Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  The war continued with missions on the four days following Christmas, at a cost of forty-four aircraft, including sixteen bombers and two fighters, over Blechhammer and Auschwitz on the twenty-sixth. The latter proved the last major strike against the notorious oil refinery.

  Five days after Christmas, Major Roy Nelson’s weather office reported a low-pressure system building off the east coast of Italy. With the detailed analysis beloved of meteorologists, the “weather guessers” noted ample moisture from ninety thousand square miles of the Adriatic and increasing temperature differences along the air mass boundaries, causing a greater pressure gradient that brewed increasing winds. The lower pressure at the center of the emerging storm generated stronger vertical action, creating precipitation that threatened to turn rain into snow. That meant grounding the Fifteenth Air Force.

  New Year’s Eve arrived on a near-blizzard wind with driving snow that discouraged much celebrating. Mostly the fliers and support personnel huddled in their billets or crowded into officer’s and enlisted men’s clubs, enjoying whatever seasonal festivities the USO, Red Cross, or Salvation Army could offer.

  At Bari, Twining’s operations office calculated that it ended the year with 2,174 bomber crews and nearly 1,100 fighter pilots. The airmen would have ample work in the dawning new year.46

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

  JANUARY–MAY 1945

  Airmen at Foggia Main and the surrounding fields awoke on New Year’s Day, 1945, to find their corner of “sunny Italy” under a light blanket of snow. It had begun falling the day before, driven on a brisk wind. There would be eight more days of snow that month, and it would continue sporadically until early March.1

  The weather rendered Salsola inoperable, forcing most of the First Fighter Group from Foggia Number Three. On January 8, a year to the day since moving from Gioia del Colle to Salsola, the air echelon moved to Vincenzo, southeast of Foggia. The pilots bunked with their Eighty-second Group counterparts while ground crews set up tents across the field, an inconvenient arrangement but workable. One First Group pilot recorded, “Things were crowded but cramped but the 82nd folks went out of their way to accommodate us.” Elements of the First remained at Vincenzo until mid-February.2

  Poor weather kept most Fifteenth aircraft on the ground except the persistent scouts of the 154th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron. Finally, on January 4, after five days of no offensive operations, weather cleared sufficiently to launch 370 heavies against rail targets in six northern Italy cities.

  The next day, Twining got some four hundred heavies airborne against Yugoslav transport targets. With the formations dispersed by heavy clouds, some individual approaches were made to Zagreb’s marshalling yard, but a 90-percent cloud cover foiled all but one of 112 Liberators.

  Lieutenant John Panas, a 461st Group radar operator in Captain David Johnson’s crew, recalled, “We arrived at the target at 23,000 feet and to our dismay found the target had 90 percent cloud coverage. . . . We were supposed to use the Norden bombsight on this target. Because there was no flak or fighters in the area, we made three passes hoping for a break in the weather. On each pass I was using my radar to spot the target for the bombardier, but the clouds never cleared. On the fourth run I told the pilot and bombardier that I would take over because I had a good fix on the target. We managed to drop our bombs on the assigned target at long last.”3

  Partially augmenting reduced bomber operations, P-38 groups flew more Droop Snoot missions that winter, using the modified Lightning’s plastic nose with bombsight on high-level formation attacks. The Eighty-second Group’s aircraft received shackles for as many as six five-hundred-pounders or five bombs and a drop tank.

  One of the group’s Droop Snoot crews was rated among the best. Lieutenant Walter Zurney had pulled some strings to get out of B-24s and into P-38s. A mechanic before the war, he had served as crew chief for then-Lieutenant Bob Baseler in Panama. Zurney cornered his old boss, now a colonel and former CO of the 325th, at 306th Fighter Wing headquarters. With B-24 credentials, Zurney was named the Ninety-seventh Fighter Squadron’s “Droop Snoop” pilot and teamed with First Lieutenant Fred Gong, previously a lead bombardier with the 483rd Group. Gong, likely the only bombardier of Chinese descent in the Fifteenth Air Force, exclaimed, “Walt flew the plane so steady I just couldn’t miss.”4

  But there were bound to be gremlins. The same day as the B-24s’ abortive Zagreb effort, the Eighty-second sent a Droop Snoot mission to Doboj, Yugoslavia. On takeoff one pilot accidentally toggled his five bombs from three hundred feet, trashing his hundred-thousand-dollar Lightning in the blast. Bombing results were deemed “lousy” mainly due to heavy clouds.

