Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (20 page)

The Flying Fortresses headed south, more or less on the same schedule as planned. At least the two divisions were not five hours apart as had happened to the best laid plans of August. As might have been expected, the Luftwaffe attacked just as the P-47 “little friends” turned back over the German city of Aachen. The tactics were familiar. Leaders and stragglers bore the brunt of their fury.

“Like good duck hunters they fired at the leading element,” Arthur Ferguson colorfully explains, “knowing that the normal spread of bursts would be likely to give them hits.”

As in the Münster mission, the Germans attacked in waves, using every weapon imaginable, including rockets and air-to-air bombing. Rockets, like flak, had often proven useful in breaking up the formations, which led to inaccurate bombing—as well as the creation of stragglers, which were so readily plucked by the Luftwaffe’s single-engine fighters. Leading the 1st Bombardment Division, the 40th Combat Wing lost seven of its forty-nine aircraft before even reaching the initial point.

“Most of the tactics used by the German fighters that day had been used before,” Ferguson observes. “But never before had the enemy made such full and such expertly coordinated use of these tactics. Indeed so well planned was the counterattack that it gave rise to the suspicion that the German fighter control had received advance warning of the timing and objectives of the mission.”

Indeed, General Eaker himself expressed this same idea in a memo to Hap Arnold five days later. If true, the idea was never proven conclusively.

The 1st Bombardment Division approached the target already badly mauled.

“We are approaching the Initial Point, the point at which we commit ourselves directly to the bomb run on the target,” observes Colonel Budd Peaslee, who led the 384th Bombardment Group. “Schweinfurt, here we come! As we turn, I take a hasty reading on our formation. I have eight aircraft left and my other group has been reduced to six. Fourteen planes left, and we still have so many miles to go! I call the captain leading the other bombers, and tell him to close in on me and to drop on my command, ‘Bombs away.’ He does not respond, but his formation moves in near to ours as we start the sighting run. The fighters know what our intentions are and they come at us like tigers…. We are right behind the leading formation as the bomb run starts. They are in good order, but one of their groups of 21 bombers has been reduced to two! The unit has been devastated, and it’s more than a little pathetic to see those two lonesome guys plugging along as though all were intact.”

The 1st Division began releasing bombs over Schweinfurt at 2:39
P.M.
, and emerged from the hellstorm of flak protecting the target area just six minutes later. There was a break in the cloud cover, and visibility was considered good for precision strikes. Even the battered 40th Wing bombardiers were able to line up their Norden bombsights on their intended targets and to put more than half their bombs within one thousand feet of the aiming point.

Captain James McClanahan, the bombardier aboard the Flying Fortress
Battle Wagon
, commanded by Major George Harris, noted that “the visibility was good over the target. I saw our bombs hit and I can say we knocked hell out of it. The bombs burst and the smoke rolled up, then there was a big explosion and all of a sudden there was a great splash of fire right in the center of everything. We got even with them today.”

The 2nd Bombardment Division followed six minutes later, at 2:51
P.M.
, and emerged at 2:57. A few clouds had drifted over the target, and the bombardiers were also somewhat hampered by the columns of smoke from the earlier attack. From beginning to end, the second Eighth Air Force raid on the
kugellager
of Schweinfurt had lasted eighteen minutes, and the survivors were on their way back to East Anglia by 3
P.M.

It would be a terrible ride home.

The same fighters that had mauled them so mercilessly during the
hours coming in were refueled and ready to reprise their actions on the way out. First came the ubiquitous Bf 109s and Fw 190s, and then came the waves of twin-engine defenders who turned to heavy-caliber cannons when their rockets had been expended.

Damaged bombers strayed from their formations, becoming sitting ducks, which became losses.

When the surviving Flying Fortresses finally stumbled into East Anglia at the end of a long day, the numbers of those losses became manifest. The 305th Bombardment Group had taken off from Chelveston that morning with 16 bombers, lost one to an abort, and suffered 12 shot down before reaching Schweinfurt. Only two made it back to Chelveston after the mission. Of the 291 Flying Fortresses that had taken off that morning, 60 had failed to return. Another 17 were damaged so badly that they had to be written off, and 121 suffered serious damage, which could be repaired, although each of those aircraft would be off the active list for some time.

