Big Week

by James Holland

  At Ridgewell, the chaplain, Captain James Good Brown, had spent much of the afternoon in his cubbyhole at the far end of the base’s cinema. The hours always seemed interminable during a long raid. Eventually, though, it was time to head over to the control tower to watch the planes return. He had been dreading this moment all day, remembering all too clearly the devastating losses suffered over Oschersleben on 11 January. ‘I guess we had feared the worst,’ he noted.22 Now standing anxiously by the control tower, he noticed some of the other pilots and crew who had not flown that day looking nervous and fidgety. Some pilots had their crews on other ships. Then came a distant drone, getting louder and louder as the first aircraft appeared. Then another, and another. And one more, and so it continued. ‘On this day,’ noted Brown, ‘the ships did not arrive in formation.23 They were strewn all over the sky. It seemed that they were going in all directions. I could not make head nor tail out of what was happening. The old days of sending out 18 planes were gone. We were now sending out 40 planes. Counting them became difficult.’ It was clear, though, that they had had a good day and before long all but one – Kirch Cogswell’s crew – had safely made it back. That seemed like little short of a miracle to those waiting on the ground.

  Even better, two crews had completed their twenty-fifth missions – those of Lieutenants Butler and Tucker. As the first of them touched down, everyone shouted out, ‘It’s Butler!’, then Tucker came in and buzzed the airfield in salute. Everyone rejoiced when a crew completed a tour, in part happy for them and in part because it showed there was hope and a chance of survival despite the appalling odds.

  Bill Lawley’s crew crossed the English coast near Dover. Lawley had been so weak he had passed out, but Mason was right behind him. ‘Stay with us!’ he said, shaking Lawley back to consciousness. Gripping the control column with his left hand once more, on he flew. One of the two still-running engines now ran out of fuel and spluttered to a halt, which meant they were flying at just 1,500 feet on only one engine. Feathering the prop on the stopped engine to reduce drag, Lawley began looking for an airfield on which to land. It needed to appear soon, because their last valiant engine was about to run out of fuel.

  Now that they were back over England the lovely, clear, azure-blue skies of the continent had been replaced by cloud and drizzle. They were flying low, but visibility was far from good and the lower they came the harder it was to see any great distance. Then suddenly Lawley spotted an airfield away to his left, but with one engine feathered, another windmilling and a third smouldering and smoking, he lacked control and, furthermore, he was struggling with rapidly diminishing strength in his left hand. Unable to turn quickly enough, he missed it.

  Lawley now gave the warning for a crash-landing, fully intending to come down in the first large, flat field he saw, but then up ahead, through the grey drizzle, he spotted some hangars. With his radio shattered, he was unable to call the airfield, so flashed the emergency signal instead. Bracing themselves, they descended slowly towards the airfield, Lawley desperately trying to keep her steady, and then, with a mighty jolt, they landed on the plane’s belly, sliding and grinding across the grass, then over the runway and finally coming to a halt. By this time one of the engines was on fire again and, before they could stagger out of the broken aircraft, fire crews were speeding towards them. Miraculously, though – and it truly was something of a miracle – all apart from Murphy had survived. Lawley even managed to clamber out of the wreckage on his own. ‘It was hair-raising and it was exhilarating,’ he said later, ‘and it was sad and most any other descriptive term … I ended up with two permanently crippled men on board.24 However, all did survive other than the co-pilot.’

  Among the last to land back home that day were the bombers of the northern force. At Knettishall, Larry Goldstein and the crew of Worry Wart touched down after ten hours in the air, by which time they were flying pretty much on fumes alone. ‘We returned to base just as it was getting dark,’ jotted Goldstein in his diary. ‘Sweated out the landing in a haze.’ Everyone was utterly exhausted by the experience but, with twenty completed missions, Goldstein was now on the final stretch. Five more missions and he’d be heading home, his combat service done.

