Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (17 page)

Worth mentioning is that Major George Scratchley Brown, West Point class of 1941, who took command of the leaderless 93rd Group during the air battle, earned a Distinguished Service Cross for leading it over the target and later went on to serve as chief of staff of the postwar US Air Force and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 1970s.

It would be nice to say that the price paid at Ploesşti on August 1 was worth the results, but the massive complex of multiple refineries there suffered minimal damage, and this was repaired within weeks.

Black Sunday cast its shadow across the other three clusters of pins on the map and added to the sense of despair at Berkeley Square. Still, those charged with the remaining missions in this maximum effort inside the Reich pressed on, knowing that they were, as Dick Hughes had said, damned if they did, but
doubly damned
if they did
not
.

The idea was for the other three targets to be attacked on August 7, with a week’s delay to allow the Tidal Wave crews, tasked with the Wiener Neustadt mission, a chance to rest. However, bad weather that blew in over Britain effectively grounded the Eighth Air Force, and the plan to coordinate the three missions was scrapped.

The Ninth Air Force went ahead with a one-two punch against Wiener Neustadt on August 13 and 14, using Liberators that had survived Tidal Wave, including sixty-one of its own the first day and another sixty-one comprised of those on loan from the Eighth Air Force on the second. The attack reduced the output from the facilities of Wiener-Neustadter Flugzeugwerke AG, a Messerschmitt subcontractor, by about a third, but the factory was far from being put out of business.

In the meantime, the Eighth Air Force was refining its battle plan for its deepest strikes yet into Germany.

On August 16, the crews were briefed for the mission the following day, which was the first anniversary of the first Eighth Air Force heavy bomber mission over continental Europe. The Regensburg strike force, led and commanded by LeMay personally as 4th Bombardment Wing commander, consisted of seven bombardment groups totalling 146 Flying Fortresses. They were to take off at 5:45
A.M.
, fly 430 miles into
Festung Europa
, bomb their targets, cross the Alps, and continue on to the fields in North Africa.

Heading to Schweinfurt simultaneously would be the 1st Bombardment Wing—formerly commanded by Laurence Kuter and Haywood Hansell, now led and commanded by General Robert B. Williams—which was comprised of a force of 230 Flying Fortresses. They were to take off immediately after LeMay’s force, attack targets 320 miles inside Europe, and return to England.

As Hughes recalls, “The weather reports over Germany were satisfactory, but those over England were not so good. General Anderson, however, decided to carry out the attack and things immediately got off to a bad start.”

All of East Anglia was blanketed by a thick ground fog, which delayed the takeoff for LeMay’s contingent by ninety minutes. Knowing that further delay would put them over Algeria in the dark, LeMay ordered an instrument takeoff, something for which Williams’s crews had not trained. Delayed for five hours, Williams did not get his bombers airborne until LeMay was practically to Regensburg.

The delay meant that two elements of the original plan were no longer possible. First, Williams had planned to strike his wing’s targets from east to west with the sun at their backs, but when they arrived at nearly 3
P.M.
, he reversed direction, causing some measure of confusion.

Second, the idea of overwhelming the German interceptor force with two simultaneous attacks had obviously not worked out. The Luftwaffe fighters that attacked LeMay in the morning had the opportunity to land, refuel, and even to eat lunch, before Williams arrived.

On top of this, among the three hundred interceptors that met the Schweinfurt strike force was the Luftwaffe’s Jagdgeschwader 11, whose Bf 109G-6 fighters had coincidentally just been armed with Werfer-Granate 21 air-to-air rocket launchers.

“Scarcely did one group of enemy fighters withdraw before another took its place,” Arthur Ferguson writes. “The Luftwaffe unleashed every trick and device in its repertoire…. In some instances entire squadrons attacked in ‘javelin up’ formation, which made evasive action on the part of the bombers extremely difficult. In others, three and four enemy aircraft came on abreast, attacking simultaneously. Occasionally the enemy resorted to vertical attacks from above, driving straight down at the bombers with fire concentrated on the general vicinity of the top turret, a tactic which proved effective.”

