Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II

by Bill Yenne

  Hermichen’s bloody spree notwithstanding, Colonel Dale Smith continued to see Day One in terms of a glass half-full, and to think in terms of the things that the Eighth Air Force had done right, and what damage the Luftwaffe might have done.

  “Expecting a reciprocal withdrawal, German controllers marshaled all the refueled fighters, together with many others, along our penetration route, ready to swarm upon us on our way out,” Smith says, explaining how at least some of the Eighth Air Force bombers continued to confound the Luftwaffe as the bombers exited the continent on Sunday afternoon. “But we didn’t return that way. Instead we turned southwest, detouring in a wide arc south of the Ruhr. By the time German defense commanders discovered our purpose and hastily ordered their assembled fighters south we were well on our way. Only an insignificant number caught the tail of our bomber column as it withdrew to the Channel.”

  Not everyone had been so lucky, nor would the Luftwaffe be so completely fooled tomorrow.

  SIXTEEN

  A WING AND A PRAYER

  On that cold Sunday afternoon, as the sun began to flirt with the notion of what the poets call “sinking slowly into the west,” men began gathering in control towers all across East Anglia, straining their eyes against the bleak winter sky.

  It was still too early to expect much. All of the bombers that had aborted for various reasons, mainly mechanical, had long since landed, and it was too early for the others to have completed the round-trips to Braunschweig or Oschersleben, and those who went to Rostock and Leipzig would be even later.

  At Polebrook, Sergeant Harold Flint had come on duty at noon as the control tower operator. About three hours later, and about an hour ahead of the expected return of the Leipzig mission, he received a sudden and urgent call over the radio.

  “This is Paramount A-Able,” the voice said, according to Flint’s recollection in a recording in the collection of the Air Force Historical Research Agency. “The pilot has been badly wounded, the copilot is dead. I am the navigator. What shall we do?”

  The voice was that of navigator Wally Truemper. Archie Mathies had flown Ten Horsepower all the way back to England and was within minutes of coming over the field from which they had departed before dawn. Truemper was communicating with the tower because the radio on the flight deck had been knocked out in the 20mm blast that killed copilot Ronald Bartley. Despite his injuries, radioman Joe Rex had repaired the intercom to the flight deck, so that at least Archie could communicate with Wally.

  Colonel Elzia LeDoux of the 351st Bombardment Group’s 509th Bombardment Squadron, who was on duty that day as the tower officer, immediately sent word to Colonel Eugene A. Romig, the group commander. Within moments, Romig’s operations officer, Colonel Robert W. Burns (who succeeded Romig as group CO eight months later) had arrived in the tower. Romig himself arrived shortly thereafter to watch Ten Horsepower make a fast, erratic pass over the field. When the men in the tower learned that one of the gunners was flying the airplane, they were less critical of his technique.

  Then it began to sink in that neither Mathies, nor Truemper, the ranking officer on board, had ever flown a B-17—until today—and that nobody aboard Ten Horsepower had ever landed one.

  Romig instructed them to make a pass over the field with sufficient altitude for the other crewmen to safely bail out. He then told Truemper to tell Mathies to point Ten Horsepower toward the North Sea coast, which was about forty miles to the east. When they were sure that the Flying Fortress was headed safely out to sea, they were to bail out themselves.

  Mathies and Truemper refused.

  Truemper said they would make the pass to let everyone else get out, but that Archie Mathies planned to land Ten Horsepower.

  Why?

  They explained that Dick Nelson, despite his severe injuries and his being unconscious, was still alive and still breathing. They refused to abandon him to die in the North Sea.

  The officers in the tower were hesitant, but they agreed to try to talk the plane down.

  Five parachutes floated down toward Polebrook, and Ten Horsepower circled around to make a pass at the runway.

  Too fast and too high.

  Flint told Mathies to go around.

  Too fast and too high, again.

  When this was repeated, and it became clear that Mathies needed to watch an example of a landing B-17, Romig decided to go up and bring him in. With LeDoux as his copilot, he took off in the Flying Fortress called My Princess and rendezvoused with Ten Horsepower.

