by Stout, Jay
At the start of the fighting in 1939—the same year that Righetti enlisted as an aviation cadet—the Luftwaffe leadership failed to anticipate what the war would become. And that failure to anticipate translated into a failure to plan and provision. The result was that during the closing months of the war, Germany was fighting the Allies with an air force that didn’t have enough aircraft of the right types. And aircraft numbers and types notwithstanding, the Luftwaffe didn’t have enough pilots. Even then, the majority of the pilots it did field were woefully undertrained when compared to their American and British—and even Soviet—counterparts.
That Germany was desperate is an understatement. A sign of that desperation was that the Third Reich committed wholesale to a broad spectrum of “wonder weapons.” In reality, most of these schemes were little more than ill-considered shortcuts and hackneyed concepts that Germany’s leadership hoped would substitute for the difficult work it had neglected to complete years earlier. Even the much-feared V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 guided ballistic missile—both of which had pre-war origins—were examples of misguided efforts that consumed tremendous resources but had little effect on the war.
The Me-163 rocket-propelled fighter was another interesting but flawed concept, with results that came far from justifying the people and material that were spent on it. Despite its high speed and heavy armament—two 30-millimeter cannon—it knocked down only about a dozen American bombers. Likewise, the He-162 and Ba-349 were designed as easy-to-fly fighters readily manufactured from non-strategic materials. They were intended to be produced in prodigious numbers and flown by pilots who had received only rudimentary training. Neither became operational and the notion that they might have been effective against the massive American bomber formations and their aggressive fighter escorts was absurd. In the aggregate, these many failed schemes were a waste that reflected the inability of the Luftwaffe’s leadership to understand what the Allies were capable of, and to prioritize resources against them.
Righetti encountered another of these ill-considered concepts on February 3, 1945, when the 55th escorted the Eighth’s heavy bombers to Berlin. The group’s mission summary report noted that the bomber men made quite an impression: “Bomb results exuberantly observed, as fires, explosions and smoke gutted city.” Still, it came at a cost as the report counted five bombers and one fighter down in the target area.
After escorting the bombers out of the Berlin area and through Bremen, Righetti, at the head of the 55th, redeployed the group. He left one formation with the bombers and took two squadrons “downstairs” for a low-altitude sweep on the return route. When the 38th Fighter Squadron called out targets that he couldn’t see, he cleared it off on its own.
His formation continued to shrink: “In the area of the Muritz See, my Red Flight leader called in a Ju-88 below the undercast which was not visible to me, but as my radio was working only intermittently, I did not receive his call.”2 William Lewis, the leader of Red Flight, dived on the enemy aircraft. “It was a Ju-88 night fighter. The turret gunner fired a short burst as I was closing in,” reported Lewis. “However, he scored no strikes on my aircraft. I opened fire at about 75-to-100 yards and closed to about 25 yards. I saw many strikes about the canopy and both engines.”3 As Lewis pulled away he noted that the German aircraft’s right engine was afire. It is likely the pilot was dead or wounded as the Ju-88 made only a couple of shallow turns before it smashed into a field and exploded.
Meanwhile, Righetti pressed westward on a course that took the formation about twenty miles southeast of Hamburg. “White Flight, which I was leading, continued on seeking targets of opportunity,” he recalled. “Near Boizenburg on the Elbe River, I located a small, clear hole in the otherwise unbroken undercast. In this hole there were two locomotives. I called them in and started down, needing only one ninety-degree turn to starboard to set me up in firing position.”
Flying conditions below the clouds were poor as the visibility was only about two miles. At a cruising speed of more than 250 miles per hour, the flight could cover this distance in less than thirty seconds. Moreover, the bases of the clouds were ragged and reached down to only about six hundred feet in places. Consequently, the men had to watch not only for the enemy, but also for obstacles such as power lines, or rising terrain.
