by Bill Yenne
“The distance was too great to see aircraft, but not their telltale contrails,” Dale Smith, leading the 384th Group, recalled. “No doubt these contrails were being made by enemy fighters launched late from southern Germany. I asked the tail gunner if we were generating contrails. ‘Affirmative,’ he reported, ‘heavy ones.’ Sometimes a combat wing would make so many contrails that it appeared to be a long cirrus cloud. Oh, oh, I thought. If I could see that Luftwaffe leader’s contrails, he could see mine. Yet in the late afternoon we were somewhat up sun from him, and I hoped he hadn’t yet spotted us. So I immediately took the wing down into warmer air where we produced no contrails. It worked. The enemy fighters never intercepted.”
Not everyone over Leipzig was as lucky as Dale Smith. The “90 local defenders,” whom he dismissively describes, had done no small measure of damage. As the 351st Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses headed southwest into Third Reich airspace as part of the Leipzig-bound stream described by Dale Smith, they met some of those “local defenders.”
In the “Tail-end Charlie” position, Dick Nelson was pushing Ten Horsepower as hard as he could, trying to keep up and not to tempt the Germans to regard the hand-me-down Flying Fortress as a straggler. Meeting the Luftwaffe air defense geschwaders in their home skies was an entirely new, and entirely disconcerting, experience. None of the crew had been over Germany before, and with the exception of copilot Ronald Bartley, this was only their second combat mission ever.
As Smith had explained, the local defenders “attacked our main force on the penetration to Leipzig.” This was just as the 351st Group’s aircraft were entering their bomb run.
Suddenly, all hell broke loose.
Nelson and Bartley barely had time to rest their eyes on the German fighter, emerging out of the fuzzy haze of the streaming contrails of other bombers, closing on them from straight ahead.
The combined speed of the two aircraft rushing toward each other was in the neighborhood of 500 mph, and at that speed you don’t have much time to comprehend what is happening, much less to react.
The German pilot squeezed off a burst from his MG 151, sending 20mm shells hurtling toward the Flying Fortress at incomprehensible speed. The white-hot discs racing toward him were the last thing that Ronald Bartley would ever see.
One of them hit the right windshield of Ten Horsepower’s flight deck square on, piercing it as though it were not there.
The explosion vaporized the copilot’s head, and the shrapnel ripped into the side of Dick Nelson’s head and arm.
Across the world in the United States, Bernice Bartley, so recently a new bride, was just then waking up on the first morning of her widowhood.
Crews elsewhere in the formation saw Ten Horsepower getting hit just as its bombs dropped. Suddenly more than two tons lighter, the B-17G nosed upward for a moment and then drifted out of formation. With the copilot dead and the pilot unconscious, the Flying Fortress was out of control. It went into a spin and began to fall, dropping from twenty thousand feet to fifteen thousand feet, and still it tumbled downward.
Joe Martin, the bombardier, alone in the nose of the aircraft, looked up into the cockpit and saw the carnage of what he assumed to be two dead men. Being unable to raise anyone on the intercom, he also made an assumption that anyone else who had survived had already bailed out. He popped the hatch and hit the silk as quickly as he could. His assumption was wrong; he would be the only one to jump.
Carl Moore crawled to the flight deck, where he found it drenched from top to bottom with the blood of two men. He grabbed the yoke and strained to fight the centrifugal force that governed the momentum of the out-of-control aircraft.
As Moore battled the controls, Ten Horsepower dropped from fifteen thousand feet to ten thousand feet, and still it fell.
Finally, he was able to gain control, and the bomber leveled out at five thousand feet.
The first reaction of most of the crew was to get the hell out of the falling coffin as soon as the centrifugal force no longer pinned them to the nearest bulkhead.
Back topside, Wally Truemper, the navigator, sensed that the aircraft was now in stable flight and ordered everyone to stay put for the time being. Archie Mathies popped out of the frightening confines of the ball turret and made his way to the flight deck, where he and Moore were quickly joined by Truemper.
They took stock of a horrible situation. Blood, brains, and flesh were plastered all over everything, and a nearly 200 mph wind whipped through the shattered windshield.