As Thomas Coffey writes in his book
Decision Over Schweinfurt
, so many Flying Fortresses were shot down so quickly that some American airmen thought that their whole wing would be annihilated before anyone reached a target.

The losses at Schweinfurt were not quite
this
severe, but they were sobering to say the least. LeMay’s force lost twenty-four aircraft, fifteen of them before they reached the target, while Williams lost thirty-six, twenty-two before reaching the target. The total losses amounted to sixty aircraft and more than five hundred crewmen, the highest number of losses suffered by the Eighth Air Force in a single day thus far. The 100th and 381st Bombardment Groups each lost nine Flying Fortresses, nearly half their complements.

“The very essence of my plan to reduce losses had been nullified to a large extent by those fogged-in fields,” Dick Hughes lamented. “Under the circumstances I consider the whole operation should have been postponed, but that decision, of course, was entirely out of my hands, and in fact, up at Eighth Air Force headquarters I did not know until several hours later that everything had not gone as scheduled.”

However, the Eighth Air Force could take some solace in knowing that at Regensburg, the six primary aircraft factories were destroyed or seriously damaged.

At Schweinfurt, even accounting for the confusion resulting from the change in direction, the results were good. Thomas Coffey reports that the two largest factory complexes, Kugelfischer and Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken, took eighty direct hits and that 380,000 square feet of factory structures were destroyed.

Albert Speer, the Reich’s armaments minister, estimated a 34 percent loss in production, forcing the German war machine to fall back on reserve stocks of anti-friction bearings of all types. Production dropped from 140 tons in July to 69 in August and 50 in September.

Commenting on the Regensburg-Schweinfurt dual mission from a tactical perspective, Speer was disparaging—albeit thankful—that the Eighth Air Force failed to launch a near-term follow-up attack on Schweinfurt, which he’d expected and which would have been devastating to German bearing production.

“We barely escaped a further catastrophic blow on August 17,” the armaments minister recalls in his memoirs. “The American air force launched its first strategic raid. It was directed against Schweinfurt where large factories of the ball bearing industry were concentrated. Ball
bearings had in any case already become a bottleneck in our efforts to increase armaments production. But in this very first attack the other side committed a crucial mistake. Instead of concentrating on the ball bearing plants, the sizable force of 376 Flying Fortresses divided up—146 of the planes [by German estimates] successfully attacked an airplane assembly plant in Regensburg, but with only minor consequences. Meanwhile, the British air force continued its indiscriminate attacks upon our cities. After this attack the production of ball bearings dropped by 38 percent…. We were forced back on the ball bearing stocks stored by the armed forces for use as repair parts. We soon consumed these, as well as whatever had been accumulated in the factories for current production.”

Apropos the ongoing debate between the Anglo-American partners over area bombing versus precision targeting, one statistic stands out. Compared to the 42,600 civilians believed to have been killed in the RAF area raid on Hamburg three weeks earlier, 203 civilians were killed in the precision attacks on Schweinfurt.

As for the aftermath of the Regensburg mission, it turned out that Dick Hughes had been correct when he surmised that General Arnold would like to have LeMay’s force bomb
something
on their way back to England, and he had sent word to Eaker to that effect. Eaker then called Hughes in and sheepishly ordered him to pick out a target and fly down to Telergma with maps and briefing materials.

“I chose the easiest target in France which I could possibly select—and yet have some semblance of a military target,” Hughes recalls, realizing that this was a last-minute addition to the program and bombs had not been stockpiled in Algeria for a major effort. “It was the Fw 200 airfield outside Bordeaux [from which these aircraft attacked convoys in the Atlantic]. This meant that the force could fly over the Mediterranean Sea, cut across the narrow neck of southwest France just east of the Pyrenees, bomb the airfield, and then fly sufficiently far out over the Bay of Biscay to be safe from German fighter interference all the way back to England. In their 12-hour flight they would be exposed to the possibility of fighter attack for about one hour, and information showed that there were few German fighters based in the Bordeaux area.”

As Hughes collected his maps for the trip south, he asked Eaker for
permission to fly with the strike force. This time, the Eighth Air Force commander acquiesced.

