Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (24 page)

At last, on the afternoon of Friday, February 18, Krick came to see Anderson and Spaatz with a guardedly optimistic expression on his face.

“A good-looking sequence,” he said, “is in the making.”

This was an understatement.

He explained that not one, but two extensive pressure areas were developing. One would be centered in the Baltic, the other just west of Ireland.
If the area over the Baltic moved southeast across Europe as Krick predicted, the resulting winds would break up the cloud cover and leave most of Germany under clear skies or scattered clouds for at least three days beginning on Sunday, February 20.

The only problem was that there would be thick cloud cover over England when the bombers launched. The aircraft would have to climb above the clouds before assembling into their formations, but the crews were used to this.

Anderson was ecstatic, but other weather forecasters were unconvinced. There were arguments on the very eve of the operation of the same name when the data was presented to the Eighth and Ninth Air Force weathermen on Saturday. They insisted that the scenario that Krick projected was extremely rare in this area for this time of year.

In the upper echelons of command Jimmy Doolittle of the Eighth and Lewis Brereton of the Ninth were inclined to believe the weather reporting of their own meteorologists, who considered Krick’s hypothesis to be impossible. As Anderson’s right-hand man, Glen Williamson, later explained to Arthur Ferguson, neither man shared Anderson’s confidence in Krick’s predictions.

The USAAF meteorologists assigned to the operational units were of the traditional school who were extremely skeptical of Krick and his methodology. He was well known, and not very well respected, within the small world of forecasting. His reputation for unorthodox methods had preceded him, and so too had the controversy.

However, as John Cox reports in his book
Storm Chasers
, Krick had the confidence of Hap Arnold, and within the USAAF, that was the last word on which weatherman would be Operation Argument’s final authority.

When Anderson then cabled Ira Eaker, now in command of the MAAF in Italy, to tell him that Operation Argument was on, and that the Fifteenth Air Force was needed, it could not have been more inopportune timing.

As noted, the Combined Bomber Offensive was not happening in a vacuum. Operation Overlord, the big show for the troops gathering in England, was still months away. However, in the Mediterranean Theater, home of the Fifteenth Air Force, Anglo-American ground forces were
already engaged. Indeed, Operation Shingle, the big Allied invasion of Italy at Anzio, had taken place less than a month earlier, on January 22. Things had not gone as hoped. The German resistance was much tougher than anticipated, and the Allied troops had been tenuously clinging to their beachhead with bloody fingernails.

When Anderson’s alert reached Eaker and Nathan Twining of the Fifteenth Air Force, they were then in the midst of discussions with General Mark Clark of the US Fifth Army, planning air support for a breakout from the Anzio beachhead. The Fifteenth Air Force was to be a key component of what was being planned for February 20.

Eaker told Anderson and Spaatz that he could not participate in Operation Argument on Sunday. As Glen Williamson later revealed, Eaker did not want to press the point with the Mediterranean Theater commander, General Henry Maitland Wilson, for fear that Wilson would take over direct command of the Fifteenth Air Force and
also
prevent Eaker from participating in Argument later in the week. Spaatz took the question to the RAF commander in chief, Peter Portal, who trumped everyone by telling Spaatz that Churchill himself wanted all the Allied airpower in the Mediterranean available over Anzio.

This turn of events, on top of an almost universal distrust of Dr. Krick’s weather reporting, marked a very ill-omened beginning for Operation Argument.

Even as the airmen across the length and breadth of East Anglia who would fly the biggest mission of the war to date were bedding down early on Saturday evening, the command staff was preparing for a long night, and a very long day.

Before dawn, Sunday morning, Fred Anderson issued the order, which he dutifully recorded in his official journal:

“Let ’em go.”

More than eleven thousand young American airmen arose to eat breakfast when the sunrise of the first day of Big Week was still hours away. It was biting cold that morning, but that was nothing new. This was February in East Anglia. Every day, in the wee hours of the morning, was monotonously cold in February. What made this Sunday different was that the weather was supposed to be clear over Germany.

Nobody got to sleep in.

