In Italy, the day had also dawned cold and clear, so a hundred Fortresses and a similar number of Liberators attacked the Steyr-Daimler-Puch aircraft factory at Steyr in Austria. Among those due to fly were bombardier Lieutenant Michael Sullivan and the McKew crew on The Second Was First. The target was the same that had been listed the previous day – the 2nd BG, including the McKew crew, had been sent off but had once again returned early due to ‘impenetrable weather’.7 However, eighty-five Liberators had attacked Steyr and had themselves come under heavy attack from enemy fighters, including Ju88s firing rockets. Seventeen of the attacking force had been shot down, a staggering 20 per cent. Now, on the morning of Thursday, 24 February, the briefing officer told them about the losses and warned them they could expect similarly heavy attacks today. He then said that if anyone wanted to leave the room now, they could do so without recriminations. No one did.
Sullivan and the crew of The Second Was First were part of the 429th Bomb Squadron, which was leading the 2nd’s effort, with the B-17s of the other three squadrons following and the group in turn forming up behind those of the 97th and 301st BGs. After assembling over Foggia, they flew north over the Adriatic. The crews were already talking about the Alps between Italy and Austria as ‘Coffin Corner’, and, with the Italian coast around Udine approaching, that was exactly where they were heading. After their briefing that morning, every man on board was keenly scanning the skies and watching for trouble.
The B-24s of 566th BS droned on over Nazi-occupied Europe, then eventually turned en masse, heading due east and readying themselves for their arrival at the IP and the inevitable flak that would follow. An error had occurred when the bombardier in the lead ship had suffered from anoxia – oxygen deficiency – and, as he passed out, opened his bomb bays and dropped their bombs early over Eisenach and on to a truck factory. Realizing their mistake, the lead aircraft in Keeffe’s second section broke radio silence. ‘You bombed the wrong target,’ said the second section leader.8 ‘We’re going on.’ This now made them the lead section for the entire 2nd Division.
The sky was crystal clear. It was a beautiful day. From that lower altitude, Keeffe saw the white blanket of snow below but also, as they reached the IP, he was able to see German fighter aircraft hurriedly taking off across the snow from their grass runways. ‘I could see these multiple individual fighters taking off far below us,’ he wrote, ‘and they were blowing snow out behind them as they took off, just like a boat leaves a wake behind it.’9
As the 445th BG Liberators reached the IP, once again the flak rose up. Several large bursts were worryingly close to Wright’s ship, and then another exploded right in front of their number one and two engines. The number two began to smoke as Wright reported a loss of oil pressure. He was, he told the rest of the crew, going to shut it down and feather it, but try to keep up with the rest of the formation.
That, however, put too much strain on the number three engine. Already they began dropping back; and the number two was still smoking from the leaking oil passing over the hot supercharger. They flew over the target and, as the bombs left, the big B-24 seemed to jump into the air with a new spring in its step.
‘That will help,’ Wright said over the intercom.10 ‘But we still can’t keep up.’ He was, he told them, now going to dive right down to the overcast skies away to the west, then try to make it back through the cloud all the way to the Channel. It sounded like a long shot.
‘Fighters at three o’clock high,’ Tyler now called out.
‘We can’t stay any longer,’ said Wright. ‘Here we go.’
‘Fighters coming at three o’clock,’ said Tyler again.
Dropping the left wing, they banked and dived. Robinson felt himself lifted mid-air and saw Cross and Tyler also suspended. The number two engine continued to smoke – worse, it seemed, now they were diving. Ears began to pop then stab with pain at the dramatic change in air pressure. The big bomber was screaming. Dabbs now called out, ‘Two Fighters coming in on our tail. They’re following us down. I can’t identify them yet. They’re coming right for us.’
From Wright: ‘Are they ours? If they are, fire a flare.’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Dabbs, ‘but they’re closing. I believe they’re Me109s.’
They were now approaching the clouds and the race was on. Buckey was complaining about his eardrums, but suddenly Wright was levelling out and thick white cloud enveloped them.
‘Dabbs, do you see the fighters?’ Wright asked.
No, he replied; they broke as the bomber entered the clouds. ‘I think they thought we were going down,’ Dabbs added.