  CHAPTER 21

  Monday, 21 February 1944

  AS THE BOMBER crews of the Eighth were being debriefed, so Bomber Command was getting ready to send another six hundred RAF heavies to Germany. This time, the mission was to Stuttgart, another major POINTBLANK target not only because of the large Daimler-Benz aero-engine plant, but also as the site of an important Bosch factory producing dynamos, fuel-injection pumps and magnetos, and considered one of the principal aircraft-industry targets in Germany. The Lichtwerk main Bosch factory where starters for aircraft engines were made was the primary focus for the night’s raid. Another feint was planned: this time over 150 aircraft from twenty-four different squadrons would fly what was described by the planners as a training exercise across the North Sea. They would take off first and, it was hoped, draw the enemy night-fighters towards them and away from the main effort far to the south. In addition, some two dozen Mosquitoes were to attack airfields in Holland, while a further seven of these high-altitude, very fast twin-engine aircraft would fly a further diversionary raid on Munich.

  Rusty Waughman and his crew at 101 Squadron were scheduled for what was going to be their second mission in two nights, one of twenty crews to fly from Ludford Magna. Rarely would a crew be expected to fly two nights in a row and especially two long trips deep into Germany; it was also unusual for American crews to fly twice in two days, but Operation ARGUMENT was an exceptional week of operations and what in Bomber Command parlance was known as a ‘maximum effort’.5 For the most part, adrenalin tended to kick in and ensured pilots and crew reached the target without feeling excessively exhausted but, unlike American crews, British bombers had no co-pilot, so the onus on the single pilot to get his boys to the target and then home again was immense. If fatigue crept in, it tended to do so on the return leg, once the worst of the danger was over. Even to Stuttgart, the trip would take up to seven and a half hours – a long flight on the back of an even longer trip the previous evening, and made worse by lack of sleep in between.

  On his return from Leipzig, Rusty Waughman had had to go to his debrief, then ate and was in bed by perhaps 8.30 a.m. By early afternoon he was up again for flight tests and briefings. The body clock of all the bomber crews was all over the place – normal days and nights one day, night operations the next.

  Medical officers kept a close watch on all crews, but especially on pilots, and had the authority to give stimulants to pilots and aircrew. This might be a flask of coffee or a caffeine tablet; or it might be Benzedrine, an amphetamine developed in the United States in the late 1920s and known by the bomber crews as ‘wakey-wakey’ pills – it would be called ‘speed’ today. It could keep pilots awake for up to twenty-four hours, and it was clearly better for an exhausted pilot to take a Benzedrine tablet and consequently ensure the safe return of himself and his crew, than not to take one, fall asleep and crash into the North Sea, never to be seen again. However, the problems of taking amphetamines were numerous, because they were a short-term fix. Although they kept a man awake, they were not a cure for fatigue and, after taking them, pilots found it very difficult to get to sleep once back on the ground. Some pilots refused them, because often missions were scrubbed at the last minute and then they would be unable to sleep, which didn’t help if they were expected to fly the following day. Benzedrine also gave its user sensations of well-being, which could reduce fear, which in turn could lead to recklessness. In one case, a Lancaster pilot on Benzedrine dived down and ordered his crew to ground-strafe targets on the return trip.

  The British were aware of the dangers of amphetamine use and in fact, although it had been quite prevalent among aircrew since the start of the war, not until November 1942 had it been officially sanctioned by the Air Ministry, but only under medical supervision, and
even then with a number of warnings. It was to be issued only ‘in situations of stress where sleep was a threat to performance.’1 Flying long missions into enemy territory two nights in a row was precisely such an occasion.

  Rusty Waughman took off at 11.40 p.m., dodging the flak off the Dutch coast. Beside Waughman, on the dicky seat on the right-hand side of the cockpit, was his engineer, Pilot Officer John ‘Curly’ Ormerod. He had joined the crew after their first engineer, Les Reeves, had been swiftly removed from the squadron and, as far as Waughman was concerned, he had been a vast improvement. Ormerod was a Lancastrian who had worked for Oldham Council before joining the RAF. In early January he had missed a mission from which the rest of his crew hadn’t returned and so was a flight engineer without a crew, while Waughman had a crew without an engineer.

