Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (28 page)

There would be, the men in the tower thought sadly, another ten empty bunks at Chelveston that night.

There may have been a glance toward the sky to see if there might be a
Cabin
in it, but there was no
Cabin
. Nor would there be.

Meanwhile, however, contrary to what anyone may have thought they had seen, the
Cabin
was
still
in the sky.

There was no more welcome sight than the line of the French coast looming up ahead of
Cabin
’s crew. They saw the white and sandy crescent where they knew that thousands of young Americans in their age group would be battling their way ashore within a few months to begin the liberation of this continent that had been beneath their wings for the past eight hours or so.

There was no
less
welcome sound than that of one of the Flying Fortress’s Wright Cyclone engines starting to choke from lack of fuel.

Bill Lawley, woozy from pain and blood loss, but still in control, feathered the prop on the engine to reduce aerodynamic drag.

Suddenly, he was greeted by another unwelcome turn of events. The engine fire had exploded to life once again. This time, at barely five thousand feet, there would be no diving to use increased air flow to blow back the flames.

They would soon be crossing the English Channel, but Chelveston was still another one hundred miles farther on. Lawley knew they couldn’t make it, and most of the crew sensed this as well.

Bill Lawley had dragged
Cabin in the Sky
across hundreds of miles of
Festung Europa
, and he finally nudged the Flying Fortress across the English coastline. They were a sorry mess, all shot up and with an engine fire that was minutes away from burning off a wing.

They had come so far, and had come so close, but they would never reach Chelveston.

“He was looking for an open pasture,” waist gunner Ralph Braswell told Richard Goldstein of the
New York Times
fifty-five years later. “All of a sudden, there was a Canadian fighter field. He flashed the emergency signal and we went right in.”

It was a terrible landing. The landing gear controls were not functional, so the only choice left to the wounded pilot was a belly landing.
Cabin in the Sky
slammed into grass paralleling the runway at Redhill, a fighter field south of London. It skidded, scraped, and careened.

Now
, for the first time since Bill Lawley had pulled it out of that near-vertical dive over Leipzig, the Flying Fortress
was
out of control.

Fortunately the mud slowed the forward momentum and the aircraft would not have long to travel in this condition.

It was a terrible landing, but they always say that any landing from which you can walk away is a good landing.

Some of the men aboard Lawley’s plane—including him—were so badly wounded that they did not actually walk away, but everyone who was aboard, except Paul Murphy, who had died over Leipzig, exited the
Cabin in the Sky
alive.

Bill Lawley had told them that he was going to get them back to England safely, and he had.

For their extraordinary heroism on the opening day of Big Week, Archie Mathies, Wally Truemper, and Bill Lawley would all be written up for Medals of Honor.

And then there were heroes less celebrated. At Kimbolton, Lieutenant Paul Breeding landed a 379th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress that had been chewed up by Bf 109s over Bernburg. He too had lost his copilot and had been hit badly himself.

“Rather than stay in his position as lead plane of the second element and chance breaking up the formation, Breeding pulled his plane up 1,000 feet above the others before calling for help,” Derwyn Robb writes in his
memoir of the unit. Two of the gunners came to the flight deck to help remove the dead man to the bombardier’s station, and to take over flying the plane while Breeding received first aid.

“It was not until the dead copilot had been removed that anyone know that Breeding was also badly wounded, as he had continued to fly the plane without a word of his own injuries,” Robb continues. “Although the pilot was bleeding profusely and in severe pain he refused to take morphine, maintaining that he would be needed to get the plane down through the undercast at the base.”

In the meantime, the crew, facing a dilemma analogous to that which had taken place a short time before aboard
Ten Horsepower
, decided to put the ship on automatic pilot, strap parachutes to Breeding and the dead copilot, and bail out.

“When Breeding heard of this plan, he ordered [waist gunner] Charlie Sans to help him back into the cockpit to take over the controls,” Robb explains. “Weak and half conscious from loss of blood and pain, he stayed at the controls to bring his crew down through the clouds and a safe landing. As Breeding taxied his plane off the runway to a stop and reached forward to cut the engine switches, he passed out.”

