Spaatz had been in his new job barely a fortnight. The poor weather was once again hampering operations. This would improve: the days would grow longer, more HX2 sets were on their way and one day, eventually, winter would be over. Time, though, was of the essence. ‘The weather here is the most discouraging of all factors,’ wrote Spaatz.2 ‘Nothing is more exasperating than trying to run an Air Force continuously hampered or grounded by weather.’
At least the Americans and British could have their pilots and crew practise flying in such conditions thanks to the plentiful amounts of fuel and resources at their disposal. The same could not be said for the Luftwaffe. The lack of bad-weather flying training was one of General Dolfo Galland’s biggest concerns but, despite his insistence on improving it at flying schools, necessity had made such plans impossible to implement properly. With the dawn of the new year, he felt increasingly pessimistic. The Allies were clearly getting ever stronger. To Galland, it seemed utterly futile to send up fighters in bad weather, because whatever victories they gained were invariably more than offset by the losses caused from icing, accidents on take-off and subsequent crash-landings. Heinz Knoke would probably have agreed. So too would Wim Johnen. The statistics were bearing them out: on 4 January, for example, I Jagdkorps had lost twelve fighters to snow and bad weather.
On Thursday, 27 January, at Parchim airfield, the pilots of 5/NJG5 were given a bleak forecast by the meteorologists: a cloud ceiling of just 150 feet, then dense cloud up to 13,000 feet. Temperatures were bitterly cold and from 3,000 feet there was a danger of icing. Snow was falling, covering the machines with a coat of ice before they even started their engines. By evening, it was worse. ‘Absolute pea-soup outside,’ said Hauptmann Bär, their new CO.3 ‘You can’t see your hand before your nose.’ Wim Johnen prayed they would not be flying.
In the crew room, they played skat and waited for the hourly weather reports. Outside, the sleet continued. ‘Take it easy,’ one of the reserve officers said, noting the anxious glances.4 ‘Tommy couldn’t come in this muck. He’s not quite tired of life yet. In this pea-soup fog, even his radar would not help him.’ Everyone murmured agreement, but Johnen suspected otherwise. He was well aware that the British were using more sophisticated ground-mapping radar – that is, H2S, which the Germans now knew about as it had been discovered on a wrecked British bomber – and it seemed to make no odds to them when they flew. As the clock ticked inexorably, the CO began pacing about. Eventually, Johnen suggested to his crew that they head out to their Me110 to carry out cockpit drills and get used to the dark.
Once on board, they went through their checks, then Unteroffizier Fabius, Johnen’s radio operator, switched on the Calais radio station. Soon after they heard an interruption in the sugary-sweet music. ‘Berlin, you were once the most beautiful city in the world,’ came a voice. ‘Berlin, look out for eleven o’clock tonight!’ So a raid was being planned. At around 8 p.m., the aircrews were put on alert and the others hurried out to their machines. Once all were on board, a green flare was fired into the air from the control tower. Hauptmann Bär was in his machine next to Johnen. Then through his headphones he heard the duty officer ask everyone to check in. Once they had all done so, the officer said, ‘Well, happy landings all,’ and then Bär rumbled forward, Johnen following close behind. Visibility was terrible, with sleety rain lashing the canopy. Johnen could barely even see the green lights of the flare-path.
The CO took off, sparks swirling in the slipstream, then Johnen opened the throttle, released the brakes and began thundering down the runway, his nerves focused entirely on just getting safely into the air. Flying on instruments alone, he had told himself not to look out any more than he had to. Suddenly, he was airborne, but just as he retracted the undercarriage and was about to retract the wing flaps a loud explosion shook his machine in a flash of angry flame. It jolted him and for a split second he was frozen by fright and the thought that it was his aircraft. But then the truth hit him: it had been Hauptmann Bär and he must surely be dead. Johnen stared grimly at his instrument panel and tried to put what had happened out of his mind. And in truth, just gaining altitude required all his concentration.