Righetti pointed White Flight—echeloned to his right in a half-mile-long string—at the two trains. At the same time he called out assignments over the radio. This served two purposes. First, it helped ensure the formation’s firepower was maximized across the targets. Second, it reduced the risk of midair collisions; aircraft firing on the same target tended to converge on the same point in the sky. It was then that Righetti spotted three, odd-looking, aircraft-on-aircraft combinations to his left-front and below, flying in the opposite direction in a loose, inverted-V formation. Each combination appeared to be a bomber with a fighter mounted atop.
The contraptions that caught Righetti’s attention were actually hybrid combinations of fighters affixed to Ju-88 bombers. German pilots informally called the arrangement a Huckepack (piggyback), or Vater und Sohn (father and son). More generally, the arrangement was called a Mistel. Mistel was the German word for mistletoe, a parasitic plant. Regardless of what it was called, it was the flawed realization of a proposal to use worn-out Ju-88s—aimed from attached fighter aircraft—as unmanned aerial bombs.
When the concept was originally presented during 1941 the German Air Ministry dismissed the idea as impractical, if not outright bizarre. However, by 1943 the Luftwaffe was increasingly hard-pressed and regularly grabbed at straws that showed even a glimmer of promise. Consequently, the Mistel concept was no longer considered quite so outlandish and the go-ahead was given to proceed with development. The first flight occurred during July that same year.
No matter how much engineering went into the concept, the result could never be better than awkward. The fighter, either an FW-190 or an Me-109, depending on the variant—and there were many—was attached via explosive bolts to an arrangement of steel struts that were, in turn, attached to the Ju-88. A rudimentary electrical control system connected the fighter to the bomber and allowed the pilot to fly the combination. The engines of both aircraft were usually running and the fighter typically drew fuel from the bomber to extend the reach of the strange weapon; although it was a one-way trip for the bomber, the pilot in the fighter was expected to return to his base.
During training, or when moving between bases, the Ju-88s often carried support personnel. However, in the operational configuration the bomber was unmanned and the cockpit and crew were replaced by a shaped-charge warhead of approximately four tons. It packed enough power to penetrate virtually any bunker or ship hull in existence. As the contraption approached the target in a shallow dive, the fighter pilot lined up as best he could before—at close range—firing the explosive bolts that connected the two aircraft. Once he was safely separated from the Ju-88, he exited the area as quickly as possible while the bomber’s three-axis, gyro-controlled autopilot held it on course until it hit its target.
The Luftwaffe’s leadership hoped to use the Mistel in long-range attacks on strategic targets. The British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow was one such target and a number of Mistels were staged in Denmark during much of 1944 before the idea was given up in the face of uncooperative weather and changing operational conditions. A group of massive Soviet power stations was also considered but the Red Army’s rapid advances during 1944 overran suitable airbases and made the scheme impossible. Instead, beginning on the night of June 24, 1944, when ships supporting the Allied invasion in Normandy were attacked, the Mistels were frittered away in small inconsequential operations that achieved virtually nothing. The last Mistel attack was made against bridges across the Oder River on April 26, 1945, in the face of the onrushing Soviets.
Righetti knew none of this. He immediately abandoned his attack on the locomotives and turned to engage the enemy curiosities: “I mistakenly called them in a
s Buzz-Bomb [V-1] equipped He-111s and broke rapidly left and up in a 200-degree chandelle, positioning myself on the tail of the middle one. I started firing at 500-to-600 yards, 30 degrees angle off, and missed two short bursts. As I swung into trail and closed to point-blank range firing a long burst, I saw many excellent strikes on the fuselage and empennage of the large aircraft and scattered strikes and a small fire on the fighter.”4
The two-aircraft combination—still intact—went into a steep dive. “As I was at this point overrunning them,” Righetti noted, “I did not actually see them crash; but five or ten seconds later I observed a large explosion and spotted considerable burning wreckage.”
