Big Week

by James Holland

  Gabreski, leading the squadron, had not seen the incident and initially thought they had been bounced, but up ahead he now spotted a large number of enemy fighters – perhaps forty twin-engine 110s – manoeuvring to attack from the rear of the bombers and more than sixty single-engine fighters already tearing into the Big Friends, one of whom was Heinz Knoke, about to shoot down his twentieth bomber.

  Gabreski ordered the squadron to attack and the P-47s dived down. Johnson immediately spotted an Me110 below him and at ten o’clock to his position. He dived, but the Messerschmitt’s rear-gunner clearly spotted him and so the pilot flipped over his aircraft and dived himself. Following, Johnson was almost at ground level by the time he caught up, having hurtled down almost 6 miles in no time at all. He thought the 110 was going to plough straight on into the ground, but at the last moment the pilot rolled the plane over and began to pull her up, then dived down again, Johnson following each time. Eventually, Johnson saw the Messerschmitt fill his sights. ‘Perfect!’ he noted later. ‘One short burst knocked the bottom out of his bucket!16 The airplane tore itself apart in mid-air.’

  Meanwhile, Gabreski suddenly found himself all alone and, aware how dangerous that could be in the middle of the fray, he looked around for some P-47s to tag on to. Instead, he spotted three more Me110s about 5,000 feet below him. It was just too good an opportunity, so, against his better judgement, he dived down and opened fire on the last of the three, keeping his finger on the firing button until he was close enough to see the crew bailing out.

  Unlike Bob Johnson, Gabreski recovered at 23,000 feet and soon spotted a formation of P-47s, only to find as he drew closer that they were, in fact, Focke-Wulf 190s. Fortunately, they had not seen him and he was able to turn and get away. By this time, his fuel was getting low. Flying high at comfortable cruising speed, it was quite possible to eke out the miles, but the moment a fighter was in a dogfight, fuel consumption rose dramatically and Gabreski told himself to head home. Turning westwards, he had begun flying away from the melee when he spotted an Me109 passing below at nine o’clock. Gabreski held his breath, hoping he hadn’t been spotted, because he knew he didn’t have the fuel to get embroiled in another tussle. But the German pilot had seen him and was soon turning his machine up to meet him.

  Another glance at his fuel gauge told Gabreski that he simply didn’t have enough to try to outrun his pursuer. Instead, he decided he would fly at about 80 per cent throttle and hopefully present the German with as tough a shot as possible. Diving a little to build up speed, he throttled back, watching his back for all he was worth. Sure enough, the Messerschmitt was soon on him but, at the moment the German opened fire, Gabreski pulled up then kicked the plane over, throwing off his pursuer’s aim and giving him nothing better than a 90-degree deflection shot, which was incredibly difficult to pull off.

  This ploy worked the first time, and the second, but on the third attempt the enemy pilot got his bead spot on and fired into Gabreski’s cockpit with a loud explosion. A cannon shell tore off one of his rudder pedals and also smashed the heel of his flying boot. Suddenly, his engine was losing power too and, with his foot throbbing, Gabreski accepted it was all over and time to bail out in quick order.

  He was now at around 20,000 feet. Pushing the stick forward and using the ailerons, he picked up air speed and began rolling the plane so that he could drop out, but with the canopy already half-open he realized he still had some manifold pressure and r.p.m.s of around 1,000. The engine was not dead quite yet. This persuaded him not to give up.

  Hastily closing the canopy, he dived towards a bank of cloud and reached it just as the Messerschmitt was closing in for the kill. It did the trick, but the German was not to be easily put off and each time Gabreski pulled back up and looked around, he saw his pursuer skirting the clouds, looking for him. Eventually, Gabreski decided it was better to stick in the cloud and rely on his instruments. Pulling further back on the throttle and calling mayday just in case, he prayed hard and spent an anxious half hour hoping he would find landfall before his engine cut out.