At 3,000 feet, however, the propellers and leading edges of the wings began to ice up, something that was blindingly obvious just from the struggling grinding of his twin engines. His gunner, Mahle, shone his torch along the wings and reported a thick coating of ice. The sleet was freezing as it hit the aircraft. Johnen now told Mahle and Fabius to check their parachutes and be ready to bail out the moment he gave the order. The struggling Messerschmitt was growing heavier, the controls sluggish. Johnen debated whether to drop into slightly warmer air or to keep climbing and pray they could push on through the danger zone. He decided to keep going.
His engines were at full throttle and bits of ice were breaking off and hitting the airframe, but the ice was also increasing. ‘Herr Oberleutnant,’ called out Mahle, ‘it’s pointless.5 The tail unit’s beginning to ice up. The temperature outside is now four degrees below.’ Johnen’s control column was no longer responding much either and he reckoned he could keep his engines at full revs like this for five minutes longer but no more. On the other hand, bailing out from that height into the icy unknown hardly appealed, so he decided to press on and hope for the best. Slowly but surely, they were gaining altitude, although the aircraft was groaning and moments away from stalling. Johnen could not help but look at the wings and the struggling engines. The tension was hard to stomach.
Then suddenly the ice layer started to break off, the engines began to sound better and the machine was responding once more to the controls, although not until they reached 12,000 feet did they finally emerge from the thick cloud bank that had shrouded them since take-off. Johnen thanked God – they had made it through into the clear and unfettered skies beyond. ‘I almost felt like patting my Me 110,’ he wrote, ‘as though she had been a human being.’6
Now he began thinking about Hauptmann Bär and what could have happened. One of the captain’s crew, Kamprath, had been married with children. Johnen was still lost in his thoughts, heading towards the Baltic coast as instructed, when the ground controller’s voice suddenly crackled in his headphones.
‘White Argus from Meteor – attention, attention! Strong bomber formation at 15,000 feet over the Baltic flying on a south-westerly course.’7
The still comparatively new Tame Boar tactics were working. They were flying over Wismar when Fabius first caught one of the RAF’s bombers in his SN2 radar. Johnen drew to close range and opened fire. The Lancaster went down after his first burst, spinning away and disappearing into the clouds. Soon after, they latched on to a second and again Johnen drew near, opened fire and saw the Lancaster plummet, crashing just on the edge of Berlin.
Johnen was now approaching the capital in a southerly direction and saw that, above the bomber stream, a number of parachute flares had been dropped, creating a square of light through which the Tommy bombers were flying. Flak was bursting all around, but above he spotted four more Lancasters and tore after them, opening fire on the nearest. It exploded and fell in burning debris, but, with more targets to hit, Johnen now went after a fourth British bomber. Spotting him, the pilot banked steeply to starboard, desperately trying to get away. The gunners on board the Lancaster also opened fire – bright phosphorescent stabs pouring towards him and framing his machine. Undeterred, Johnen pressed on, drawing in behind and then, once the big Lancaster filled his sights, opening fire with his combination of cannons and machine guns. Armour-piercing cannon shells raked the bomber’s fuselage then ruptured the fuel tanks in the wings. Tracers set the fuel on fire, while his high-explosive cannon shells tore holes in the wings. Really, the Lancaster, with its thin skin, stood no chance. Nor did the crew. The Lancaster went down, burning as it spiralled, like a slain dragon.
By Johnen’s reckoning he had shot down four that night in just forty-five minutes. He felt all in and had to circle for a further ten minute
s just to calm down, but then reality was restored and he knew he faced the ordeal of trying to get back down to the ground. There were some forty other night-fighters in the vicinity and all faced the same problem. Weather reports continued to be fed into his headset, but none of them was good. Every airfield within easy flying distance was reporting the same thing: a cloud ceiling of 150 feet, terrible visibility, snowstorms and temperatures several degrees below freezing.
‘Go through that again, Herr Oberleutnant?’8 Mahle asked him. ‘No, it’s better to get above Parchim and fall out of the sky like Father Christmas.’
Johnen, though, did not want to abandon ship and bail out; his trusty Me110 had got him up and it would get him down. Another airfield, Leipzig–Brandis, was reporting a cloud base of 240 feet, but Johnen thought that would make everyone try for there. Far better, he reasoned to himself, to aim for Parchim where he knew every hill, every contour, and therefore had the best chance of flying in blind and in a snowstorm.
