Blakeslee’s solution was simple – and typical. ‘How much time can you give us to switch, sir?’
‘If the Fourth is out of action more than 24 hours, we’re in trouble,’ was Kepner’s reply.
‘General, give me the Mustangs and I give you my word. I’ll have them in combat in 24 hours. I promise!’
It was a hell of a promise, and a hell of a risk, but both men knew each other, and they knew the Fourth, and its pilots. They also knew that there were still enough pilots with hundreds of combat hours in Hurricanes and Spitfires to make up a full complement for a mission; and they knew that the mechanics had worked on Rolls Royce engines when we had our Spitfires.
So Kepner got us our P-51’s and in 24 hours we were on our first mission. Most pilots have about 200 hours in a front-line fighter before taking it into combat. We had about thirty minutes!
The Mustang gave a new impetus to the Fourth. While flying Thunderbolts, their only rivals, the 56th Fighter Group, under ‘Hub’ Zemke, had forged ahead, and soon had 300 destroyed against the 150 of the Fourth. Having flown only P-47’s in combat, the 56th had no other love. Most of their pilots had hundreds of hours in the plane, knew its every whim, and knew how to get the most out of it. They also had an aggressive, intelligent leader who was a great strategist, but still encouraged individual flair among his star pilots like Bob Johnson, Gabby Gabreski, Dave Schilling and Bud Mahurin. When the 56th Group’s score soared past that of the Fourth, I heard mumbled complaints that the 56th were not adhering to the strict orders to give top priority to protecting the bombers. I’m sure that was not true. What they did do was to organise a free-ranging sweep as soon as they were relieved on their escort, a strategy which the Fourth adopted later, but then more on an ad hoc basis by squadron leaders or section leaders, rather than on an organised group basis.
When the long range fighters of the Eighth Air Force had gained air superiority and the bombers were no longer taking the terrible losses of the days before total fighter cover, General Kepner cautiously authorised more aggressive tactics in attacking and destroying enemy fighters; always providing the bombers were adequately protected.
Once again, I think the 56th Group took advantage of this new approach faster and more aggressively than the Fourth. I don’t remember Blakeslee ever telling us of any change in strategy, but then I never remember Blakeslee ever discussing strategy. Talk wasn’t his style; with him it was action. He motivated us by example, not by instruction. He disliked words and mistrusted those who used them glibly.
As for strategy, I remember one evening in the mess, when Don had just come back from a session at headquarters. He was always ill-at-ease in those meetings, and bad-tempered afterwards. ‘Goody,’ he said, ‘why do they talk so much about strategy and tactics? Hell, what you do depends on what’s happening at that moment. What good’s a strategy when you’ve got three 109’s on your ass?’
It was a typical fighter pilot’s reaction, and therefore typical Blakeslee. ‘What the hell is our strategy?’ he asked.
I knew he wanted an answer. ‘In 1917 when von Richthofen was asked that question, he said: “Find the enemy and shoot him down – anything else is nonsense.” I guess it still holds.’
It held for Blakeslee, and probably all successful fighter pilots.
The old argument as to whether fighters should give first priority to protecting the bombers or pursuing and destroying the enemy whenever sighted raged throughout the war on both sides. During the Battle of Britain, German bomber losses became so heavy that Göring ordered his fighter commanders to fly close cover on the bombers and stay with them as long as their fuel permitted. It cut bomber losses, but Moelders, Galland, and the other Luftwaffe fighter leaders were furious. They knew they could only eliminate the RAF by destroying their planes either in the air or on the ground. What was worse, they knew that for fighters, the best defence is offence. The aggressive spirit of attack must be maintained. A purely defensive fighter force is a contradiction of terms.
When the American air generals found themselves faced with the same problem at the beginning of the daylight bombing offensive, they avoided the typical extreme decision of Göring, and settled on a compromise, which left a certain amount of flexibility to the commanders, and even to individual section leaders. As the number of long-range fighters increased, more freedom was given to, and taken by, the pilots.
