by Bill Yenne
Operation Argument could not go forward until the maximum effort could be sustained for a week. As Anderson later observed, “It was the business of getting in and out of Germany that was going to be costly. I was not prepared to accept such risks for anything less than a clear shot at the targets.”
It was not just weather over the targets that worried Anderson, it was the weather in East Anglia, where ground fog is common in the winter months. Because of the short days of winter, and the distance to the targets deep inside Germany, the bombers would be taking off and returning in the dark. Adding thick ground fog to nighttime landings with damaged aircraft was a prescription for disaster.
Until they were sure of a week of favorable weather, the Combined Bomber Offensive would just be biding time with routine missions to routine targets. The first month of 1944 began with Eighth Air Force operations on a scale that would have been impressive just four months earlier, but was not so impressive when it was recognized that the Eighth’s part of Operation Argument was now four months behind schedule.
On the fourth of January, the Eighth managed to launch more than five hundred heavy bombers, and followed with more than four hundred the next day, and again on January 7. However, as with the operations in December, the primary targets were still relatively close—the port of Keil and the I.G. Farben factory at Ludwigshafen—and attacking them did nothing toward the mission of hitting the strength of the Luftwaffe at its source.
Each day, and several times each day, Tooey Spaatz, Fred Anderson, and Dick Hughes were not alone among the men of the Eighth Air Force who craned their necks and looked into the sky for anything favorable about the damnable winter weather. More often than not, their gaze was met with raindrops, which they knew would exist as ice and sleet at the altitudes where the Flying Fortresses and Liberators were flying.
An indication of the poor weather conditions during the month came on January 24, when 857 B-17s and B-24s were launched, but all but fifty-eight had to be recalled because of the weather.
Favorable weather conditions, in northern Europe, in January for an entire week?
It would not happen.
January came and went, and it had not.
Time was running out. The campaign against the Luftwaffe was another month behind, and Operation Overlord was another month closer.
If they looked skyward and saw the clouds part, how would they know how long it would last?
Even today, in an era of satellite imagery and computer analysis, most people still consider meteorology to be as much art as science, in which the weatherman hedges his bets with percentages. In the 1940s, weather forecasting, especially long-range weather forecasting, was much more art than science.
As Arthur Ferguson writes, during January, “Argument had been scheduled repeatedly—every time, in fact, that early weather reports seemed to offer any hope; but each time deteriorating weather had forced cancellation.”
Just as Fred Anderson was growing impatient, so too was his boss. On February 8, Tooey Spaatz told Anderson emphatically that Argument must happen by the end of the month.
“By February the destruction of the German fighter production had become a matter of such urgency that General Spaatz and General Anderson were willing to take more than ordinary risks in order to complete the task,” Ferguson continues, “including the risk of exceptional losses that might result from missions staged under conditions of adverse base weather.”
Just as Tooey Spaatz was growing impatient, so too was his boss. Finally, to aid the men of the Eighth Air Force, Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the USAAF, sent his own weatherman.
Arnold had first met Dr. Irving P. Krick in 1934, when he was stationed at March Field near Riverside, California, and Professor Krick had just founded the Department of Meteorology at California Institute of Technology at Pasadena. Krick had recently leapt to national attention when he explained the cause of the 1933 crash of the US Navy airship USS Akron. Arnold called his first meeting with the professor “unforgettable,” and, in his memoirs, he lists numerous almost uncanny long-term predictions made by Krick.
“Naturally, I watched Dr. Krick’s work eagerly after that,” Arnold writes. “Weather is the essence of successful air operations.”
Krick’s method, which was considered unorthodox by the meteorology establishment in those days, used modeling of past events to predict the future. Krick studied weather patterns going back decades in order to determine patterns. According to Kristine Harper in her book Weather by the Numbers, Francis Reichelderfer, the head of the federal Weather Bureau, derided Krick as a “smug, supremely self-confident self-promoter.”
Though his “weather typing” was nontraditional, it seemed to work, and Hap Arnold believed in him. Indeed, the USAAF chief was so taken with the professor that he had him commissioned as a major and brought him into the service when the war started.