  Thin cloud built up as they neared Stuttgart. ‘Hazy cloud,’ Waughman described it later in his diary. As they reached the bomb run, the flak swiftly grew heavier, although Waughman had seen much worse; Stuttgart was a piece of cake compared with the thousands of heavy guns defending Berlin, for example. What’s more, his and his crew’s growing experience made a difference; the learning curve was a steep one when making regular trips to the capital of the Third Reich. ‘You learnt very quickly,’ Waughman admitted.2 The technique of the flak gunners down below was to send up a box of shellfire – firing in such a way that shells burst in a wide area of the sky shaped like an imaginary box. The idea was that a bomber formation would fly directly into it and that some would inevitably be hit. Gun-laying radar helped the gunners on the ground by calculating height and speed, and predicting where a bomber would be by the time the shell reached a height of 4 or 5 miles, on a level with the bombers. Anti-aircraft fire was, however, an imprecise science, even with the help of predictive radars. Flak caused plenty of damage to airframes but rarely was anything shot down; in fact, by February 1944, on average 5,000 rounds of light flak and 3,500 rounds of heavy flak were needed to shoot down a single aircraft, which amounted to an 0.002 per cent chance of a heavy flak round destroying a bomber.3 Fighters, on the other hand, could knock a bomber out of the sky with a few bullets and cannon shells.

  One of the reasons gun-laying radar wasn’t especially effective was because pilots like Waughman were able to roughly predict the prediction. ‘You knew it took forty-five seconds for the guns to be relayed,’ said Waughman, ‘and for the shell to burst.4 So you turned off forty-five degrees, flew for forty-two seconds, turned back ninety degrees, and then, with a bit of luck, the next burst would miss.’

  As they flew over Stuttgart, jostled and jolted by flak, the bomb-aimer spotted the target, although it was partly shrouded by thin cloud and looked tiny from 22,000 feet up. Even so, they reckoned they bombed pretty accurately and, now lightened, climbed, turned and made their way back towards England and home. ‘Long trip,’ noted Waughman in his diary, ‘but quiet.’

  Waughman had been untroubled by night-fighters and, in fact, losses were slight – just seven Lancasters and two Halifaxes, which amounted to only 1.5 per cent of the attacking force. The lack of night-fighters was the main reason for the easy ride Bomber Command had that night, and in part that was because this time the Germans had been duped by the northern feint and their night-fighters had scrambled too late. By the time Wim Johnen and his Gruppe had reached Stuttgart, the attackers had gone. Johnen had looked down on the burning city, cursing the old crates they were still expected to fly. He had begun his Luftwaffe career as a night-fighter on an Me110 Zerstörer and was still flying one now.

  The bombing had been a little scattered but had caused considerable damage to the city centre and the north-eastern and north-western suburbs, as the main Bosch factory stood on the river all too close to the city centre. A number of historic buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, including the Landtag, the old parliament building, and the State Gallery, State Theatre and two churches. Although there were now a good number of air-raid shelters in the city, some 125 civilians were still killed and 510 injured – no small number, and casualties that stretched the city hospital and medical services.

  It was the Lichtwerk that was hardest hit, however. The manager of the plant was 36-year-old Willi Hofmann, whose job was sufficiently important to have kept him away from military service. As he was discovering, however, civilian life could be every bit as dangerous as it was at the front. The Bosch factories had been targeted before – not least three times during the previous October and November – and had prompted Feldmarschall Erhard Milch to order the movement of vital machine tools and other equipment. He had even visited the factory. ‘If the Bosch firm fails,’ he told Hofmann and other senior staff, ‘or if the German Wehrmacht fails because the Bosch firm has failed, heads will roll!’6

  Hofmann had been responsible for moving much key equipment, but none the less was staggered by the level of destruction. Nor had he appreciated just how powerful giant flames could be. ‘You had to hold on tight,’ he said, ‘to avoid being dragged into the roaring flames by the tremendous air suction.’7 The old factory was largely ruined, its back broken by the bombs and the conflagration. As far as Hofmann was concerned, it had been hit by precision bombing, despite the strays that struck elsewhere in the city. ‘No doubt about it,’ he said.

