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

by Bill Yenne

  “We were going down and we were too low for all of us to jump in safety,” Breitenbach continues, writing in his story “The Last Flight of a Flying Fortress,” which is excerpted in Harry Gobrecht’s anthology Might in Flight, “Things happened so fast, it is hard to say what really happened. We were all crouched down and waiting for the first bounce. It came and plenty hard. We bounced up into the air, came down again with a loud crash, and were sliding along the ground, taking fences and everything along with us. Things were flying all around inside the ship: ammunition, radio sets, flares, and boxes of all kinds. A thousand thoughts passed before me. Will the plane catch fire and blow up? Will we crash into a house? The feelings of terror and suspense that gripped us can’t be put on paper.”

  The fact that only one Eighth Air Force division was over northern Germany on Tuesday, as opposed to three on Sunday and Monday, gave the Luftwaffe a much higher attacker-to-defender ratio, thus increasing their effectiveness. Indeed, it was a good day for the Luftwaffe and Big Week’s worst day of losses for the Eighth Air Force.

  Of the 430 bombers credited with bombing a target, 41 were shot down—mostly from among the 1st Bombardment Division—for a loss rate of nearly 10 percent. Over Regensburg, meanwhile, the Fifteenth Air Force lost 14 of its aircraft, a loss rate of 12 percent. The escort force, meanwhile, lost three Mustangs and eight Thunderbolts, while claiming approximately 60 Luftwaffe aircraft.

  As Anderson, Williamson, and Hughes studied Tuesday’s results that night, the reconnaissance photos brought further disappointment. The Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke facilities at Aschersleben were seen as having been 50 percent destroyed, while the facilities of the Junkers suppliers at Bernburg were perceived as having been more than 70 percent destroyed. However, elsewhere, the Eighth Air Force had little to show for Tuesday’s efforts, nor had the Fifteenth Air Force made a serious impact at Regensburg.

  The men of the 379th Bombardment Group, who had dropped 110 tons of bombs on Wernigerode, which looked a bit like a storybook village as they flew over, felt a little queasy.

  “Later, back at the base, they would tell us that the town of Wernigerode was a [rest and recuperation] home for the Luftwaffe, so we might have taken out some experienced German pilots in what appeared to some of us as a senseless killing of civilians,” Jesse Pitts recalls. “We suspected, though, that this was a story put out by our PR officers to alleviate our guilt. On our last few missions, many of us had lost our sensitivity about targets. As I had experienced on my last pass, when the Germans bombed London, they made no pretense of going for strategic targets, so why should we?”

  His group had lost four aircraft that day, leaving forty empty bunks in Kimbolton. Colonel Mo Preston’s aircraft had been hit and he was wounded badly enough to be bunking in a hospital at Diddington that night.

  The Eighth Air Force lost more than 400 men on Tuesday. There were 35 who were known to have been killed in action and 397 who were missing and presumed dead or captured. Charles Crook would make it out alive and get home, but he was one of a handful.

  There was a lot of gnashing of teeth that night at Park House.

  “After the third day of successive operations, General Doolittle, from the Eighth Air Force, began to protest violently,” Hughes recalls. “His crews were getting more and more tired, and subsisting primarily on an alternate diet of Benzedrine and sleeping pills. Still Fred Anderson drove them on. Whenever Jimmy Doolittle’s phone calls came through, I’d stand near Fred Anderson’s shoulder as he answered the telephone, and, morally supported by me, he would daily tell Jimmy to ‘shut up’ and carry out his orders.”

  NINETEEN

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23

  On Tuesday night, all across East Anglia, as the crews who had survived the day ate their dinners and staggered back to their quarters, the operation people were on the horn to the engineering people tasked with processing the damaged aircraft.

  “How many can you get ready to fly tomorrow?” the operations staff asked the engineers in a conversation paraphrased by Derwyn Robb of the 379th Bombardment Group in his memoirs.

  “Tomorrow!” replied the engineering supervisor, standing in a cold and drafty open hangar staring at Flying Fortresses with holes chopped in them. He had just put out three days of maximum efforts and his airplanes were getting badly beaten up. “What the hell, you kiddin’?”

