Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (25 page)

Mac Hagbo, the tail gunner in Dick Nelson’s crew, took his place with his twin .50-calibers in the distant rear of the aircraft. His glassed-in perch had some protection from the elements, but he had the worst of the wild gyrations of turbulence and the dubious distinction of defending against German fighters who could park themselves in the bomber’s wake and pour 20mm and 30mm cannon shells into the aircraft—and the gunner—for long durations.

Archie Mathies would be flying in the cramped position as the ball turret gunner. This would be Archie’s second combat mission, the first having been the February 6 mission to France—although on February 11, he and bombardier Joe Martin had filled in with another crew aboard
April Girl II
on a mission to Frankfurt that had been aborted. Having just been promoted to staff sergeant, Archie had the distinction of being the senior enlisted man aboard.

Aviation author Martin Caidin called the Sperry ball turret “unquestionably the loneliest position in the Flying Fortress—or the Liberator.”

“The turret,” wrote Caidin, “is like some grotesque, swollen eyeball of steel and glass and guns that seems to hang precariously from the belly of the B-17. It is a hellish, stinking position in battle; the gunner must hunch up his body, draw up his knees, and work [himself] into a half ball to meet the curving lines of the turret. The guns are to each side of his head, and they stab from the turret eyeball like two even splinters. Jailed in his little spherical powerhouse, the ball turret gunner literally aims his own body at enemy fighters, working both hands and feet in deft coordination, spinning and tilting and then depressing switches atop the gun grip handles to fire the two weapons. It is the most unenviable position in a bomber,
any
bomber, and the man most unlikely to escape from a blazing B-17 is that lonely soul in the ball.”

The sun was still not up when Dick Nelson’s crew took their places
and Nelson started the engines. Launching a thousand bombers from two dozen airfields, at minimum intervals, as fast as possible, in the dark is a feat of immense precision. Every pilot had been briefed on his place in the takeoff sequence, his rendezvous point in the sky, and his place in the immense bomber stream. It was a process requiring meticulous choreography with no room for error. Dick Nelson had been assigned a place in the formation that would be number three in the 351st Bombardment Group, or on the right wing of the group leader.

Nelson was taxiing toward the Polebrook runway according to the plan, when suddenly, a jeep appeared out of nowhere. Reacting instinctively, Nelson made a hard right turn, the right main landing gear slid into the mud, and the plane became stuck. Immediate and frantic efforts by a small army of ground crew personnel tried to nudge the bomber from her sticky trap.

By some accounts, they finally freed the stuck airplane, but as Joe Rex recalls in an audio recording in the collection of the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the crew was ordered to transfer their gear to another aircraft named
Ten Horsepower
. By all accounts,
Ten Horsepower
was the aircraft that the crew would fly during Sunday’s mission. A Seattle-built Boeing B-17G with the tail number 42-31763, this bomber was one of the hundreds that had arrived since the first of the year, and it had been flown by several different crews on five previous missions since the first of February.

The snafu with the mud cost the crew its coveted position as number three in the group, as anyone who did not make his prescribed takeoff position had to wait for everyone else to go. This put them last in the air, struggling to catch up and flying the position known as “Tail-end Charlie.”

As Joe Rex points out, “The day was one of those you feel had to get better right from the start, but which keeps going downhill.”

Thanks to Wally Truemper’s excellent navigating,
Ten Horsepower
, the Flying Fortress piloted by Dick Nelson and Ron Bartley, caught up with the rest of the 351st Bombardment Group and took its place in a thousand-plane bomber stream that stretched for 150 miles across the skies over the North Sea.

Some of the elements of the 2nd Division would go nearly as deep as the 1st Division, almost 500 miles from East Anglia, to the city of Gotha, a place that earned its name in the eighth century when Charlemagne wrote that it was a place of “good water.” A capital first of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha, and later of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the city was now home to the facilities of Gothaer Waggonfabrik (GWF). The company had originated in the nineteenth century as a builder of railway rolling stock but had branched into aircraft as early as 1914 and was currently manufacturing a variety of its own aircraft for the Luftwaffe, as well as being the largest manufacturer of Messerschmitt’s twin-engine fighters.

