Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (26 page)

“The clouds seemed to open up and there was the target right in the middle of the hole,” Lieutenant Richard Crown, the 384th Bombardment Group’s lead bombardier recalled. “The hangars stood out plainly against the white snow, and when the bombs hit, those buildings disappeared in one puff. Our bombs swept right through the hangar area of the field. It was one of those days when everything goes right”

“Visibility was perfect and I could see one [target] airfield below with about 25 planes lined up in a row,” recalled Staff Sergeant Glen Dick, a radio operator with the 381st Bombardment Group, in a conversation with David Osborne for the book
They Came from Over the Pond
. “You could see big pieces of planes blown into the air when our bombs caught them. I also saw a tremendous explosion down there right after that. There was a big orange sheet of flame in the middle of the airfield.”

“Because the weather was uncertain we were provided with a Pathfinder crew especially trained for instrument bombing,” recalled Colonel Harold Bowman, commander of the 401st Bombardment Group. “The weather en route was indeed bad and preparations were made for aiming by instrument means but as we approached the target area, the clouds opened up to ‘scattered’ and a visual sighting was made. The result was, for our group, 100 percent of our bombs were within one thousand feet of the aiming point. Hits were made on the principal assembly shop of the Erla Messerschmitt production factory, and its other large assembly building was observed to be on fire as the bombers left the target area.”

“We started out on Pathfinder [using H2X or AN/APS-15 radar],” recalls Tech Sergeant Joseph Purdy, the radio operator in the 384th B-17 named
Mrs. Geezil
. “But the target was clear for miles around. We had very little escort—area cover, and not too good, but the enemy fighters were snowed in and the ground looked pretty. The sky was beautifully empty of everything except B-17s—lots of them.”

As the bombers exited the target area over Leipzig, the pilots could see a large number of contrails far to the south and coming toward the American force.

“The distance was too great to see aircraft, but not their telltale contrails,” Dale Smith, leading the 384th Group, recalled. “No doubt these contrails were being made by enemy fighters launched late from southern
Germany. I asked the tail gunner if we were generating contrails. ‘Affirmative,’ he reported, ‘heavy ones.’ Sometimes a combat wing would make so many contrails that it appeared to be a long cirrus cloud. Oh, oh, I thought. If I could see that Luftwaffe leader’s contrails, he could see mine. Yet in the late afternoon we were somewhat up sun from him, and I hoped he hadn’t yet spotted us. So I immediately took the wing down into warmer air where we produced no contrails. It worked. The enemy fighters never intercepted.”

Not everyone over Leipzig was as lucky as Dale Smith. The “90 local defenders,” whom he dismissively describes, had done no small measure of damage. As the 351st Bombardment Group Flying Fortresses headed southwest into Third Reich airspace as part of the Leipzig-bound stream described by Dale Smith, they met some of those “local defenders.”

In the “Tail-end Charlie” position, Dick Nelson was pushing
Ten Horsepower
as hard as he could, trying to keep up and not to tempt the Germans to regard the hand-me-down Flying Fortress as a straggler. Meeting the Luftwaffe air defense
geschwaders
in their home skies was an entirely new, and entirely disconcerting, experience. None of the crew had been over Germany before, and with the exception of copilot Ronald Bartley, this was only their second combat mission ever.

As Smith had explained, the local defenders “attacked our main force on the penetration to Leipzig.” This was just as the 351st Group’s aircraft were entering their bomb run.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose.

Nelson and Bartley barely had time to rest their eyes on the German fighter, emerging out of the fuzzy haze of the streaming contrails of other bombers, closing on them from straight ahead.

The combined speed of the two aircraft rushing toward each other was in the neighborhood of 500 mph, and at that speed you don’t have much time to comprehend what is happening, much less to react.

The German pilot squeezed off a burst from his MG 151, sending 20mm shells hurtling toward the Flying Fortress at incomprehensible speed. The white-hot discs racing toward him were the last thing that Ronald Bartley would ever see.

One of them hit the right windshield of
Ten Horsepower
’s flight deck square on, piercing it as though it were not there.

The explosion vaporized the copilot’s head, and the shrapnel ripped into the side of Dick Nelson’s head and arm.