“The week of good bombing weather was over Germany,” Derwyn Robb of the 379th Bombardment Group recalls of Big Week in his memoir,
Shades of Kimbolton
. “In no way could anyone say that about the weather conditions in England during the same period of time. Snow covered the ground, runways were sheets of ice, and the wind whipping across the base froze everything and everyone in its path…. It all started on the dreary afternoon of the 19th when Division sent down the usual alert with the usual notation ‘maximum effort.’ Again the planes were loaded with bombs, again the gas was put in, and again completely readied for a mission. Cooks again prepared chow and S-2 again prepared the briefing. No one really expected the mission to go out but preparations went on anyway with the usual griping.”

But Big Week had already started. At about 3:15
A.M.
, as the Yanks were mustering for breakfast, 921 bombers from RAF Bomber Command were beginning an hour-long bombardment of Leipzig, Germany’s fifth largest city.

When General Fred Anderson said “Let ’em go,” the Eighth Air Force would proceed to launch more bombers than it ever had. For the first time, more than a thousand bombers wearing American stars would be headed toward Germany.

At Eighth Air Force bases all across East Anglia, those eleven thousand young American airmen, nearly four times the number who mustered here on Black Thursday, finished their coffee and headed for their briefings.

Held simultaneously in dozens of Quonset huts all across East Anglia, the briefings were always a dramatic affair, whether it was your first, or your twenty-fifth—and last. The temperature went from the cold and damp of the night outside to hot and muggy as dozens of warm bodies crowded inside, each sweating his immediate future.

The briefings were the unveiling of “your target for today,” which was a little like waiting for your name to be drawn in a lottery. The men who had been through the Selective Service lottery understood this well. Until the target was announced, there could only be guesses.

“More than one pair of sleepy eyes popped open when they saw the routes stretching into Germany to twelve different targets, and heard that over a thousand heavies with fighter escort would be crowding the skies on this one mission,” Derwyn Robb recalls of the briefing at the 379th that morning.

“There probably will be icing conditions at altitude, and you may have a little difficulty with contrails,” the briefing officer cautioned.

“This remark was generally made for every mission during the winter months,” Robb explains. “It was usually a very gross understatement.”

“A neat major steps on the platform at the front of the room and begins roll call,” recalls Colonel Bud Peaslee, who had led the 384th Bombardment Group to Schweinfurt in October. “He sings out only the names of the plane commanders. Each answers for his crew. There is some screwing around in the front rows as a few commanders turn to scan the faces in the back for their men. All are present. The major moves to the rear of
the platform and rips aside a black curtain hanging against the wall. A large-scale map appears with the usual length of black yarn crossing it. There is no noise now as all lean forward, looking at the eastern end of the yarn.”

The black curtains were drawn back, and at RAF Polebrook, about sixty-five miles northeast of London, Second Lieutenant Dick Nelson of the 351st Bombardment Group, took in the eastern end of
his
piece of yarn. It was Leipzig, the same target that the RAF was just finishing as the Americans watched the curtain.

The 351st was part of the 1st Bombardment Division, which would have the biggest role to play on Day One of Big Week, and they would go the deepest into Hitler’s Reich. About 80 miles southwest of Berlin, Leipzig is around 527 miles from East Anglia, farther than Regensburg or Schweinfurt.

This morning, Dick Nelson was about to embark on his second combat mission. He glanced around at the officers in his crew—Joe Martin, the bombardier; Wally Truemper, the navigator; and Flight Officer Ron Bartley, his copilot. Their attention was on the yarn, the destination, and the lecture being delivered by the briefer.

After having lost their first Flying Fortress,
Mizpah
, in mid-December, Nelson and his crew had passed their first month and their first Christmas overseas, biding their time in the Replacement Depot Casual Pool, before going to the 1st Training and Replacement Squadron, all the while waiting to be given a home, and an airplane to fly.

On January 19, they had finally been assigned to the 510th Bombardment Squadron of the 351st Bombardment Group, based at Polebrook.

Nelson’s whole crew, minus Ron Bartley, flew their first mission on February 6, against German targets near Caen in northern France, with Nelson flying copilot to Harold Peters, a pilot with seven missions under his belt. Their aircraft was a nearly new B-17G named
April Girl II
. Bartley had sat out the mission so that Nelson could fly with a more experienced pilot on his first outing.

The briefing officer explained that Operation Argument was all about the German aircraft industry, and Leipzig was the home of the Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke and the Erla Maschinenwerke. The Junkers
factories were where they made the versatile, twin-engined Ju 88, which was used by the Luftwaffe both as a tactical bomber—mainly on the eastern front—and as a rocket launching interceptor against the Eighth Air Force. Erla, meanwhile, built components for Messerschmitt aircraft, and they were also one of the principal final assembly sites for the Bf 109G fighter, especially the newer, enhanced-range Bf 109G-10 variant.

