Big Week

by James Holland

  As they neared the target, they were unable to open the bomb bays because they had iced up, so they quickly used the Bomb Door Emergency Operation, which meant pulling the pin on the emergency air control in the nose of the Halifax and holding the control mechanism down until the doors were fully open. Fortunately, this failsafe worked and at 4.18 a.m. their bombs dropped and they, too, were climbing and on their way home.

  Rusty Waughman touched back down at Ludford Magna at 6.55 a.m. The squadron had got off comparatively lightly – just one had failed to return. For Ken Handley and his Australian crew, however, fuel was once again the issue, although on this occasion it was an overload pump that had packed in, leaving them short. As they flew back across the North Sea, it was touch and go whether they would make landfall, but they did so and called up Snetterton Heath, an American air base in Norfolk. As they were circling to land, they suddenly saw another Halifax coming in just ahead of them and only 50 feet below. With a wingspan of over 100 feet, that was all too close for comfort, especially at the end of a long and fraught flight. To make matters worse, their own hydraulics were shot, which meant they had to land with no brakes. Touching down, the big bomber kept running and Handley thought they would keep going off the runway and crash. Quick thinking by Jack Scott enabled him to wheel the Halifax by using the throttles to steer, but still they ran on, off the perimeter and over a slight ditch, which eventually brought them to a standstill.

  Leipzig had none the less proved a bloody raid for Bomber Command. ‘Pretty deadly trip,’ noted Rusty Waughman.6 ‘Lost 78 A/C.’ Ken Handley noted the same figure in his diary, along with the three that did not return from 466 Squadron. That the number was so widely known so quickly was not brilliant for morale. And the losses were huge – 9.5 per cent of the force; of those, fifty-four had been shot down by night-fighters. Harris’s stubborn insistence that sustained and coordinated night bombing alone was the best way to shorten the war was being disproved only too palpably. Only when the Luftwaffe was destroyed would his bombers be free of marauding night-fighters and therefore considerably more effective. And to win air superiority, the Allied strategic air forces needed to continue daylight bombing and employing the aggressive tactics of their increasingly superior day-fighters.

  Even so, despite the losses, and despite the cloud, the best part of 800 heavy bombers had hit Leipzig, a major target. Furthermore, this raid had just been the start, because as the weary returning crews wolfed down their eggs and bacon and headed off to bed, the Eighth Air Force was readying to launch its own strike. And one of the main targets was Leipzig once again.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sunday, 20 February 1944

  THE NIGHT OF 19/20 February had been a long one at US Strategic Air Forces Headquarters in south-west London. Starting ARGUMENT without the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy had been a blow, but then had come the doubts from Doolittle and Brereton. On top of that it had become increasingly clear that something was fundamentally wrong with the P-38 Lightning, which, although nothing like as effective as the Mustang against Me109s and FW190s, still had an important long-range role to play. Powered by twin Allison engines – which had also powered the P-51A – it was proving unsuited to the extreme cold and high moisture levels. On 17 February, staff at VIII Fighter Command had reported that as much as 40 per cent of its P-38 force of five fighter groups was currently affected by trouble with its Allison engines; not for nothing had the aircraft gained the name the ‘Widow Maker’. In fact, the problem of icing was not just the preserve of the Luftwaffe or P-38 Lightning; overnight, Bill Kepner also waded in, warning that if temperatures were as cold and cloudy as the Eighth’s weathermen predicted, then icing could be expected not only to cut the P-38s’ performance by half, but also to lower the performance of the Mustangs and Thunderbolts.

  General Fred Anderson, commanding officer of VIII Bomber Command, was determined ARGUMENT should go ahead, however, and spent the entire night at his desk, by his phone, ready to counter the opinions of any of the nay-sayers. Hovering at the back of the minds of all the senior commanders and staff were the losses suffered every time their bombers had previously penetrated deep into Germany. Schweinfurt, Regensburg and, more recently, Oschersleben hung heavy on their collective conscience. After so carefully building up their air forces, was it sensible to risk everything when the weather was so notoriously fickle? Long months of cold, dark days and seemingly constant cloud, rain and fog had been enough to dent anyone’s confidence.

