by Bill Yenne
Aside from an experimental flight of a single H2S-equipped bomber in August, the September 27 mission marked the first use of Pathfinders at part of a bomber formation. Emden was picked in part because it was a port city, and the ground-scanning radar displayed especially high contrast between land and sea.
More than 300 Flying Fortresses from the 1st and 2nd Bombardment Divisions took part in the raid, with a pair of Pathfinders assigned to lead each division. It was customary for bombardiers in the formations to follow the example of the lead bombardier, and such was the case here, except that in this case, the lead bombardier “saw” his target only on a radarscope.
On October 2, the VIII Bomber Command launched another mission to Emden, this time with 339 bombers led to the targets by Pathfinders.
“Although by no means completely successful, these two initial attempts at radar bombing gave room for restrained optimism regarding the new techniques,” Arthur Ferguson writes, summarizing the ORS report on the Emden “blind bombing” missions. “Three of the four combat wings that bombed on an H2S plane achieved the reasonably small average circular error of from one-half to one mile. Difficulty in the fourth sighting resulted in an abnormal error of two to three miles. Results were less encouraging for the combat wing that attempted to bomb on flares dropped by the Pathfinder planes. Confusion [at the beginning of the bomb run] during the first mission and a high wind during the second, which blew the smoke of the markers rapidly from the target area, help to account for an average error of more than five miles. One of the leading combat wings did considerable damage…. More encouraging than the bombing was the fact that the enemy fighters, since they had to intercept through the overcast, fought at a distinct disadvantage. Overcast bombing was obviously a safer type of bombing than visual.”
Promising results had been achieved by formations that were led directly by a Pathfinder, but it was determined that the smaller the number of bombers led by a Pathfinder, the more condensed and more accurate the bombing pattern would be.
There was also a good deal of optimism with regard to improving technology in aircraft armament. By the autumn of 1943, the Eighth Air Force was beginning to receive new-model Liberators and Flying Fortresses equipped with the long-awaited powered nose turrets, each armed with a pair of .50-caliber machine guns, to counter the nagging and serious threat of head-on attacks by Luftwaffe interceptors.
An improvement over the first generation B-24C and B-24D Liberators, which had been in USAAF service around the world in 1942 and early 1943, the second generation, which started arriving in the field by the autumn of 1942, all had powered nose turrets. Most of the Liberator nose turrets themselves were based on the design of the tail turrets, which had been developed for the Liberator by Emerson Electric.
There were three major second generation Liberator variants, which were similar to the point of being hard to distinguish visually. These included the B-24G, built by North American Aviation in Dallas; the B-24H, built by Ford at Willow Run, Consolidated, in Fort Worth or by Douglas in Tulsa, using Ford subassemblies; and the B-24J, initially built only by Consolidated in Fort Worth and San Diego, but later by the other manufacturers. Of a total of more than 18,000 Liberators, 6,678 were of the B-24J variant.
The new B-17G Flying Fortress, meanwhile, retained the same Plexiglas nose as the previous B-17 variants, but had a powered Bendix “chin” turret located beneath the nose. The nose of the B-17G also retained the “cheek” guns that had been introduced on the sides of the nose in late-production B-17Fs. Aside from the chin turret, the B-17F and B-17G were largely similar, including improved Pratt & Whitney R1820-97 engines, and had the same Boeing model number (299P). Seventy percent of all Flying Fortresses were of the B-17G variant, of which 2,250 were built by Lockheed Vega, 2,395 by Douglas, and 4,035 by Boeing.
The B-17Gs began arriving in England for Eighth Air Force assignments in August and September, 1943, with the second generation Liberators coming on line over the next few months. Many of these newer Liberator variants would also go to the Fifteenth Air Force, formed in the Mediterranean Theater in November.
With the promise of such a technological marvel as blind bombing now a reality, and with more and better aircraft flooding into the bases in East Anglia, those who had theorized and prophesied the validation of the daylight strategic doctrine were optimistic. Against a technologically static foe, all of this would have added up to a decisive turning point.