The crews were told that Leipzig was ringed by twelve hundred antiaircraft guns, and the city would be ferociously defended by the Luftwaffe.

Most of the 1st Division’s Flying Fortresses were tasked with the Erla and Junkers plants in the Leipzig suburbs of Heiterblick and Abtnaundorf, as well as at Leipzig’s Mockau airfield, which was home to the Junkers engine works, where they made Jumo 213 engines for Fw 190s. In addition to the Erla and Junkers facilities, the galaxy of targets arrayed around Leipzig also included numerous aircraft component subcontractors, including Allgemeine Transportanlagen Gesellschaft (ATG). A smaller number of 1st Division B-17s were assigned targets among the Junkers facilities at Bernberg, about fifty miles northwest of Leipzig.

Like the flight crew, the sergeants were up at around three-thirty for breakfast, and the gunners picked up their guns. These they loaded into trucks along with their flak suits. As described by Wright Lee of the 445th Bombardment Group, the suits were “cushioned, steel panel enclosed jackets covering the front and back of your body from neck to groin.” The suits weighed more than twenty pounds and were awfully uncomfortable, but they served a definite purpose. If they had extra flak suits, crewmen sat on them to protect themselves from beneath. For additional protection, the men also often wore regular M1 GI steel helmets over their aviator’s helmets.

The flak, like the Luftwaffe, was greatly dreaded, but the antagonist most feared by the men in bombers was the cold, the searing, painful subzero cold.

The crewmen, officers, and sergeants alike dressed in sheepskin-lined leather, from their jackets—of the style known to this day as a “bomber jacket”—to their ungainly sheepskin-lined flying boots.

Russell Robinson and Tom Sowell, the waist gunners on Dick Nelson’s crew, picked up their .50-caliber Brownings and caught a lift to the flight
line. In combat, they had the dangerously cold and unenviable task of aiming their single machine guns through open windows in the frigid stratosphere where a man could lose his fingers to frostbite. They wore thick, lined gloves, tight-fitting leather helmets, and leather pants. With their goggles, and the oxygen masks they wore at high altitude, no skin was exposed to the air—although the rubber of the oxygen mask was hardly adequate protection. Contemporary descriptions often referred to the waist gunners as looking like “men from Mars.”

As Jerry Penry recalls in his memoir,
Sunrise Serenade
, named for his 452nd Bombardment Group Flying Fortress, the ambient temperature above twenty thousand feet was often around forty degrees below zero, which made it very difficult for the airmen to function inside the unheated planes.

“The airmen wore heated flying suits, but they were not able to keep every part of their body covered to avoid getting frostbite,” Penry explains. “One area that was susceptible to frostbite was the face, particularly the cheeks. A bare hand touched against the side of any metal surface would adhere itself to the metal at these extreme temperatures. The instinctive reflexes needed by the gunners to shoot at enemy fighters were considerably slowed due to the often bulky clothing. Under the large gloves worn by the gunners was a nylon glove that closely fit the contour on the hand. These gloves allowed the gunners to work on their equipment without getting their hands stuck to the bare metal. Often the guns turned white due to the extreme cold temperature. Many airmen realized that it was indeed possible to both freeze and sweat at the same time during a tense mission.”

Though not every man carried one, every combat crew member was issued a Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, along with two clips. As John O’Neil recalls in Marshall Thixton’s anthology about the 482nd Bombardment Group, “Around this period of the European air war, US fighters began making ground-level attacks on airdromes, airplanes, trains, military vehicles and other potential targets. The Eighth fighters would do their strafing on the way back to England after escorting bombers, or as direct ground-level missions. This in effect threw out some of the unwritten ground rules under which the old air war was carried out. German broadcasts to England stated that captured Allied airmen would be dealt with
as murderers. Many German civilians were attacking downed Allied airmen, if possible, before German military arrived on the scene. If an Allied airman had a firearm when captured, it could be an excuse to kill the airman on the spot. It was also never clear what a handgun could accomplish for a downed airman in any case. For these reasons and others, a number of US airmen did not carry their Colt .45s on missions.”