Big Week

by James Holland

  Johnson glanced around – where the hell was Grosvenor? – and saw the sky full of turning, swirling planes. Abandoning the FW190, he pulled up and, swivelling his head frantically, could suddenly see no Thunderbolts at all but plenty of Germans. Got to hit ’em, he thought, take them off the bombers. Away to his left, a Messerschmitt 110 twin-engine fighter, with two Focke-Wulfs, all three in a long, shallow dive towards the bombers and waiting for the Me110 to get in range to fire its rockets. If those hit a bomber it was all over. A B-17 could take a hell of a beating, but it had no answer to a rocket – a 90lb projectile full of high explosive that could create a hole 30 yards wide.

  Got to break them, get in there fast, Johnson told himself. A kick on the rudder pedal, open the throttle and the Thunderbolt sped towards the enemy planes, Johnson bringing his gunsight on to one of the Focke-Wulfs. Both the 190 pilots saw him and pulled their fighters up into steep climbs. To hell with them. Johnson now lined up the 110, big and increasingly filling his sights. Spotting him, the German pilot tried to evade, twisting and turning, but the two-engine Zerstörer – ‘Destroyer’ – was not agile enough and, by using the rudder, Johnson was able to press his gun button and rake the Messerschmitt from side to side. The Me110’s rear canopy disintegrated in a spray of Perspex and metal, then the navigator-gunner flung up his arms and collapsed.

  There were hits all over the stricken enemy fighter. Desperately, the pilot tried to get away, then flipped the plane hard to port. Johnson slammed his foot down on the rudder, eased back the stick, then rolled, his Thunderbolt responding smoothly and cleanly like the thoroughbred she was when handled by such an experienced pilot. Now the Messerschmitt filled his sights once more. Finger on the gun button, the shudder from a short burst, and eight lines of smoking, bright tracer as the bullets of the big .50-calibre machine guns converged and tore the 110 apart. Johnson sped past, so close that his Thunderbolt shook from the violence of the explosion. Bits of debris clanged sharply against his own airframe as he hurtled through the mass of flame, smoke and obliterated enemy aircraft.

  Stick back, throttle forward and a surge of power as he climbed up out of the fray to where he could see more clearly the air battle that was now raging. There was space behind him and to his right, but no sign of Bill Grosvenor. German fighters filled his view, some firing rockets towards the bombers. All around him he saw FW190s, Me109s and 110s, and the newer upgraded twin-engine Messerschmitt, the 210, and even some Junkers 88 twin-engine bombers. Repeatedly they were attacking the bomber stream, diving in and stabbing at them, swirling around the vast formation like angry wasps. Johnson watched their cannons and machine guns sparkle, then suddenly he saw a large leap of flame as another rocket was launched. There was a bigger flame in the sky too: a bomber plunging earthwards, spinning grotesquely. Parachutes blossomed – that was something – half-spheres of white against the vivid blue, the streaks of smoke and flash of flame and luminescent dots of tracer. Fighter planes everywhere, but, curiously, none seemed to have spotted Johnson in his big Jug.

  Now he saw three Focke-Wulfs diving down hard towards the rear of the bombers, several thousand feet below. Johnson realized he was the only friendly fighter between them and the Flying Fortresses, so he pulled the stick to his left, put his foot down on the port rudder, flicked the Thunderbolt over and dived down like a banshee. His closing speed was over 700 m.p.h., which made it difficult to score any hits, but he hoped he could ruin their attack and protect the Fortresses.

  He spotted one of the Focke-Wulfs climbing steeply and turning towards him. These boys want to fight! Johnson thought to himself. Keeping a close watch on that 190 out of the corner of his eye, he continued to dive towards the lead Focke-Wulf, convinced the German now turning towards him could not possibly hit him. He pushed the stick further forward. The speed and g-forces were immense as he dived ever more steeply: 80 degrees, 90 and then the vertical. Still he pushed the stick forward until the fighter dipped under the vertical so that he was starting to loop upside down as he readied himself to open fire on the lead 190. The angle of his dive meant he was hurtling towards the enemy plane at 90 degrees: the 190 streaking towards the bombers and he in his P-47 diving in from above. Despite the speed, his mind was clear. Carefully, he increased the lead, aiming off so that the Focke-Wulf and his bullets would converge. A squeeze of the trigger, then that familiar judder of the aircraft as the machine guns fired. White flashes peppered the 190, little stabs of orange as they struck. The cockpit shattered, then a sudden flash, an intense glare, as the fuel tanks burst and erupted into flames.

