Big Week

by James Holland

  Their first pass over, he saw about eight enemy fighters roll upright and bank to the left, then climb parallel with the formation. Machine guns from the bombers were hammering away at the German planes as they sped on ahead and re-formed to make another attacking pass. Once again, those bright stabs of tracer were speeding towards them in the cockpit and Keeffe found himself ducking involuntarily.

  ‘Keeffe, are you hit?’26 McArthur asked him.

  Rather sheepishly, Keeffe sat up again. Curiously, though, he didn’t feel particularly frightened, which meant he was probably well cut out for the task in hand. They managed to drop their bombs on Diepholz, the secondary target, and then they headed for home.

  The crew of Worry Wart landed back down safely and Larry Goldstein, for one, reckoned it had been a pretty easy trip, all things considered. The Little Friends – not least the P-51s of the 357th FG – watching their backs had helped. ‘Our fighter support today was terrific,’ he jotted in his diary that evening.27 ‘It felt good to see our boys up there instead of Jerry.’ In fact, he had not seen too much of the enemy at all and even the flak had seemed substantially lighter than on their last trip. To really put the icing on the cake, they had bombed well and, it had seemed to him, pretty accurately. ‘So all in all,’ he added, ‘it was an easy mission.’28 What’s more, he now had only four more to do until his tour was over and he could head home to Brooklyn.

  The bombing of Brunswick had not, however, gone as well as hoped. The cloud over the target had meant they had used H2X and had not been accurate, with the bombs landing on the city rather than the aircraft factories. On the other hand, only sixteen bombers had been lost and a further seven written off, which amounted to just 2 per cent of the attacking force of 762 heavy bombers. Every bit as important as the bombing, however, was what had gone on in the air battle between the fighters, and in this the Allies were once again very much in the ascendancy with a score of thirty-three aircraft confirmed shot down on gun camera, against a loss of five of their own.

  One of the pilots not returning, however, was Al Boyle of the 357th FG. He had been lost over Holland, along with Bud Anderson’s brand-new Mustang, Old Crow. Anderson was upset about losing his new plane, and Boyle’s best friend in the squadron, Lieutenant William ‘OBee’ O’Brien, waited up hours that night, out by the runway, watching for an aircraft that wasn’t coming home. In fact, Boyle was safe, although he would lose a leg and spend the rest of the war in a POW camp. For Anderson, grouching about his plane was a studied pose and nothing more. ‘By now,’ he wrote, ‘I was getting pretty good at blocking out unpleasant distractions.29 I was developing a thick hide.’

  At Tibenham, Robbie Robinson and his crew had still been on leave when Operation ARGUMENT opened, so had missed the 445th BG’s first mission of the week. Robinson was feeling pretty good after a seven-day furlough that had been all the better for having tracked down a cousin in Nottingham. ‘Finding a family here in England,’ he noted, ‘was like finding a light at the end of a dark tunnel.’30 A major shock on their return, however, had been the news that their trusted B-24, Bullet Serenade, had gone down in flames with another crew. Robinson had taken this news very badly, as had all the crew. That ship had seen them through some tough missions yet had always got them home. That she was gone was like losing one of the crew. ‘The bottom dropped out again,’ wrote Robinson.31 ‘I felt empty, like I had lost everything.’

  That afternoon, Monday, 21 February, George Wright told them they would be flying the following day. After supper in the mess hall they returned to their hut and had settled down for the night when in walked Major Jimmy Stewart. After telling them to stay at ease, he went over to the pot-bellied stove, warmed his hands then his backside, then, after a brief glance around the hut, went over to a pile of rugs and lifted them to reveal a keg of beer that had been mysteriously ‘liberated’ before their furlough by Ken Dabbs, their tail gunner. He had never explained how he had got it, nor had any of them ever pressed him; instead they had all been quietly helping themselves, but, having been on leave for a week, there was still quite a lot left.

  Stewart took Robinson’s canteen from the shelf and helped himself. ‘Well, this black English beer is pretty good,’ he said, ‘if you can’t get anything else.32 Right?’ Robinson smiled but no one dared speak. Then Stewart poured himself a refill and sat down. After a short while, he looked up at them and said, ‘Fellers, someone stole a keg of beer from the officers’ club a few days ago. Ah, you guys hear anything about that?’