Other 2nd Division Liberators heading southeast on Sunday were flying toward Braunschweig, the city commonly known in English as Brunswick, about 440 miles from 2nd Division bases. Here, the targets included factories in the city’s northern suburbs, as well as at Helmstedt,
about a dozen miles to the east, and Oschersleben, 20 miles to the southeast. The Braunschweig area was home to the engine maker Muhlenbau-Industrie AG (MIAG). Though MIAG’s stock in trade was power plants for Panther tanks and Jagdpanther armored vehicles, they were also a major manufacturer of engines designed by Daimler-Benz, and they produced components for Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters.

The 1st and 2nd Divisions would be escorted by a greater number of fighters than had yet been launched by the USAAF on a single mission anywhere. It was a maximum effort, in which every available American fighter plane—18 fighter groups worth—was tapped for service, while the RAF also contributed 16 squadrons of Spitfires and some of its own Mustangs. Drawn from VIII Fighter Command, as well at the Ninth Air Force’s IX Fighter Command, there were 73 USAAF P-51 Mustangs, 94 P-38 Lightnings, and 668 P-47 Thunderbolts. The latter, being unable to accompany the bombers all the way to their targets, would, as they usually did on deep penetration missions, go as far as possible, return home to refuel, and pick up the bombers on their way out of
Festung Europe
.

The Flying Fortresses of the 3rd Division, meanwhile, would fly a far northern route which would not cross the paths of the other two divisions after leaving British airspace. Flying across the North Sea and over the northern part of Denmark, they approached northern Germany from over the Baltic Sea.

Their primary targets would be the huge Luftwaffe engineering facility and bomber crew training school at Tutow. The most distant on the 3rd Division target list, the buildings were clustered around the city of Posen. Located 140 miles inland from the Baltic, Posen was a historically Polish city known in Polish as Poznan. It had been part of the Prussian and, later, German empires between 1815 and 1919 and was Polish again for twenty years before Hitler reincorporated it back into Germany in 1939. Here, the primary target was the Luftwaffenfliegerhorst Kreising airfield and factory complex that was located in the suburb of Krzesiny.

The secondary targets for the 3rd Division included the German port cities of Stettin and Rostock, which housed aircraft manufacturing facilities operated by Heinkel Flugzeugwerke.

Part of the plan in sending the 3rd Division so far north was diversionary.
Seeing this force on radar or with observers in Denmark, the Luftwaffe would be alerted to counter them by shifting interceptors from central Germany. When it was discovered that the main part of the Sunday mission was coming over central Germany, the fighters that had gone north would have to make a U-turn from a long distance. This would pull them away from the 3rd Division and make them late in intercepting the other divisions—at least in theory.

Following a course that was mainly over the water, the 3rd Division would fly without fighter escort. They would depend for their defense on the other two divisions having lured the Luftwaffe into action over Germany’s industrial heartland.

This may have worked to a certain extent, but the ploy could certainly not be proven by the experiences of the 3rd Division crews who were mauled by the Luftwaffe east of Denmark.

The 100th Bombardment Group came south across the North Sea with the 3rd Division bomber stream, crossing the coastline at ten minutes to noon, a little more than three hours after departing British airspace. Contrary to the theory about the Luftwaffe being elsewhere, interceptors were on hand to meet the bombers three minutes after they made landfall. First to attack were Fw 190s, which was perhaps fitting, as the 100th was heading in to attack a Focke-Wulf factory, and these were followed by Bf 109s and rocket-firing Bf 110s and Ju 88s. Several crews reported seeing an Fw 190 carrying a bomb that hung from a cable.

Also known as the “Century Bombers,” the 100th Bombardment Group had earned a Distinguished Unit Citation in the Regensburg mission on August 17. The 100th would also be known throughout the Eighth Air Force as the “Bloody Hundredth” for the punishment it had taken from the Luftwaffe and flak batteries in missions going back to the first one to Regensburg.

Unfortunately, the 100th discovered that the clear skies over most of Germany did not extend to the parts of Germany that had recently been Poland. Because the United States still officially recognized Poznan as Polish, the strike force had been briefed to divert to the secondary target if their bombardiers did not have a clear view of their objectives relative to
residential areas. Finding cloud cover, they made a “circling climb to the left” and diverted to the port of Stettin, their secondary target.