‘I thought so too,’ Robinson replied.
Others were not so lucky, and aircraft were now falling in droves. There was no doubt that by flying in close formation the American bombers were defensively stronger, but that proximity could also work against them. At one point, an Me109 dived towards a B-24 firing until at almost point-blank range, its cannon shells ripping the nose to shreds and causing the bomber to start to fall earthwards. The Messerschmitt climbed up steeply, but as it did so the top-turret gunner in the stricken Liberator opened fire and his bullets tore into the enemy, so that suddenly both bomber and attacker were falling out of the sky. As the B-24 began spinning in a nose-dive, it smashed into another bomber below it, ripping off the unsuspecting Liberator’s tail. Instead of immediately plunging downwards too, the front half continued flying, but vertically and straight into a third B-24, which also broke apart, and now large sections of two bombers were falling through the formation with everyone else taking evasive action and risking further collision as they did so.
The Messerschmitt factory at Gotha lay just outside the town. On Jim McArthur’s ship, Jim Keeffe, in the co-pilot’s seat, spotted it clearly: a large square divided diagonally into two triangles. The factory and its test airfield next door were on one triangle, while a major fighter base was on the other. Enemy aircraft were still taking off from both. They were scrambled too late to interrupt the bomb run of the lead section of the 389th BG, however, and Jimmy McArthur’s ship had a good run in, dropped its bombs accurately, then climbed and turned for the home leg.
By now, however, those enemy fighters Keeffe had just seen taking off were rapidly climbing up to meet them and in no time single- and twin-engine fighters were making head-on passes at them, then circling back again in a pattern that deftly moved along with the bomber formations. As a new crew, they had been put on the inside of their formation, the left-hand ship in a vic of three behind and to the right of Captain Wood, the element leader, so they were in the safest place in a suddenly very unsafe part of the sky; Keeffe was grateful not to be on the outside of the formation or in the lead, or tail-end Charlie at the back. Again and again, the fighters hurtled towards their formation, machine guns and cannons blazing. ‘It became pretty grim,’ noted Keeffe, ‘and airplanes began to go down.’11 The B-24 flying above and to the left caught a hail of cannon shells and immediately veered off then went into a spin. There was something unreal about watching such violence at close hand, but almost immediately to Keeffe’s left, just 100 yards or so away and flying at the same level, another B-24 was in trouble. In no time, flames began pouring out of the windows and fuselage where the bomb bays had opened. He spotted a waist gunner standing at his station, flames all around him, clutching his arms to his head. Then he fell, his body on fire, while the bomber began to tilt downwards. Keeffe watched, aghast, then saw the nose wheel come down, which also enabled the forward hatch to be opened. One man now tried to get himself out, but got caught against the nose wheel, and then a moment later the entire aircraft blew up. ‘I saw it explode,’ wrote Keeffe, ‘and then it was gone.12 It was behind us, all in a matter of seconds, ten young men dying in an exploding inferno.’
No sooner had Keeffe watched this horror than an FW190 slowly looped down and flew alongside them no more than 100 feet away, then throttled back so that they were flying in tandem. Keeffe was wondering w
hat on earth the pilot was doing when he saw flames licking from the enemy fighter and, seconds later, the canopy popped up and spun away. The pilot now clambered on to his seat and then his parachute blossomed – in flames. It was open enough to yank the man clear of the fighter, but a second later he had been flung through the burning flames of the chute and pilot and burning debris fell downwards together. Keeffe was certain the German had not been wounded when he had bailed out, but now that young enemy pilot faced falling some 14,000 feet to his certain death. ‘It was going to take him a minute plus to go down, and then there’d be a big thud and that would be the end of it,’ he noted.13 ‘What a way to go.’
Keeffe and his crew still had to get through their own bomb run, but they managed to drop their payload and lurch upwards to join the rest of the 389th, who had already delivered their bombs and were now weaving in a wide ‘S’ waiting for the last of the group to catch up. Just as the second section caught up with the first, another bomber on Keeffe’s left began falling back out of formation and was immediately pounced upon by enemy fighters. An engine exploded and fell away, then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the enemy were gone. Once more the skies were clear.