The arrival of the maverick meteorologist to prognosticate weather for Operation Argument was almost like a scene from a motion picture, and indeed, he would have been at home in such a scenario. Krick was no stranger to Hollywood. In fact, David O. Selznick had hired him to predict the weather in advance of filming the burning of Atlanta scene for the 1939 film Gone with the Wind.
Looking thoughtfully at the leaden overcast, Krick told Anderson and Spaatz that they would need to wait for a stable, high-pressure pattern to move in over southern England and the continent and linger for several days.
They asked him to tell them when, and he asked for historical weather maps. Fortunately, they had been creating weather maps in England and northern Europe since the middle of the nineteenth century. Sitting down with data on winter weather patterns going back to the 1890s, Krick calculated what to look for as the harbinger of such a stationary high.
At last, on the afternoon of Friday, February 18, Krick came to see Anderson and Spaatz with a guardedly optimistic expression on his face.
“A good-looking sequence,” he said, “is in the making.”
This was an understatement.
He explained that not one, but two extensive pressure areas were developing. One would be centered in the Baltic, the other just west of Ireland. If the area over the Baltic moved southeast across Europe as Krick predicted, the resulting winds would break up the cloud cover and leave most of Germany under clear skies or scattered clouds for at least three days beginning on Sunday, February 20.
The only problem was that there would be thick cloud cover over England when the bombers launched. The aircraft would have to climb above the clouds before assembling into their formations, but the crews were used to this.
Anderson was ecstatic, but other weather forecasters were unconvinced. There were arguments on the very eve of the operation of the same name when the data was presented to the Eighth and Ninth Air Force weathermen on Saturday. They insisted that the scenario that Krick projected was extremely rare in this area for this time of year.
In the upper echelons of command Jimmy Doolittle of the Eighth and Lewis Brereton of the Ninth were inclined to believe the weather reporting of their own meteorologists, who considered Krick’s hypothesis to be impossible. As Anderson’s right-hand man, Glen Williamson, later explained to Arthur Ferguson, neither man shared Anderson’s confidence in Krick’s predictions.
The USAAF meteorologists assigned to the operational units were of the traditional school who were extremely skeptical of Krick and his methodology. He was well known, and not very well respected, within the small world of forecasting. His reputation for unorthodox methods had preceded him, and so too had the controversy.
However, as John Cox reports in his book Storm Chasers, Krick had the confidence of Hap Arnold, and within the USAAF, that was the last word on which weatherman would be Operation Argument’s final authority.
When Anderson then cabled Ira Eaker, now in command of the MAAF in Italy, to tell him that Operation Argument was on, and that the Fifteenth Air Force was needed, it could not have bee
n more inopportune timing.
As noted, the Combined Bomber Offensive was not happening in a vacuum. Operation Overlord, the big show for the troops gathering in England, was still months away. However, in the Mediterranean Theater, home of the Fifteenth Air Force, Anglo-American ground forces were already engaged. Indeed, Operation Shingle, the big Allied invasion of Italy at Anzio, had taken place less than a month earlier, on January 22. Things had not gone as hoped. The German resistance was much tougher than anticipated, and the Allied troops had been tenuously clinging to their beachhead with bloody fingernails.
When Anderson’s alert reached Eaker and Nathan Twining of the Fifteenth Air Force, they were then in the midst of discussions with General Mark Clark of the US Fifth Army, planning air support for a breakout from the Anzio beachhead. The Fifteenth Air Force was to be a key component of what was being planned for February 20.
Eaker told Anderson and Spaatz that he could not participate in Operation Argument on Sunday. As Glen Williamson later revealed, Eaker did not want to press the point with the Mediterranean Theater commander, General Henry Maitland Wilson, for fear that Wilson would take over direct command of the Fifteenth Air Force and also prevent Eaker from participating in Argument later in the week. Spaatz took the question to the RAF commander in chief, Peter Portal, who trumped everyone by telling Spaatz that Churchill himself wanted all the Allied airpower in the Mediterranean available over Anzio.
