One reason why so many young men were able to get back into a bomber and head off into the fire was because to most of them death was so incomprehensible that they simply could not imagine it happening to them. Sometimes, however, that conviction was punctured and premonitions of imminent death took root. Such powerful feelings very often became self-fulfilling. One of Robbie Robinson’s best pals, Earl Doggett, had been on Lieutenant Metcalf’s crew, but shared the same Nissen hut as Robinson. One evening in early February the two had been returning to their hut when Doggett had told Robinson he felt certain he would die the next day. He had tears in his eyes. Robinson tried to talk sense into his friend. ‘I get as scared as you,’ he told him, ‘but I am going to do everything I can to stay alive.12 I am not going to give up. Earl, if you really do expect to get killed, then you will because you will do something wrong. You don’t have to give up. There is always a way.’ Doggett, though, was convinced God wanted him to die. He couldn’t shake it, no matter how hard Robinson tried to persuade him otherwise.
Robinson’s crew had not been scheduled to fly the following day, but twenty-eight from the group took off and two crews did not return. One of those was Metcalf’s. Apparently, the plane had gone down into the Channel on the return leg. They had simply disappeared. The next day, 3 February, Robinson and the rest of the Wright crew had been on a mission, but when they got back the six beds of the Metcalf crew on the other side of the hut had all been stripped, the blankets rolled up and their lockers cleared. It was as though they had never been there at all. ‘I don’t think I could have said anything without crying,’ wrote Robinson.13 ‘It was like losing a big part of our family all at once.’ He couldn’t stop thinking about Earl Doggett’s premonition. Could it really have been possible that he had known? He couldn’t believe it himself, but that was exactly what had happened.
Over the next few days, Robinson noticed everyone getting a little twitchy; tempers quickly flared. They had had a tough mission on 29 January, when they had lost two engines and been cut adrift from the rest of the formation, but thankfully they’d made it back in one piece. They had had civilian photographs taken for fake IDs as part of their escape and evasion kit should they be shot down and bail out. It was another sobering reminder of the ever-present risks on a mission. The weather had cleared for their mission on the 11th and they had another close call when flak shards knocked out an engine and once again they found themselves on their own and with no fighter protection. Fortunately, they made it back across the Channel, but were forced to come down at the first airfield they saw in Kent.
Two days later, Robinson and his crew had been due for another mission but their pilot, Lieutenant George Wright, had arrived late. It wasn’t the first time – in fact, it was becoming something of a habit – and Major Jimmy Stewart gave him a public tongue-lashing. Afterwards, they headed out to their plane, Bullet Serenade, and were on board with their engines running when a Jeep arrived with the operations officer and medical officer on board offering them an immediate week’s furlough. It had been presented as a choice – after all, having leave meant it took longer to reach twenty-missions – but the arrival of a different crew told them the decision had already been made. In the air, Wright had repeatedly proved himself to be a first-class pilot with a cool head; but maybe the combination of a dressing down and seven days off base would get him back on track, and so they were sent to a camp in Blackpool, known as a ‘Flak Home’, for rest and recuperation.
More fighters were reaching England, including increasing numbers of Mustangs, which was good news for the 4th Fighter Group, who were itching to ditch their Thunderbolts and get themselves into this wonderful new fighter. The first of their new Mustangs had reached Debden on 13 February and they had taken possession of several more since then. Don Blakeslee had confessed to his boys his pledge to General Bill Kepner: that they would be ready to fly operationally in them twenty-four hours after their full complement had arrived at the weekend. That had prompted a fair bit of teeth-sucking. ‘You can learn to fly ’em,’ Blakeslee told them, ‘on the way to the target.’14 But in between sorties, the pilots had been swapping Thunderbolts for Mustangs and taking them for a ride. ‘The guys are working the new Mustangs to death,’ noted the group’s diarist.15 ‘Everyone wants a ride.’