  Luck was with him. Eventually, the cloud thinned and he saw England and the long finger of Kent up ahead. Spotting Manston air base at the south-east tip, he called up and was able to land. No sooner had he begun taxiing, however, than his engine cut out, and only then did he summon the nerve to look at his foot. Fortunately, there was no blood at all – the cannon shell had merely skimmed his boot, which had a gash across it, but he was miraculously uninjured.

  Stuck on the runway, Gabreski was soon rescued and towed clear. A call was put through to Halesworth and someone sent to collect him, leaving him a little time to ponder his lucky escape. There were holes all over his cockpit, an oil tank that was almost dry and a completely bust turbocharger unit. It said much about the ruggedness of the P-47 that it had got him home, but equally it was testimony to Gabreski’s own experience and skill.

  CHAPTER 12

  Change at the Top

  AIR CHIEF MARSHAL Sir Arthur Harris’s battle for Berlin continued. Some 450 aircraft flew over the capital on 26 November, the same day that Goldie Goldstein and others in the Eighth attacked Bremen, and a similar number attacked the capital of the Reich a few days later on 2 December. Far heavier winds than had been forecast affected the latter raid, with a number of aircraft blown way off course. German intelligence had correctly identified the capital as the target nearly twenty minutes before the first bombers attacked, so that by the time the Lancasters reached the city there was a mass of night-fighters waiting for them. Forty bombers were lost on the raid, including five of twenty-five from 460 Squadron, made up mostly of Australian crews. One of those that went down was carrying two reporters, Captain Nordhal Grieg, a Norwegian working for the British Daily Mail, and Norman Stockton of the Sydney Sun. Both were killed.

  Then the following night, 3/4 December, the target was Leipzig. Margarete Dos was an 18-year-old Berliner studying medicine in nearby Jena. An athletic girl, she had once hoped to compete at the Olympics, but such ambition had been dashed by the war. On the other hand, she had done well in her school exams, had completed her compulsory Arbeitsdienst – the Reich labour service – and, as there was an urgent need for doctors, medics and nurses, in September she had begun her first term at the ancient university where Goethe had once lived and worked.

  Jena had avoided the bombs so far and, although she worried for her mother, who was still in Berlin, Margarete was relishing the medical training she had begun; as her mother had urged her, she had been concentrating hard on her studies and trying to put the shifting fortunes in the war behind her. Even so, the sirens rang out all too frequently in the picturesque town, as it lay on the path from England to Berlin. Loudspeakers around the town and university would announce, ‘The enemy has been sighted and is advancing from a northerly direction,’ although so far the planes had passed on over them.1

  On the night of 3 December, however, Margarete was working late in the laboratory, dissecting a dog, when suddenly the sirens rang out again and the loudspeakers blared. Soon after, she heard the sound of bombs dropping. Putting down her instruments, she hurried out of the lab and ran to the bomb shelter just outside the main entrance to the medical school. A number of students and professors were already there. They looked bewildered. More bombs were falling, closer this time. Margarete put her arms over her head and prayed hard to God.

  When the all-clear sounded, no one dared move. Instead they remained where they were in silence until a commotion outside the hatch roused them. ‘Open up, open up!’2 someone shouted. ‘We have a wounded man!’

  The hatch was opened and two men came in carrying a third, who was grimacing in agony. Blood was spattered over his front, and below the knees his trousers and his legs had been shredded. Strips of skin hung off them. His feet had gone entirely.

  ‘There are medical students here, aren’t there?’ cried one of the men.3 Margarete called out that she was. ‘Bring him down into the bunker,’ she
told them. ‘At least we can lay him down somewhere and keep him warm.’ Only when she had him lain down and others were tying tourniquets around his legs did Margarete realize the wounded man was Professor Schmitt, one of her lecturers.