I always felt that fighter commanders could be compared to cavalry commanders in the days when cavalry were the deciding factor in warfare. Captain Nolan, the cavalry expert who played such a key role in carrying Lord Raglan’s order for the charge of the Light Brigade to Lord Lucan, wrote: ‘The tactics of cavalry are not capable of being reduced to rule. … With the cavalry officer almost everything depends on the clearness of his coup d’oeil and the felicity with which he seizes the happy moment of action.’ Had Raglan, Lucan and Cardigan understood this, there would have been no tragic charge, and the British cavalry would have won the Crimean War.
In the air war, ninety years later, the generals, Hunter, Auton, Kepner, Eaker, Doolittle, Spaatz, all experienced pilots themselves, understood, and so did we.
In early 1943, when less than ten percent of the bomber crews completed their twenty-five missions, and there was a real question as to whether the offensive could be continued, we didn’t need to be told that protection of the bombers had top priority. Since the Fourth provided cover on the last lap of the fighter relay, usually over the target area, we were in on the hottest battles, when the Luftwaffe pilots hurled themselves at the bombers when they were most vulnerable. None of us could ever forget those nightmare scenes; a great bomber tumbling out of the air like a crazy toy; another spiralling down almost vertically; another somehow staying straight and level, but losing speed and altitude while smoke and flame licked the entire fuselage; yet another disappearing in a bright explosion, leaving a cloud of smoke and a wing and other pieces of debris fluttering down.
In those days, no one was going to goof off looking for Hun fighters. They were there!
Our generals were quick to react as the situation changed, and more long-range fighters became available, but it was that very availability that made the difference. They had quickly recognised the need for the long-range fighters, and insisted we got them fast, even if, as in the case of the Mustang, the original idea was someone else’s.
But their real genius was in encouraging their wing, group, and squadron leaders to take the initiative and play it as they saw it. The German fighter leaders had brilliance, experience, and incredible bravery, but they were defeated by the lack of understanding and backing of Göring and Hitler.
The generals of the Eighth Air Force needed all the understanding they could muster in backing Blakeslee, but he never let them down. Probably the event that underlined the final complete air superiority of the long-range fighter, and represented the peak of Blakeslee’s combat career was the England-Russia-Italy shuttle. The plan was to escort bombers from England 1,600 miles across Europe to Poltava in Russia.
From Russia, the bombers would take off for Italy, bombing an oil refinery in Southern Poland on the way, escorted by the Fourth as far as the Yugoslav coast where Mustangs from the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy would take over. From Italy, the bombers and their escort would fly from Italy back to England, bombing railroad yards in France en route.
The 1,600 miles from England to Russia would be the longest leg, but it should take only seven and a half hours, and we had already been airborne for eight hours before. Nevertheless, every precaution was taken to assure success. Only 104 bombers were to be escorted to Russia and 1,000 bombers and their escort were to act as a diversion by bombing Berlin. The fighters were ordered not to engage in combat, nor to drop their wing-tanks until crossing the Polish-Russian border.
The group was to fly at only 15,000 feet across Europe to the Russian border and then drop to below 6,000 feet. As Blakeslee said at the end of the briefing: ‘This whol
e thing is for show!’
Blakeslee was armed with sixteen maps, but those covering Russia showed very little. In the event, none of them were necessary: there was cloud cover over the whole route. This meant that everything would depend on Blakeslee’s ability to fly an accurate compass heading. He always maintained he was lousy at instrument flying, and flatly refused instrument practice in the Link trainer.
There were only two incidents on the flight to Russia, each resulting in the loss of a plane. Flying straight and level on one heading gave the German flak an excellent opportunity to line up their guns. South of Berlin a sudden intense barrage came up through the undercast. In spite of the accuracy only one Mustang was hit.
The other loss was a bomber, but a special bomber as far as I was concerned. Some of our crew chiefs and mechanics went along on the mission as gunners in the bombers so that they could service the Mustangs in Russia. East of Warsaw, they were hit head-on by ten to fifteen 109’s. The B-17 which went down was the one in which my crew chief, Staff-Sergeant Bob Gilbert, was flying as waist-gunner. They were able to bale out and eventually joined up with a group of Russian partisans with whom they lived and fought for some weeks before finally getting back to England.