  “No,” replied the operations man from the comfort of a heated, soundproof building. “How many can you get ready to fly?”

  “Let’s see—nine engine changes, five wings, tires…”

  “I don’t give a damn what’s wrong with them, all I want to know is how many will fly tomorrow.”

  “Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you if you’ll just hold your fire.”

  “OK but hurry up, I don’t have all night,” the operations man replied impatiently. He had generals at High Wycombe breathing down his neck for this information, and they had generals at Bushy Park breathing down their necks. “Well look, let’s leave it this way. We need 42 planes [from your group alone] to go out….”

  “Forty-two planes. You’re crazy in the head. We couldn’t get that many kites in the air tomorrow, let alone planes. Who do you think we have working out here—supermen? Forty-two planes. Of all the crazy ideas. Why, we’ve got more planes to patch up than…”

  “Look, Mac, don’t tell me your troubles, I’ve got plenty of my own. Give me a call back in a little while and let me know the score, will ya’?”

  “OK, But 42 planes. Of all the… ideas.”

  “Let ’em chew on that awhile,” the operations man said to his colleague, who was sitting nearby.

  “You shouldn’t be so rough on those guys,” he replied.

  “Well, somebody has to keep those guys on the ball or they’d forget there’s a war on.”

  The obvious irony in this yarn was that everyone in those hangars, like everyone who had spent ten of the longest hours of his life in the bombers that day, knew that there was a war on. They had seen it and felt it, or they had seen and felt the effects of flak and fighter.

  The exhausted men whom Jimmy Doolittle colorfully described as “subsisting primarily on an alternate diet of Benzedrine and sleeping pills” knew very well that there was a war on. They could close their eyes and see it just as vividly as they had seen it over Hitler’s Festung Europa for the past three days.

  On Wednesday, though, Jimmy Doolittle got his wish.

  There would be a day of rest for his exhausted crews. The high pressure area that had prevailed for a rare three straight days was gone, and Anderson ordered the Eighth Air Force to stand down. Dr. Irving Krick promised that good weather would return on Thursday, but for the moment, most of the bombers stood silently in their hardstands. As on the previous night, the RAF also stood down its great bomber fleet, sending out only a handful of Mosquito flights over the Reich.

  For the Fifteenth Air Force, and its commander, General Nathan Twining, however, Wednesday was not to be a day of rest. For them, Wednesday brought 102 of their bombers to the Steyr Walzlagerwerke, the anti-friction bearing works in the industrial city of Steyr—which had been in central Austria until the 1938 Anschluss had merged Austria into greater Germany.

  As noted in the postwar report on anti-friction bearings issued by the Strategic Bombing Survey, the site was then gearing up to produce up to 15 percent of the bearings needed by German industry. The location was one of the beneficiaries of the dispersal of the bearing industry that took place after the October 14 Schweinfurt attack.

  “Well before we reached the target it became apparent that this was not to be a milk run,” Tech Sergeant Max Rasmussen, the top turret gunner on the Liberator Harry the Horse, piloted by Lieutenant Marvin Grice, recalls in James Walker’s 376th Bombardment Group anthology. “Bombers that had preceded us to the target were returning and they approached us head on at lower altitudes. Their condition was noticeably critical. Formations were almost nonexistent and
many planes were on fire. As we approached the target, German fighters, mainly Bf 109s, began attacking the formations. The entire formations in front and to the right of us disappeared within a short time and it was then that we were attacked.

  “Gunners Hermann and Root called in to report fighters climbing and coming up fast at three o’clock. I watched them as they hit the eleven planes in the high flight formation. They were attacking with about seven to ten fighters in succession and in their first pass downed Tail-end Charlie. In about ten minutes they had wiped out the high element, attacking from every hour of the clock. Then they hit our element and we fought them into the target. That battle into the target probably lasted 30 minutes.”

  The Luftwaffe was up in force against the Fifteenth that day. Lieutenant Ben Konsynski, a section leader with the 376th “Liberandos” Bombardment Group remembers that “the mission seemed routine except that it was very cold and two of the 513th [Bombardment Squadron] planes turned back because of perceived mechanical difficulties, leaving six planes from the 513th and an unknown number from the [515th] squadron flying with us in our section. About 20 minutes from the target our formations were attacked by 75 to 100 German aircraft, there were Bf 109s, Bf 110s and Fw 190s. We lacked air cover at this point. When we saw the enemy planes attacking the high boxes it took a few minutes to tighten up our section and to move in close to the ‘A’ and ‘B’ sections of our formation.