  A loud crack and Johnson’s plane jarred. He felt the hit. The climbing third Focke-Wulf, guns still twinkling. A cannon shell tore into the tail of the P-47, snapping a rudder cable. The Thunderbolt rolled. A blinding flash just ahead and the lead Focke-Wulf exploded, flame and matter flung outwards. Johnson gripped the stick through the debris, but the Thunderbolt was slow to respond. Then at last the nose began to turn and the big fighter climbed once more. As the speed dropped, Johnson pushed the stick forward and regained level flight.

  But no respite. Ahead, slightly to his port, a grey Me110 sped towards him, guns winking. Streaks of tracer and smoke rushed harmlessly past. Johnson kicked on the rudder – a slight yaw was all that was needed and the Me110 would be kill number three – but the rudder did not respond. No rudder! A rocket flashed towards him just above his head. Johnson ducked involuntarily, then pushed open the throttle and climbed once more until he had reached 30,000 feet and some kind of safety. Far below the air battle had shifted, slipping away, fighters still swirling around the bombers like hornets, but little dots now.

  Johnson flew on, straight and level, trying to gauge just how bad his situation was. One rudder cable snapped, gaping holes in his tail and fuselage. It wasn’t good. The stricken Thunderbolt might be managing to fly now, but he knew at any moment it could easily slip out of control and into a spin, or worse, from which he would not be able to recover. That realization was enough. Pulling back the canopy, he released his belt and shoulder straps and readied himself to jump.

  Wind slapped hard as he began to climb on to the seat. But he was a long way up and there below was Germany. Nazi Germany. Enemy territory. Perhaps, he thought, it would be better at least to try to reach one of the unoccupied countries. Then he remembered how a couple of months earlier one of his fellow pilots had nursed a Thunderbolt home successfully. That Jug had been in a worse state than his. Using one arm to pull the broken rudder cable, he did nothing more than gather a length of wire, but then thought of the rudder trim tabs and – yes! – they responded. It wasn’t much, but by working the stick and using his ailerons and the rudder trim he was able gradually to bring the Thunderbolt around so that he was heading west in the direction of home. He was now flying back over the air battle as it continued to drift westwards, bombers and fighters still swirling around the sky. Johnson began to feel scared; there were too many aircraft with black crosses and he was in a crippled plane that needed careful nursing home and nothing more. On the other hand, just below him and utterly oblivious of Johnson and his Thunderbolt above, was a Focke-Wulf, flying straight and level. It was hard to imagine a juicier target, ripe for the plucking. And because Johnson was just twenty-three years old and because his job was to shoot down Germans, he dropped the nose, opened the throttle and began to dive towards him.

  Another Thunderbolt now dropped in front of him, cutting in on his prey, then opened fire at close range and blew the 190 out of the sky before continuing with his dive, on the lookout for other targets.

  Johnson, recognizing it was time to quit while he was still just ahead, pulled back on the stick and climbed up to safety again, then began calling for help on the RT. A pilot named ‘Hydro’ Ginn responded – from the 62nd, not Johnson’s 61st Fighter Squadron, although in Zemke’s 56th Fighter Group everyone knew everyone pretty much.

  ‘Bob, we have you in sight,’ he heard Ginn say over his headphones.1 Johnson looked
around and saw three of them heading towards him in a shallow dive.

  ‘Come, escort me,’ Johnson replied. ‘I got a little problem here and I don’t know when I am going to have to bail out.’

  He was still flying all out. ‘Bob, for God’s sake,’ said Ginn, ‘cut that thing back.’

  Doing as Ginn suggested, he pulled back on the throttle and was relieved to be joined by fellow P-47s on either side.