  The crew all shook their heads. No, they said, they’d not heard a thing about that. Stewart finished off his beer, then said, ‘I thought not.’ After putting the cup back on the shelf, he walked over to the keg, covered it once more with the rugs and, clearing his throat, said, ‘I know that Lieutenant Wright’s crew doesn’t know anything about this. I’m certain they didn’t have a thing to do with stealing a keg of beer.’ He walked out without saying another word.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tuesday, 22 February 1944

  FINALLY, ON TUESDAY, 22 February, Fifteenth Air Force in Italy was able to contribute to Operation ARGUMENT. Yet again, the planned main target was Regensburg and specifically the Prüfening plant. The Messerschmitt plant at Augsburg was a secondary target once more, as were various bridges and marshalling yards and also the airfield at Graz, in southern Austria, which, it was hoped, might draw off enemy fighters. ‘Finally, our first trip in to Germany!’ scribbled Sully Sullivan in his diary.1

  Nearly 300 of the Fifteenth’s bombers would be joining ARGUMENT, making well over 1,000 heavies in all for the day. They would also be providing around 150 Lightnings and Thunderbolts. It was no small contribution and the first time German targets would be hit by night by the RAF and by day by the heavies of both the Fifteenth and Eighth Air Forces. Spaatz had always wanted ARGUMENT to be about grinding the Luftwaffe down through sheer weight of relentless numbers. It looked as though he was going to get his wish.

  In England, much of the country was covered in misty low cloud and drizzle. At Kimbolton, none of the crews had believed there was the slightest chance of them flying that day. At the briefing, a collective groan went out when the curtain was drawn back to reveal their target as Halberstadt, almost all the way to Berlin. Hugh McGinty and the rest of his crew remembered what had happened last time they had gone there, on 11 January: sixty crews had not made it back.

  By the time they reached their B-17, the weather had worsened and it seemed impossible they could still fly. Surely, McGinty thought, the mission would be scrubbed. But the green flare was fired into the sky and so they started their engines. McGinty always said a silent prayer before each mission, but this time he spoke it aloud, imploring God to help him find the courage. For some reason, he had a profound feeling of dread and intense fear about the mission ahead – much more so than usual. Soon it was their turn to take off into the murk. As they climbed, from his tail position McGinty saw one of the Fortresses crash, burst into flames and explode. It was not a good start.

  The Liberators of the 445th BG were flying to Gotha, and Robbie Robinson and the Wright crew were in a new ship, No. 666, a somewhat ominous number. As they climbed and moved into formation, they passed through large banks of towering cumulus, then they were out across the Channel, testing their guns while Elvin Cross, the armourer, and one of the gunners removed the arming wires on the bombs.

  As always, fighter escorts worked in rotation in order to manage fuel, as combat flying used a lot more than just cruising. Now, as the bombers neared the IP, the P-51s left and before more could arrive the Me109s were suddenly speeding past them like a shoal of sharks – above, below and alongside, with tracer from their cannons and machine guns flashing past. Machine guns hammered and American tracer criss-crossed towards them as they sped by.

  Flak was now bursting up ahead, and beyond the target towered a huge front of cloud. Gotha lay a short distance away.

  ‘We should be over our Initial Poin
t,’ called out George Wright, ‘but the ships in front of us haven’t opened their bomb bay doors.’2

  Robinson now felt stabbing heat under his armpit and noticed smoke coming from his sleeve. The air around them was 40°C below, but he had no choice but to pull off his heated glove, pull off his flak suit – a kind of heavy armour that covered his front and back – and feel inside his armpit. Already his right hand was starting to freeze, but his electric suit was short-circuiting and the only way he could sort it was by taking off the next layer – his silk glove – and exposing his bare hand. Quickly thrusting his hand under the armpit of the flight suit, he felt for the heating wires and twisted them together. Immediately he felt warmth start returning to the sleeve. ‘Boy!’ he wrote. ‘It sure would have been cold if the heated suit had failed and not gone back to heating.’3 Had it not worked, he would have suffered frostbite or, worse, died of hypothermia.

  Then Wright reported a recall order. He was furious. ‘We are being recalled when we are almost over the target,’ he called out in exasperation.4 ‘For God’s sake, we should drop some bombs!’ They began turning in formation, but as they did so Robinson watched two bombers drop their loads. If two others were doing so, why couldn’t they?