No one spoke as he flew for half an hour at 15,000 feet until he was circling over Parchim. Calling up the ground-control officer, he made contact. Ceiling was 150 feet, but the snow had stopped. ‘Am putting out the shroud and firing radishes,’ he told Johnen.9 ‘Reception good.’ The shroud meant pointing the airfield searchlights directly up to light up the clouds, which, in such conditions, could reach about 450 feet or so. Johnen now had to descend in a spiral through the dense cloud and ice to find the beacon of light. On paper it was all very straightforward, but at around 4,500 feet the plane began to ice up again, so Johnen throttled back and dived down to 1,500 feet, which seemed to do the trick. Now they were almost there, but he could still see nothing. Outside it was pitch black, and then the flashing lights of the radishes appeared and, a moment later, the shroud. That meant they were directly over the airfield.
Johnen now prepared to land, sweeping in a wide circle so that he could line up on the runway. To help him was the ultra-short-wave Barque approach: if he veered to port of the correct flying-in course, dots could be heard in his headset, while to starboard were dashes. When on track, both sounds merged into a sustained single note. A mile and a half from the airfield, he lowered his undercarriage, which, despite the ice, clicked into position. Wing flaps were lowered to 70 degrees, approach speed was 100 m.p.h. Suddenly he saw blurred lights ahead and moments later he touched down, somewhat fast. He put on the brakes but the aircraft kept going until finally coming to a halt on the edge of the airfield. Johnen said a little prayer and Mahle opened the cockpit so that they were breathing the cold night air.
Back inside, emotions were mixed. There was delight at seeing Johnen and his crew safe – and with four victories! – and Leutnant Kamprath had successfully bailed out of Bär’s machine. But Bär was dead and so too were Leutnant Sorko and Oberfeldwebel Kammerer, who had been shot down. Leutnant Spoden and crew had bailed out after bad icing. ‘On the one side joy,’ noted Johnen, ‘and on the other side grief. But we had grown hard in this pitiless war.’
On 1 January, Lieutenant-Colonel Don Blakeslee had taken over command of the 4th Fighter Group when his predecessor left to join the Ninth Air Force as combat operations officer. Blakeslee had been waiting for this moment for quite a while and told all his pilots that he wanted them to be aggressive and to become the top fighter group in the Eighth. Anyone who didn’t embrace this approach would be transferred to another unit.
Doolittle and Kepner were equally keen for their fighters to become more offensive-minded. The 4th had had a quiet few months and the ramrods they had been carrying out had not allowed for much combat. Most were chomping at the bit and only too willing to follow Blakeslee’s instructions to the letter. As if to prove the point, their new commander had led the group into action on 7 January. When a dozen Focke-Wulfs had dived on some straggling bombers, Blakeslee had brought his pilots down on the enemy fighters in a classic bounce. He shot down one with his usual tactic of getting as close as possible, but then had been hammered himself until Jim Goodson shot down the two Focke-Wulfs on Blakeslee’s tail. Blakeslee had made it back to Manston; he might not have liked the Jug, but Thunderbolts could certainly take some punishment.
The group was flying a freelance operation on Friday, 14 January. At around 3 p.m. they were at some 26,000 feet near Paris when Don Gentile spotted a gaggle of fifteen Focke-Wulfs around 4,000 feet below them and heading east. Leading his flight, Gentile immediately flipped a wing and dived down, yelling at his wingman, Lieutenant Richards, to stick with him.
‘Keep going,’ Richards replied over the radio, ‘I’m with you.’10
As the Thunderbolts were diving down behind them, the Focke-Wulfs spotted them and broke into two groups, each fanning out in a wide arc so that they were turning in towards their attackers. Suddenly, some eight enemy planes were closing towards them. Gentile, out in front, adjusted his gunsight and flicked off the safety switch on his guns. The closing speed was now over 700 m.p.h. ‘You can think of a thousand things,’ he noted, ‘at such moments, and nothing seems to be happening in your life except that the plane is coming slowly toward you and you’re living a lifetime – as if it was a speed-up movie reel – and ageing fast and growing old and older and looking suddenly at the end of your life in just about the time it takes to say it.’11 This was a game of high-speed chicken. Either Gentile or the lead German pilot had to break first or they would collide. Gentile felt calm and, at that moment, unafraid, and then the Germans broke and he knew he had the psychological edge. The Focke-Wulfs dived down towards the deck and Gentile followed, so intent on catching them that he couldn’t think what to say over the radio to his wingman, but assumed Richards was still following. Closing in on the first, he opened fire and saw a mushroom of thick smoke as the 190 rolled over into a vertical spin and crashed.