  Romig flew as close as he could, close enough to see an exhausted Archie Mathies in the right seat, but not so close that Mathies would collide with him as he tried to control the bomber.

  Unfortunately, when Romig tried to speak to Truemper directly, he could not. Yet another communications glitch compelled him to relay his messages for Mathies to Truemper by way of the control tower.

  By now, the rest of the 351st Bombardment Group had started to return, but in order to keep Polebrook clear for Ten Horsepower, Burns declared an emergency and ordered them to divert to the airfield at Glatton, the home of the 457th Bombardment Group, which was about three miles to the east.

  By this time, however, Ten Horsepower and My Princess had strayed south of Polebrook by about five miles and were closer to the field at Molesworth, home of the 303rd Bombardment Group. Most of the 303rd’s aircraft had returned, so Romig and LeDoux briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of trying to bring Ten Horsepower down there.

  As they approached Polebrook to try again, Truemper and Mathies abruptly made the decision to try putting Ten Horsepower down in a large field. Romig tried to instruct them to land on the downslope of this field, but by then, Archie Mathies was already committed, and he proceeded to land uphill.

  At first, it looked as though they were going to make it, but this was not to be.

  Mathies and Truemper were killed on impact in their valiant, failed effort to save Dick Nelson.

  On that day back in 1929, on the trestle outside Library, Pennsylvania, Archie Mathies had embraced danger and looked death in the eye. On that day in 1929, death had blinked.

  Today, death exacted its cold, heartless vengeance.

  Miraculously, Nelson survived the crash. He was taken from the wreckage of Ten Horsepower alive and rushed to a hospital.

  He did not make it. He died without regaining consciousness. Some say that he survived through the night, but his headstone in the Rock Island National Cemetery carries Sunday’s date.

  In Chelveston, about as far south of Molesworth as Molesworth was from Polebrook, the 305th “Can Do” Bombardment Group was recovering its bombers, and eyes were scanning the sky for stragglers. They might have been hoping to see Lieutenant Bill Lawley’s Cabin in the Sky, but they had already gotten the word from several people who had seen it go down. It was in a nearly vertical dive with an engine on fire. They knew that was one of those things from which you don’t often walk away.

  There would be, the men in the tower thought sadly, another ten empty bunks at Chelveston that night.

  There may have been a glance toward the sky to see if there might be a Cabin in it, but there was no Cabin. Nor would there be.

  Meanwhile, however, contrary to what anyone may have thought they had seen, the Cabin was still in the sky.

  There was no more welcome sight than the line of the French coast looming up ahead of Cabin’s crew. They saw the white and sandy crescent where they knew that thousands of young Americans in their age group would be battling their way ashore within a few months to begin the liberation of this continent that had been beneath their wings for the past eight hours or so.

  There was no less welcome sound than that of one of the Flying Fortress’s Wright Cyclone engines starting to choke from lack of fuel.

  Bill Lawley, woozy from pain and blood loss, but still in control, feathered the prop on the engine to reduce aerodynamic drag.

  Suddenly, he was greeted by another unwelcome turn of events. The
engine fire had exploded to life once again. This time, at barely five thousand feet, there would be no diving to use increased air flow to blow back the flames.

  They would soon be crossing the English Channel, but Chelveston was still another one hundred miles farther on. Lawley knew they couldn’t make it, and most of the crew sensed this as well.

  Bill Lawley had dragged Cabin in the Sky across hundreds of miles of Festung Europa, and he finally nudged the Flying Fortress across the English coastline. They were a sorry mess, all shot up and with an engine fire that was minutes away from burning off a wing.

  They had come so far, and had come so close, but they would never reach Chelveston.

  “He was looking for an open pasture,” waist gunner Ralph Braswell told Richard Goldstein of the New York Times fifty-five years later. “All of a sudden, there was a Canadian fighter field. He flashed the emergency signal and we went right in.”

  It was a terrible landing. The landing gear controls were not functional, so the only choice left to the wounded pilot was a belly landing. Cabin in the Sky slammed into grass paralleling the runway at Redhill, a fighter field south of London. It skidded, scraped, and careened.