  The Eighty-second tried its hand at level bombing again on January 21, lining up forty-three Lightnings behind the Ninety-fifth Squadron’s Droop Snoot. The “Snoop” caught fire and crashed on takeoff, however. Pilot and bombardier escaped, and though sabotage was suspected, the mission proceeded. The high-level fighters claimed hits on the Fiume refinery, a rail yard, and harbor facilities.5

  In the first month of 1945, Fifteenth fighters claimed just nine aerial kills, all by the 325th, mainly around Vienna and Regensburg. The Checkertails’ January sharpshooter was Second Lieutenant Edward L. Miller, who on the twentieth bagged three of the four long-nose 190s the group claimed. They were his only victories of the war—by 1945 fighter pilots had to maximize each opportunity.

  January seemed like a bust. Bombing missions left the ground on only seven days, and one of those missions was ineffective. The Fifteenth attacked both Blechhammers, Oswiecim, Brux, Odertal, and Austrian targets, often with good results and light losses. But four years of experience had taught bomber men the need for persistence—frequent restrikes were necessary to knock a target out of business permanently. The Fifteenth, after all, had needed four months to shut down Ploesti.

  In mid-January the First Fighter Group had begun planning for a complex mission conducted under strict security. Detachments were sent to Gibraltar and points east through the Mediterranean to provide air and sea escort for unidentified Allied VIPs. The flights met no resistance but incurred losses: two pilots lost in accidents over Italy.

  Maintenance support for the operation was stretched across a 1,500-mile route, from Gibraltar to Athens. One February morning in Greece, mechanics used hammers and wrenches to knock ice off the P-38s’ wings. In spite of a ground fog, the Lightnings got airborne on schedule to escort two eastbound C-54 transports. Upon completion of the mission, the group received a congratulatory radio message from the British foreign secretary: “Mr. Eden wishes to thank the Lightning pilots for their splendid effort.”6

  The airmen had played a small but crucial part in the historic conference at the Soviet Black Sea port of Yalta, which safely concluded on February 11. There Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin completed plans for World War II’s end game and the postwar division of Europe. The First Group’s Greek detachment learned that the two returning Skymaster transports carried General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, and Admiral Ernest J. King, the vice chief of naval operations.

  The Lightnings were back in Italy on the nineteenth, and the First Group was reunited at Salsoa. Suitably dried out, the base boasted perhaps the largest theater in the Fifteenth Air Force, sure to draw top-level USO acts.

  Weather continued to affect operations in February, and when bombing missions got airborne, 80 percent required radar. Persistent Foggia fog and violent winds over the Alps confined Twining’s heavies to mostly “local” missions in northern Italy until the fifth, when the on-again-off-again efforts against strategic targets resumed.

  Though enemy fighters were scarce, the Luftwaffe still could turn up. In early February there was another episode like the 82nd Fighter Group’s encounter with the rogue Mustang the previous October, this time involving the 455th Bomb Group over Austria. A stray B-24 bearing the 304th Wing’s black diamond joined on a wingman in one of the 455t
h’s boxes. No radio contact was established, and the lead pilot grew suspicious that the stranger was operated by the Luftwaffe, providing flak batteries with the formation’s altitude and airspeed. He ordered every gunner who could bring his sights to bear to open fire. Turrets swiveled and waist gunners unlimbered their single mounts. As .50 caliber rounds began slicing though the thin air, the intruder banked away, reversing course.7

  A strong effort on the fifth destroyed more oil storage at Regensburg with small losses. Two days later, however, revisiting petroleum facilities around Vienna and Bratislava, the heavies found antiaircraft crews on top of their game. The group’s Red Force found “absolutely perfect bombing weather” over Vienna, as did the Blue Force over Bratislava. The American bombardiers enjoyed unobstructed views, but so did the Luftwaffe gunners. Because of heavy, accurate flak, “our bombs were strewn over half of Austria and Czechoslovakia,” one of the airmen complained. Upon the survivors’ return to Castelluccio airfield, the mechanics surveyed eighteen Liberators with visible flak holes. “The sheet metal crews could only shake their heads and get the tin snips ready to cut more patches.”8 The day had been costly: two dozen bombers fell to flak, including six Liberators from the 451st Group.