  On 21 February, at the headquarters of US Strategic Air Forces and Eighth and Ninth Air Forces, preparations were already well under way for Day Two of ARGUMENT. The losses of the previous day had been light, all things considered – just 2.8 per cent – while at the same time reports were reaching them of astonishing acts of heroism. Bill Lawley, for example, would later be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for what he had done. Two others would be awarded posthumously to men in the same crew from the 351st Bomb Group. Rather like Lawley’s ship, Ten Horsepower had been attacked frontally and the co-pilot decapitated and the pilot badly wounded, incapable of flying any further. Two other members of the crew, Lieutenant Walter Truemper and Sergeant Archie Mathies, then managed to fly the stricken Fortress back to England, where the rest of the crew bailed out. In an effort to save the wounded pilot, Truemper and Mathies then attempted to land the plane. Tragically, they crashed and all three were killed. Never before or again would three Medals of Honor be awarded for actions on the same day in the air war.

  The action of Mathies and Truemper was symptomatic of the intense bond that existed within most crews. Few clambered into their planes each day out of patriotism. Rather, they did so for the age-old reason that most continue fighting in a war: because they were in it together and because to let down a fellow crew member was simply unthinkable. ‘We would never abandon a wounded man if the plane was still under control,’ noted Hugh McGinty.8 ‘We were mostly untrained in first aid. We were, on average, twenty years old.’ Larry Goldstein agreed. His crew had bonded well from the outset. He never thought much about the enemy or the wider cause. ‘It’s just that we were doing a job,’ he said.9 ‘We were trained to fly in an airplane, to drop the bombs and go home.’ He never thought of the bombs hitting civilians. As far as he was concerned, they were going after military targets. ‘If the German government had built their factories close to a city or a town and it was residual damage, it wasn’t our fault.’

  Death and the prospect of dying hung heavily over all bomber crews, especially during this week of intense activity. Aircrew were all volunteers, but the reminders of what a short straw they’d drawn when they initially signed up were all around them. Empty beds in the Quonset hut where that morning there had been six men. Scenes of vivid and violent destruction in the air. Aircraft blown up, chopped in half, disintegrated. Body parts splattered over fuselages and windshields. Crew shot up and bleeding to death in front of their comrades. Larry Goldstein had lost one of his best pals on 30 December. He and Danny Letter had trained together, come to England together and, although on different crews, the enlisted men of both shared the same Nissen hut. Letter’s Fortress, Satan’s Sister, had collided with another ai
rcraft on the bomb run. As Goldstein had looked out of his radio hatch he had seen his friend’s Fortress sway back and forth, flip over and break in half. ‘Our morale was at its lowest point,’ he said, ‘especially when we returned to our barracks and saw their empty beds.’10

  And then there were the shortening odds. If even 5 per cent of crew, on average, were being lost every mission, that meant 100 per cent losses in twenty missions. Usually, loss percentages were higher than that. By Operation ARGUMENT, an average crew was doing well to reach thirteen completed missions, which meant surviving twenty-five required a massive dose of luck. Skill and experience helped, but only went so far. BJ Keirsted, Larry Goldstein’s pilot, repeatedly and emphatically told his crew they would make it through, and although it did boost their confidence, the others never felt the same degree of conviction.

  Lieutenant Bob Hughes, of the 100th BG, was finally about to complete his tour but in November had lost one of his crew, Joe Boyle, during the mission to Gelsenkirchen. Hughes had, of course, written a letter of condolence to Boyle’s mother, which had reached her just before Christmas. He received her reply in the middle of February and, while young men were able to a large degree to push the deaths of friends and colleagues to one side, it was much harder to reconcile oneself to the grief of parents, wives and loved ones. ‘This all seems so unreal to me,’ wrote Boyle’s mother in her letter to Hughes, ‘yet I know now that it is true.’11 To Hughes’ wife, Elaine, she wrote, ‘When I lost him I lost my whole world and it will take me quite some time to get use to living without him … That something like this was going to happen was the farthest from my mind. I kept planning for when he would be home.’