  ‘To hell with walking out,’ he told them.2 ‘I am going to fly!’

  On the way home they were bounced by two German fighters. Johnson’s protectors saw them early, climbed up to meet them and the would-be attackers rolled away. Without those friends, he would have been dead meat.

  At last they neared the English coast, but Johnson was still not home and dry. Over England lay a heavy cloud mass, dense, low and through which nothing could be seen. For twenty minutes they descended slowly in a wide spiral, hoping they might spot a break in the cloud. And then, as if by magic, the gap they needed appeared and below them lay their airfield. Hydro Ginn was the first to land, but Johnson’s buddy Ralph kept circling, warning the control tower to get the fire engine and ambulance ready. Now came the moment of truth: Johnson flew towards the runway, low and still at around 120 m.p.h., using the trim tabs to steady the big Thunderbolt. Suddenly the ground was rushing towards him. Easy does it! One wheel then a second hit the ground heavily, too fast, but Johnson slammed on the brakes, the port rudder cable taut in his hand.

  Slowing now, and eventually the big Jug came to a halt. Power off, then Ralph Johnson’s Thunderbolt pulled up alongside, but fog was closing in. As he clambered out and jumped down from the wing, Johnson was conscious that he had had the luckiest of escapes. Then came exhilaration: two kills, which his gun cameras would soon confirm. That made five to his name in all and made him an ace – the fifth American pilot in the European theatre to achieve that coveted accolade. ‘It was,’ he noted later, ‘a great and auspicious moment for me.’3

  Bob Johnson had been one of some 216 Thunderbolts dispatched in waves that day to protect the bombers. That was five fighter groups, and between them they had shot down twenty enemy aircraft for the loss of just one of their own – a good ratio. Even so, the raid had cost VIII Bomber Command another 326 casualties, of whom 306 were still missing in action. Of the fourteen Flying Fortresses from the 100th Bomb Group, for example, just one had made it back. That was a truly devastating level of losses. One hundred and twenty men from that single bomb group and one airfield alone had gone. Such casualties were not sustainable. Not sustainable at all. Men like Bob Johnson were doing a great job – they were besting the enemy when they caught up with them – but they were not protection enough. Not yet at any rate. But it was the fighters, not the bombers, that held the key: to wrest back the initiative from the Luftwaffe, they needed many more and better fighter aircraft than those of the enemy, flown by pilots with greater skill and experience and employing superior tactics, and, perhaps most important of all, with greater range.

  But in the dark days and nights of the autumn of 1943, bringing these six criteria together still seemed a long way off.

  CHAPTER 1

  For the Love of Flying

  BY OCTOBER 1943, Britain had been in the war for just over four years and the United States for almost two. For Britain, the war had brought a number of defeats, from the terrible shock of the collapse of France at the hands of Germany in 1940, to the catastrophic loss of Singapore, Malaya and Burma to the Japanese in early 1942. Yet there had been some notable triumphs too. The emphatic defensive victory in the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 had changed the entire course of the war, forcing Hitler to fight a long and attritional war Germany could not afford, and to turn east into the Soviet Union in June 1941 far earlier than ever originally intended. It was a gamble that had failed: the Soviet Union had not collapsed and Germany, increasingly short of vital resources, had been forced to fight a war on multiple fronts, an eventuality Hitler and his commanders had been so desperate to avoid from the outset.

  Then there had been the Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, which, in the circumstances of the wider war, had so far proved the most important theatre of all, for without access to the world’s sea lanes – and specifically the Atlantic because all global shipping passed through that ocean en route to Britain – neither Britain nor the United States would be able to fight Germany, nor the United Kingdom take on Japan either. Britain, quite sensibly, had poured a huge amount of effort into winning this all-important clash at sea. In terms of the number of ships being built and in vital technological advances, as well as in the strikes scored against the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, by as early as May 1941 Britain had reached a point where she was no longer going to lose that particular battle. Two years later, in May 1943, the U-boats, the biggest threat to Allied shipping, had been emphatically defeated. This meant that not only were the sea lanes largely clear, but that the Allies could now properly plan the road to final victory because they now knew how much shipping they could expect to reach Britain safely from around the world.