Though 186 German fighters were claimed by the gunners, the actual number was 38 shot down and 20 damaged in combat.

For Adolf Hitler, the terrible mauling suffered by the Americans was a glass half-full. Speer was with him that night at his field headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (“Wolf’s Lair”), near Rastenburg in East Prussia, when he received the news.

“The Reich Marshal urgently wishes to speak to you,” Hitler’s adjutant said, entering the room to report that Hermann Göring was on the phone. “This time he has pleasant news.”

As Speer reports, “Hitler came back from the telephone in good spirits. A new daylight raid on Schweinfurt had ended with a great victory for our defenses, he said. The countryside was strewn with downed American bombers.”

Not sharing in Hitler’s jovial reaction, and admitting to a certain queasiness about potential damage in Schweinfurt, Speer attempted to phone the city.

“All communications were shattered,” he writes. “I could not reach any of the factories. Finally, by enlisting the police, I managed to talk to the foreman of a ball bearing factory. All the factories had been hard hit, he informed me. The oil baths for the bearings had caused serious fires in
the machinery workshops; the damage was far worse than after the first attack. This time we had lost 67 percent of our ball bearing production…. Our reserves had been consumed; efforts to import ball bearings from Sweden and Switzerland had met with only slight success. Nevertheless, we were able to avoid total disaster by substituting slide bearings for ball bearings wherever possible. But what really saved us was the fact that from this time on the enemy to our astonishment once again ceased his attacks on the ball bearing industry.”

Indeed, a great deal of damage
had
been done in Schweinfurt that day.

“The entire Works are now inactive,” Fred Anderson reported cheerfully after he had seen the post-strike photoreconnaissance imagery. “It may be possible for the Germans eventually to restore 2.5 per cent of normal productive capacity, but even that will require some time. A tremendous amount of clearance, repair work, and rebuilding will be necessary before plants can again be operative. Fires raged throughout three of the plant areas, burning out not only factories, but stores and dispatch buildings as well.”

The postwar US Strategic Bombing Survey report,
The German AntiFriction Bearings Industry
, notes “a high concentration of bombs in all the target areas… on and about all three of the big bearing plants. Of the 1,122 high-explosive bombs dropped, 143 fell within the factory area, 88 of which were direct hits on the factory buildings…. Strategically it was the most important of the sixteen raids made during the war on the Schweinfurt plants. It caused the most damage and the greatest interference with production, and it led directly to a reorganization of the bearing industry. The raids of 14 October, coming upon the still fresh damage of 17 August, alarmed the German industrial planners to a degree that almost justified the optimistic estimates made by Allied observers in the fall of that year.”

Citing German records, and a postwar debriefing of Speer, the Strategic Bombing Survey goes on to say that had the attack been followed promptly by another one, the ball bearing industry would have been seriously crippled. Indeed a November 18 memo from the British Ministry of Home Security stated that the bearing plants at Schweinfurt “are ready for practically immediate reattack.”

The “re-attack” would not come “immediately” in October, or November, or indeed, before Big Week.

Indeed, “the re-attack” that Speer both feared and expected was postponed because of the success that
appeared
to have been achieved. In Washington, General Arnold proudly told the media that “now we have got Schweinfurt,” but he was only partly right, and trying to spin the good part. In Arnold’s defense, his remarks to the media were made against the backdrop of great apprehension on the home front about the casualties that were being endured by the Eighth Air Force—especially over Schweinfurt.

In a memo to Secretary of War Stimson, which exaggerated even the reconnaissance evidence, Arnold wrote, “All five of the works at Schweinfurt were either completely or almost completely wiped out. Our attack was the most perfect example in history of accurate distribution of bombs over a target. It was an attack that will not have to be repeated for a very long time, if at all.”