  “When I next looked up I saw three B-24s coming down out of control from the ‘B’ section. The Germans were shooting rockets and 20 mm cannon with telling effect. The attack continued from that point up to the target. In the low section we were not getting the brunt of the attack until inexplicably the formation leader of the lead group decided to turn off course, without notice, and head back. We had not reached the IP so we continued on alone and that is when we were hit by rocket and cannon fire from attacking planes.”

  “As we had no fighter escort, all crews were very alert for signs of enemy aircraft,” Major Harry Gillett, commander of the Liberandos’ 512th Bombardment Squadron, recalls in James Walker’s anthology. He was flying right seat with Lieutenant Gerald Brown, 512th operations officer. “After passing Klagenfurt the first Bf 110s, with their rockets, started attacking the [other] formations. Although intelligence information indicated they carried only two rockets, I saw four fired by a Bf 110 into the 98th Bomb Group on our right from about 1,000 yards. Several aircraft were hit and blew up. On some of their attacks they were not too accurate, as the rockets exploded ahead or behind the formation. None attacked our formation but you had the feeling you would be next. Time went by and we survived the attacks.”

  Lieutenant Harry Hanson, a 376th Bombardment Group navigator, recalled in Walker’s anthology the terror of the Steyr mission. He wrote that “it was about enough to discourage a guy. Our flight of five aircraft lost three. Bf 109s were coming right through our formation and split us all over the sky. Just before the IP one B-24 parallel with us, was all afire, and several guys jumped out the waist window without chutes. None of our crew was injured. I figured I wouldn’t last a month. Sunday I went for a long walk alone and thought about my Dad mostly, and realized I had to finish the job. I never had a problem with missions after that, however they never got that tough again.”

  Meanwhile, tail gunner Staff Sergeant Glynn Hendrix agrees that the missions never again got as tough as Steyr, adding that “never before or since did I see the enemy so wildly aggressive, pressing their attacks in very close. I could actually see debris fly from the nose and cowl of a Bf l09 as I fired point blank. Thought he might collide.

  “I recall thinking, ‘If I don’t get this b****d he’s gonna kill me.’ His fire was just above my head right up the fuselage and I think he hit the top turret. The enemy this day attacked, almost to a man, from the rear and not too high and they just lined up on you and bored on in. We were in a good position, formation-wise, but three or four planes behind us were shot down so we [became] ‘Tail-end Charlie’ and getting a drubbing when the attack broke off.”

  As Ben Konsynski led his section into their bomb run over Steyr, the Luftwaffe fighters backed off, leaving the Liberators at the mercy of the flak batteries, who could fire at will, knowing that the Americans would not take evasive action until they had dropped their bombs. However, Konsynski noticed a single Bf 109 flying level and parallel to his B-24D, just out of the range of the .50-caliber guns aboard the bomber. Suddenly, he accelerated far ahead of Konsynski’s aircraft.

  “He then made a 180-degree turn and came straight at us,” Konsynski continues. “We could see his guns blinking as he approached, Lieutenant Ferber, copilot, slid to the floor, Sergeant Glove, engineer, got behind the armor plate in back of the pilot’s seat, and I scootched down as low as I could and still see to fly the plane. As if the instrument panel would protect us if the enemy aircraft would have hit us!

  “Lieutenant John Konecny, navigator, took the .50-caliber gun in the nose of the B-24D we were flying and started firing; it was point-blank shooting. I thought the enemy aircraft was going to ram us, but he flipped to his right, our left, exposing his bottom and Konecny kept on firing. The Bf 109 blew up. It is difficult to understand the German pilot’s actions, except that we were flying the only ‘pink’ [desert-camouflage color] B-24 left in the [Mediterranean] Theater and it was in the lead position of the formation. He may have thought that there was some significance to the combination.”