Estimated Arrival Time was 7.35 p.m. At 7.35 exactly the Russian flares floated up from the base. Blakeslee had hit it on the nose!
However, if the Eighth Air Force had shown the Germans that they had air superiority over Germany, the Luftwaffe showed that they didn’t have it over Russia. German planes had shadowed the American fighters and bombers to the Russian airfields. On the second night, Luftwaffe bombers attacked Poltava where most of the B-17’s had landed. Although it was never reported, forty-three bombers were destroyed. A few Ju88’s bombed and strafed the bases where the Mustangs were parked, and put fifteen Mustangs out of action. One 88 was shot down by a Russian YAK. A section of P-51’s scrambled into the air. They didn’t get any hits, but may have driven the raiders off.
In the meantime, Blakeslee had been taken to Moscow to be wined and dined, and to make a radio broadcast to America. He hated anything to do with public relations, but acquitted himself nobly. Asked how he enjoyed it, he said, ‘It was tougher than the trip over.’
The flight from Russia to Lucrera near Foggia in Italy was uneventful, but it was then arranged that the Fourth would join the Fifteenth Air Force on a bombing mission to Budapest. That was a different story. Lack of dust filters, and different sized nozzles on the drop tanks, led to many abortions, and the group arrived over Budapest with only twenty planes. 334 Squadron had only eight. The Fourth were flying top cover at 30,000 feet while the Fifteenth Air Force were flying some 10,000 feet lower.
Suddenly fifty to sixty 109’s were screaming in to attack the bombers. Blakeslee called for the Fifteenth Air Force to come up and help, but in the event, the Fourth’s twenty pilots were on their own. What they didn’t know was that they were up against the unique squadron of aces, Jagdgeschwader 52, just transferred from Russia to Czechoslovakia. It included most of the top aces of all time: ‘Bubi’ Hartmann with 352 victories; Barkhom, 301 victories; Rall 275; Batz, 237; Graf, the Kommandant, 212; Lipfert, 203; Krupinski (‘Graf Punski’) 197; and many others. Fifty or sixty of them now faced twenty of the Fourth, or, perhaps eight of 334 Squadron, since they were mainly involved. The best of the Luftwaffe against the best of the US Air Force.
In what was probably the last great dog-fight of the war the Fourth shot down seven, of which Blakeslee got one, and Deacon Hively got three, but they lost Hofer, and George Standford, who ended up a POW. Hively and Siems were wounded, but managed to get back to Foggia.
It would be unfair to give the Fourth a score of 7 to 2. The Luftwaffe’s priority was obviously to shoot down the bombers, and, in doing so, they took the risk of exposing themselves to fighter attack.
The fact that the Fifteenth Air Force didn’t come up to help the out-numbered Fourth came in for some criticism, but not from Blakeslee. Most of us have often had the experience of being in the thick of the battle while other units, even in close vicinity, neither heard nor saw anything, and didn’t become involved. The first reaction is to jump to the wrong conclusions. In my experience, this overlooks three important factors. First, radio contact could not be relied on; volume and clarity dropped off dramatically with distance, and short, shouted transmission from another group would probably be garbled, or so weak as to be drowned out, by other, closer signals.
With radio contact unreliable, reaction depended on visibility, but, when one was flying in formation, escorting bombers, calculating speeds and times, it took a cool, and, above all, experienced, fighter leader to spot, and identify as hostile, the minute specks far above or far below, against a dazzling sun, or a background too bright, or too dark.
But by far the most important factor in this sort of situation was one of time. When one was attacking or being attacked, it seemed like an eternity. In reality, the whole action was over in seconds, rather than minutes; and, in those few seconds, enormous distances were covered, in all directions and altitudes, particularly in relation to planes flying on a different course. Therefore, even if the leader of a distant group caught sight of the brief action, and recognised the need for assistance, the chances that he could bring his group up in time to be of any help, especially if he didn’t have the advantage of superior altitude, were nil.