  ‘Eleven o’clock.5 Fighters!’ called out Lieutenant Wendell Wittman, the bombardier. ‘Me109s coming in!’ Once again, their machine guns blazed away as the 109s sped through the formation. Away to their left another flight of B-24s were dropping their bombs, which Robinson reported to Wright.

  ‘We have been ordered to drop in the Channel,’ replied Buckey, the radio man.

  ‘What a waste of effort,’ Robinson replied.

  ‘It won’t be a waste,’ answered Wright. ‘We will drop near the coastline and maybe hit some of the mines they have buried. We might even hit some other German defences.’

  ‘Fighters coming in at six o’clock!’ called out Dabbs. This time it was just a lone Me109 that roared through the formation then disappeared.

  The raid was turning into a fiasco, with both the 2nd and 3rd Divisions recalled. When General Fred Anderson heard the news, he was furious, especially since no one had bothered to contact his headquarters to ask permission. As far as Anderson was concerned, once committed to the operation the bombers had to press on regardless. In any case, the priority was not so much the targets themselves but more the opportunity to draw enemy fighters into the air and then shoot them down. Not all turned back, however. The 379th BG, which included Hugh McGinty and his fellow crew, were part of the 41st Combat Wing, led that day by Brigadier-General Robert F. Travis, who had also led them on 11 January. It was left to Travis to decide whether to accept the recall. Since they were nearing the target, he decided to press on.

  At the time, they were crossing ‘Happy Valley’ as the Ruhr was known, bristling with nearly three thousand anti-aircraft guns. Their formation was flying high, at some 28,000 feet, to try to avoid the worst, but soon shells were peppering the sky. McGinty curled himself into as tight a ball as he could as the Fortress jolted around the sky. It sounded to him as if they were flying through a hailstorm so thick he reckoned he could have almost walked on it.

  At Wunstorf in northern Germany, Heinz Knoke and the pilots of JG11 were airborne just before 1 p.m., scrambled yet again to intercept large formations of American bombers. There were just five of them from the entire Gruppe; at full strength there should have been thirty-six and twelve in Knoke’s 5 Staffel alone, but such had been the losses already that year that a mere five was the best they could manage from all three squadrons.

  By chance, they intercepted the bombers directly over Hamelin, Knoke’s home town, so he was able to look down at familiar hills from 25,000 feet. On his wing was Feldwebel Kreuger, who had joined his Staffel just two days before, and Knoke now led him down to attack a group of about thirty Flying Fortresses. On board his Gustav, Knoke had fitted a gun camera so that the Fighter Schools might then use the footage as part of their training. At the start of the war, Nazi Germany had been awash with movie and stills film; never had any armed forces been more filmed or photographed. Now, Allied fighters had gun cameras as standard while in Germany it was just another once-common article in desperately short supply.

  Knoke was making good use of his gun camera as he swooped in for a textbook front attack; he opened fire and saw hits straight into the cockpit, then circled wide and came back for a second run, speeding towards the bomber until they almost collided, but, as Knoke knew, getting in close was how to cause the most damage and this time bullets and cannon shells tore across the wing and fuselage. Flames now erupted from the tail of the bomber, and Knoke thought about the gun camera and how devastating his handiwork would look.

  Kreuger, meanwhile, had stuck admirably close by and was now opening fire at the Fortress on Knoke’s left; moments later flames erupted all along the fuselage. Sweeping in a wide arc to the left, it then tottered and began diving in an uncontrollable spin directly towards Hamelin. Knoke watched as it plummeted and saw it land in the meadow beside the river, from where, as a 17-year-old, he had taken his first flight – that fifteen-minute joyride in an old transport plane during the air pageant at the edge of town. That had been in 1938. A lifetime ago.

  Suddenly a second aircraft hurtled down out of the sky, also in flames, and crashed and exploded at the southern end of town in a timber yard that Knoke knew belonged to the Kaminski wagon-maker and repair shop. ‘It was my wingman, the young corporal,’ noted Knoke.6 ‘This was his first mission.’

  Knoke now dived down and swept low over his home town. The streets were utterly deserted, no doubt because of the air battle raging above, then he flew on back to Wunstorf, his fuel tanks showing empty after ninety minutes in the air.