However, the Germany of 1943 was not a technologically static foe. Though they had been slow to exploit radar technology, they now had an increasingly effective radar early warning system to track incoming Eighth Air Force and RAF bombers. The Luftwaffe had also gotten its hands on a British H2S set, taken from a downed bomber, and they were learning how to direct interceptors to attack Pathfinders by homing in on their radar.
Meanwhile, just as the bombers were increasingly better armed, the Luftwaffe was matching the Allies move for move with other weapons and tactics of their own.
If the enlarging and improving Eighth Air Force was cause for optimism in the fall of 1943, that feeling was tempered by the knowledge that the Luftwaffe still controlled German airspace, and nose turrets alone would not change that. The German interceptor pilots would remain the masters of the skies in the heart of the Reich until there were American fighter pilots to challenge them in those skies. Until the P-51 Mustang arrived, no American fighter pilots could go there.
ELEVEN
BLACK WEEK
On August 1, the Luftwaffe had painted Black Sunday black, and they had painted August 17 with paint from the same bucket.
No matter how the Eighth Air Force went about its business and structured its missions, there would continue to be days like this so long as the bombers went deep into the Reich without fighter escort. Ira Eaker knew this. Fred Anderson knew this. Dick Hughes knew this, and it was why he continually tormented over “sending young men to their deaths.”
However, to suspend the Combined Bomber Offensive, or to limit Eighth Air Force participation to easier targets in France, would have been no option. Operation Overlord was coming, and work needed to be done before D-Day arrived. If the Combined Bomber Offensive and Operation Pointblank were unsuccessful, or if those who planned them threw in the towel, then tens of thousands of young lives could be lost in the cross-channel invasion. If Overlord failed, all those lives would have been lost in vain. With weather and sea conditions what they were in the English Channel, and with the time needed to regroup from a failed Overlord, it would be 1945 before it could be tried again.
There was nothing to do but press on.
There would continue to be days like Black Sunday on the road to Big Week and Overlord. Beginning on October 8, there would be a whole week like Black Sunday. The week that came to be called “Black Week” was, on the planning papers, a miniature prototype of what was to come in Big Week. In other words, it was planned as a sustained series of maximum efforts.
It had not been long since a three-hundred-plane raid was an isolated milestone, but this week was planned to be a series of back-to-back missions comprised of numbers in excess of three hundred. Normally, the force would be compelled to stand down after such a mission. By October, the Eighth Air Force had enough resources to keep going—despite the losses. The latter phrase contained the darkest implications of the week.
On Friday, October 8, a record number of heavy bombers, one shy of four hundred, went out from East Anglia. The targets were familiar, the Focke-Wulf plant and the shipyards in Bremen, and the Bremer Vulkan shipyard, which built U-boats in Bremen’s northern suburb of Vegesack. Of the planes that took off, 357 made it through to bomb their targets.
The Luftwaffe and the flak batteries on the ground had seen them coming, though not as well as they might have. Just as the Yanks had borrowed H2S radar bombing technology from the Brits, so too had they borrowed technology for confusing radar. The British called it “Window,” and today we call it “Chaf
f.” In 1943, the Eighth Air Force, who first used it on October 8, called it “Carpet.”
The concept was as brilliant as it was simple. Just as metal foil reflects light, so too it reflects radar, creating false echoes. The RAF had been studying the concept since 1937 but did not use it operationally until the summer of 1943, out of fear that the Germans would start using it against England. By that time, British air defense radar had improved toward a point where the value of using Window outweighed the potential negatives.
Window, which consisted of metallic coated sheets of paper, was successful in fooling the Luftwaffe at night, because the night fighters depended on their radar to find the bombers. The Eighth Air Force, whose Carpet consisted of narrow strips of aluminum foil, would not foil the German interceptors when they could see the bombers visually, but it was harder for the flak batteries to target them.