“Still not realizing just what we were attacking, but feeling that I had destroyed one complete unit, I turned slightly port for another,” he said. In a later radio interview he recalled, “The propellers of both planes were spinning … really an odd sight.”5 It was indeed an unusual scene as no one in the Eighth Air Force had ever encountered the odd contraptions.
“As I closed, and even before I could open fire, I discovered that the ‘Buzz-Bomb’ was actually an FW-190 fastened atop the heavy twin-engine aircraft. As I was closing to fire, the heavy aircraft seemed to be jettisoned, went into a shallow diving turn to the left, and crashed and burned in a small hamlet.”
Righetti pressed after the enemy fighter that only a moment before had been attached to the larger aircraft. Attacking from behind, he set it afire. “Jerry went out of control and crashed straight ahead. At this point I noticed a few tracers too close and coming from behind. I broke sharply left and up into the low cloud.”
Richard Gibbs was Righetti’s wingman and he wasted no time in knocking down another of the Mistel combinations. He set one of the bigger ships on fire and immediately attacked the fighter when the two aircraft separated. “After a short dive the FW-190 was released. The 190 appeared to be unstable in the air, but it managed to get in violent evasive action during the ensuing combat.”6
Gibbs saddled up on the enemy fighter and began firing from a range of two hundred yards. He continued to fire bursts until he was nearly on top of the German. “I saw many strikes all over the aircraft and observed parts of the cowling and the canopy fly off. There was also fire in or around the cockpit.” Gibbs skidded out to the right to keep from running into the enemy fighter. “As I looked back, I saw where the 190 had crashed into the ground.”
Righetti probably didn’t realize it, but the group of three Mistels that he and Gibbs shot down were trailed by a line of three more. These were attacked by his number three and four men, Bernard Howes and Patrick Moore. Both of them had actually continued their firing runs on the locomotives and spotted the second group of Mistels after pulling up from their attack. Howes led Moore into a hard left turn in pursuit, and after a short engagement the two of them knocked down a pair of the combinations.
The fighting was over in just a few minutes. When the shooting stopped, Righetti’s White Flight claimed five of the six Ju-88s and four of the six fighters. Of these, Righetti claimed two of the Ju-88s, one of the fighters and another fighter as probably destroyed.
It is difficult to reconcile the 55th’s air combat claims that day against remaining German records. Fritz Lorbach was a Ju-88 pilot with KG 200 and was the pilot of one of three crews that were ferrying Mistels from Kolberg, in eastern Germany, to a base in Denmark. Because it was a ferry flight rather than an operational sortie, the Ju-88s were flying with crews. Lorbach recalled that he and his comrades were especially wary because the fighters atop the Ju-88s were unarmed. As they approached the airfield at Hagenow—about twenty miles east of Boizenburg—he spotted a flight of fighters that he mistakenly identified as Me-109s.
As it developed, the fighters were American P-51s and they attacked immediately. All three Ju-88s were shot down, including Lorbach’s: “The crew of my Ju-88 was not injured even though the left engine was on fire and I had to make an emergency landing in the woods.”7 About half of the men aboard the other Ju-88s perished as did the pilots of the Mistel fighters.
Although there are discrepancies, it is likely that it was Lorbach’s flight that Righetti and his men attacked that day. That Righetti and the other pilots described the location of the encounter as the vicinity of Boizenburg rather than Hagenow is minor considering the limited visibility and the fact that American pilots were typically not as familiar with German geography as were their enemy counterparts. Too, Boizenburg and Hagenow were only about twenty miles apart. However, that being said, it is unusual that none of the Americans mentioned the combat taking place in the vicinity of an airfield.