His concluding sentence, which bought valuable time for Albert Speer, could not have been further from the truth.

As Speer himself recalls in his memoirs, “In June 1946 the General Staff of the Royal Air Force asked me what would have been the results of concerted attacks on the ball bearing industry. I replied: Armaments production would have been crucially weakened after two months and after four months would have been brought completely to a standstill.

“This, to be sure, would have meant: One: All our ball bearing factories (in Schweinfurt, Steyr, Erkner, Cannstatt, and in France and Italy) had been attacked simultaneously. Two: These attacks had been repeated three or four times, every two weeks, no matter what the pictures of the target area showed. Three: Any attempt at rebuilding these factories had been thwarted by further attacks, spaced at two-month intervals.”

Ironically, the damage that Fred Anderson, Hap Arnold, and others observed, celebrated, and
misinterpreted
resulted in the industry being “reorganized”—i.e., dispersed away from Schweinfurt. This made it much less efficient but spared it from total annihilation.

“In the two months following the first attack [in August] on Schweinfurt nothing had been done,” Speer writes of the decentralization effort.
“There was resistance on all sides, The Gauleiters did not want new factories in their districts for fear that the almost peacetime quiet of their small towns would be disturbed.”

Speer goes on to say that after the second heavy raid on October 14, “we again decided to decentralize. Some of the facilities were to be distributed among the surrounding villages, others placed in small and as yet unendangered towns in eastern Germany.”

The official armaments ministry office journal entry for October 18 reveals that “the minister [Speer] forcefully expressed his dissatisfaction with the measures previously taken, asserting that the urgency of the matter required all other considerations to be put aside. Deeply impressed by the damage and by the minister’s account of the potential consequences for the armaments industry, everyone readily offered all assistance, even the neighboring Gauleiters who would have to accept the unwelcome intrusions into their domains that would accompany the transfer of operations from Schweinfurt to their territories.”

In the Schweinfurt aftermath, the results of the attack were of less concern to the Eighth Air Force than the losses it had suffered. It has been written in numerous accounts that if the Eighth Air Force had continued to sustain losses on this level, it would have soon been out of business.

October 14 was dubbed “Black Thursday,” with good cause. Including those Flying Fortresses shot down or written off, the Eighth Air Force had suffered a staggering loss rate of 26 percent, or 28 percent of those that reached the target. Meanwhile, nearly six hundred airmen were killed, and more than fifty who bailed out became prisoners of war. Schweinfurt marked the most severe losses suffered by the Eighth Air Force to date.

As Ferguson writes of Black Week, “The Eighth Air Force was in no position to make further penetrations either to Schweinfurt or to any other objectives deep in German territory. The Schweinfurt mission, bad enough in itself, had climaxed a week of costly air battles. Within the space of six days the Eighth lost 148 bombers and crews, mostly as a result of air action, in the course of four attempts to break through German fighter defenses unescorted.”

Walt Rostow, who worked on the plan that Hughes had presented to the secretary of war in July, credits Fred Anderson with great heroism in
pursuing the Pointblank objectives against steep odds and criticism from higher quarters. He celebrates Anderson for taking “the bold initiative of attacking aircraft production, then concentrated in central Germany, before long-range fighters were available to protect the bombers.”

Martin Caidin, in his book about that day, writes that “the battle fought on Black Thursday stands high in the history of American fighting men. It will be long remembered, like the immortal struggles of Gettysburg, St. Mihiel and the Argonne, of Midway and the Bulge and Pork Chop Hill. Tens of thousands of our airmen fought in desperate battles in the sky during World War II. From China to the Aleutians, from Australia through the Philippines and across the Southwest Pacific, through the Central Pacific, in Africa and the Mediterranean, and across the length and breadth of Europe, American fliers engaged in combat with the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians. In all these battles one stands out among all the others for unprecedented fury, for losses suffered, for courage. This was the battle on Black Thursday…. It is an aerial struggle remembered with great pride, for it demanded the utmost in courage, in skill, in carrying on the fight in the face of bloody slaughter.”