Nevertheless, the flak batteries over major targets, such as Bremen, were now so many and so concentrated that they could fill the entire sky with the dirty black layer of bursting 88mm shells, coincidentally described by bomber crews as a “carpet” so thick that you could walk on it.
The flak took a heavy toll on October 8, even though two bombardment groups of the 3rd Bombardment Division, who led the attack that day, were using Carpet. There were thirty bombers shot down that day, and twenty-six of those that limped back to England were heavily damaged, and many of these had to be written off. The two numbers together accounted for 16 percent of the number of bombers that got through to the target. Even if new aircraft were flooding into the East Anglia bases from the Arsenal of Democracy back home, planners and commanders from Eaker to Anderson to Hughes wondered how long such losses could be sustained.
Flak took its share of young American lives, but so too did the Luftwaffe, although the young American gunners also exacted a price from the defenders of the Reich. They claimed that they got 167 German fighters, which was good for sagging morale, even though everyone knew the numbers were exaggerated by multiple reports of the same kills. Postwar reviews of the Luftwaffe’s own records reveal losses of 33 fighters destroyed and 15 damaged through “enemy action” on October 8. This is still a testament to good shooting by the young Americans who were tracking airplanes flying as fast as 200 mph through crowded skies, and who were able to sight on their targets for a few seconds at best.
The next day, it was a maximum effort to the maximum distance yet flown by the Eighth Air Force to a target. On Saturday—despite Friday’s losses—378 bombers took off and headed east, some of them flying as far as 780 straight-line, one-way miles, compared to a mere 570 in the Regensburg missions. The targets were divided between Pointblank operations against the German aircraft industry and the continuing war on U-boat yards.
Having flown over the North Sea, and the narrow neck of Denmark, the strike force divided into three parts over the Baltic Sea. The first to attack were 106 bombers that struck an Arado Flugzeugwerke factory at Anklam on the Baltic coast, which manufactured subassemblies for Focke-Wulf Fw 190s.
The remaining force continued eastward for yet another two hundred miles. Of these, 96 bombers flew to Marienburg in East Prussia (now Malbork in Poland). It was here, nearly eight hundred miles from England, that Focke-Wulf had established an assembly plant under the assumption that it was reasonably safe from the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive.
At the same time, another 150 bombers targeted what was probably the largest port and shipbuilding complex east of Hamburg. Like the plane makers in Marienburg, the shipbuilders of Danzig imagined themselves, being nearly eight hundred miles from England, to be safer than their brethren in Hamburg or Bremen.
In 1980, the shipyards of Danzig—Gdansk in Polish—would be the birthplace of the Solidarity movement that accelerated the end of Polish Communist rule, but in 1943, the shipyards were part of the German Reich and building U-boats for the German Kreigsmarine. On October 9, the shipyards of Danzig, as well as those at Gdingen (Gdynia), a dozen miles to the north, were the targets of the Eighth Air Force.
Given the distance, there was certainly no chance of an VIII Fighter Command escort all the way to any of Saturday’s targets, but the distance also stymied the defenders, who had not seen USAAF bombers over their cities before. The force striking Anklam lost eighteen bombers, but the defenders farther east were taken by surprise. Compared to 17 percent losses over Anklam, where the Bf 109 and Fw 190 interceptors attacked with air-to-air rockets, the Danzig and Marienburg attackers suffered only a 4 percent loss.
The Luftwaffe scrambled everything they had, which was less than they would have had farther west, and found it costly. By their own records, the Germans lost fourteen fighters destroyed and nine damaged.
Except for the 2nd Bombardment Division, whose work at Danzig and Gdingen was judged as poor, the mission results were extraordinary. Given the anticipated element of surprise, the bombers went in at ten thousand to fourteen thousand feet, relatively lower altitudes than would have been used at more heavily defended targets, and this improved their precision considerably. Nearly every building at the Anklam factory complex was hit, and heavy damage was rendered by other units at Danzig and Gdingen.
“It was at Marienburg that the most brilliant bombing was done,” Arthur Ferguson writes. “There, the Focke-Wulf plant was almost completely destroyed by high-explosive and incendiary bombs dropped with unprecedented accuracy.”
