Chasing the Demon

by Dan Hampton

  Bastogne, to the southwest of St. Vith, had been immediately reinforced by a tank destroyer battalion and the 101st Airborne Division. By December 20 the town, a critical junction with eleven hard-surfaced roads linking Liege and Antwerp, was surrounded by elements of von Manteuffel’s XLVII Panzer Corps, including the Panzer-Lehr and 26th Volksgrenadier Divisions. Despite the grim tactical situation, Allied commanders realized that the Germans could not bypass Bastogne, and with clearing weather they could be caught advancing on open ground. If this happened, they’d either have to retreat or dig in.

  Like rocks in a stream, the American defenders forced the Germans to go around and disperse. This cost them momentum, further confused an already confusing tactical situation, consuming precious fuel and time, and irretrievably stalled the advance. On Christmas Eve, Hasso von Manteuffel suggested a withdrawal back into Germany, but Hitler refused point-blank. The day after Christmas four Sherman tanks, what remained from Company C, 37th Tank Battalion of Patton’s Third Army, broke through to Bastogne. Just before 1700 the company commander, First Lieutenant Charles Boggess Jr., shook hands with a lieutenant from the 326th Airborne Engineers, 101st Airborne. Patton’s armor continued up from the south and drove an armored wedge into the Germans. Along the Meuse River the British XXX Corps firmly held the bridges at Givet, Dinant, and Namur. Out of fuel and stretched thin, the Germans could either halt and hold their considerable salient or retreat eastward. They held.

  Their last great hope was Operation Bodenplatte.

  Unable to attack in conjunction with Watch on the Rhine due to weather, the air assault was now intended to cripple Allied airpower over the Low Countries so the ground offensive could continue. On December 31 Hitler also launched Operation Nordwind (North Wind) into the Alsace region 100 miles south of the Bulge along the French border. The idea was to split the French First Army and U.S. Seventh Army, then capture Strasbourg and its huge supply depots. This would permit a huge thrust up from the south to hook up with German forces in the Bulge. Hitler believed this would force the Allies to fall back and again be compelled to negotiate a peace. For the German combat generals this was nonsense, yet they had reached that desperate point in a fight where nothing remains except the fight, and the faint chance that in war anything could happen.

  For Hitler, it was life or death for himself and his Reich, and he was perfectly willing to take as many down with him if the war was lost. For Eisenhower and the Allies, Operation Bodenplatte was a cold slap of reality in the face. They had underestimated the Germans and considered the war already won; it was just a matter of mopping up and sorting out the mess with the Soviets. For those in actual combat on both sides it was, as always, a day-to-day struggle for food, ammunition, a warm coat, and survival. The fighter pilots at Asch had it slightly better than their infantry brothers—but not much. They slept in torn tents over mud, had one small bucket of coal per day to keep warm, and slept in every piece of clothing they had. There was ammunition and fuel, but they were short of just about everything else.*

  Yet the fighters kept flying.

  About forty minutes prior to the German attack on Asch, eight P-47s from the 391st Fighter Squadron took off and turned south toward the heart of the Bulge. Led by Captain Eber Eugene Simpson, they caught an armored column in Ondenval, four miles southeast of Malmedy, and destroyed five Panzer Mark IVs. They then did what fighter pilots like best: went trolling for targets.* Back at Asch, the Mustang ground crews had been up for hours preparing the planes for the morning mission while the pilots briefed. At 0915 a second flight of P-47s from the 390th Fighter Squadron rolled off the steel matting toward the southwest. Coming 180 degrees around to the northeast to join up their flight lead, Captain Lowell Smith saw anti-aircraft bursts over Ophoven and turned north to get a better look.

  And he did—of at least thirty Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs heading south toward Asch and him. Radio calls filled headsets and gunfire arced across the sky as the airfield’s two anti-aircraft guns opened up. Twelve 487th FS P-51s in three flights of four began their takeoff roll. Twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant Colonel John Meyer, their flight leader, was pulling his nose up and firing before his landing gear retracted, downing his first Fw 190 of the day right over the field.* For the next minute pilots scrambled to stay with their leaders, switch on gunsights, and jettison bombs or extra fuel tanks.

  For the Germans it was worse.