Not far away, the Fortresses of the 1st Division were having a fairly easy time of it for a change. Certainly, compared with the past few trips, Schweinfurt was proving a cakewalk for the boys of the 379th BG. Escorts dutifully accompanied them all the way, including the P-51s, whose pilots tussled repeatedly with the 109s and 190s so that enemy fighter attacks were pressed home with nothing like the severity of recent missions. ‘Our losses were not nearly as high as we expected,’ noted Hugh McGinty.14 ‘We plastered the target with very good results.’ In fact, the only hiccup for McGinty came shortly after they hit the target, when his electric suit short-circuited and he had to depend on the heated Norden bombsight cover to keep him from freezing.
Covering 1st Division’s withdrawal were the 4th Fighter Group, which managed to rendezvous successfully near Koblenz on the Rhine at around 2 p.m. with the 4th Combat Wing of B-17s and 1st Combat Wing of 2nd Division’s B-24s. No sooner had they arrived on the scene than four FW190s were seen attacking the Liberators head on. Don Gentile was flying Blue 1 in 336th FS and immediately led his section down in a hard starboard turn. As he neared, he saw the four Focke-Wulfs speeding straight towards them, tracer arcing across the sky. Just before they all collided, the German pilots broke and rolled down through the bomber formation. Gentile followed one of them through the bombers, whose gunners were blasting their machine guns for all they were worth. He could feel their propeller wash as he sped down, and also his own airframe shaking, but then he was through and up ahead was his 190. Closing in, he opened fire, saw the Focke-Wulf start to smoke, then the enemy fighter rolling over and falling like a lead weight from the sky.
The mass of close escorts without doubt made life difficult for the Reich’s defenders, and Heinz Knoke and the fighter pilots of I Jagdkorps felt the strain that day. The shortage of fighter aircraft was less of a problem than the lack of pilots. Young, under-trained freshmen like Knoke’s Feldwebel Kreuger did not really have a chance; they were still thinking about how to fly the aircraft as they were thrust into skies criss-crossed with lead. All too many were arriving and promptly being shot down. Attrition affected the veterans too. It was a miracle that Heinz Knoke was still flying despite having been shot down more times than he could count on one hand, but others did not share his apparent invincibility. That morning, he had heard that his friend August Geiger, a Knight’s Cross-winning night-fighter ace, had been killed. Back in early 1940, Knoke and a group of aspiring pilots had all been taught to fly at the Military Academy by an inspiring instructor called van Diecken. Knoke realized sadly that he was now the sole survivor.
It was an altogether bleak day for him and the men of JG11, as a further six pilots had been killed at noon in another one-sided tussle with American fighters. ‘Our little band grows smaller and smaller,’ he wrote in his diary.15 ‘Every man can work out for himself on the fingers of one hand when his own turn is due to come.’
Far to the south, across the Alps, the Fifteenth Air Force’s bombers heading to Steyr were having a brutal time, and particularly so the 2nd Bomb Group, who were flying at the rear of the bomber formation. Although escorted by 150 Thunderbolts and Lightnings, only a handful of P-47s showed up, while the P-38s did not appear until the badly mauled formation was on the return leg. For an hour after midday, from the moment they crossed over into Austria to the moment they returned again, the formation was attacked by a Luftwaffe force of over a hundred fighters of varying types.
Fortunately for Michael Sullivan and the crew of The Second Was First, they were in the lead squadron; the rear two squadrons were particularly badly pummelled with wave after wave of Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs and even Ju88s attacking from the rear, with the sun behind them, rather than head-on. Enemy fighter groups would attack in turn, then head out of range, re-form, and attack once again. Suddenly, ships – and fighters – were falling, breaking up mid-air, plummeting in flames, parachutes swinging down slowly all over the mountains. Despite this, those that were able to press home their attack managed to hit a number of machine shops and assembly buildings, but their bombs also fell in a residential area.