This turn of events, on top of an almost universal distrust of Dr. Krick’s weather reporting, marked a very ill-omened beginning for Operation Argument.
Even as the airmen across the length and breadth of East Anglia who would fly the biggest mission of the war to date were bedding down early on Saturday evening, the command staff was preparing for a long night, and a very long day.
Before dawn, Sunday morning, Fred Anderson issued the order, which he dutifully recorded in his official journal:
“Let ’em go.”
FOURTEEN
BEFORE SUNDAY’S DAWN
More than eleven thousand young American airmen arose to eat breakfast when the sunrise of the first day of Big Week was still hours away. It was biting cold that morning, but that was nothing new. This was February in East Anglia. Every day, in the wee hours of the morning, was monotonously cold in February. What made this Sunday different was that the weather was supposed to be clear over Germany.
Nobody got to sleep in.
“The week of good bombing weather was over Germany,” Derwyn Robb of the 379th Bombardment Group recalls of Big Week in his memoir, Shades of Kimbolton. “In no way could anyone say that about the weather conditions in England during the same period of time. Snow covered the ground, runways were sheets of ice, and the wind whipping across the base froze everything and everyone in its path…. It all started on the dreary afternoon of the 19th when Division sent down the usual alert with the usual notation ‘maximum effort.’ Again the planes were loaded with bombs, again the gas was put in, and again completely readied for a mission. Cooks again prepared chow and S-2 again prepared the briefing. No one really expected the mission to go out but preparations went on anyway with the usual griping.”
But Big Week had already started. At about 3:15 A.M., as the Yanks were mustering for breakfast, 921 bombers from RAF Bomber Command were beginning an hour-long bombardment of Leipzig, Germany’s fifth largest city.
When General Fred Anderson said “Let ’em go,” the Eighth Air Force would proceed to launch more bombers than it ever had. For the first time, more than a thousand bombers wearing American stars would be headed toward Germany.
At Eighth Air Force bases all across East Anglia, those eleven thousand young American airmen, nearly four times the number who mustered here on Black Thursday, finished their coffee and headed for their briefings.
Held simultaneously in dozens of Quonset huts all across East Anglia, the briefings were always a dramatic affair, whether it was your first, or your twenty-fifth—and last. The temperature went from the cold and damp of the night outside to hot and muggy as dozens of warm bodies crowded inside, each sweating his immediate future.
The briefings were the unveiling of “your target for today,” which was a little like waiting for your name to be drawn in a lottery. The men who had been through the Selective Service lottery understood this well. Until the target was announced, there could only be guesses.
“More than one pair of sleepy eyes popped open when they saw the routes stretching into Germany to twelve different targets, and heard that over a thousand heavies with fighter escort would be crowding the skies on this one mission,” Derwyn Robb recalls of the briefing at the 379th that morning.
“There probably will be icing conditions at altitude, and you may have a little difficulty with contrails,” the briefing officer cautioned.
“This remark was generally made for every mission during the winter months,” Robb explains. “It was usually a very gross understatement.”
“A neat major steps on the platform at the front of the room and begins roll call,” recalls Colonel Bud Peaslee, who had led the 384th Bombardment Group to Schweinfurt in October. “He sings out only the names of the plane commanders. Each answers for his crew. There is some screwing around in the front rows as a few commanders turn to scan the faces in the back for their men. All are present. The major moves to the rear of the platform and rips aside a black curtain hanging against the wall. A large-scale map appears with the usual length of black yarn crossing it. There is no noise now as all lean forward, looking at the eastern end of the yarn.”
The black curtains were drawn back, and at RAF Polebrook, about sixty-five miles northeast of London, Second Lieutenant Dick Nelson of the 351st Bombardment Group, took in the eastern end of his piece of yarn. It was Leipzig, the same target that the RAF was just finishing as the Americans watched the curtain.