As Dick Hughes and others studied subsequent photoreconnaissance imagery, they could see that 286 of the 598 five-hundred-pound general purpose bombs that had been dropped at Marienburg had landed within the factory complex, and that 35 had achieved direct hits on buildings. As late as July, the bombers were putting 12.7 percent of their ordnance within one thousand feet of the aiming point, and 36.7 percent within two thousand feet. In October the accuracy numbers had increased to 27.2 percent and 53.8 percent, respectively.
In a letter to Robert A. Lovett, Henry Stimson’s assistant secretary of war for air (and future secretary of defense), Eaker called Marienburg and Anklam “the classic example of precision bombing.”
In his own analysis of Eighth Air Force operations, Arthur Ferguson credits experience and enhanced training for the improvements. He also mentions changes in tactics. Citing Eighth Air Force monthly reports, he notes that the earlier practice of having formations follow lead formations over the target resulted in the accuracy of the following formations falling off very rapidly. He notes that when this was changed, the results for the third and fourth formations improved by 58 and 105 percent, while “formations in positions still farther back showed improvement amounting to as much as 178 percent. This improvement, which more than anything else raised the average of accuracy, resulted from separating the bombing formations with great care, especially as they approached the target.”
Of course for the October 9 missions, not having the sky clogged with the Luftwaffe probably improved accuracy immeasurably.
As it was, that day was the only day during the week on which one might find anything but a black lining in the clouds.
The next day, the “maximum effort” mustered fewer bombers, of which 236 reached their target, which was the great complex of rail and highway interchanges in and around the city of Münster. In stark contrast with Danzig and Marienburg, Münster was in the heart of the Ruhr industrial region, one of the most heavily defended targets in Festung Europa.
Indeed, the fighters were out in force. As was often the case over the Ruhr, the Luftwaffe matched an Eighth Air Force maximum effort with a maximum effort of their own. There were fast, single-engine Bf 109s and Fw 190s, as well as larger, twin-engine aircraft, such as Bf 110 and Me 210 night fighters and Ju 88 light bombers, which were now doubling as rocket-launching night fighters. There were even Dornier Do 217 bombers lobbing rockets into the bomber formation from just outside the range of the Eighth Air Force gunners.
While the gunners would claim 183 German aircraft shot down, the Luftwaffe’s own loss
records put the number at a more plausible 22 destroyed and 5 damaged.
The bomber stream first met the Luftwaffe at their IP (initial point), the start of the bomb run, and were followed by them as they entered the target area and as they withdrew and headed for home. As Arthur Ferguson writes in the official history, the fighters “flew parallel to the bombers, out of range, in groups of twenty to forty, stacked in echelon down. They then peeled off, singly or in pairs, in quick succession to attack the lowest elements of the formation.”
The 100th Bombardment Group, flying in the lead position that day, was the first to feel Luftwaffe wrath. The Germans knew that the Eighth Air Force had traditionally organized missions so that subsequent groups “bombed on” the lead group, so it was customary for the Luftwaffe interceptors to hit the lead group hard to knock them off course. The 100th, which had also flown in the Saturday and Sunday missions, launched 18 Flying Fortresses of their own on Monday from their base at Thorpe Abbots, as well as two that were “borrowed” from the 390th Bombardment Group to round out the complement to 20 bombers. Of these, six aborted over the North Sea for mechanical reasons, so there was an unlucky 13 that reached the initial point.
There began seven minutes of hell. The lead bomber was hit and was engulfed in burning aviation fuel as he began to fall. Lieutenant Jack Justice, the pilot of Pasadena Nena, later recalled in a document preserved on the 100th veterans’ website, that “his wing man, according to procedure, should have taken over the lead formation, instead, all five ships in his squadron followed him down, leaving our squadron with three aircraft and the high squadron with three aircraft. The Germans immediately came in at all of us and split the remaining formation all over the sky. We found ourselves completely alone.”