Across the world in the United States, Bernice Bartley, so recently a new bride, was just then waking up on the first morning of her widowhood.

Crews elsewhere in the formation saw
Ten Horsepower
getting hit just as its bombs dropped. Suddenly more than two tons lighter, the B-17G nosed upward for a moment and then drifted out of formation. With the copilot dead and the pilot unconscious, the Flying Fortress was out of control. It went into a spin and began to fall, dropping from twenty thousand feet to fifteen thousand feet, and still it tumbled downward.

Joe Martin, the bombardier, alone in the nose of the aircraft, looked up into the cockpit and saw the carnage of what he assumed to be two dead men. Being unable to raise anyone on the intercom, he also made an assumption that anyone else who had survived had already bailed out. He popped the hatch and hit the silk as quickly as he could. His assumption was wrong; he would be the only one to jump.

Carl Moore crawled to the flight deck, where he found it drenched from top to bottom with the blood of two men. He grabbed the yoke and strained to fight the centrifugal force that governed the momentum of the out-of-control aircraft.

As Moore battled the controls,
Ten Horsepower
dropped from fifteen thousand feet to ten thousand feet, and still it fell.

Finally, he was able to gain control, and the bomber leveled out at five thousand feet.

The first reaction of most of the crew was to get the hell out of the falling coffin as soon as the centrifugal force no longer pinned them to the nearest bulkhead.

Back topside, Wally Truemper, the navigator, sensed that the aircraft was now in stable flight and ordered everyone to stay put for the time being. Archie Mathies popped out of the frightening confines of the ball turret and made his way to the flight deck, where he and Moore were quickly joined by Truemper.

They took stock of a horrible situation. Blood, brains, and flesh were plastered all over everything, and a nearly 200 mph wind whipped through the shattered windshield.

Bartley was obviously gone, but Dick Nelson, despite horrendous injuries, was still breathing.

As the men looked around, they realized that
Ten Horsepower
was, with the obvious exception of the flight deck, completely intact. All four of her four turbo-supercharged Wright Cyclone engines still thundered as smoothly as they had that morning when she lifted off from Polebrook. As far as anyone could see, the wings and control surfaces were in good working order. The decision was made to remove Bartley and Nelson from the flight deck and attempt to fly the bomber back to England.

They managed to lift what was left of the copilot down into the bombardier’s station, but when they attempted to move Dick Nelson, they found him so entangled in the controls that they decided to leave him for fear of exacerbating his injuries.

It has been said that a little knowledge is a bad thing, but on this Sunday, it was good. Between them, Moore, Mathies, and Truemper had enough of a basic understanding of the pilot’s trade to keep
Ten Horsepower
level and get the aircraft turned toward home. Truemper, being the navigator, figured out the course, and they headed in that direction.

Archie Mathies, who had watched pilots enough to believe that he could fly the plane, slipped into Bartley’s vacant seat and took the controls. Truemper gave him a northwesterly course that they believed would take them home.

However, the Luftwaffe was not finished with
Ten Horsepower
.

From straight above, a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 dived on the airplane, trading streams of tracers with Joe Rex and his .50-caliber machine gun for a few seconds before exploding in a shower of debris. Rex had canceled the Focke-Wulf, but not without being badly wounded in his arm.

Two more Fw 190s came up on the right side, flying parallel with
Ten Horsepower
so close that the crewmen had to do a double take to be sure they weren’t escort fighters. As the Germans were studying the damaged Flying Fortress, Russell Robinson, the right waist gunner, fired a burst of .50-caliber lead at them.

The two German planes backed off, then made one firing pass at
Ten Horsepower
before inexplicably disappearing to chase someone else.

Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the crew headed for home.

Tom Sowell, who had crawled into the ball turret abandoned by Archie Mathies, later recalled the surreal view of people just five thousand feet below, standing on the streets of German and Dutch cities and staring up at the American four-engine bomber. Those in the Dutch cities waved.

At that same moment, and in those same skies, another, eerily similar drama was playing out aboard another 1st Bombardment Division Flying Fortress.