  Now, for the first time since Bill Lawley had pulled it out of that near-vertical dive over Leipzig, the Flying Fortress was out of control.

  Fortunately the mud slowed the forward momentum and the aircraft would not have long to travel in this condition.

  It was a terrible landing, but they always say that any landing from which you can walk away is a good landing.

  Some of the men aboard Lawley’s plane—including him—were so badly wounded that they did not actually walk away, but everyone who was aboard, except Paul Murphy, who had died over Leipzig, exited the Cabin in the Sky alive.

  Bill Lawley had told them that he was going to get them back to England safely, and he had.

  For their extraordinary heroism on the opening day of Big Week, Archie Mathies, Wally Truemper, and Bill Lawley would all be written up for Medals of Honor.

  And then there were heroes less celebrated. At Kimbolton, Lieutenant Paul Breeding landed a 379th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress that had been chewed up by Bf 109s over Bernburg. He too had lost his copilot and had been hit badly himself.

  “Rather than stay in his position as lead plane of the second element and chance breaking up the formation, Breeding pulled his plane up 1,000 feet above the others before calling for help,” Derwyn Robb writes in his memoir of the unit. Two of the gunners came to the flight deck to help remove the dead man to the bombardier’s station, and to take over flying the plane while Breeding received first aid.

  “It was not until the dead copilot had been removed that anyone know that Breeding was also badly wounded, as he had continued to fly the plane without a word of his own injuries,” Robb continues. “Although the pilot was bleeding profusely and in severe pain he refused to take morphine, maintaining that he would be needed to get the plane down through the undercast at the base.”

  In the meantime, the crew, facing a dilemma analogous to that which had taken place a short time before aboard Ten Horsepower, decided to put the ship on automatic pilot, strap parachutes to Breeding and the dead copilot, and bail out.

  “When Breeding heard of this plan, he ordered [waist gunner] Charlie Sans to help him back into the cockpit to take over the controls,” Robb explains. “Weak and half conscious from loss of blood and pain, he stayed at the controls to bring his crew down through the clouds and a safe landing. As Breeding taxied his plane off the runway to a stop and reached forward to cut the engine switches, he passed out.”

  Late that afternoon, at Park House in the London suburbs, where Tooey Spaatz and his staff lived—about sixty-five miles south of Polebrook and Molesworth, and a little less distance from Kimbolton—the teletypes began clattering as soon as the first bombardment group had landed all of its bombers.

  As evening approached, the men who had planned Sunday’s missions, and the men who commanded the crews who flew the bombers, gathered to view and analyze the results of the day’s work. Fred Anderson, Glen Williamson, and Dick Hughes were there, and so too were Jimmy Doolittle and his staff.

  “We had been up all night and all day,” Williamson later told journalist Charles Murphy. “The reports came in all evening. Group after group reported no losses or only one or two. We couldn’t believe it. We were all thinking somebody’s going to get wiped out, somebody’s going to say he was cut to pieces. When all the reports were in and we added up the totals the figures were unbelievable.”

  The men who gathered on Sunday night at Park House were expecting to learn of two hundred lost bombers and two thousand lost crewmen. They learned that the Eighth Air Force had lost only twenty-one bombers and four fighters shot down. Losses were losses, but the commanders fixated on those who might have been lost but who were now snoring in their bunks across East Anglia.

  The 1st Bombardment Division reported that seven of its Flying Fortresses had gone down, and one had to be written off after it returned. The division had lost seven men killed in action—including Archie Mathies and Wally Truemper—and seventy-two were listed as missing after bailing out over Germany.

  For the 2nd Bombardment Division, eight Liberators were lost and three written off. The division reported ten men killed in action and seventy-seven missing. The 3rd Bombardment Division lost six bombers, plus one write-off, three men killed in action, and sixty missing.

  Reconnaissance aircraft had been over each of the targets roughly ninety minutes after the bombers had departed.