The weekend was still a long way off, however, and this Monday Blakeslee led them in their Thunderbolts as they escorted the bombers on Day Two of Operation ARGUMENT. The weather over Europe once more looked promising, and the plan was to hit the enemy again after what had been unquestionably a good day for the Eighth Air Force that Sunday. Out of more than a thousand bombers detailed to fly, only twenty-one had failed to return. Subsequent reconnaissance showed considerable damage. Four assembly plants in the Leipzig area had been heavily hit, with substantial structural destruction and significant damage to machine tools. For Spaatz and Anderson, the losses were far lighter than they had dared to hope and the results had been encouraging too. This was no time to sit back. Main targets were to be aircraft factories at Brunswick, Diepholz and a number of other aircraft storage parks.
Fifteenth Air Force in Italy were also due to take part in the day’s operations, with primary attacks again planned for Regensburg. At Lucera, Lieutenant Sully Sullivan once more emerged from his tent to a day of heavy cloud and by 6 a.m. was at the 301st BG’s briefing. The secondary target was Augsburg, but just in case the weather closed in, Plan B was an attack on the marshalling yards at Rome, which had nothing to do with ARGUMENT at all.
Just down the road was the 2nd Bomb Group, where Lieutenant Michael Sullivan was also being briefed. The 2nd BG had finally moved to Foggia in early December but, as for everyone else in the Fifteenth, actually reaching a target – any target – was proving difficult and when they did they were invariably battling weather as well as enemy fighters and flak. ‘Failure to take off.16 Bad weather,’ Sullivan wrote on 1 February. ‘Whole group recalled from mission, reason unknown,’ he scribbled the next day. ‘Non-op,’ on the 3rd. He did fly on 4 and 5 February, but again the weather was terrible, the wing formation separated and they came up against ‘very aggressive’ Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. ‘Strain of combat telling on all crew members,’ he added. ‘Tempers are short. Opposition tougher all the time. Raid tomorrow, weather bad.’ So it had continued. On the 17th, they had taken off for a raid on the Anzio beachhead, but the strain on the navigator, Lieutenant Celestine ‘Tony’ Antonie, proved too great. ‘Tony went nutz on route,’ noted Sullivan, ‘crazy as a loon.17 Too much combat strain.’ And so the pilot of their Fortress, The Second Was First, Lieutenant Marshall McKew, had returned to base. Later, the colonel of the 2nd BG, Lieutenant-Colonel Barthelmess, had threatened to bring charges against both Antonie and McKew. In the end, McKew had been let off with a roasting – pilots were too precious – and only Antonie had been suspended from duties and put up for a court martial, but the episode had not been good for team morale. Nor had the ongoing poor weather: planned raids had been scrubbed on the 18th, 19th and 20th, and no one was accepting odds on them flying again on the 21st. But, with the briefing over, they were told to get ready and then wait by their ships. Outside the briefing room, however, it was raining once again.
Flying his first combat mission this Monday, 21 February, from a far more clement England was 20-year-old Lieutenant James H. Keeffe from Sioux City, Iowa. Keeffe was co-pilot in Lieutenant Jimmy McArthur’s crew, which had formed up while at Blythe Army Air Base near Phoenix, Arizona. How and why some were made pilots and others co-pilots was down to a number of factors, but in Keeffe’s case he had fallen sick during his final training, lost a week, and so got placed in a low-flying-time group and was appointed a co-pilot. Sometimes this didn’t sit well with those who had higher ambitions, but Keeffe had immediately recognized that McArthur was both a very good pilot and a nice guy, so he had no issue about playing second fiddle. In any case, he got on well with most of the crew, especially the bombardier, Lieuten
ant Raymond ‘Moose’ H. Moulton, and by the time they reached England in late November 1943 they had gelled nicely. The only personality clash as far as Keeffe was concerned had been with the navigator, Lieutenant Don Stevens. ‘Right from square one I didn’t like him,’ wrote Keeffe, ‘and my initial impression didn’t change over time.’18 On the trip over, however, the crew was split in two and by the time they were reunited in Scotland Stevens was gone, ill with gonorrhea.