  Usually an attacker has the edge, but the confusion of hitting the wrong field threw the plan off. That, and running into twenty angry American fighters full of gas and bullets protecting their home field, such as it was. The P-47s split up the initial attack long enough for the P-51s to get airborne, and the German pilots never recovered. Flights were split up; inexperienced wingmen flew through anti-aircraft fire, jabbered on the radio, and strafed the wrong targets. A derelict B-17 attracted nine or ten of them, and they consequently ignored rows of parked Thunderbolts and Mustangs. The runway wasn’t hit, nor was the fuel storage area or ammunition dump attacked.

  In the end, the thirty-minute battle at Ophaven and Asch cost JG 11 at least twenty-six fighters in air-to-air combat, confirmed by gun camera film or witnesses. Battery B and D of the 784th AAA AW Battalion claimed four and three kills, respectively, but this should be taken lightly. Living up to their unofficial motto of “if it flies it dies,” anti-aircraft units fired more or less indiscriminately at whatever came close to them. Some 5 percent of the Luftwaffe’s losses were from their own flak batteries who, for secrecy reasons, were not informed of the operation. The Allied units have no excuse, and pilots like Lieutenant Dean Huston of the 487th Fighter Squadron were lucky to have survived being shot down by friendly ground fire. Major George Preddy, commanding officer of the 328th Fighter Squadron, wasn’t so fortunate. A P-40E Warhawk veteran from the Pacific, Preddy was now the leading P-51 ace in the ETO with 26.83 kills, including six Bf 109s on a single day back in August. He was shot down and killed by an American anti-aircraft unit on Christmas Day 1944: six days before Bodenplatte.*

  Damage at Asch was light. The abandoned B-17 took most of the hits, though several aircraft were damaged and four enlisted men were injured. Ophoven fared worse; several men were wounded, and ten Spitfires were damaged or destroyed. Across the ETO, results were similar. Tents, AAA sites, railroad equipment, assorted vehicles, and, by averaging out several sources, about 300 aircraft were destroyed with some 190 damaged. Only fifteen Allied aircraft were lost to aerial combat, with a dozen more damaged, including three P-47s and a Spitfire at Asch. Yet the material losses could, and were, replaced within days. Loss of trained pilots is always a severe blow as they cannot be manufactured like aircraft or weapons yet the United States, with its vast pool of resources, was not professionally hampered by the losses.

  However, the numbers add up—and the truth usually lies somewhere in between—there is no doubt Operation Bodenplatte was a disaster for the Germans. Luftwaffe losses were at least 280 Fw 190s, Me 109s, and Ju 88s confirmed destroyed, with another 69 damaged. Out of approximately 850 aircraft, this amounted to 41 percent of the total lost.* Unsustainable, to be sure, but not as disastrous as the loss of 143 single-engine fighter pilots killed or missing (presumed dead), 70 captured, and 21 wounded. Forty-five experten were gone, with the cataclysmic loss of three wing commanders, five group commanders, and fifteen squadron commanders. These were all highly experienced veterans from multiple combat campaigns, and certainly after Bodenplatte the German air force effectively ceased to exist.

  Historian Gerhard Weinberg accurately wrote that the Luftwaffe was “weaker than ever and incapable of mounting any major attack again.” Truly, the duel for air superiority was unquestionably finished in the skies above Europe, and even some sort of air parity on any level was now impossible—time had run out. So by the desperate spring of 1945, after Bodenplatte, all that remained for Germany, and the Luftwaffe in particular, were desperate hopes like the jet fighter, and even more desperate measures like
the rocket-powered Natter.

  But time had caught up with Lothar Sieber as it had for hundreds of other Luftwaffe pilots. Hans Mutke, two weeks after the dive, flew his Me 262 across the border into northern Switzerland and landed at an airfield outside Zurich. Claiming he was lost, Mutke was interned for the short duration of the war. His unit, 9 Staffel of Jagdgeschwader 7, fought the last Second World War European dogfight thirteen days later on May 8, 1945.