  On February 13, hundreds of Liberators and Fortresses did a thorough job on Vienna, striking ordnance depots, storage yards, train repair shops, and marshalling yards, destroying or blocking rail access in much of the city. By month’s end the capital was nearly paralyzed, and Allied targeteers reckoned that the nearby Moosbierbaum chemical-refinery complex was 50-percent destroyed. Similar targets were attacked at Graz, while other task forces flew to Hungary and Yugoslavia.

  The Fifteenth could go anywhere it chose within range of Foggia, but not without paying a toll to the Flakwaffe. February combat losses were double January’s, with more than one hundred bombers and nearly forty fighters written off, only two by enemy aircraft.

  Priorities had changed. In early 1945, two-thirds of Twining’s heavy bomber missions were directed at transport targets, and one-third to oil. In February, aircrews flew tactical missions against railroads in northern Italy, Austria, and southern Germany. The debate between the Oil Plan and the Transport Plan of early to mid-1944 had been resolved as petroleum production continued to decline. The Wehrmacht was running out of gas.

  TURBO TROUBLE

  Officially it was the Messerschmitt 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow, the world’s first jet fighter. To the pilots privileged to fly it, the shark-nosed interceptor was “Turbo,” for its twin jet turbine engines. With a top speed nearly a hundred miles per hour faster than piston-engine fighters, the 262, along with the Me 163 rocket fighter, V-1 cruise missiles, and V-2 ballistic missiles, represented the cutting edge of German technology.

  When the Luftwaffe’s young fighter general Adolf Galland first flew the jet in early 1943, he famously reported, “It was as though the angels were pushing.” But technical and bureaucratic delays kept the jet sidelined past the point that its stunning performance could make a difference.9 The revolutionary Swallow had gone operational in the summer of 1944, and Fifteenth pilots had glimpsed fast, high-altitude contrails during missions over southern Germany. Twining’s fighters had first sparred with 262s in December, getting within firing range on only three occasions. On December 22 two Thirty-first Group pilots on photo escort combined to down a Turbo, but thereafter the jets remained immune until late March.

  By early 1945 the 262 was becoming known, and its threat to bomber formations was genuine if limited. Armed with a potent battery of four 30mm cannon and two dozen rockets, the Turbo could handily destroy any bomber flying. Of some 1,400 built, perhaps no more than fifty were operational at once, and thanks to Hitler’s interference, many were diverted into service as schnelle Bomber, fast bombers.

  The Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces responded to the new jet-propelled threat by trying to smash the eggs before they could hatch. One of the Fifteenth’s first efforts took place on February 16, when some 260 B-24s pushed through marginal weather to a Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg. The German armaments minister, Albert Speer, had begun constructing underground plants safe from Allied bombs, but time ran out. From late February through March, perhaps ninety 262s were destroyed on the ground at Leipheim and Obertraubling in Bavaria. Forced to disperse the precious assets, in some places the Germans used stretches of the Autobahn as makeshift runways, hiding the jets in nearby trees.

  In the spring of 1945, the Fifteenth typically launched seven hundred to eight hundred heavies and four hundred fighters almost daily, frequently targeting Turbo hatcheries. The jets opposed them whenever possible, engaging Allied aircraft on twenty-one days in March, including every day from the fifteenth to the twenty-fifth. Turbo units claimed some 115 American bombers during the month—clearly an exaggerated figure, and even if valid, insufficient to affect the war.

  Still, the jet pilots kept flying as long as kerosene and ammunition lasted. Galland, with a better grasp of strategy than his masters, had recognized that the war was lost in 1941. But he and his Kameraden possessed a sense of heady fatalism. Oberleutnant Herbert Schlüter spoke for many: “This was an extremely difficult time for us. The daily strain was hard to take. We were on the defensive and were ‘the hunted.’ For this reason I was happy to be transferred. Finally, we would have the chance to fly a superior aircraft and show the ‘Amis’ how we could do it better.”10

  The Fifteenth encountered 262s in strength for the first time on March 22 while bombing the Ruhland synthetic plant again. Jagdgeschwader Seven launched twenty-seven jets from Parchim, 160 miles to the north, and got results. Led by two-hundred-kill major Theodor Weissenberger, the aggressive 262 pilots ignored the flak zone, flashed past the Mustangs, and tore into the Fifth Wing, downing at least seven Forts. The 483rd alone lost six. The Second Group reported eight Me 262s attacking the formation with one B-17 shot down in exchange for a jet credited to three gunners.