Late that afternoon, at Park House in the London suburbs, where Tooey Spaatz and his staff lived—about sixty-five miles south of Polebrook and Molesworth, and a little less distance from Kimbolton—the teletypes began clattering as soon as the first bombardment group had landed all of its bombers.

As evening approached, the men who had planned Sunday’s missions, and the men who commanded the crews who flew the bombers, gathered to view and analyze the results of the day’s work. Fred Anderson, Glen Williamson, and Dick Hughes were there, and so too were Jimmy Doolittle and his staff.

“We had been up all night and all day,” Williamson later told journalist Charles Murphy. “The reports came in all evening. Group after group reported no losses or only one or two. We couldn’t believe it. We were all thinking somebody’s going to get wiped out, somebody’s going to say he was cut to pieces. When all the reports were in and we added up the totals the figures were unbelievable.”

The men who gathered on Sunday night at Park House were expecting to learn of two hundred lost bombers and two thousand lost crewmen. They learned that the Eighth Air Force had lost only twenty-one bombers and four fighters shot down. Losses were losses, but the commanders fixated on those who might have been lost but who were now snoring in their bunks across East Anglia.

The 1st Bombardment Division reported that seven of its Flying Fortresses had gone down, and one had to be written off after it returned. The division had lost seven men killed in action—including Archie Mathies and Wally Truemper—and seventy-two were listed as missing after bailing out over Germany.

For the 2nd Bombardment Division, eight Liberators were lost and three written off. The division reported ten men killed in action and seventy-seven missing. The 3rd Bombardment Division lost six bombers, plus one write-off, three men killed in action, and sixty missing.

Reconnaissance aircraft had been over each of the targets roughly ninety minutes after the bombers had departed.

As soon as they returned to England, the film from their cameras was processed, and the photos were hand delivered to the gathering at Park House. With these and the teletyped reports that were still coming in, Spaatz, Anderson, Doolittle, Hughes, and the others began putting together a picture of what the crews and their bombers had accomplished.

The 1st Bombardment Division reported that of the 417 Flying Fortresses that it sent against the arc of aircraft industry sites around Leipzig, 239 had bombed their primary targets. Another 44 bombed Oschersleben, while 37 attacked Bernburg.

The 2nd Division put 26 Liberators over the primary targets around Braunschweig, and 71 over Helmstedt and Oschersleben, while 87 attacked Gotha. Of the 314 Flying Fortresses of the 3rd Division, 105 reached the Tutow complex, while 76 bombed the Marienehe Heinkel plant near Rostock, and 115 bombed other targets in the area.

The damage at Leipzig was especially extensive. The reconnaissance photos showed, and the Strategic Bombing Survey later confirmed, that the serious destruction that had occurred at all four Allgemeine Transportanlagen Gesellschaft plants included structural damage and
impairment to critical machine tools. Erla Maschinenwerke GmbH also took a heavy hit, especially at Heiterblick and the final assembly facility at Mockau.

In the wartime history of the 384th Bombardment Group, Quentin Bland, the group’s official historian, working with Linda and Vic FayersHallin, compiled a collection of firsthand accounts. Staff Sergeant Richard Hughes, the ball turret gunner in
Mr. Five by Five
, had an extraordinary view of Leipzig when “the whole place blacked up as soon as the bombs hit. The bomb blasts were like little lights flicking on and off among the buildings down there.”

“We had the most perfect bombing conditions I’ve ever seen,” Lieutenant James Miller, the copilot of the 384th Bombardment Group’s
Tame Wolf
said as he was debriefed on Sunday night. “There was a big hole in the clouds for a 20-mile radius around the target. The first bomb hit right in between two hangars, and the rest fell in a perfect pattern. If we didn’t shake that place today we’ll never hit anything.”

Meanwhile, the Eighth Air Force bomber gunners claimed to have sixty-five Luftwaffe interceptors. While this is probably an exaggeration because of the usual incidence of double claims, the claims of sixty-one enemy fighters downed by escorting fighters can be considered accurate. Given the loss of just four of the escorts, their results for the day were cause for celebration.

“It was not till late in the evening that the reports came in from the last groups to get back to their fields,” Hughes adds of the long vigil at Park House that night. “As the figures came in hourly it became clearer and clearer that we had achieved an astounding victory at minimum cost. Every target had been hit, and hit well, and our casualties had been under five percent of the force engaged. General Spaatz drew his first easy breath and took off for Italy.”