Bartley was obviously gone, but Dick Nelson, despite horrendous injuries, was still breathing.
As the men looked around, they realized that Ten Horsepower was, with the obvious exception of the flight deck, completely intact. All four of her four turbo-supercharged Wright Cyclone engines still thundered as smoothly as they had that morning when she lifted off from Polebrook. As far as anyone could see, the wings and control surfaces were in good working order. The decision was made to remove Bartley and Nelson from the flight deck and attempt to fly the bomber back to England.
They managed to lift what was left of the copilot down into the bombardier’s station, but when they attempted to move Dick Nelson, they found him so entangled in the controls that they decided to leave him for fear of exacerbating his injuries.
It has been said that a little knowledge is a bad thing, but on this Sunday, it was good. Between them, Moore, Mathies, and Truemper had enough of a basic understanding of the pilot’s trade to keep Ten Horsepower level and get the aircraft turned toward home. Truemper, being the navigator, figured out the course, and they headed in that direction.
Archie Mathies, who had watched pilots enough to believe that he could fly the plane, slipped into Bartley’s vacant seat and took the controls. Truemper gave him a northwesterly course that they believed would take them home.
However, the Luftwaffe was not finished with Ten Horsepower.
From straight above, a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 dived on the airplane, trading streams of tracers with Joe Rex and his .50-caliber machine gun for a few seconds before exploding in a shower of debris. Rex had canceled the Focke-Wulf, but not without being badly wounded in his arm.
Two more Fw 190s came up on the right side, flying parallel with Ten Horsepower so close that the crewmen had to do a double take to be sure they weren’t escort fighters. As the Germans were studying the damaged Flying Fortress, Russell Robinson, the right waist gunner, fired a burst of .50-caliber lead at them.
The two German planes backed off, then made one firing pass at Ten Horsepower before inexplicably disappearing to chase someone else.
Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the crew headed for home.
Tom Sowell, who had crawled into the ball turret abandoned by Archie Mathies, later recalled the surreal view of people just five thousand feet below, standing on the streets of German and Dutch cities and staring up at the American four-engine bomber. Those in the Dutch cities waved.
At that same moment, and in those same skies, another, eerily similar drama was playing out aboard another 1st Bombardment Division Flying Fortress.
Lieutenant William Robert “Bill” Lawley, a twenty-three-year-old pilot from Leeds, Alabama, had taken off from Chelveston that morning in a Flying Fortress on whose nose, the paint proclaiming it as the Cabin in the Sky, was still fresh.
Bill Lawley’s life had paralleled the lives of so many of the young pilots in the sky that day. He had enlisted for flight training in August 1942, the same month that he had turned twenty-two. He had earned his wings in April 1943, been matched with a crew, trained at Tyndall Field in Florida, and was part of that huge influx of personnel who had flowed into the Replacement Depot Casual Pool in England around the first of the year.
In January, Lawley and his crew received their assignment to the 364th Bombardment Squadron of the 305th “Can Do” Bombardment Group. Like so many of the men amassed for the thousand-bomber maximum effort that Sunday morning, he and his men had yet to fl
y a mission deep into the Third Reich. However, unlike the crew of Ten Horsepower, they had managed to get the experience of multiple shorter missions before that day.
As Dick Nelson and Ronald Bartley had awakened at Polebrook around 3 A.M. to eat breakfast and head over to the 351st Bombardment Group briefing hut, so too had Bill Lawley and his copilot, Lieutenant Paul Murphy, done the same at Chelveston. When the black curtain was pulled back at the 364th Squadron briefing, the string of black yarn stretched, like that on the map at the 510th, from East Anglia to Leipzig. They too saw names such as Heiterblick, Abtnaundorf, and Mockau airfield.
As Wilbur Morrison writes in his book The Incredible 305th, Lawley turned to his bombardier, Lieutenant Henry Mason, and said, “Doesn’t sound too bad, Henry.”
“Who knows?” Mason replied as he stared at the map. “You never can tell about a strike into Germany.”
Five hours later, it was not the streets and landmarks on a map or recon photo that bombardier Henry Mason was viewing through his Norden bombsight. It was the streets and landmarks of the real Leipzig.