But the shuttle shouldn’t be judged by the number of bombs dropped, or 109’s shot down. Blakeslee was right when he said: ‘This whole thing is for show!’ And it showed a lot. It showed that no corner of Germany’s world was safe from the air. In 1944, Churchill said: ‘Hitler did make Europe into a fortress, but he forgot the roof.’ Quite independently, Lieutenant-General Adolf Galland took ‘Fortress Without a Roof’ as the title of a chapter of his book, and Lieutenant-General ‘Macky’ Steinhoff’s book is entitled They Had Forgotten the Roof. All three saw this air supremacy as the basis of the Allied victory. The shuttle raid underlined the fact that Allied air supremacy was complete, and the end of the war only a question of months.
The Russian shuttle was the last big show for Blakeslee. For it, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the second time, which must be some kind of record. But there were other records. Blakeslee had been in combat continually for three years – over 1,000 combat hours. He dreaded the day when he’d have to go home, and did everything to avoid it, but the day came when, if he had been poetic, which he definitely was not, he would have thought of Thomas Moore’s poem:
When I remember all
The friends, so linked together,
I’ve seen around me fall
Like leaves in wintry weather,
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Most of his old squadron were prisoners of war, or killed in action. A few, like Deacon Hively, had finally gone back to the States. He knew they were ganging up on him. It might have made it a little easier to take to know that Hub Zemke, his rival CO of the 56th ‘Wolfpack’ Group, would be going back to the States at the same time, but on his last mission, Zemke’s plane iced up and he had to bale out and spend the rest of the war as a POW.
The same day, Blakeslee was grounded.
The two leaders were almost opposites: Zemke, conservative, level-headed, intelligent, self-disciplined, every inch an officer and a gentleman; Blakeslee, every inch a flyer and a man.
But they had one thing in common: the ability to motivate everyone in their command. Like most good fighter leaders, including their Luftwaffe counterparts like Moelders, Galland, Trautloft, Hrabak and Priller, in spite of having more opportunities, they were not among the highest scorers, but their groups produced most of the war’s aces.
The Fourth Group ended the war with more than 1,000 enemy aircraft destroyed, but their contribution far
exceeded the number of swastikas on the sides of their planes. They were only a symptom of the spirit of the Fourth. It was a spirit born during the Battle of Britain, incorporating the best traditions of the RAF and the USAAF. It was a maverick unit, with a maverick commander. They were happy warriors; happy to be flying; happy to risk their lives for each other. It was a winning team.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Playboy
We were still flying with the RAF when I first met Vic France. He was in 71 Eagle Squadron, but in those days we were always being shifted from one base to another and never had time to get to know everybody in the other squadrons. Mike Sobanski, Ray Fuchs and I were on a rare 48 hour pass and sitting in the ‘Salted Almond’ bar of the Trocadero Hotel. The more usual hang-out for Americans in the RAF was the ‘Crackers Club’ which was one good reason for not being there that evening. We had dates with three girls from the Windmill Theatre, and we didn’t need any competition. Also the girls preferred the Troc. It was on Shaftesbury Avenue, just down Great Windmill Street from the theatre, so it was handy in those days of bombs and blackouts, but more important, they considered it ‘posh’, with its wall-to-wall carpeting, a coloured barman (rare in those days) and such exotic concoctions as Planter’s Punches.
And I guess they deserved something a little ‘posh’ once in a while. Their little theatre had struggled on throughout the Blitz proud of its boast that alone among London’s theatres ‘We Never Closed’, and from noon till the late evening they put on a prim, genteel, somewhat 1920’s version of a vaudeville show, ranging from Ivor Novello scores, to corny comedian spots featuring struggling young hopefuls who in later days included such famous names as Kenneth More, Jimmy Edwards, Michael Bentine, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Alfred Marks and many others. The whole was accompanied by a three-piece tinny, and very elderly, band. Apart from the scantily-clad girls in the chorus and dance sequences, glamour was provided by statuesque nudes in the background. This was considered daring in the extreme in those days, and was only permitted by the Lord Chamberlain’s office on condition that the pose was artistic, not very revealing, but, above all, immobile. The girls were made so conscious of the dire consequences of any movement that even the bombs falling were not considered a valid excuse for flinching.
Tumult in the Clouds Page 9