  Near the time Mutke made his dive, Bob Hoover escaped from the notorious Stalag Luft I in northern Germany.* He passed through Russian lines and, thanks to Gus Lundquist’s instruction, managed to steal a Focke-Wulf 190 from an abandoned German airfield. Getting airborne and very aware he was flying an enemy fighter into U.S.-held airspace, Hoover stayed up long enough to get to Holland, then crash-landed in a farmer’s field. Over the tips of their pitchforks he barely convinced the local farmers to take him to a British unit nearby rather than perforate him. For the first time in sixteen months Bob Hoover was a free man.

  Ken Chilstrom had survived eighty combat missions in the A-36 and was finally back in the States. One day in late November 1943, as he and another pilot, Gene Santella, were sitting in their four-man tent in Italy, K.O. was surprised by the 27th Fighter-Bomber Group commander, Colonel Dorr Newton. “He came and sat down,” Chilstrom recalls, “and said he was here because the morale of the outfit was going downhill. He was right. There was supposedly a rule, which wasn’t really enforced, that with fifty missions in fighters you rotated home. Well, I had eighty missions and my tent mate had eighty-seven . . . as far as I knew no one had ever left unless they’d crashed and burned.”

  The colonel asked them if they wanted to go home and “it didn’t take too long to decide that,” Chilstrom remembered. The two officers found themselves with orders back to “some damn place in Florida” but no official travel arrangements. “You cut loose a pair of young lieutenants who want to get home and they’ll find a way!” Indeed they did. Chilstrom and Santella hitchhiked down to Naples and caught a flight back to Casablanca. From there they scrounged a ride on a B-24 returning to the States through Val de Cans outside Belém, Brazil. After that it was the Redistribution Center at Camp Miami Beach in Florida. Over 300 apartments and hotels had been requisitioned by the Army, and it was here that combat vets were debriefed, given new uniforms and physicals, then released or reassigned.

  After a week or so of this, Chilstrom was asked what he wanted to do and he said he wanted to go to Wright Field. “They tried to send me to a P-40 replacement training unit in Waycross, Georgia,” Ken recalls, “but I wanted nothing to do with training. I knew about Wright Field and thought that’s where I oughta go.” So he went to see the personnel officer and said, “these orders aren’t at all to my liking . . . I’ve got a suggestion. I’d like to have you send me to Wright, and I’ll find a job when I get there.” This was not the way things were done, but for some reason the personnel officer “went along with it, cut orders and I rode the train up from West Palm Beach to Dayton, Ohio.”

  Chilstrom found the correct building, got up to the second floor, and found the Flight Test Division’s executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ernest K. Warburton, who listened to his story and sent the young pilot along to Major Chris Petrie, the Chief of Fighter Test. Petrie told him there was no need for more pilots as he just got a few men in from the South Pacific, but “we could use an officer in maintenance.” Ken immediately told the major how he’d been trained as a maintenance technician at Chanute and, stretching the truth a bit for a good cause, conveyed the idea that he could easily handle such a position. He was hired on the spot and found himself as the assistant maintenance officer for the Fighter Test Section at Wright Field.

  George Welch was also home.

  After nearly eighteen months in the Pacific flying P-39 Airacobras and P-38H Lightnings, he had shot down at least sixteen Japanese aircraft over the course of 348 combat missions. Following his marriage to Janet, he did in fact come home about the same time Ken Chilstrom left Italy. George went to Florida into a tactics development unit and reluctantly resumed publicity work for the Army. Early in 1944 he had a way out; the chief engineering test pilot for North American Aviation, Ed Virgin, offered him a job using his combat experience to flight test variants of the P-51 Mustang. George immediately accepted a position as a test pilot with North American Aviation during the spring of 1944.

  Chuck Yeager left the European Theater in January 1945, immediately after Bodenplatte and the Battle of the Bulge. With the combat debut of the Me 262 and the disappointing performance of the Airacomet, Lockheed’s Shooting Star had been approved for accelerated service testing. The result was a little-known historical footnote called Project Extraversion. On December 30, four days after Bastogne was relieved and the day before Hitler’s big push into Alsace, a freighter slipped into the river Mersey on England’s northwest coast. A collection of unmarked crates were offloaded, then taken from Liverpool to nearby RAF Burtonwood: the first two American jet fighters had arrived in Europe.