As Arthur Ferguson best summarizes Day One of Big Week, “That the first mission was attempted can be attributed to the stubborn refusal of General Anderson to allow an opportunity, even a dubious one [because of the weather], to slip past him. To the intense relief of USSTAF headquarters the gamble paid off.”

Irving Krick promised continued clear weather over Germany on Monday. The high pressure area that Hap Arnold’s weather guru had promised would linger had done just that.

As Dick Hughes observed and as Arthur Ferguson reports, “When the weather prospect for the twenty-first indicated continuing favorable conditions over Germany, an operation was enthusiastically undertaken. The feeling was spreading within USSTAF headquarters, and from there to the operational headquarters, that this was the big chance.”

It was a big chance that would be seized, although on Monday, instead of the crystal clear weather encountered on Sunday, the high pressure area delivered what should more accurately have been described as “partly cloudy.”

Again, as in the wee hours of Sunday, RAF Bomber Command was at work even as Tooey Spaatz, Jimmy Doolittle, and Fred Anderson were still reading the teletypes and congratulating one another at Park House. The Wright R1820 radials on the American Flying Fortresses had barely cooled from Sunday’s triumph when Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris sent his Lancasters and Halifaxes to carpet Germany with bombs. Unlike the previous night’s visit to Leipzig, the principal
target for the RAF would be a city that was not on the USAAF target list for Monday.

According to the RAF Bomber Command campaign diary for February 1944, there were 826 Bomber Command aircraft that reached their targets that night. Of these, 598 visited the environs of Stuttgart, a penetration mission of around 460 miles. Speaking of aircraft engines, Stuttgart was important to the Operation Argument mission as home to Daimler-Benz, whose ubiquitous DB601 water-cooled V12s were used in Messerschmitt Bf 109, Bf 110, and Me 210 fighters, among others.

The Eighth Air Force, meanwhile, launched 861 bombers before dawn on Monday morning. Whereas Sunday’s target list had focused on aircraft manufacturing, today’s would see the 1st and 2nd Bombardment Divisions concentrating on the Luftwaffe itself.

The arc of sky across northwestern Germany, generally between Münster and the North Sea, was essentially the gateway to the industrial heartland of Germany. Unless they took a wide detour, all of the RAF and USAAF bomber missions had to pass through this gateway to reach targets—from Hamburg and Berlin to Schweinfurt and Regensburg—deep inside the Reich.

Accordingly, the Luftwaffe had turned this gateway into a corridor of death for the bomber crews, by establishing interceptor bases here. From here, fighters could intercept and maul the bombers on their way in, then land to refuel, and hammer them again on their way home.

On February 21, the Eighth Air Force went after these bases.

Foremost among these, and present on the target list as a primary target for the 1st Division, and as a secondary target for the other two divisions, was the Diepholzer Militär-Flughafen (Fliegerhorst) at Diepholz, about forty miles southwest of Bremen. This large base had an interesting history, having been planned as early as 1934, before Hitler officially abrogated the provision in the Treaty of Versailles that forbade Germany an air force.

Working through the noblewoman Emmy Baroness von Wagner, the city had acquired farmland and sold it to a front company called “Deutsche-Luftfahrts-und-Handels AG (German Aviation Authorities and Trade Inc.),” who had used Reich Labor Service crews to build a massive complex
of runways and other facilities that are still in use by both military and civilian traffic in the twenty-first century. The Luftwaffe officially took possession in 1936 and turned Fliegerhorst Diepholz into a major base. There was a certain irony when the Allied bombers appeared overhead, given that in 1940, Diepholz had been home to the He 111 bombers that flattened Rotterdam and brought the Blitz to London.

The 336 Flying Fortresses of the 1st Division, who had had the longest missions on Sunday, drew the shortest for Monday, while 244 Liberators of the 2nd Bombardment Division were sent against Luftwaffe bases slightly deeper. The airfields at Gütersloh, Lippstadt, and Werl, the 1st Division primary targets, were obscured by thick overcast, so 285 of the bombers diverted to secondary Luftwaffe targets at Bramsche, Hopsten, Quakenbrück, and Rheine.