At five thousand feet, the bombers burst through the last bank of clouds into a bird’s-egg blue sky. In every direction Joe looked, other bomb groups were banking gently in slow lazy turns as they spiraled ever upward into the crowded sky.
There was something comforting to him about the huge mass of bombers forming in the sky over England. Seeing them all come together, it was hard to believe that all the enemy fighters in Germany could challenge their impregnability.
When Patricia reached twelve thousand feet, Ted ordered the crew to put on their oxygen masks. Each mask was supplied by a rubber hose connected to metal oxygen canisters anchored along the plane’s fuselage. At more than two miles above the earth’s surface, it was impossible to breathe for long without one.
Once his face was encased in the mask, Warren felt cut off from the world below. From then on, his life was dependent on the continued expansion and contraction of the bladder beneath his chin. The crew would now be on oxygen all the way to the target, and most of the way back.
One by one, Warren asked the crew members to confirm that their oxygen masks were working.
At fifteen thousand feet, frost began to appear on the interior of the Plexiglas windows in the plane, and the men used scrapers to clear them. The air temperature was already far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. If a crew member removed his sheepskin-lined gloves for more than a minute or two, he would suffer severe frostbite.
As zero hour approached, several groups had failed to reach their rendezvous in the allotted times. It was 0734 when the lead plane of the 96th Bomb Group turned onto the compass heading that would lead the armada across the English Channel toward France.
Eight miles back in the bomber train, General Bob Travis sat in the copilot’s seat of Satan’s Workshop, the lead plane of the 303rd Bomb Group and the lead bomber of the First Bombardment Wing. Travis was now in direct command of all nine bomb groups following behind him. So far, his first combat mission was going smoothly.
Flying in the low group behind General Travis, Jimmy Armstrong was getting the feel of Yankee Raider as he flew for the first time as an element leader. Unlike Sad Sack II, the cockpit of Yankee Raider smelled rank, but so far it was handling well.
In the waist compartment of Yankee Raider, Reb Grant was enjoying a sight that never failed to give him delight as he gazed out at all the heavy bombers surrounding him. In the rarified atmosphere in which they were flying, each of the B-17s was trailing four beautiful white contrails, long cones of condensed water vapor produced by the exhaust gases from the airplane engines. To Reb, the fluffy plumes looked like silvery comets slashing across the blue heaven.
Once they were out over the English Channel, Jimmy Armstrong gave the order for the gunners to test fire the plane’s eight machine guns. When Reb cut loose with his .50s, the vibration rattled his teeth and filled the compartment with the stink of cordite.
It was 0750.
The 96th Bomb Group was halfway across the English Channel when one of its Fortresses suddenly peeled away, banking into a 180-degree turn and heading back toward England. Its departure was quickly followed by another bomber in the high squadron of the 388th.
Under Eighth Air Force operational guidelines, if a pilot concluded that his plane could not complete the mission because of an unexpected problem, he was permitted to turn back.
Prior to the beginning of the air offensive against targets inside Germany, a few pilots aborted each mission. In the wake of the disastrous crew losses in July and August, the number of aborts had grown exponentially.
Now the migration became a steady stream.
As the twenty-mile-long bomber train continued east across the channel, a smaller train of bombers was already heading back, flying well below the attacking force, as if not wanting to be noticed.
Within the 100th Bomb Group, which had valiantly earned the sobriquet “Bloody 100th” due to its severe losses on previous missions, seven Fortresses out of the twenty-one planes flying in the group turned back. The remaining pilots in their combat box were forced to tighten up to fill the vacuum.
The exodus became contagious.
Five Fortresses aborted from the 390th group, four from the 95th, seven from the 94th, six from the 385th, and eight from the 305th based at Chelveston. More pilots continued to peel away as they neared the enemy coast.