When the time came, he toggled the bomb release, anticipating the sharp jump that a Flying Fortress does when it is abruptly relieved of the groaning weight of around three tons of bombs.
Nothing. There had been a hang-up. The bombs did not release.
However, this problem quickly moved down Mason’s list of priorities in the clear skies over the Reich.
As had happened so recently aboard Ten Horsepower, and on way too many other Flying Fortresses in the past half hour, all hell broke loose.
A German fighter raced toward Cabin in the Sky, making one of those head-on passes that Egon Mayer had helped to turn into Luftwaffe doctrine.
Exactly as had happened aboard Ten Horsepower—and probably as the interceptor pilots had been told at their morning briefing that Sunday to make happen—the Messerschmitt hurled its 20mm shells directly into the flight deck windshield.
As had happened on Ten Horsepower less than an hour before, the copilot died instantly. Like Ronald Bartley, the last thing that Paul Murphy saw was those burning hot disks of incoming rounds heading directly at his face.
As Dick Nelson had been seriously injured by the shell that had killed the man in the seat next to his, so too was Bill Lawley.
Unlike Nelson, however, Lawley was still conscious.
In every other respect, though, Cabin in the Sky was in much worse shape than Ten Horsepower. Unlike Nelson’s place, which took a single, deadly hit, Lawley’s bomber had been worked over. One engine was on fire, and several of the men had been badly wounded as the fighters raked the Flying Fortress from nose to tail.
To add to their problems, Cabin in the Sky was in a steep, almost vertical dive with a full bomb load.
They were going down.
However, Bill Lawley decided not to let this happen.
He jerked back on the yoke, but Paul Murphy’s lifeless body had fallen forward onto his and was pushing the bomber ever downward.
Though his right hand was badly injured and essentially useless, Bill Lawley managed to maul Murphy’s body off the controls and then strain with all he could do with his left hand to get the bomber into level flight at about twelve thousand feet.
As on the flight deck of Ten Horsepower, blood was splattered everywhere.
“In the excitement of the moment he had felt sharp pains,” Wilbur Morrison writes of Lawley’s discovery that he too had been badly wounded. “Only when he wiped his hand across his face and saw the blood was he fully aware that he had been hit by the exploding shell.”
While he was pulling out of the dive it had not really mattered, but now that he had managed to level out, Lawley needed to see where he was going, and he would have liked to see his instruments. Accomplishing this necessitated the grisly task of cleaning Murphy’s blood and shreds of his flesh—not to mention no small amount of Lawley’s own blood—from the windshield and the instrument panel.
As he was doing this, the Luftwaffe hit Cabin in the Sky once again.
Lawley instinctively took evasive action, and the fighters broke off their attack. They probably figured that this Flying Fortress was a goner and not worth their attention when the sky was so full of other bombers.
As the engine fire seemed to be getting out of control, Lawley managed deftly to maneuver the plane in such a way that the rush of air provided by the forward momentum knocked the fire back.
Feeling all this evasive action and maneuvering, the crew probably figured that Cabin in the Sky was out of control. In fact, the opposite was true. The Flying Fortress was very much in the control of a skilled pilot. One is tempted to say that the plane was in good hands, but given the situation, it was the singular, “hand.”
Up to this point, only the flight engineer had bailed out of the aircraft, but the topic was now back on the agenda. Lawley told the crew to go ahead and jump.
“We can’t bail out!” Sergeant Thomas Dempsey, the radio operator, replied over the intercom. “Two gunners are so seriously wounded they can’t leave the ship.”
With this, Lawley made the decision to take Cabin in the Sky back to England. He was not about to abandon wounded men. Everyone else who remained aboard decided to stay with him. Nobody wanted to give up the ship.
Henry Mason, the bombardier, who had some flight training, came up out of the nose to help. They were unable to extricate Murphy’s body from his seat, so they used his coat to tie him to the seat back, and Mason stood between the seats to help with the controls. They used the bomb release on the flight deck to get rid of the ordnance and lighten the Flying Fortress.
Though he was bleeding heavily from wounds in his face and neck, as well as his hand, Lawley refused first aid. He probably used the phrase “just a scratch.”