  As soon as they returned to England, the film from their cameras was processed, and the photos were hand delivered to the gathering at Park House. With these and the teletyped reports that were still coming in, Spaatz, Anderson, Doolittle, Hughes, and the others began putting together a picture of what the crews and their bombers had accomplished.

  The 1st Bombardment Division reported that of the 417 Flying Fortresses that it sent against the arc of aircraft industry sites around Leipzig, 239 had bombed their primary targets. Another 44 bombed Oschersleben, while 37 attacked Bernburg.

  The 2nd Division put 26 Liberators over the primary targets around Braunschweig, and 71 over Helmstedt and Oschersleben, while 87 attacked Gotha. Of the 314 Flying Fortresses of the 3rd Division, 105 reached the Tutow complex, while 76 bombed the Marienehe Heinkel plant near Rostock, and 115 bombed other targets in the area.

  The damage at Leipzig was especially extensive. The reconnaissance photos showed, and the Strategic Bombing Survey later confirmed, that the serious destruction that had occurred at all four Allgemeine Transportanlagen Gesellschaft plants included structural damage and impairment to critical machine tools. Erla Maschinenwerke GmbH also took a heavy hit, especially at Heiterblick and the final assembly facility at Mockau.

  In the wartime history of the 384th Bombardment Group, Quentin Bland, the group’s official historian, working with Linda and Vic FayersHallin, compiled a collection of firsthand accounts. Staff Sergeant Richard Hughes, the ball turret gunner in Mr. Five by Five, had an extraordinary view of Leipzig when “the whole place blacked up as soon as the bombs hit. The bomb blasts were like little lights flicking on and off among the buildings down there.”

  “We had the most perfect bombing conditions I’ve ever seen,” Lieutenant James Miller, the copilot of the 384th Bombardment Group’s Tame Wolf said as he was debriefed on Sunday night. “There was a big hole in the clouds for a 20-mile radius around the target. The first bomb hit right in between two hangars, and the rest fell in a perfect pattern. If we didn’t shake that place today we’ll never hit anything.”

  Meanwhile, the Eighth Air Force bomber gunners claimed to have sixty-five Luftwaffe interceptors. While this is probably an exaggeration because of the usual incidence of double claims, the claims of sixty-one enemy fighters downed by escorting fighters can be considered accurate. Given the loss of just four of the escorts, their results for the day w
ere cause for celebration.

  “It was not till late in the evening that the reports came in from the last groups to get back to their fields,” Hughes adds of the long vigil at Park House that night. “As the figures came in hourly it became clearer and clearer that we had achieved an astounding victory at minimum cost. Every target had been hit, and hit well, and our casualties had been under five percent of the force engaged. General Spaatz drew his first easy breath and took off for Italy.”

  As Arthur Ferguson best summarizes Day One of Big Week, “That the first mission was attempted can be attributed to the stubborn refusal of General Anderson to allow an opportunity, even a dubious one [because of the weather], to slip past him. To the intense relief of USSTAF headquarters the gamble paid off.”

  SEVENTEEN

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21

  Irving Krick promised continued clear weather over Germany on Monday. The high pressure area that Hap Arnold’s weather guru had promised would linger had done just that.

  As Dick Hughes observed and as Arthur Ferguson reports, “When the weather prospect for the twenty-first indicated continuing favorable conditions over Germany, an operation was enthusiastically undertaken. The feeling was spreading within USSTAF headquarters, and from there to the operational headquarters, that this was the big chance.”

  It was a big chance that would be seized, although on Monday, instead of the crystal clear weather encountered on Sunday, the high pressure area delivered what should more accurately have been described as “partly cloudy.”

  Again, as in the wee hours of Sunday, RAF Bomber Command was at work even as Tooey Spaatz, Jimmy Doolittle, and Fred Anderson were still reading the teletypes and congratulating one another at Park House. The Wright R1820 radials on the American Flying Fortresses had barely cooled from Sunday’s triumph when Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris sent his Lancasters and Halifaxes to carpet Germany with bombs. Unlike the previous night’s visit to Leipzig, the principal target for the RAF would be a city that was not on the USAAF target list for Monday.