Here, at four minutes past 2
P.M.
, a Pathfinder Fortress picked out the target on radar and the other bombers followed its lead. However, any time a diversion is necessary, it is hard to maintain unit cohesion, especially while a formation is under fighter attack, and this axiom was proven that afternoon over northeastern Germany.

“For some reason or other the Group leader was flying slow,” John Johnson of the 100th explains in the anthology
Century Bombers
by Richard LeStrange. “On several occasions we were indicating 145 mph and still overrunning the leader. So was everyone else and by the time we reached the target we were not a formation, we were a mob. We bombed but could not be sure if we hit anything.”

Edward Huntzinger, in his wartime history of the 388th Bombardment Group, writes that “at the Danish Coast on the route in, in the target area, and on the route out approximately 20 to 25 twin engine aircraft, most Me 210s, and 10 to 15 Fw 190s and Bf 109s were encountered. They used both 20mm cannon and rockets during these attacks.” He further notes that two of the group’s Flying Fortresses were lost, though most of the crewmen survived to become POWs.

Some of the 3rd Division Flying Fortresses that were hit attempted to make it to neutral Sweden, where they knew internment for the duration would be far more agreeable than imprisonment in a German stalag. They did not all make it. One such aircraft attempting to reach Swedish airspace was
Ain’t Mis Behavin
, piloted by Lieutenant Reginald Smith, with copilot Lieutenant Orlin “Mark” Markussen.

“The plane was hit in the number two engine after encountering heavy antiaircraft fire over Stettin,” Markussen explains in Richard LeStrange’s anthology. “I could not feather the propeller and we dropped out of formation. We called for our Squadron leader to slow down to the airspeed required to keep ‘cripples’ under the protection of other B-17’s. He would not—he panicked and told us to try and make it to the under cast clouds and fly to Sweden for internment. As we broke formation and dived for the clouds we were immediately hit by eight Fw-190s, who, on the first head
on pass, shot off our top turret. This was followed by side, quarter and tail attacks which knocked off the left horizontal stabilizer, cut the control cables to the tail section, started a fire in the number two engine and wing tank and broke the glass canopy in the tail gunner’s section…. Miraculously, not one of the ten of us on the crew was hit. Now we were completely on fire and the wing was about to melt off. We all bailed out over the island of Fyn.”

Picked up by the Germans, Markussen was taken for interrogation by the Gestapo at Odense, which was, ironically, his mother’s hometown. Everyone else was also captured, except radio operator Ira Evans, who managed to evade the Germans. He was picked up by Danish resistance fighters and he found his way to Sweden two weeks later.

Meanwhile the 3rd Division “diversion” was perceived by the other divisions to have worked to disrupt and limit what the Luftwaffe
might have
done to the 1st and 2nd Divisions. It was a case of contemplating not the mischief the enemy did, but the unquantifiable potential for greater mischief that went unrealized.

In his memoir,
Screaming Eagle
, Colonel (later Major General) Dale O. Smith, the commander of the 384th Bombardment Group during Big Week, explains how the 3rd Division’s diversionary tactics seemed to have helped.

“German controllers saw our first force, a diversion of three hundred bound for Poland, swing across the North Sea toward Denmark,” he writes. “Believing this a threat to Berlin, the Luftwaffe not only kept their northern fighters in place but dispatched 70 fighters from southern displacements to intercept. Eighty minutes later our main force of 700 bombers thrust at Holland on a direct route to the targets. I led the 41st Combat Wing of almost 60 Forts in this bomber stream. German radar stations soon reported our huge strength and before the 70 enemy fighters sent north could intercept our diversionary force their controllers recalled them. Some 90 local defenders attacked our main force on the penetration to Leipzig, but they had to break off and refuel about target time. The 70 fighters recalled from the north hardly got in the fight before running out of fuel.”

That morning, Leipzig lay beneath a blanket of snow, and a deep blue sky. Down there, it was a sunny day—literally, but not figuratively.