Lieutenant William Robert “Bill” Lawley, a twenty-three-year-old pilot from Leeds, Alabama, had taken off from Chelveston that morning in a Flying Fortress on whose nose, the paint proclaiming it as the
Cabin in the Sky
, was still fresh.

Bill Lawley’s life had paralleled the lives of so many of the young pilots in the sky that day. He had enlisted for flight training in August 1942, the same month that he had turned twenty-two. He had earned his wings in April 1943, been matched with a crew, trained at Tyndall Field in Florida, and was part of that huge influx of personnel who had flowed into the Replacement Depot Casual Pool in England around the first of the year.

In January, Lawley and his crew received their assignment to the 364th Bombardment Squadron of the 305th “Can Do” Bombardment Group. Like so many of the men amassed for the thousand-bomber maximum effort that Sunday morning, he and his men had yet to fly a mission deep into the Third Reich. However, unlike the crew of
Ten Horsepower
, they had managed to get the experience of multiple shorter missions before that day.

As Dick Nelson and Ronald Bartley had awakened at Polebrook around 3
A.M.
to eat breakfast and head over to the 351st Bombardment Group briefing hut, so too had Bill Lawley and his copilot, Lieutenant Paul Murphy, done the same at Chelveston. When the black curtain was pulled back at the 364th Squadron briefing, the string of black yarn stretched, like that on the map at the 510th, from East Anglia to Leipzig. They too saw names such as Heiterblick, Abtnaundorf, and Mockau airfield.

As Wilbur Morrison writes in his book
The Incredible 305th
, Lawley turned to his bombardier, Lieutenant Henry Mason, and said, “Doesn’t sound too bad, Henry.”

“Who knows?” Mason replied as he stared at the map. “You never can tell about a strike into Germany.”

Five hours later, it was not the streets and landmarks on a map or recon photo that bombardier Henry Mason was viewing through his Norden bombsight. It was the streets and landmarks of the
real
Leipzig.

When the time came, he toggled the bomb release, anticipating the sharp jump that a Flying Fortress does when it is abruptly relieved of the groaning weight of around three tons of bombs.

Nothing. There had been a hang-up. The bombs did not release.

However, this problem quickly moved down Mason’s list of priorities in the clear skies over the Reich.

As had happened so recently aboard
Ten Horsepower
, and on way too many other Flying Fortresses in the past half hour, all hell broke loose.

A German fighter raced toward
Cabin in the Sky
, making one of those head-on passes that Egon Mayer had helped to turn into Luftwaffe doctrine.

Exactly as had happened aboard
Ten Horsepower
—and probably as the interceptor pilots had been told at
their
morning briefing that Sunday to
make
happen—the Messerschmitt hurled its 20mm shells directly into the flight deck windshield.

As had happened on
Ten Horsepower
less than an hour before, the copilot died instantly. Like Ronald Bartley, the last thing that Paul Murphy saw was those burning hot disks of incoming rounds heading directly at his face.

As Dick Nelson had been seriously injured by the shell that had killed the man in the seat next to his, so too was Bill Lawley.

Unlike Nelson, however, Lawley was still conscious.

In every other respect, though,
Cabin in the Sky
was in much worse shape than
Ten Horsepower
. Unlike Nelson’s place, which took a single, deadly hit, Lawley’s bomber had been worked over. One engine was on fire, and several of the men had been badly wounded as the fighters raked the Flying Fortress from nose to tail.

To add to their problems,
Cabin in the Sky
was in a steep, almost vertical dive with a full bomb load.

They were going down.

However, Bill Lawley decided
not
to let this happen.

He jerked back on the yoke, but Paul Murphy’s lifeless body had fallen forward onto his and was pushing the bomber ever downward.

Though his right hand was badly injured and essentially useless, Bill Lawley managed to maul Murphy’s body off the controls and then strain with all he could do with his left hand to get the bomber into level flight at about twelve thousand feet.

As on the flight deck of
Ten Horsepower
, blood was splattered everywhere.

“In the excitement of the moment he had felt sharp pains,” Wilbur Morrison writes of Lawley’s discovery that he too had been badly wounded. “Only when he wiped his hand across his face and saw the blood was he fully aware that he had been hit by the exploding shell.”