  Anderson was also concerned that his boss, General Spaatz, was starting to waver. Spaatz always let his subordinates express their points of view. What Anderson interpreted as a sign that Spaatz was having second thoughts, however, was, in reality, just his boss listening to other opinions.

  The decision, when it came, was made early and was Spaatz’s alone. On his shoulders was the terrifying thought that they might lose in the region of two hundred crews. The dangers were certainly considerable. On the other hand, Arnold had been urging more ruthlessness and for the strategic air forces to take greater risks. So, early in the morning of Sunday, 20 February, Spaatz made his decision. ‘Let ’em go.’1

  The wake-up call was 3 a.m. for most of the bomber crews of the Eighth. ‘Awakened very early today,’ scribbled Larry Goldstein in his diary, ‘and expected a long, rough mission, even long before briefing.’2

  As usual, the map on the wall at the end of the briefing room was covered, but there was also an extension to the right, which could mean only one thing: that their target was so far away it did not fit on to their normal wall map. That hardly eased nerves. Then Colonel William R. David, commander of the 388th, pulled back the curtain and there was a long strip of red tape running from England out over the North Sea to Denmark, then across the Baltic and back to eastern Germany and into Poland, until it finally stopped at Poznań, nearly 1,000 miles away.

  ‘Men,’ Colonel David said, ‘your bomb is 5,000 lbs, gas load, naturally, maximum.3 Don’t start your engines before you have to. You’ll need all the gas you have.’ They were to climb to 11,000 feet and cruise at that altitude, then over the Baltic climb again to 17,000 feet, which was to be their bombing height. ‘If you lose an engine over or near the target,’ he continued, ‘check your gas and if you don’t think you can make it, head for Sweden.’ Their wing, he explained, was hitting Poznań, but the 13th Wing, who would be flying with them much of the way, would be hitting a target in Germany instead. Then came the worst part: they would be alone all the way back, the colonel told them; the rest of the Eighth would be bombing targets all over central and southern Germany. ‘You’ll have no fighter escort,’ he said, ‘so shoot at anything you see in the way of a fighter. Keep on the ball and good luck to all of you.’

  At Tibenham, Jimmy Stewart, now a major, had turned in the previous night conscious that something was up. He had seen the ground crew busy fuelling and loading the B-24s, but the consensus was that nothing would come of it and that the mission would probably be scrubbed, because whatever the talk of improving weather, there was certainly no sign of it at Tibenham.

  Stewart was also roused at 3 a.m., and after quickly shaving and dressing, and before heading to the mess for breakfast, was ordered to attend a pre-pre-briefing. With nine missions already under his belt, Stewart was considered an old hand. More than that, the commanders of the 2nd Division had come to regard him as a safe pair of hands and a man with sound judgement. While he and some of the other senior pilots waited, one of them, Bob Kiser, read out a letter from his wife, who was describing getting the nursery ready; the couple were expecting their first child in May. When the briefing officer arrived, they all stood to attention, then were seated again as the curtain was drawn back. Target: Brunswick, some 450 miles from Tibenham, with a component plant for the Ju88 as the primary and the factory at Neupetritor, on the edge of the city, as the secondary.

  ‘We will put up thirty-five ships today,’ they were told.4 ‘Major Stewart and Lieutenant Conley will b
e Second Combat Wing lead ship, low. They will be in front of the 445th, 453rd and 389th.’ Pathfinders would lead them in and they would have fighter escort from Thunderbolts, Lightnings and Mustangs. Afterwards, for breakfast there were real eggs, rather than powdered, and bacon, which always had a whiff of the condemned man’s last meal about it.

  Elsewhere, other crews were also getting ready. At Chelveston, Lieutenant Bill Lawley and his crew would be targeting aircraft factories and assembly plants at Leipzig and nearby Bernburg, the day’s principal target, along with some 417 bombers from the 1st Division. As the curtain had been drawn back, Lawley had turned to his bombardier, Lieutenant Henry Mason, and said, ‘Doesn’t sound too bad, Henry.’5

  ‘Who knows?’ Mason had replied. ‘You never can tell about a strike into Germany.’