  Colonel Marcus Cooper and Major Fred Borsodi of Wright Field were to fly a pair of YP-80s for operational testing and evaluation. Two other jets appeared at the Foggia Airfield Complex in southern Italy during January and, in both cases, the aircraft were entirely off limits to regular British and American military personnel. Veiled in secrecy, these aircraft were maintained by civilian contractors but flown by Army pilots. For the pair in Britain, this was an extremely short operation. With one of the jets reassembled by the end of January, Colonel Cooper flew the first test hop without incident. Unfortunately, the next day, January 28, 1945, hot exhaust gases vented directly into the YP-80’s tail section and it disintegrated. The jet crashed into a field, killing Major Fred Borsodi, Yale graduate and 130 combat mission veteran.*

  The two YP-80s in Italy flew out of Lesina, near the Adriatic coast, on what may have been armed reconnaissance missions and, technically, combat. Very few people were even aware of the jet’s existence, yet the Shooting Stars did fly, and Major Ed LaClare logged a pair of operational sorties to an unspecified location north of the base. Both aircraft were returned to the United States, while the remaining YP-80 in England was loaned to the Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough, to test the new Rolls-Royce Nene turbojet.

  Despite the Luftwaffe’s success with the Me 262, the Komet, and the Arado 234 jet bomber, after the Bodenplatte disaster, time quickly ran out for Germany. Bases were abandoned, files burned, aircraft destroyed, and those who could flee westward did so to escape the advancing Russians. Tragically, President Franklin Roosevelt did not live to see the culmination of his extraordinary efforts to extricate the United States from the Great Depression, and consequently deliver civilization from the darkness of imperialism, fascism, and national socialism. On April 12, 1945, the man who had done so much to shape his world (and ours) died at his “Little White House” at Warm Springs, in far western Georgia. That same day Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the thirty-third president of the United States, and when he asked Eleanor Roosevelt if he could help in any way, she replied, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now!”

  In January 1945, the Red Army had crossed the Oder River and closed to within forty miles of Berlin. Over seven million artillery shells had been stockpiled and 300 artillery pieces allocated for every square mile of the German capital. Several thousand ground-attack aircraft had been moved forward as well; Stalin wanted his revenge, and eight American and British armies were ordered to halt at the Elbe River so he could have it. Fragmented Wehrmacht battalions banded together with a few Waffen SS and Panzergrenadiers units who knew there was no mercy for them, and they prepared to fight to the death.*

  On April 20, Russian armor overwhelmed Hasso von Manteuffel’s few remaining tanks and turned toward Berlin. By April 26, while Hitler cowered in his bunker and expelled Göring and Himmler from the Nazi Party, a half-million Red Army soldiers began looting the city. At the s
ame time in San Francisco, representatives of fifty countries gathered to produce a charter that would structure a better postwar world, a world of international cooperation overseen by what they called the United Nations. This was envisioned as a peaceful embodiment of Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, including Freedom from Fear, which still had to be won. At 1530 on April 30, as the Soviet 8th Guards Army leveled downtown Berlin, the leader of Germany’s Thousand-Year Third Reich married his mistress, shot his dog, and finally killed himself; Victory in Europe (VE) Day was officially designated a week later on May 8, 1945.

  Three months after this, nearly 7,000 miles to the east, a single B-29 under the call sign of “Dimples 82” took off from the Pacific island of Tinian. At 0815 local time in Japan, a ten-foot-long, oddly shaped bomb named “Little Boy” detonated 1,968 feet above the city of Hiroshima.* Surviving locals later remembered it as a “sheet of the sun.” Three days later, on August 9, another Superfortress dropped a second atomic bomb on the port city of Nagasaki. President Harry Truman, himself a combat veteran of World War I, knew this was the only way to defeat the Japanese, and he was correct.* After declaring that the empire would never know defeat, and absolutely intending to cause millions of American casualties, the Japanese unconditionally surrendered on September 2, 1945, under the threat of additional such bombings.*

  The Second World War, the most destructive cataclysm in human history, was over, and with it the old world order that had guided humankind for centuries faded also. Men emerged from the firestorm who, for better or worse, had been shaped by the economic collapse of 1929, the bleakness of the Great Depression, and years of war. Many of them could never return to a normal day job, or a school, or any other fragment of their old life. They were no longer suited to a world without danger, excitement, and the constant challenge of life over death.