The 351st was part of the 1st Bombardment Division, which would have the biggest role to play on Day One of Big Week, and they would go the deepest into Hitler’s Reich. About 80 miles southwest of Berlin, Leipzig is around 527 miles from East Anglia, farther than Regensburg or Schweinfurt.
This morning, Dick Nelson was about to embark on his second combat mission. He glanced around at the officers in his crew—Joe Martin, the bombardier; Wally Truemper, the navigator; and Flight Officer Ron Bartley, his copilot. Their attention was on the yarn, the destination, and the lecture being delivered by the briefer.
After having lost their first Flying Fortress, Mizpah, in mid-December, Nelson and his crew had passed their first month and their first Christmas overseas, biding their time in the Replacement Depot Casual Pool, before going to the 1st Training and Replacement Squadron, all the while waiting to be given a home, and an airplane to fly.
On January 19, they had finally been assigned to the 510th Bombardment Squadron of the 351st Bombardment Group, based at Polebrook.
Nelson’s whole crew, minus Ron Bartley, flew their first mission on February 6, against German targets near Caen in northern France, with Nelson flying copilot to Harold Peters, a pilot with seven missions under his belt. Their aircraft was a nearly new B-17G named April Girl II. Bartley had sat out the mission so that Nelson could fly with a more experienced pilot on his first outing.
The briefing officer explained that Operation Argument was all about the German aircraft industry, and Leipzig was the home of the Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke and the Erla Maschinenwerke. The Junkers factories were where they made the versatile, twin-engined Ju 88, which was used by the Luftwaffe both as a tactical bomber—mainly on the eastern front—and as a rocket launching interceptor against the Eighth Air Force. Erla, meanwhile, built components for Messerschmitt aircraft, and they were also one of the principal final assembly sites for the Bf 109G fighter, especially the newer, enhanced-range Bf 109G-10 variant.
The crews were told that Leipzig was ringed by twelve hundred antiaircraft guns, and the city would be ferociously defended by the Luftwaffe.
Most of the 1st Division’s Flying Fortresses were tasked with the Erla and Junkers plants in the Leipzig suburbs of Heiterblick and Abtnaundorf, as well as at Leipzig’s Mockau airfield, which was home to the Junkers engine works, where they made Jumo 213 engines for Fw 190s. In addition to the Erla and Junkers facilities, the galaxy of targets arrayed around Leipzig also included numerous aircraft component subcontractors, including Allgemeine Transportanlagen Gesellschaft (ATG). A smaller number of 1st Division B-17s were assigned targets among the Junkers facilities at Bernberg, about fifty miles northwest of Leipzig.
Like the flight crew, the sergeants were up at around three-thirty for breakfast, and the gunners picked up their guns. These they loaded into trucks along with their flak suits. As described by Wright Lee of the 445th Bombardment Group, the suits were “cushioned, steel panel enclosed jackets covering the front and back of your body from neck to groin.” The suits weighed more than twenty pounds and were awfully uncomfortable, but they served a definite purpose. If they had extra flak suits, crewmen sat on them to protect themselves from beneath. For additional protection, the men also often wore regular M1 GI steel helmets over their aviator’s helmets.
The flak, like the Luftwaffe, was greatly dreaded, but the antagonist most feared by the men in bombers was the cold, the searing, painful subzero cold.
The crewmen, officers, and sergeants alike dressed in sheepskin-lined leather, from their jackets—of the style known to this day as a “bomber jacket”—to their ungainly sheepskin-lined flying boots.
Russell Robinson and Tom Sowell, the waist gunners on Dick Nelson’s crew, picked up their .50-caliber Brownings and caught a lift to the flight line. In combat, they had the dangerously cold and unenviable task of aiming their single machine guns through open windows in the frigid stratosphere where a man could lose his fingers to frostbite. They wore thick, lined gloves, tight-fitting leather helmets, and leather pants. With their goggles, and the oxygen masks they wore at high altitude, no skin was exposed to the air—although the rubber of the oxygen mask was hardly adequate protection. Contemporary descriptions often referred to the waist gunners as looking like “men from Mars.”