  Gabby Gabreski and the 56th FG boys were once more on escort duty that day. Over northern Holland, they dived down on a number of FW190s and Gabreski managed to shoot one down before climbing back up to continue their assigned escort duty. Flying on his wing was Lieutenant-Colonel Gil Meyers, commander of the 368th Fighter Group, which had just arrived in England. Meyers was flying with the 56th for experience and stuck dutifully to Gabreski, but during the tussle with the Focke-Wulfs they lost contact with the rest of the squadron and when it was time to turn back for home, the two did so alone.

  As they were flying over Eindhoven in Holland, Gabreski spotted the airfield below and noticed what looked like a Dornier bomber parked beside a hut. It seemed the perfect opportunity to try out General Doolittle’s new instructions about attacking aircraft on the ground as well as in the air.

  Diving down, they swooped over the airfield low and fast, Gabreski spraying the Dornier and Meyers letting rip at a hangar. Light flak and small-arms fire was coming up at them, but they were over the airfield in a trice. Although Gabreski knew he had hit the Dornier, exactly how much damage he had caused wasn’t clear, but he had no intention of sticking around. ‘Ground strafing was a sure way of blowing off steam and it was a lot of fun,’ he wrote later, ‘but I couldn’t see any point in pushing my luck.’7 Both made it home without a scratch and Gabreski was able to celebrate in the mess with the rest of his men in the 61st FS that night because that day they had scored their hundredth victory for the squadron. It was no small feat; in February alone they had so far accounted for forty-four enemy aircraft for no loss of their own. It was indicative of the increasing superiority the American fighter pilots had over their enemy.

  The bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force were having mixed fortunes. Sully Sullivan and the crews of the 301st BG were battling the inevitable heavy cloud in southern Germany as well as furious attacks by the Luftwaffe. As navigator, it was Sullivan’s job to direct them to the target, and despite the cloud they still managed to bomb the Prüfening plant, as did a number of others, hitting the main factory as well as causing damage to an assembly shop and several other buildings.

  As they were turning for home, however, they came under heavy enemy fighter attack. These planes had be
en expected to have been drawn towards the Eighth’s bombers attacking southern Germany first, before the heavies of the Fifteenth reached their target, but because the 2nd and 3rd Divisions had been recalled, the German fighters based in central and southern Germany were instead able to turn their full fury on the bombers of the Fifteenth. The damage was considerable. Sullivan had been at his gun position when a 20mm cannon shell burst through the nose and smashed his navigator’s stool. ‘Lucky I was at my gun,’ he wrote, ‘or I would have been a goner!’8 Both the radio man and tail gunner were wounded, and the radio room caught fire after their Fortress was raked by bullets and cannon shells. While one of the waist gunners managed to put out the flames, Sullivan hurried back to give the two wounded men first aid as best he could. They were in trouble, however, because as they crossed back over the Alps and into Italy they ran out of oxygen; the electrical system on the plane had been badly shot up too.

  Meanwhile, on Hugh McGinty’s aircraft, they somehow emerged through the flak over the Ruhr Valley only for him to see a B-17 on fire. Flames were billowing out of the bomb bay and radio hatch. The pilot pulled out of the formation so as not to endanger the rest and McGinty watched, mesmerized, as the crew tried to get the fires under control. An auxiliary fuel tank was discarded and soon after the flames disappeared altogether and the pilot began moving to rejoin the rest. A hundred yards off McGinty’s ship’s wingtip the B-17 suddenly blew up in a blinding flash of flame. Shocked, McGinty now saw two parachutes, one with only half a torso and another on fire.

  On they flew, only to be attacked by successive waves of enemy fighters. Of the Little Friends, there was no sign. The Luftwaffe seemed to be everywhere: Me109s, Focke-Wulfs, Ju88s, Me110s, Me210s, all swarming around them like angry bees. The sky was now clear and McGinty’s eyes were smarting from straining into the sun. He attempted to concentrate on maintaining the firing discipline he always tried to use, despite the mayhem outside. His twin .50-calibre machine guns had a fast rate of fire of around 800 r.p.m. Each box of ammo held five hundred rounds, so around forty-five seconds’ worth of firing time. Long, sustained bursts of fire were not effective, however, and McGinty had learned to shoot short bursts of just a handful of rounds at a time and alternately with each of the brace of machine guns. The moment a fighter broke off, McGinty also stopped firing at him, even though as the enemy turned away he would often show the juicy target of his underside; McGinty knew German fighter pilots operated in fours and that if he was focused on trying to shoot down a plane that was no longer a direct threat, he would not see the other three fighters rolling in behind.