Cabin in the Sky droned on, with the crew knowing that they would be alone, aboard a vulnerable straggler, for five painfully long hours in skies in which the Luftwaffe might burst upon them at any moment.
Somewhere over France, the shock and blood loss took its toll.
Bill Lawley passed out.
Henry Mason grabbed the yoke from his awkward standing position and jostled the pilot.
“Stay with us!”
Finally, Lawley regained consciousness and wrapped his left hand around the controls once again.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Bombardment Division was sharing an experience more like that of Ten Horsepower or Cabin in the Sky than like that of 1st Division bombers who had avoided the “90 local defenders.”
Over the 2nd Division target area, which spanned a one-hundred-mile swath of German airspace between Braunschweig and Gotha, the Liberators were intercepted by the heavily armed Bf 110 interceptors of Jagdgeschwader 11.
As Wright Lee, a navigator with the 445th Bombardment Group, wrote in his memoirs, the Germans attacked just as the Liberators were approaching Braunschweig.
“Something was wrong,” Lee recalls of the approach to the target. “We were almost on the bomb run and no flak or fighters until 1:18 p.m….then the sky seemed to fill immediately with a host of Nazi planes. They came out of nowhere and we were all kept busy calling off enemy fighter positions and firing when the chance came. I had put up my navigation table and was standing by to ‘toggle’ the bombs, when someone shouted over the interphone, ‘Fighter high at 12 o’clock. He’s coming in on us.’ The nose and upper turrets responded immediately, swinging their guns forward and upward, while the others of us forward—pilot, copilot and navigator—were cringing from the bursting 2Omm shells just outside the windows. The German fighter poured them in but we felt no direct hits. Simultaneously our plane shook violently from nose to tail.”
What Lee described was the heavy vibration of multiple machine guns hammering away simultaneously.
“The nose and upper turrets were blasting away at the same time at the onrushing fighter,” he explains. “Our bullets tore into his right wing and fuselage. Black smoke burst from this Fw 190 as he pu
lled up and over our plane, seemingly only a few feet from our heads. Within an instant the waist gunner, Eugene Dueben, shouted into the interphone ‘Hey, two fighters just ran together behind us.’ Later, he told us that while the two turrets were blazing away at the attacking fighter forward, a Bf 109 came up from under the formation for a belly attack, completed an unsuccessful pass, zoomed up and over and collided with the nose attacking Fw 190 right behind us. Both planes went spiraling down in flames and we were credited with two ‘kills’ that day.”
Over the target, Lee was surprised to see that the Luftwaffe interceptors continued to attack, despite the presence of German antiaircraft fire exploding all around them. As the 445th exited the target area, Liberators started dropping one by one.
“Another of our Group’s ships, the Sky Wolfe, suddenly began dropping with its nose down. He fell right through our formation between [Lieutenant] Winn’s plane and ours, nearly taking Winn’s wing with him. Our tail gunner watched him continue his helpless spiral downward and he finally blew up. No chutes were observed.
“Meanwhile, the attacks continued with the same fury as when they started and enemy fighters shot down two from the 389th Bomb Group, a part of our [2nd Combat] Wing. In contrast to the air battle’s utter horror, it was a picturesque view as we watched the many descending parachutes blend into the terrain’s snow covered background…. Another Liberator from our Group began falling behind and suddenly the entire tail section fell off. The plane nosed up, went into a spin, burst into flames, then exploded…. A half hour after the attack started, the enemy activity ceased, but the toll on us was great. Our Wing of 70 planes had lost seven.”
One Luftwaffe pilot in particular became the scourge of the B-24 force. Major Rolf-Günther Hermichen, who had transferred from Jagdgeschwader 26 in October 1943 to become Gruppenkommandeur with I Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 11, shot down four Liberators in the space of eighteen minutes on Sunday.
Beginning at 1:27 P.M., he chased the 2nd Division formations from Holzminden in Lower Saxony toward Gotha, claiming two of the four Liberators in the first three minutes of his relentless spree. Hermichen ended the day with fifty-two aerial victories out of his eventual career total of sixty-four. Of these, twenty-six would be four-engine heavy bombers.