport was named.

  Another flight leader, First Lieutenant William H. Caughlin, recalled, “I shot at least eight of them and two went down. All the Jerries that I didn’t get, my flight got. Every man in my flight got at least one enemy.”11

  Despite the heroics, there was serious damage. Fifteen bombers were destroyed, fourteen of them from the 483rd Group. It tied the one-day loss record established by the Second Group during Big Week five months earlier.

  The four engaged fighter groups logged forty kills against five losses, while bomber gunners claimed nearly thirty. Actual Luftwaffe casualties were twenty-eight aircraft and seventeen pilots, but in war’s grim ledger, it represented a victory for the Germans.12

  Major Walther Dahl of the Luftwaffe found himself on the receiving end of a bombing for a change. Famous as a Viermot slayer, the cigar-chewing group commander in JG 3 who feuded with Hermann Göring was grounded with angina. He later described hearing the approach of the bombers and the wailing air raid sirens:

  I pull on some trousers over my pajamas. My driver Matton rushes in, out of breath as the first explosions go off. The building is shaking. Damn close! We dash outside to my car, gun the engine and with squealing tires we tear off. People are running around in panic as bombs rain down. The air is filled with the sound of engines, the bark of the flak guns and the crashing of collapsing buildings. There is a small wood just off the airfield. We jump out and throw ourselves to the ground. After what seems like an eternity the sound of the bombers recedes and we drive back to the field to be confronted with some terrible sights. Dead and dying are lying around, mostly civilians. We try to help those still alive. Our accommodation blocks are in ruins, where my room was, just an enormous hole.13

  More than fifty aircraft were wrecked on the field and some three hundred men were killed or wounded.

  Apparently unaware of the results of the massive July 15 mission, operations officers in Bari allotted more than 450 heavies to Romana Americana on the twenty-second.

  The escort was excellent. Nearly two hundred fighters kept most of the forty-two Axis interceptors beyond range of the bombers, whose gunners claimed just five shootdowns, four by the Forty-seventh Wing. Only sixteen Luftwaffe aircraft were seen in the target area—a contrast to many previous missions. A measure of the American fighter pilots’ dedication is that none claimed kills but they lost two Mustangs and a Lightning while protecting the “big friends.”

  The Axis defenses, however, were undiminished. Flak crews shot off 46,000 rounds of heavy-caliber ammunition, and they got hits. The twenty-six losses (5.6 percent) topped the previous Ploesti mission’s record, but the harm to the Fifteenth was inconsequential.

  Despite the maximum effort, only forty-five bomb hits were counted inside the perimeter. Even allowing for countermeasures, the results were unacceptable. There was only one hit on a refinery for every ten attacking aircraft.14

  MORE SHUTTLES

  On the same day, July 22, 134 Fifteenth fighters departed on Operation Frantic Three, headed east. The 306th Fighter Wing commander, Brigadier General Dean Strother, was number three in the Thirty-first Group’s lead flight, behind Lieutenant Colonel Yancey Tarrant leading forty-seven Mustangs. Very few brigadier generals ever flew fighter missions, but Strother’s rank could help smooth things over with prickly Russians.

  Lightnings of the Fourteenth and Eighty-second Groups teamed up, the former providing top cover while the latter did most of the strafing on eastern Romanian airdromes. The Eighty-second CO, Colonel William P. Litton, had to abort early, but the group continued without him. His pilots “hit the deck” about fifteen miles from Buzau and Zilistea, executing company-front strafing attacks on several airfields. They shot five planes out of the Zilistea traffic pattern then reported a record haul: forty-one planes thought destroyed on the ground.

  Meanwhile, the Fourteenth engaged airborne fighters at both targets, downing eleven. The Americans then proceeded to their Russian bases, leaving five Lightnings in the Balkan soil.

  On the afternoon of July 25, Third Gruppe of Stuka Wing 77 was transiting to its new base at Piastow when the forty-four fixed-gear, cranked-wing dive-bombers had the misfortune to cross paths with sixty-eight American fighters.

  The Thirty-first Group had just strafed Mielec Airdrome sixty-five miles northeast of Krakow and had ammunition remaining. Colonel Tarrant, being up front, got first choice and dropped three Stukas, while Lieutenant George McElroy also claimed a triple. Major Sam Brown’s 309th Squadron was best positioned for what the RAF called a “Stuka party,” claiming nineteen of the group’s twenty-six credited kills. Even so, Brown had the narrowest possible escape: a sharpshooting Stuka gunner put a round through his canopy, scorching the top of his leather helmet. An Eighty-second Group Lightning pilot also gunned a Junkers; one squadron of nine Stukas was completely destroyed.

  That day the Fifteenth Air Force fighters recorded forty-three shootdowns, the third-highest daily total of the war, with only the Fourteenth Group missing the action.15

  The Fifteenth’s second shuttle mission ended the next day, strafing more Romanian airfields en route to Italy.

  But war is more than combat, and the Fourteenth Group lost its commander that month to an unforeseen cause. Colonel Obie Taylor, after commanding for ten months, was stricken with polio in June and was relieved in mid-July. He had helped turn the group around after its North African doldrums and went home an ace. He was one of an unfortunate few. Only 157 American servicemen were stricken with polio in the Mediterranean Theater throughout the war.16

  THE COWBOYS AND CALAMITY JANE

  Amid the carnage of a world war, there were occasional reminders of the combatants’ shared humanity. Second Lieutenant Larry Jenkins of the Second Bomb Gro
up was on a mission near Vienna on July 16 when his plane was hit. With flash burns to both eyes, the twenty-year-old copilot found his way to the bomb bay and parachuted to Earth, where he was immediately surrounded by three Germans. “For you the war is over,” they told him. They looked at his mangled legs, and one surmised that amputation would be needed. “I didn’t care,” Jenkins said later, “for the pain was terrible.”

  Sent to a hospital near a Vienna rail yard with other wounded fliers, Jenkins experienced the air war from the groundling’s view. At night the RAF dropped “Christmas tree” target markers before unloading ordnance. Just outside Jenkins’s window, a flak crew dubbed “Eager Joe” boomed away with concussive 88 mm salvos.

  “The sound of the bombs was terrible, and each one felt like it was funneled to my stomach,” Jenkins recalled. “Food was scarce and terrible, therefore bones would not mend.” A nun serving as a nurse often stayed with her charges through the bombing rather than take shelter. She considered all Americans “cowboys,” and in turn they dubbed her “Calamity Jane.” Despite the pounding they were taking from Jenkins’s comrades, the Germans treated him according to the rules of war and even sympathetically. Jenkins’s third surgeon confided that his wife and fifteen-year-old daughter had been killed by Allied bombs. Nevertheless, he dutifully continued his work until he suffered an emotional breakdown.17

  PLOESTI AGAIN

  The pace was unrelenting that month. On July 28 nearly 325 bombers of the Fifth, Forty-ninth, Fifty-fifth, and 304th Wings struck the Astra Romana and Standard refineries. Aircrews reported “at least 100” enemy fighters, but fewer than half that number actually got airborne. They were unable to shoot at any bombers, though they downed two Lightnings and two Mustangs while losing eleven of their own.18