The reasons for each pilot’s decision extended to a wide range of problems. Low fuel pressure was reported in the left outboard engine of one Fortress, a ball turret gunner’s hand had begun to swell at eight thousand feet due to past frostbite in another, an oxygen leak, a runaway propeller, high oil temperature in a right outboard engine, a sick tail gunner, a malfunction in the bomb bay doors, low oil pressure, a supercharger problem, a loose ball turret hatch, an intercom malfunction, a bomb bay switch failure, more oxygen leaks.
It was hard for some of the men still headed to Germany not to envy them.
As Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti approached the coast of France, Andy Andrews tuned his radio compass to a program he had become familiar with on the BBC. It was called Whistle While You Work, and delivered only popular musical favorites. For one solid hour, there was nothing but music, music while you worked. Andy grinned as he imagined housewives all over England doing their ironing while he was on his way to bomb Germany.
The Golden Eagle
Tricqueville Air Base
Normandy, France
Jagdgeschwader 2 “Richthofen”
Major Egon “Connie” Mayer
0800
The air base’s Teletype machines had begun chattering well before dawn.
Using long-range receivers, Luftwaffe air controllers had monitored the testing of aircraft radios by American ground crews at more than a dozen bases in England, clearly indicating a major strike was under way.
At 0600, the Luftwaffe’s radar platforms deployed along the “Atlantikwall” of France began monitoring several large masses of aircraft over southern England. In the next hour, it grew to the largest concentration of aircraft the radar controllers had ever recorded.
“It will be a good day for hunting,” declared an eager pilot of Jagdgeschwader 2 “Richthofen” after the fighter unit was put on full alert. JG 2 “Richthofen” was one of the elite fighter wings in the Luftwaffe; it had been named in honor of Freiherr Manfred von Richthofen, the famed “Red Baron,” who had scored eighty victories before his death in the First World War.
For Egon “Connie” Mayer, JG 2’s commander, every day was good hunting. He was as naturally gifted as any combat pilot in the war. Since 1941, he had shot down seventy-seven Allied planes, including forty-eight English Spitfires.
In contrast to many of the other leading aces of the Luftwaffe, who had racked up their victories against the poorly trained and equipped Soviet air force, Connie Mayer had scored all his aerial victories on the western front.
A recipient of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, he was one of the most decorated pilots in the Luftwaffe. Unlike some of his more flamboyant contemporaries, he never felt the need to exaggerate his accomplishments, and evidenced no desire to join in the spirited competition of those who sought to become Germany’s highest-scoring ace. As a matter of personal honor, he never made a victory claim that couldn’t be confirmed.
For Connie Mayer, fighting one’s enemy wasn’t a contest between medieval knights or modern gladiators. Germany was at war. He was a professional. His job was to help destroy the Allied planes attacking the Fatherland.
Born in 1917, he had grown up near Lake Constance in the alpine foothills close to the Swiss border. An exceptional skier, he had joined the Luftwaffe in 1937. Only twenty-six years old, he looked much older, the direct result of four years of arduous combat.
With the exception of his eyes, he looked more like an earnest peacetime lawyer than one of the most celebrated fighter pilots of the war. His eyes were hawk’s eyes, intense and aware, which contributed to the deadliness of his aim and his
tactical brilliance in the air.
He now had four fighter groups under his command, all of them based in the western quadrant of France. Their job was to defend the Paris region and the U-boat pens along the coast of France. Since the start of the war, the pilots of Jagdgeschwader 2 had achieved almost two thousand victories.
The once boundless confidence enjoyed by the Luftwaffe after the fall of France in 1940 was long gone. As the enemy grew ever stronger, it became clear to Connie Mayer and the other frontline commanders that Germany would eventually be defeated unless Hitler’s claims of new secret weapons could change the balance. Mayer had become increasingly skeptical of the Führer’s boasts.
He knew the personal odds. Most of his closest comrades were already dead. Two of them, Helmut Wick and Wilhelm Balthasar, had been killed while commanding Jagdgeschwader 2. Connie Mayer had now flown more than three hundred missions and been shot down four times, surviving against the odds. It was only a matter of time before his luck ran out.