  “It appeared that we were slowly falling behind our formation,” recalls John Pizzello, the nose gunner aboard Harry the Horse. “Before getting into the nose turret I asked John Byrne [the bombardier] to be sure to check the doors of the turret if we had trouble and I was not out. I made sure to put my chute where it would be out of the way and I could get to it if I had to. I then entered the turret.

  “We went over the target, dropped our bombs and were on our way back. We were falling behind more now and I had lost contact as the intercom system in my turret was not working, I tried to call anybody but no luck. I tried for some time to get my doors open but couldn’t. I now started to pray. I just sat back and relaxed while praying. I was at ease, I can’t understand that at all, but my doors suddenly opened. Thanks, John.”

  Exiting their bomb runs, the Liberators were once again pounced upon with full fury by the Luftwaffe. Aboard Harry the Horse, Max Rasmussen observed that “everything happened at once. A fighter passing from nine to three o’clock blew off our left elevator and rudder and instantly killed [fellow gunners] Hermann and Root. John Pizzello came out… and manned both waist guns. I was firing at some fighters coming in at nine bells when from out of nowhere a 20mm hit our number two engine and wing. You could have driven a tank through the hole in the wing. [This] engine ran away and the propeller tore off the shaft. The prop cut into the fuselage behind Grice and cut the control cables.

  “Just then a shell came in past my head and exploded in my turret, knocking off my dome and finishing my guns. This numbed me completely although I felt a sharp twinge in my left shoulder. I felt like the whole right side of my face was blown away, but I wiped my hand over my face and there wasn’t any blood. The plane dropped out of formation and Grice tapped my foot as I looked down and saw him go out the bomb bay and hit the silk. I got down from my turret, helped the skipper and hit the silk also, not knowing the fate of the crew in the waist until we joined up with Pizzello after we landed.”

  Pizzello, Rasmussen, and the other survivors of Harry the Horse’s crew spent the remainder of the war in German stalags.

  “I remember the February 23, 1944, Steyr mission better than most,” writes Max Simpson, a waist gunner in Lieutenant L. V. Lockhart’s 376th Bombardment Group Liberator. “After a few minutes off the target, Bf 109s picked us up. They had yellow noses [and] wing tips, and pilots wore yellow helmets. We called them Göring’s flying circus. In a few minutes we had lost our wing planes on both sides. [It] seemed like we were by ourselves. Tail turret malfunc
tioned and [probably tail gunner] Raymond [Dickey] called out each attack and the gunners would switch to the rear and try to keep them away. Bf 109s came in from every direction. After what seemed like an hour P-38s showed up and enemy took off. A B-24 trying to fly formation with us almost stuck his wing tip in waist window. I called the front and told the copilot to watch him. He was all shot up, top turret plastic was gone and he was in bad shape. With P-38s at our side we returned to home base.”

  Eight of the 376th Bombardment Group Liberators were not so lucky, although the group claimed nineteen German fighters shot down, plus four probables. The Liberandos also lost a total of 84 crew members, either killed in action or missing and presumed captured on Wednesday’s hard fought mission.

  Adolf Hitler’s war machine had also paid a price at Steyr on Wednesday, though by comparison to other places and other days during Big Week, the price had been less than exorbitant.

  The Fifteenth Air Force knocked out 20 percent of the Steyr Walzlagerwerke, which could be extrapolated as about 3 percent of the antifriction bearing needs of German industry.

  TWENTY

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24

  Looking ahead to Thursday, Dr. Irving Krick asserted that good weather was sure to be in store again, and Fred Anderson sent orders to Doolittle to prepare accordingly.

  “For us, this was the ‘make or break’ of the whole air war,” Dick Hughes said enthusiastically, “and we were determined not to let a single Eighth Air Force bomber sit around as long as this fantastic freak of weather lasted.”

  As Krick promised, the “fantastic freak” was back, and it was time to resume the maximum effort program.

  For five combat wings of the Eighth Air Force 1st Bombardment Division, Thursday would be an opportunity to make up for its aborted maximum effort against Schweinfurt on Tuesday. When the curtain over the operations map came up, lines of red and blue yarn come together deep in the heart of Hitler’s Reich. It was like a metaphor for the pit of your stomach, which is where the crews took it, and took it hard.