  When she eventually emerged from the shelter, she was shocked by the level of damage. Wandering over the rubble, she headed into the town, walking dazed and exhausted towards the tavern where she and her friends would meet. A few students had had the same idea and together they stood by the statue of Hanfried in the market square. ‘No one spoke, but we wept,’ wrote Margarete.4 ‘We wept for the friends we knew we would never see again. We wept for the professor whose booted feet were missing. But mostly we wept because our dreams were dead. We would no longer be able to study and we wept deeply for that.’

  Margarete Dos and her friends regularly used the phrase ‘Until better times.’ It might well also have been adopted by General Hap Arnold, who, by December, was committed to providing new impetus for the Combined Bomber Offensive, and particularly the aims laid out in POINTBLANK. Ever since August, he had been considering an overhaul of the air command structure in the European Theatre of Operations – a belief that had become only more entrenched with the creation of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy and with his belated acceptance that his heavy bomber force could not, after all, successfully defend itself without fighter escorts. By December, the hard reality was that POINTBLANK was at least three months behind schedule. Looming ever closer was the planned cross-Channel invasion, yet there was no sign of any reduction in German fighter production, which Allied intelligence sources put at 645 per month. In fact, the figure was over two hundred more than that. Injecting as many long-range Mustangs as possible, as quickly as possible, into the Eighth Air Force was one clear way to improve matters, but there was a growing feeling that fresh eyes, a new look at tactics and a burst of energy might also be needed.

  One increasing concern was the need for better coordination. RAF Bomber Command and the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces were three strategic bombing forces now operating collaboratively in many ways but hardly as one. Arnold wanted a single Allied Strategic Air Force Commander in overall charge of all three, with a headquarters in London and status equal to other theatre commanders. Such a move would make all Allied strategic air forces in the west independent of any ground forces commander and allow them to pursue the Combined Bomber Offensive entirely independently. On top of that, it would further Arnold’s agenda to create a US air force unshackled from the army.

  He also wanted a US Strategic Air Force Commander in Europe, also based in London, who would have operational control of Fifteenth Air Force in Italy and Eighth and Ninth Air Forces in England. Again, this was the better to oversee and coordinate efforts in Britain and Italy. In late August and early September, when Arnold had visited Britain, he had started to talk to various people about these ideas, not least Air Marshal Harris. After a dinner on 4 September at Harris’s house, where Arnold was staying as a guest, the conversations had continued the following morning in Harris’s garden, underneath plum trees dripping with fruit and with geese and chickens wandering about. Harris, unsurprisingly, was against a joint Allied air commander because it threatened his autonomy.

  When he returned to the US, Arnold managed to persuade Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s senior advisor, and also got the conditional support of General Marshall, although the US Chief of Staff warned him not to press the matter just yet – at least, not until the new Supreme Allied Commander had been appointed and other issues of command in the Mediterranean had been resolved.

  Thus not until the Joint Chiefs of Staff conference in Tehran in November was Arnold able to raise the matter more formally. On the trip out, aboard the USS Iowa, he won the backing of President Roosevelt and then the support of the American Chiefs for the creation of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF) – a decision that could be made independently of the British. They also agreed with Arnold’s suggestion that the new commander should be Tooey Spaatz, who, since November, had been C-in-C Fifteenth Air Force in the Mediterranean Theatre. He was liked, respected, had the seniority and experience, and shared Arnold’s views on strategic bombing.

  At the Tehran Conference, however, the British made clear their considerable objections to Arnold’s plans. Portal had been given the task of coordinating the Combined Bomber Offensive, which enabled him to ensure Bomber Command maintained its independence. Soon the number of American heavy bombers in Britain would exceed those of the RAF, so looking ahead it was even more important for the British to maintain that independence, and especially so since British and American attitudes and approaches to strategic bombing were different. Portal also objected to creating a new and what he believed to be unnecessary headquarters, plus all the staff that would go with it. Why add another level of command, which threatened to hamper rather than help future operations?