  While the 1st Division were heading to Leipzig, the B-24s of the 2nd Division would be split up over five targets: Poznań, Brunswick, Gotha, Oschersleben and Helmstedt. For the Fortresses of the 3rd Division, some 314 in all, there were two further targets: Tutow and Rostock. Hitting multiple targets at once with over a thousand bombers was intended to cause widespread destruction and also to confuse the enemy air defence. The idea was for the main bomber force striking the Brunswick–Leipzig targets to appear on enemy radar screens first and attract the enemy fighter force, leaving the northern bombers with a clear run.

  After starting engines as late as possible, just before taxiing, the Fortresses of the 388th BG took off and, after managing to cut their assembly time by half, headed off on their northern course. On board Worry Wart, Larry Goldstein’s pilot, BJ Keirsted, and co-pilot, Ace Conklin, were using the lowest possible power settings and lowest r.p.m. in an effort to conserve fuel.

  The B-24s of the 2nd Division were also airborne. On board Tenovus, Major Jimmy Stewart sat in the co-pilot’s seat next to Lieutenant Bill Conley, the pilot. They took off at 9.08 a.m. and by 10.30 had completed assembly and were heading off on the 450-mile trip to Brunswick. Just then, Stewart saw a formation of B-17s out of position to their left, so quickly ordered their own group to climb and shift to the south of their planned route to avoid them, but already that meant a three-minute delay to the schedule. However, everyone adjusted without the need to break radio silence, including the all-important Pathfinders, and by the time they were approaching the Dutch coast the B-17s were little more than specks on the horizon.

  The sky was a bright, deep blue. Above and away to their right, another combat box of bombers was trailing long white streaks of vapour. So too were their own ships as they crossed the coastline at some 17,000 feet. Ahead, flak began to open up, puffs of dark brown, initially above them, then too far below; but then the gunners below found their range and the bombers were heading straight for it, although it was neither heavy nor particularly threatening. Stewart thought about warning everyone, but then resisted the urge, while behind him Sergeant Wilson, the radio man, tapped him on the arm and made urgent signals: their radio frequency was being jammed. Stewart understood and, in any case, the boys all knew what to do. It was now nearly midday.

  Winds were pushing them slightly off course, Lieutenant Steinhaurer, the navigator, reported, but they were able to adjust quickly, with only a minute lost.

  ‘Good work, Manny,’ said Conley.6

  The fighter boys had an early start too. At Leiston, Bud Anderson was woken while it was still dark and told to get ready. On went the long-johns, two pairs of socks, trousers, shirt, flight suit, GI shoes with fur-lined boots on top, and RAF-issue gloves that went halfway up his forearms. Dressed and ready, he headed to the mess in one of the station Jeeps, ate a peanut butter-and-marmalade sandwich, then heard the bombers heading off overhead. That meant the mission was definitely on.

  Group briefing was in a large Nissen hut that could seat fifty pilots. As with the bomber crews, a curtain was drawn back from a large map and there they saw their destination: Leipzig. This was to be Anderson’s fifth mission, and the rule of thumb was ‘Do five, stay alive’, so he was eager to get it under his belt. He paid attention to the reaction from his fellow pilots when the target was revealed. ‘Some would groan when the target looked tough,’ he noted, ‘and some would grin.7 The guys who grinned were the ones I wanted with me.’ The group operations officer then took over with more specific details about the targets, timings, the number of other groups involved, the rendezvous point with the bombers and the course back home. The pilots wrote the key stats and details on the back of their hands. Then came the weather brief and finally the synchronizing of watches.

  Outside, light snow was falling over the Suffolk coast as they headed to their Mustangs. Take-off was in pairs, and in squadrons with one squadron strung out on the long main runway and the other two lined up on the secondary runways that criss-crossed the main one like a giant ‘A’. A flare was fired, brakes were released, throttles gunned and they were away, flagged off in pairs, each squadron in order, eight seconds per pair, sixty-four seconds per squadron, and three and a half minutes at the most for the entire 357th Fighter Group to get themselves airborne.

  They took off in radio silence, although they soon guessed that the enemy knew they were coming. On his first few missions, Anderson had already become familiar with a strange harmonic humming in his headset, a kind of yuum-yuum-YUUM-yuum-yuum, which he had discovered was the enemy radar beam tracking them. It was a reminder that, as they flew across seemingly empty skies, they were being watched. Anderson found it a bit of a distraction but, in any case, they wanted the Germans to come up and fight; that was half the point of being there.