Since the Americans had begun their daylight bombing campaign, JG 2’s principal assignment was to intercept and destroy the Allied bombers attacking the Fatherland, and particularly the Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force.
In November 1942, Connie Mayer became the architect of a bold and unorthodox strategy that was to alter the course of the air war. After his first few encounters with the Fortresses in their tight combat box formations, Mayer concluded that the approach then being employed by the Luftwaffe was ineffective and too costly in pilot losses.
Up to that point, German fighter pilots usually made their attacks on the B-17s from the “six o’clock low” position, coming in from behind with cannons and machine guns blazing, one plane at a time.
This left the fighters vulnerable to the .50-caliber machine-gun fire from the bomber’s tail gunner, as well as to the massed firepower of the other Fortresses in the same combat box.
Mayer believed that attacking a Fortress from the front would provide the best chance of destroying its vital systems, including the cockpit controls, the engines, and the fuel tanks. He concluded that the Fortress’s most vulnerable spot was its nose, which was equipped with only a single .30-caliber machine gun manned by the crew’s bombardier, who was not a trained machine gunner.
Making a frontal attack against a Fortress required extraordinary daring and skill. The fighter pilot had to line up his target while the two planes were closing at a combined speed of 600 miles an hour. He had only a few seconds to open fire with his cannon and machine guns from a distance of about one hundred yards, and then dive away to avoid ramming the bomber.
Mayer added another difficult component to his tactical maneuver as well. He advocated rolling the fighter onto its back just before commencing the attack, because the belly of the Fw 190 was armor-plated, and largely impervious to the .30-caliber machine gun in the Fortress’s nose.
Mayer also conceived the strategy in which attacks would be made by three or more fighters, flying wing tip to wing tip. This dangerous aerial ballet would concentrate more firepower on each target, and potentially force the unnerved bomber pilots to take evasive action, breaking up the combat box. If the formation’s integrity could be compromised, the individual bombers would become more vulnerable.
His ideas were initially met with widespread skepticism and largely ignored.
On November 22, 1942, Connie Mayer was appointed commander of the III Group of Jagdgeschwader 2. One day later, he decided to put his new theories into practice. A mixed bomber force of B-17s and B-24s was attacking the German submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire when Mayer’s staffel intercepted the lead bombers and attacked them head-on as they approached their bomb run.
He led the first of several waves of Fw 190 fighters, all flying three abreast. In their initial pass, the first wave of fighters shot down four bombers. Mayer himself accounted for two Fortresses and a B-24 Liberator before the action ended.
In the following weeks, Connie Mayer perfected his frontal pass techniques and trained the pilots in his group to master each maneuver. He quickly discovered that the ideal attacking path was from twelve o’clock high. Coming in on a slightly downward approach enabled him to better judge the distance between himself and his target as the planes closed at 600 miles an hour.
“Twelve o’clock high” quickly became the awestruck cry of B-17 pilots as they called out the compass heading of the attacking German fighters on the intercom.
As the victories in Mayer’s group mounted, General Adolf Galland, commanding all Luftwaffe fighter forces, issued a memorandum to his groups. “The attack from the rear against a four-engine bomber formation promises little success and almost always brings losses. The attack from the front ... is the most effective of all,” he wrote.
In 1943, Connie Mayer became the premier Flying Fortress killer in the Luftwaffe, having shot down sixteen B-17s, along with four more Spitfires, an American P-47 fighter, a B-24, and three Hawker Typhoons. On June 26, he and his group destroyed five Fortresses in less than three minutes with the now patented head-on attacks.
He was promoted to command the Jagdgeschwader 2 a week later.
His skill in the air often astonished the American bomber crews who witnessed it.
On July 14, the 305th Bomb Group had been returning from a bombing run near Paris when two Fw 190s appeared ahead of them.