In fact, as they had dived after the lead two Focke-Wulfs, Gentile had been bounced in turn. Richards, seeing a Focke-Wulf open fire at Gentile at some 800 yards, then attacked, and moments later both aircraft were spiralling, each trying to get on to the tail of the other. An FW190 was supposed to be able to out-turn a Thunderbolt, and Richards knew this. It was his first-ever combat, but eventually he managed to get on to the German’s tail and, opening fire, saw smoke appear. Moments later, the Focke-Wulf flipped on to its back and dived down straight into a wood and exploded. By this time, though, Richards had lost Gentile and was now out of ammo, so, after wondering what he should do, he set his course west and headed for home.
Meanwhile, the rest of the group had been caught in a melee higher up from where they had first engaged after their dive. Leading his flight in 334 Squadron, Bee Beeson had dived after the Focke-Wulfs, finally closing in at about 6,000 feet. Hurtling in close to the rear four, Beeson opened fire at 250 yards and kept firing until he was almost upon one. He could see strikes and large flashes along the wing roots and in the canopy as he broke over the enemy. The Focke-Wulf plunged downwards, exploding as it hit the ground. That was his sixth confirmed kill.
Gentile was now all alone, miles from the others and about to become embroiled in a titanic death struggle with one of the best enemy pilots he had ever come up against. Having chased after three Focke-Wulfs, he had caught up with one, closing to 150 yards, and opened fire, seeing strikes all around the cockpit. Down and down they went until they were flying only just above the treetops of the Forest of Compiègne, where Hitler had made the French sign the armistice in June 1940. He could feel the turbulence from the slipstream of the German ahead of him and then the Focke-Wulf crashed into the trees in a ball of fire, the force of which Gentile felt as he sped past.
He now climbed back up, but as he did so he came under attack. Tracers sped towards him. Gentile flung the Thunderbolt this way and that, yawing and side-slipping as he tried to shake off the lead Focke-Wulf now on his tail. He was taking hits and two jagged holes appeared in his fuselage and right wing. Horrified, Gentile realized the lead attacker was now so close he could actually hear the chugging
of his machine guns and the poom-poom of the cannons. Frantically, Gentile looked around and actually saw a 20mm cannon shell hit his wing and a metal flower open up like a torn mouth. He also now realized that Richards, his wingman, was nowhere to be seen.
Gentile had to think quickly and clearly. Pushing the stick over, he turned directly into his attacker, thinking that if he had to die he might as well ram his enemy and take him with him, but instead the lead German pilot pulled up and over him. Gentile stayed in a tight port turn because the lead pilot’s wingman was now coming in towards him. But he seemed not to have the stomach for it, because he broke and turned away from the fray. ‘Right quick,’ noted Gentile, ‘I threw my Thunderbolt into a starboard swing and let loose a burst at the guy, but didn’t hit him.12 My nerves at the time were not conducive to accurate gunnery.’ Closing in on him, he had a clear shot and pressed down on the firing button, but nothing happened – he had run out of ammunition. The lead Focke-Wulf had now swung around and was positioning himself for a 30-degree deflection shot. That he was even attempting it told Gentile that he was up against a highly experienced and proficient hunter – but with no bullets himself. The tracers were fizzing past some 40 feet in front, then 30 and getting closer. Gentile kept going, turning towards them as his enemy gradually corrected his aim. Gentile had always had a habit of talking to himself in the cockpit. Now he muttered, ‘Don, hold on to yourself.13 Keep yourself steady and you’ll get out of this all right. Don’t panic, Don!’
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