  As the Mustangs climbed high to 30,000 feet or more and cruised towards Germany, the 3rd Division were continuing on their northern route. Thick cloud covered the North Sea, but as the 388th BG neared Denmark, the skies cleared. Soon they spotted enemy fighters away to their left and saw another group under attack. Two Fortresses could be seen plunging down, then a little further on a third came under attack, although ten parachutes were spotted.

  FW190s swept at them until they were out of the Baltic, but the attacks were not pressed home with the normal degree of fury. Their formation now changed course, climbed to 17,000 feet and gradually the clear skies gave way to increasingly thick cloud, which became a mounting concern.

  In Italy, many of the Fifteenth Air Force’s bomb groups were getting ready to bomb Regensburg after all. The problem facing Spaatz had been that General Henry Maitland Wilson, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, had the authority to pull rank and demand the Fifteenth’s bombers be used for supporting ground operations; however, General Eaker had got around the dual demands of the Anzio crisis and ARGUMENT by offering a part of his strategic bomber forces – supporting US V Corps at Anzio did not require all the Fifteenth’s heavy bombers.

  As a result, crews had been woken early from their tents and other roughly erected barracks for operations into Germany. Among those getting ready had been Lieutenant Robert ‘Sully’ Sullivan, a navigator in the 32nd Bomb Squadron, part of the 301st Bomb Group now based at Lucera, one of the hastily created airfields of the Foggia complex in central southern Italy.

  Sullivan had joined the 301st in late December. ‘January 1, 1944, finds me here in southern Italy,’ he had jotted on the first page of his diary for the new year, ‘trying to do my bit to end this damn war.’8 Life was basic: there were few paved tracks, even officers were expected to live in tents, and there was a lot of mud. No one had told Sullivan that Italy was going to be so wet and cold. One of the biggest problems had been boredom; for far too many days since his arrival, missions had been scrubbed due to bad weather and, even when they did go ahead, they were usually only within Italy itself and rarely very far.

  ‘Miserable day,’ Sullivan noted of the morning of Sunday, 20 February, ‘and we never dreamed that we’d even get to the briefing room before the mission would be scrubbed!’ They had been wrong.9

  They took off for their target, Regensburg, an hour later,
climbed through the cloud and began their assembly at just 1,500 feet over the Adriatic. They were due to rendezvous with a fighter escort of Thunderbolts at 19,000 feet, but an hour later were still struggling through thick cloud when they were told to return to base, as the mission was being abandoned. ‘Had a recall and was very happy,’ Sullivan jotted, ‘even tho’ a mission over the Alps counts double for us.’10 So that was the end of the Fifteenth’s efforts to join the day’s attacks – not stymied by other priorities, but once again by the fickleness of the weather.

  The heavies of the Eighth Air Force were continuing their missions, however. The 379th BG, with forty-seven B-17s, were en route to attack the aircraft assembly plant at Bernburg, some 40 miles to the north-west of Leipzig. This was Hugh McGinty’s eleventh mission and from his position in the tail he could see the massed armadas climbing up through the largely clear skies. This was a good start, with not one crew lost to collision on take-off. None the less, it still took a good while to get so many bombers into formation. Each would climb up to 11,000 feet then begin flying a circuit in a rectangular pattern over their forming-up area. Each bomber group had an assembly plane, usually an old, beaten-up ship no longer suitable for combat. It would be painted in wild, bright colours – stripes, polka dots, anything to make it stand out, and each group’s was painted differently. This would be the first plane off, followed by the group leader for the mission. The assembly plane and group leader would then circle over their allocated assembly area, with newly arriving bombers joining the circle, first in threes and then vics of three threes, which made up a squadron. Thirty-six aircraft – four squadrons of nine – made up a group. Usually some four or even six aircraft would fly as spares in case any dropped out due to technical glitches.

  The bombers ran into enemy fighters as soon as they crossed the coast. One of the consequences of the time needed to form up was that it allowed the Luftwaffe’s early-warning system to pick up the gathering raid and scramble aircraft to meet it. McGinty, from his tail position, saw their own escorts turning towards the enemy fighters with the result that, as they droned on, more and more swirling dogfights were breaking out. Despite the escorts, some enemy aircraft still managed to get close, but McGinty’s group at least managed to drive them off. So far, he had not seen a single bomber going down.