One of the B-17 navigators recalled what happened next. “Whoever it was gave a riveting display of aerobatics in front of our entire 102nd Combat Wing before slashing in to fatally damage the leading ship of the 422nd Squadron in the low slot.”
The machine gunners in the other B-17s in the box then cut loose at the Fw 190. The American navigator reported that he had never seen such a tremendous volume of tracer go after one plane, but they hit nothing but air.
The Fw 190 pilot was Egon Mayer.
By the end of August, the Luftwaffe’s fighter forces were delivering one brutal beating after another to the Eighth Air Force, which saw its losses rise on long-range missions to Hannover, Kassel, Gelsenkirchen, Schweinfurt, and Regensburg. The goal of the Luftwaffe was now simple: to force the Americans to suspend their air offensive against Germany.
To defend the Reich, twenty-nine staffeln, each consisting of about a dozen fighters, had been spread out at airfields across France and Germany along the corridor the bombers had to fly through to reach most of their targets. In the wake of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid, the Luftwaffe brought back two additional fighter groups from Russia to help meet the threat.
When an American bomber force was on its way, the fighter staffeln were scrambled from their fields as the formation approached. After completing their attacks, the fighters would return to their bases for more ammunition and fuel, and the next group of staffeln along the corridor would come up to take their place. After the B-17s bombed their target and finally turned for home, they would meet the same squadrons on the way back, now refueled and rearmed.
On September 6, dawn gave way to a sun-drenched sky over Normandy. At his headquarters in Tricqueville, Connie Mayer waited for orders to arrive from the Luftwaffe air defense command.
The day became confusing at the outset.
At 0710, Luftwaffe air controllers reported a large formation of bombers headed toward the Dutch coast, accompanied by an escort of twenty-four Spitfires. It was the American force of sixty-nine B-24 Liberators undertaking the first diversionary raid staged by the Eighth Air Force to divert German fighters away from the Stuttgart force.
Two staffeln from JG 2 were scrambled to intercept the B-24s, but by the time they located the formation, it had already turned back from the Dutch islands to return to England. The staffeln were then ordered to patrol over northern France.
At 0725, German air controllers reported that a separate force of B-26 Marauders with escorting Spitfires had crossed the French coast and was attacking the marshaling yards at Rouen, along the Seine River northwest of Paris. Four more staffeln in Mayer’s gro
up were sent up to intercept them.
Minutes later, another bomber force was monitored over Dungeness across the English Channel. The staffeln of JG 2 were ordered to divert from their positions near the Seine and fly north toward the Somme River, where they circled while waiting for further orders.
At 0745, yet another formation of light bombers was reported to be attacking Boulogne Harbor. It was the last of the diversionary raids planned by the Eighth Air Force, and it drew off another staffel of Mayer’s Fw 190s.
His staffeln began running short of fuel.
At 0752, the German air controllers, now aware of the magnitude of the heavy bomber force heading for France from Dungeness, ordered Mayer’s JG 2 to return for refueling and rearming.
Most of the fighters were about to land when several hundred Fortresses thundered across the sky above them. For those under their flight path, it sounded like the continuous rumble of a vast freight train.
The Luftwaffe air defense command had no idea where the bomber force was going, but the Americans would soon have to show their hand. Once the target region was determined, they would mobilize their fighter groups in Germany to destroy it.
For Connie Mayer and the pilots of Jagdgeschwader 2, one thing was certain. The Americans would have to come back through western France to reach England. He would be waiting for them.
Into the Valley
Cayeux, France
306th Bomb Group
First Lieutenant Andy Andrews
0807
As Est Nulla Via Invia Virtuti crossed the French coast, Andy Andrews was leading an element of the 306th’s high squadron. He was part of the sixty-two-plane combat box that included the 92nd and 305th groups, and flying at seventeen thousand feet. The formation was maintaining a cruising speed of 180 miles an hour.
Once past the French coast, the group turned onto the predesignated compass heading that would take them on a southeasterly path toward the city of Saint-Quentin, eighty miles inside the French border.
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