  The matter was left up in the air at Tehran, but resolved in early December at the Cairo Conference, which was attended by just the Western Allies. Arnold’s plan for an overall Allied air commander was rejected, but the British did not object to the creation of a new overall American air commander for Europe. It was also agreed that POINTBLANK must remain the absolute priority.

  Clearly, with the new command, General Ira Eaker’s position as US commander of both the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces in England had effectively been made redundant, which meant he had either to be given the leg-up instead of Spaatz or moved somewhere else entirely. What became apparent in Cairo was that Arnold had no intention of further promoting Eaker. Rather, he had lost confidence in his old friend, who, he told his fellow Joint Chiefs, had shown inflexibility during recent months. The frustrations Arnold had been feeling for some time emerged in a blistering critique of Eighth Air Force’s performance. He had, he told them, sent a number of inspectors, who had reported that the Eighth was using only 50 per cent of the available aircraft instead of the 60–70 per cent used in other theatres where operating conditions were more primitive. Arnold felt that the lack of key targets destroyed had been because of a failure to employ bombers in sufficient numbers. Not enough focus had been given to the priority targets of POINTBLANK. Training, technique, tactics and operational efficiency all needed improving.

  Only some of this was fair. The weather had been atrocious and it was also hard, when looking at numbers on a piece of paper, properly to appreciate the devastating effect on morale and operational capability that the huge rates of attrition had caused individual bomb groups and their bases. Arnold might have been head of the US Army Air Forces, but he had never commanded even a group in combat and perhaps lacked the sympathy held by those with operational experience. And from Eaker’s perspective, the insufficient numbers combined with the terrible weather had caused the setbacks, not a lack of either ruthlessness or operational efficiency. He was convinced, for example, that attacking Schweinfurt with 600 heavies rather than 300 would still have resulted in the loss of 60 bombers, but the percentage of the overall force would have been halved, while the weight of bombs dropped would have been double, and very probably decisive.

  Arnold was, to a certain extent, finding in Eaker a scapegoat for his own mistakes. He had overestimated the destructive power of his bombers and their defensive strength; and he had not foreseen the need for a long-range fighter when one was already there in front of his eyes. Yet it was true that Eaker did lack vision and tactical acumen. Whenever Arnold had shown his frustration and criticized the efforts of the Eighth or suggested to Eaker that he change some of his senior commanders, the response had always been the same: more aircraft and crews needed urgently. Eaker never fired anyone.

  Perhaps Eaker’s biggest failing, however, was his misunderstanding of the role of the fighter. Even though transforming the Mustang with a new engine had been initiated in the UK, Eaker had never once mentioned this remarkable machine before Arnold was suddenly alerted to its potential in the summer of 1943. The tactics used we
re also unimaginative. Insisting on close escorts was a mistake and a tactic that had proved woefully bad for the Luftwaffe back in 1940. This was because fighters flew much faster than bombers, so the only way to stick with them was by weaving back and forth, which used far more fuel and meant the fighters’ range was badly affected. To Arnold, it was absurd that the Americans were still sending fighters over in such a way. As he had learned, but Eaker had not, fighters were the key to defeating the Luftwaffe. That Eaker still believed sheer weight of bombers was enough betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the battle in which his forces were now engaged.

  Over the ensuing days in Cairo, a large change of senior Allied command was discussed, agreed and put into motion. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Allied Commander for OVERLORD, which meant him moving from the same post in the Mediterranean. His deputy would be Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who was currently C-in-C Mediterranean Allied Air Forces. This meant the two most senior air commanders in the Mediterranean would be leaving the theatre, which, Spaatz warned Arnold, might upset the balance between the RAF and US Army Air Forces there. A solution was to put Eaker into the position vacated by Tedder; it would mean a promotion of sorts for Eaker and would allow the Americans to maintain influence in a theatre dominated by the British. A final shift of command came at Spaatz’s suggestion: that Major-General Jimmy Doolittle take over leadership of the Eighth Air Force.