For several weeks they had been stuck at the B-24 United Kingdom Orientation Program, carrying out their transitional training and getting used to conditions very different from those in the Arizona desert. Then in early January they had been posted to the 566th Bomb Squadron, part of the 2nd Division’s 389th Bomb Group, based at Hethel in Norfolk. There they had carried out a few familiarization flights and then the crew had been sent off on its first mission, although without Keeffe; a more experienced pilot had sat in his seat to check out Jimmy McArthur on this first flight. Thus, on this second day of Operation ARGUMENT, Keeffe was finally making his first combat flight, some eighty-five days after arriving in England.
Their primary target that day was Brunswick, with nearby Diepholz the secondary. After the main briefing and specialist briefings for the gunners, navigators and bombardiers, the crew reconvened and went over to a separate squadron building to pick up their parachutes, flying helmets and oxygen masks. The chaplain now came round, offering prayers and distributing Holy Communion to any who wanted it. Dropped off at their ship, each man went through his own personal checklist around the outside of the plane and on board. Gunners went to a shack next to the hardstand to pick up the barrels for their machine guns, which had been cleaned, oiled and stored there since the previous mission. In the bomb bays, the day’s load was already stacked up in the bomb racks.
When everyone had been through their checks and collected all they needed, Jimmy McArthur called them together on the stand and gave them a short briefing. After that, they clambered aboard and took up their ten different stations. In the cockpit, Keeffe and McArthur went through ritual pre-flight checks prior to starting up the engines.
‘Brakes?’19 asked McArthur.
‘On,’ replied Keeffe.
‘Superchargers?’
‘Off.’
‘Cowl flaps?’
‘Open.’
‘Wing flaps?’
‘Up.’
The list was long, but neither pilot nor co-pilot was prepared to rush. Every part of the procedure was done by synchronized clock. At start time, engines were run up and radios and all other vital equipment were checked. At their allotted taxi time, they moved off their hardstand and began to taxi around the perimeter, one of nine in the squadron, creeping forward nose to tail along the edge of the airfield. Green Very flares were fired from the control tower, and off went the assembly aircraft – at Hethel affectionately known as the ‘Green Dragon’ because of the wild green and yellow stripes across the wings and fuselage – and then the group leader.
The big bombers headed off down the runway at thirty-second intervals, so that it took the best part of twenty minutes for them all to take off. In their ship, McArthur ran up the engines, watching the r.p.m.s on each, while Keeffe set the wing flaps to 20 degrees to give them extra lift and checked that the auxiliary hydraulic pump was on and the auxiliary power unit off. Next, he switched the cowl flaps to ‘Trail’ and continued to work his way down the take-off list. Now they were off, the throttles opening wide and the beast thundering down the runway with Keeffe calling out the speed so McArthur could concentrate on looking ahead. At just under 100 m.p.h. the B-24 lifted and began to climb. Keeffe applied brakes to stop the wheels rotating, then retracted them into the wings. Next he set the superchargers to ‘Climb’, adjusted the r.p.m.s, raised the wing flaps and switched the booster and auxiliary hydraulic pumps to ‘Off’. Gradually, they climbed up towards the assembly point. In theory, each plane would ascend safely in its own air space, but at all times, and especially when flying through cloud, they had to keep a close watch to make sure they didn’t collide with each other. They all felt better once they had emerged into the clear, bright sky above.
The Thunderbolts of the 4th FG crossed the Dutch coast at around 12.50 p.m. and then rendezvoused with the B-17s of the 3rd Combat Wing at about 1.15. Blakeslee was flying with the 334th Fighter Squadron – Bee Beeson was not on the sheet this time – and led them off to investigate some contrails while the rest of the group stuck with the bombers. They found nothing, but then, on their return, bounced fifteen FW190s and shot down four of them without any loss of their own.
While the fighters were tussling, Larry Goldstein and the crew of Worry Wart were among the 3rd Division Fortresses heading to Brunswick. When the curtain had been drawn back at the briefing, Goldstein had not been the only one to groan and immediately think of the hellish experience they had suffered on their last visit to the city eleven days earlier.