When Hughes reached Telergma with news of the Bordeaux mission, LeMay told him to wait at Spaatz’s headquarters in Tunis until the weather over the target was suitable. Informed of Arnold’s desire for the Eighth Air Force to undertake more “shuttle” missions like the present one, LeMay, who was standing at Telergma watching fuel being hand-pumped into his bombers, disagreed.

In an August 29 memo to Fred Anderson, which was passed up the chain of command, LeMay would explain that it was “difficult to operate heavy bombers without their ground crews, especially if maintenance and base facilities were insufficient, as in Africa, where the changing nature of operations demanded that the supplies and equipment be constantly moved. Moreover, landing away from their bases put an additional strain on combat crews and affected their efficiency adversely.”

Nevertheless, the mission was on. It had been ordered by Hap Arnold.

On August 24, the weather cleared and the bombers took off for Bordeaux. The contingent was comprised of 84 Flying Fortresses, which had survived the aerial battle over Regensburg. Others that had been damaged would linger behind for repairs, which were slow to come. In England, the Eighth Air Force had access to an increasingly sophisticated depot network. In Africa, things were still quite spartan.

“The runways were just dry packed dirt and the dust kicked up by the takeoff ascended to something like 2,000 feet,” Hughes explains. “As we circled, waiting for the remaining bombers to take off and fit themselves into their respective formations, it was quite impossible to see the field at all under the dust cloud. Plane after plane popped out of the dust and by some miracle all took off safely.”

The force crossed the Mediterranean, and headed into Bordeaux at twenty-three thousand feet, with the Pyrenees under their left wings. They passed through minimal anti-aircraft fire, but noticed the contrails of German fighters high above. These attacked the rear of the formation, claiming four of the Flying Fortresses. The “easiest target in France” turned out not to be so easy for those four crews.

As they passed over the Bay of Biscay, LeMay ordered the bombers
down to five hundred feet so that they could fly under the German radar and avoid a second fighter interception.

They returned to England late, so LeMay invited Hughes to spend the night at his headquarters at Camp Blainey. “Both of us were still considerably hopped up from oxygen [used at high altitude for most of the day] and found difficulty sleeping,” Hughes writes. “Suddenly this grim, taciturn character began to talk, and I don’t think he stopped talking for two or three hours. All the pent up feelings from his terrible raid on Regensburg, and from all the tough missions that he had invariably led, came spilling out of him in a gush. I doubt whether any person in the world, except perhaps his wife, ever heard the great Lieutenant General LeMay, presently [circa 1950s] commander of the Strategic Air Command, express himself so freely.”

It was not until September that the Eighth Air Force undertook another maximum effort against Germany on the scale of the August 17 missions. On September 6, there were 407 bombers launched, the largest number to date, though, as on August 17, it was a split force, with 69 Liberators flying a diversionary sweep over the North Sea, while the main force flew south to bomb Stuttgart, home to Daimler-Benz, manufacturer of everything from military vehicles to the DB601 aircraft engines used in Messerschmitt Bf 109s. When they found the city obscured by cloud cover, the formations broke up and 262 bombers attacked “targets of opportunity.”

Once again, as on August 17, and indeed on every mission flown thus far by the Eighth Air Force inside Germany, Luftwaffe interceptors took a terrible toll. A total of 45 bombers were shot down, for a loss rate of 17 percent of those that dropped bombs.

Losses such as these, on top of the losses suffered on August 17, took a severe toll on Eighth Air Force effectiveness—not to mention the toll on morale.

The nemesis of the bombers this day was II Gruppe of the Luftwaffe’s veteran Jagdgeschwader 27, which had redeployed from the Mediterranean in August for
Reichsverteidigung
operations, and which was based at Wiesbaden’s Erbenheim Airfield. Four of the bombers were claimed by Werner Schroer, II Gruppe’s leader, an ace who increased his total of aerial victories
to 88 on September 6, and who would eventually shoot down 26 four-engine bombers.

It was days like this that underscored the fact that bomber crews over Germany were more likely to be killed in action than front-line marines in the terrible fighting in the Pacific.