Seventeen bombers were shot down that day, of which thirteen were from the 2nd BG, although the Luftwaffe had also paid a price, with over thirty shot down in all, including eleven by the P-38s. ‘49th Squadron annihilated in its entirety,’ noted Sullivan, then added, ‘The Luftwaffe must be destroyed.’16
To the north-west, the Eighth Air Force’s 2nd Division Liberators were heading home. Among those on the return leg were the Wright crew of 445th BG, whose B-24 was now running on engines one and four. In the pilot’s seat, Wright was keeping them under the top of the cloud layer and at just 6,000 feet. For the time being, they were safe, but if the cloud disappeared they would be vulnerable again. Fortunately, however, the skies cleared just as they reached the coast after a tense and painfully slow journey back across Germany and western Europe. On they went, limping across the sea and eventually back to Tibenham. Two engines had got them home.
Back at base, everyone was surprised to see them. Others had reported them going down in flames with two Me109s on their tail. ‘You were lucky to get back,’ the debriefing officer told them.17 ‘Thirteen other bombers went down behind you.’ The 445th had taken a hammering that day.
For once, every one of the 379th BG’s bombers that had left Kimbolton that morning returned safely to base. The ground personnel had lined up to watch them coming in and had begun cheering as one after the other landed safely, with just one crewman killed and another wounded.
Thirty miles away at Knettishall, the crew of Worry Wart also landed back in one piece, and Larry Goldstein, for one, reckoned it had been a pretty good trip, all things considered. He had not seen much of the enemy at all, and even the flak had seemed substantially lighter than the last time they had made the trip. They had bombed well and, it had seemed to him, pretty accurately. ‘So all in all,’ he added, ‘it was an easy mission.’18 What’s more, he now had only four more until his tour was over and he could head home to Brooklyn.
Jim Keeffe and the rest of the 389th, who had survived the carnage above Gotha, had also made it home without further trouble. Taxiing in to their hardstand, McArthur and Keeffe shut down the engines, gathered up their kit and clambered down from the bomber as its engines ticked and clicked while they cooled. Before they could head to the debrief, they had to note down the condition of the aircraft, how it had flown and write up any problems. Keeffe now realized his hands were shaking, something about which he felt acutely embarrassed, so he thrust them into his pockets in the hope that none of the others would notice.
Over three hundred holes were counted in their ship, yet, incredibly, ‘Not one of us had been hit,’ noted Keeffe, ‘not one scratch!’ But Keeffe couldn’t stop his hands shaking.19 Before
the debrief they were all offered a shot of whisky and he took several, hoping it would calm him down. Then came the debrief, a grim experience where they had to relive all they had seen. The 389th had lost seven aircraft that day, including one from their own squadron. Seven crews gone in one mission left a big hole in a bomb group.
All the crews in their section were given an immediate pass for five days. Keeffe decided to catch a train to London, where he hoped he would be able to enjoy himself. But he couldn’t shift the thought that, if seven ships had gone down in one operation, the chances of finishing twenty-five missions seemed horribly unlikely. It was a question of simple mathematics. So far, he’d completed just two.
CHAPTER 24
Friday, 25 February 1944
THE ROUND-THE-CLOCK BOMBING continued during the night of 24/25 February, with RAF Bomber Command finally hitting Schweinfurt, following directly on from the Eighth’s attack earlier that day. The suggestion that Bomber Command strike Schweinfurt had been pushed first by the Ministry of Economic Warfare in November, then championed by the planning men at the Air Ministry and not least Air Marshal Sir Norman Bottomley, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, who had written to Air Marshal Harris on 17 December specifically suggesting it as a priority target. Harris had replied three days later, giving a number of very sound reasons why it was not the best target for night ops. ‘It is extremely small and difficult to find,’ he wrote.1 ‘It is heavily defended, including smokescreens. In these circumstances it might need up to six or seven full scale attacks before a satisfactory result was secured.’ If it was as important a target as was being claimed, then Harris felt it was definitely a target on which the Americans should focus.
Harris’s arguments were entirely valid, but in January he had been overruled by Portal and ordered directly to send his bombers there. Now, during Operation ARGUMENT, the time had come, and while Harris might still be privately muttering about the prospect, he had taken the decision on the chin and was now determined to make as good a fist of it as possible. Following the Americans’ earlier raid made sense and, furthermore, he now had more H2S-equipped aircraft than he had had in December when his exchange with Bottomley had taken place.
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