  Then there had also been the victory in North Africa, fought first with the successful harnessing of her Dominions and Empire – and the Free French – and later, in Tunisia, with the help of new coalition partners the United States, whose troops had landed in Northwest Africa in November 1942. Yet while America had entered the war only in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the USA had been helping Britain long before that. With the fall of France, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had quietly begun to ready America for war. Her tiny pre-war army began to expand, her minuscule air corps rapidly increased and became the biggest focus of the exponential growth in defence spending, and her navy vastly enlarged. Isolationism, so ingrained in 1939, gradually began to slip into the shadows as America’s burgeoning commercial home industry was turned over to armaments production. By December 1941, the USA had certainly become, as Roosevelt had pledged, an arsenal of democracy, but the journey there had begun back in the summer of 1940, eighteen months before formally entering the war. And as with Britain’s war effort, America’s journey to become the world’s leading armaments manufacturer had been a long and rocky one with plenty of lows as well as highs along the way.

  Air power, however, had been central to both Britain’s and America’s military growth, and a key part of their strategy. ‘Steel not flesh’ was the mantra; both nations were determined to use modern technology and mechanization to limit the number of their young men who actually had to fight at the coalface of war. Compared with Nazi Germany or the USSR, for example, with their enormous armies and already monstrous casualty lists, this was proving a remarkably successful and efficient strategy. Air power had halted German ambitions in 1940, had helped win the Battle of the Atlantic and had saved the British Eighth Army in the summer of 1942 as it had fallen back in retreat to the Alamein line in Egypt; Allied air power had also made a massive contribution to the victory in North Africa and, more recently, to the successful conquest of Sicily. Yet in terms of the strategic air campaign against Germany – that is, the bomber war – it was only since March 1943, just half a year earlier, that the commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, had been able to launch his all-out air assault on Germany, and only in the past couple of months, a year on from its first operations from Britain, that the US Eighth Air Force had accumulated enough bombers and fighters to make a significant contribution to this effort to bludgeon Germany from the air.

  Now, though, other constraints were emerging, and not least the weather. Already, summer had become a distant memory. The days were shortening and the skies darkening with what seemed like incessant low cloud and rain. It was largely down to the weather, for example, that between 1 and 10 October 1943, the pilots of the 56th Fighter Group had flown just three operational missions.

  On the other hand, such light combat flying was good news for these fighter boy
s and for the future prospects of VIII Fighter Command. Without question, American fighter pilots were given a far better chance of survival than any other of the world’s air combatants. They began their flying training in the wide open skies of Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere – parts of the United States where the sun invariably shone, cloud cover was mostly minimal and which enabled them to begin their flying careers with a consistency and intensity that was just what was needed. It was true that Canadians, Australians, South Africans and many embryonic RAF pilots were also able to make the most of peaceful clear blue skies through training schemes in the US and in British Dominion countries, but few were sent to operational units with as many hours in their logbooks as US fighter pilots. A British fighter pilot by 1943 might have around two hundred hours’ flying by the time he joined his squadron; a US fighter pilot would have more like three hundred.

  Entire fighter groups were being formed in the US and, like Bob Johnson and others, had trained and then headed overseas to England together. What’s more, a number of them had already learned to fly long before joining the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). Bob Johnson was a case in point. Born and raised in Lawton, Oklahoma, he was the son of a motor mechanic and so grew up around engines and automobiles. When he was eight, his father took him to see a travelling barnstorming team, after which he became determined to fly. By the age of eleven he was working for a cabinetmaker when not at school and saving up to learn to fly. A year later, having saved enough, he began flying lessons and, incredibly, soloed after less than six hours’ flying time. Later, while still at college, he joined the Civilian Pilot Training Program and managed to notch up over a hundred hours in his logbook before the start of his sophomore year. By the time he joined the Army Air Forces in the summer of 1941, he already had hundreds of hours under his belt. In the United States – even as it emerged from the Depression – it was possible to be the teenage son of a car mechanic and still learn to fly privately.