Additionally, the 55th’s mission summary report clearly stated that two different formations of three aircraft were spotted: “… observed 6 pick-a-backs (FW 190s straddling Ju 88s) at about 800 feet intently prowling along on a NW heading. Combo’s were flying in a cheesey ‘V’ of 3’s in trail.” The exact origin of this observation is difficult to determine as Righetti observed that the three Mistels he attacked were in a loose line abreast, whereas Howes declared that the three Mistels he and Moore engaged after firing on the trains were flying in trail. And in a newspaper article that described the attack as the first in which Eighth Air Force fighters encountered the Mistel combinations, Righetti was quoted: “… I spotted five strange-looking contraptions—He-111s with FW-190s perched on top, riding pick-a-back.” Based on this article, it is apparent that the mission debriefings occurred later and correctly determined, and recorded, that the bigger ships were Ju-88s rather than He-111s.
Another discrepancy is that the fighters atop the Ju-88s in Lorbach’s formation were Me-109s rather than FW-190s. This conflicts with the encounter reports filed by the 55th’s men. None of them mentions Me-109s. The discussion is further muddied by Lorbach’s declaration that the Mustangs did shoot down an FW-190 over Hagenow that was not associated with the Mistels whatsoever. This information notwithstanding, it was not uncommon for the two German fighter types to be mistaken for each other.
Ultimately, it must be acknowledged that air combat was a whirling maelstrom that was nearly impossible to accurately recreate after the fact. Indeed, the records of air combat between opposing sides very rarely reconciled to a fine degree of accuracy. It should also be considered that many of the German Air Force’s records were destroyed or lost and that KG 200 was a secretive unit. It is unlikely that all the details considering this particular engagement will ever be known for certain.
Regardless of how many Mistel combinations were airborne that day, Righetti’s gun camera film showed excellent strikes and flames on one combination, and good strikes on two other aircraft. He was consequently awarded credit for two of the Ju-88s and one of the fighters. Other pilots were credited with aerial victories over three other Ju-88s and three FW-190s.
The encounter caused quite a buzz. Aside from the Allied intelligence offices, the public was fascinated by the notion of conjoined combat aircraft. And Righetti was obviously pleased when he wrote home to the family that evening. “Got a special commendation from General Doolittle and my pictures [gun camera film] will make national newsreels on account of targets were pickaback jobs—no one [in the Eighth Air Force] had nailed any before.” In fact, just as Righetti said, the Army Pictorial Service released a newsreel, Air Support on the Western Front, that featured, among other footage, his gun camera film from the mission.
The criticism of Germany’s leadership and its proclivity to chase after dubious concepts in search of a wonder weapon should be tempered by the acknowledgement that the United States also tested similar concepts. For instance, Operation Aphrodite was an American effort to steer unmanned, radio-controlled bombers—loaded with high explosives—into German targets. It was a bigger failure than the Mistel effort and claimed the life of Joseph P. Kennedy, the older brother of the future president. On the other hand, whereas the United States had the resources to spare for such experiments, Germany did not. And of course, it should be recalled t
hat the United States was successful in developing and fielding the most effective wonder weapon of the war—the atomic bomb.
Righetti, like most men, had his aircraft embellished to denote how many enemy aircraft he had been credited with destroying. These included aircraft destroyed on the ground, for which the Eighth Air Force gave official credit. That is not to say that these official credits counted toward qualification as an “ace,” as this was not an official designation in the USAAF, and the popular notion of an ace was of a pilot that had been credited with five or more aerial victories.
Righetti wrote home during this time to describe how the “swastikas on Katy look super.” To be sure, the kill markings that Righetti mentioned were among the most unique in the Eighth Air Force—certainly no other aircraft in the world carried them. Rather than traditional red, black and white Nazi flags, or simple black swastikas or iron crosses, the markings were made up of a black swastika on a circular field of yellow or light green, with a darker green border. The swastikas were ragged, as if riddled by gunfire. Superimposed over each, was a stylized katydid with wings that spanned the entire marking. The markings were arranged in a single horizontal row along the left side of Katydid’s nose.
These were individual artworks rather than decals, or stencil jobs. Each was carefully and painstakingly created. To be sure, the layered nature of the many features required several hours of detailed attention and indicated that the now-unknown artist was particularly dedicated to Righetti, or well-rewarded, or both.