Among those escorting the bombers to Brunswick were the Mustang-flying 357th Fighter Group, although Bud Anderson was not one of them. As a flight leader, it was up to him when he flew and there were always seven or eight pilots available for the four aircraft needed in the flight, which meant nearly half his pilots missed out on every mission. Rather like Dick Turner, Anderson tended to fly more than the others, but who was going to fly and who was stood down was decided the night before. ‘There was no way to know in advance what the mission would be,’ he noted, ‘what fate might hand you, and I always worried I might miss something special.’20 But he had decided to sit out the Brunswick ramrod and Al Boyle had taken his Mustang, a still new P-51B-5, which had had all the usual teething bugs of a new aircraft sorted out and Old Crow painted neatly below the exhaust stubs on the engine cowling.
Gordon Carter, having bailed out of his Pathfinder in the early hours of 20 February, was still tramping across northern Germany. He had walked much of the night, then briefly tried to get some sleep in the snow by covering himself in foliage. Realizing the absurdity of the idea, he hauled himself back up and continued on his way, his prime motivation being the large tankard of Dutch beer that he had promised he would give himself the moment he could.
Early in the morning he decided to have a shave. He had packed all sorts of things in his escape and evasion pack, including a Gillette razor, thinking that being unshaven would only attract attention. Scrambling down to the base of an archway over a stream, he was about to start shaving in the freezing-cold water when a young boy pedalled up the bridge and, stopping, looked down over the parapet. Carter froze and the boy moved on. Carter had a rough, icy scrape of his chin, then pushed on his way.
In the afternoon he reached some sort of fenced compound, cut his way through the fencing but, seeing warning signs that trespassers would be shot, quickly retreated. He then saw hundreds of American bombers flying over on their way to Brunswick and Diepholz. ‘What a sight it was for an airman stranded five miles below,’ he wrote, ‘who couldn’t get over the fact that they would be back home in a few hours’ time.’21
It wasn’t just American bombers in the sky above, however, but also German fighters, most of which were already flying their second sorties of the day. Among them were Heinz Knoke’s whole Gruppe, who were now airborne once more having swiftly rearmed, refuelled and taken off again. On this second flight of the day, Knoke and his pilots had been ordered to draw off the escorting fighters at any cost; the idea was to keep the American fighters engaged while others went for the bombers. The flaw in these new tactics was twofold, however: first, there were enough American fighters to deal with both bombing and fighting; and second, in a dogfight German fighters generally came off worse. ‘That cost my squadron two more dead,’ scribbled Knoke curtly in his diary.22
Meanwhile, back at the airfields of Foggia, once again the missions were scrubbed. Instead, Michael Sullivan planned to watch a Mickey Rooney film at the airfield’s makeshift cinema. ‘This weather,’ jotted his namesake, Sully S
ullivan, in his diary, ‘has sure been against us this month.’23 It sure had.
To the north, however, the bombers from the Eighth were still forging on towards their targets. From his position in the cockpit in the left-hand seat, Jim Keeffe now saw his first flak and to begin with he found it rather mesmerizing. ‘They looked like vertical elongated columns,’ he noted, ‘with blackish-grey smoke at the base coming out in two puffs to the side.’24 After watching more flak bursts, he quickly realized that, if they could see it, there wouldn’t be any damage because it had already done its work. If they could hear the burst then it was getting uncomfortably close; and if the debris and shrapnel rattled against the airframe then it really was too close.
He saw his first enemy fighter planes too, watching as they flew wide past them before turning and making their runs straight towards them. ‘I watched as they queued up for their attack,’ he wrote.25 ‘They rolled over onto their backs and fired at us from upside down while going through our formation.’ Suddenly, unusual-looking reddish balls began streaking towards them, zipping past down the outside of their plane. To his naked eye they looked to be the size of basketballs with black speckles in the middle. ‘What in the world are those?’ he thought to himself, then realized they were 20mm cannon shells.
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