  Staff Sergeant Alfred Novak said, “I saw B-17 number 440 attacked by an Me 262 which came in from six o’clock low, firing 20mm [sic]. It received a direct hit between No. 1 and No. 2 engines and caught fire. The aircraft appeared out of control and in a roll. The wing then fell off and the aircraft continued in a dive. I couldn’t follow it all the way to the ground because of fighter attacks. I observed no parachutes.” Only the tail gunner survived.11

  LAST BATTLES

  March was rough on the First Fighter Group. Ten pilots were killed, captured, or missing, including the commanding officer and his number two. The deputy CO, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Thaxton, went down on the fourth but was found by Partisans. He returned in early April, temporarily assuming command. Upon being hospitalized, Thaxton was relieved by Lieutenant Colonel Milton Ashkins.

  March 31 was the group’s worst day of the year: five losses, including three killed; one evaded; and the commanding officer captured. Strafing along the Austrian-Hungarian border, the twenty-nine-year-old Texan colonel Arthur C. Agan parachuted from his burning aircraft and was nabbed by Germans just short of the Russian lines.

  ACE IN A DAY

  On March 14 the 325th Group escorted Liberators to Nové Zámky, Czechoslovakia. First Lieutenant Gordon H. McDaniel, a Tennessean with one previous victory, was descending from twenty thousand feet when he encountered the fighter pilot’s dream: a formation of eight or more “bogies” strung out in front of him, with altitude and position to his advantage. “We were in an area where anything could happen,” McDaniel related. He was worried that the strangers might be Russians so he proceeded with caution.

  “I closed up behind the last plane, about 150 feet from him. There was no doubt about it—they were Jerry planes. The guy directly ahead of me had a big white three and a black cross on the side of his plane.” McDaniel ordered his flight to shuck its drop tanks, then he attacked.

  Working from back to front, McDaniel lined up several FWs in sequence, closing unseen on four of them. The first exploded in his face, and he go
t within about thirty yards of another before the obviously green German realized his peril. In moments McDaniel ran his score from one to six, becoming the third and last Fifteenth Air Force ace in a day—one day after his twenty-first birthday. When he looked around, McDaniel saw only his wingman—the second section had dropped out with mechanical problems.12

  Eleven other Checkertails also scored that day, including Captain Harry Parker, beginning his second tour. He claimed a double, and now with thirteen kills, he was the leading Fifteenth ace remaining in combat.

  Though fighter interceptions of bombers had dropped nearly to zero, flak only increased. As the Reich’s borders were compressed, its defenses necessarily became concentrated. On March 23, the 465th Group joined a fleet of 157 Liberators sent to bounce the rubble of the Saint-Valentine tank factory. Austrian airspace already was notorious, but Saint-Valentine lay fifteen miles north of Linz, known as “a flak hole” and “one of the greater areas of hell.”13

  Lieutenant Robert Carlin, later a successful artist, recalled:

  We could see the target clearly as we turned to start the bomb run. It was a biting clear day, and intensely cold at 26,000, all making for flawless visibility. Black boiling curls appeared at once. We were eleven minutes from the target and already the shells were exploding around us. They were huge, meaning they were close. The flak those days was so bad that we were being forced to split the mission. The first wave would suppress the gunners, hopefully allowing the second wave to approach and bomb with greater accuracy.14

  Enough was enough. The flak was so dense that some four-burst patterns overlapped, loud enough for crews to hear over the drone of four powerful engines. With some planes taking heavy damage and flak splinters bouncing off others, the lead bombardier dropped sixty long seconds from the planned release point. Almost immediately the formation took evasive action. “Radio silence ended as we broke into a hard right turn,” Carlin said. “Down steep, hard right. We leveled off only to find more flak awaiting us. Hard left, and dive. Able Box dropped beneath my vision. The horror of sliding into them ripped me in sudden panic. They appeared again, but it was an effort to release the steel grip I had on the yoke.”15 The day’s operations cost seven Liberators.