Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (29 page)

Indeed, the patchy clouds found over so many of the primary targets forced so many diversions to secondaries and targets of opportunity that Lieutenant Colonel William Buck, the commander of the 1st Division’s 41st Bombardment Wing, referred to Monday as a “scavenger hunt.” Units diverted from their primaries to their own secondaries or the secondaries of other groups, or bombed the next airfield or railroad marshaling yard they could find.

By various accounts, many of the personnel in the air that day recall air commanders urging the units to search for and attack targets of opportunity, and not to return to England without dropping their ordnance on something of importance in Germany.

Meanwhile, the 2nd Division also diverted to their secondary targets at Lingen, Hesepe, and Verden with 214 bombers. Both of the divisions bombed the Luftwaffe fields at Achmer and the notorious Diepholz.

As it turned out, the big base at Diepholz was enjoying clear weather that day. In his book
Might in Flight
, Harry Gobrecht of the 303rd Bombardment Group recalls the Diepholz attack, quoting Major Walter Shayler, commander of the 360th Bombardment Squadron, who said, “We sure hit something at this airdrome. There was a horrible mess of smoke and flames coming up. Somebody was there before us, so we just added a bit to the general damage.”

Recollections of two anonymous people who were schoolchildren in
Diepholz on that fateful Monday are contained in the book
100 Jahre Realschule Diepholz
(
100 Years of Secondary School Diepholz
), published in 2000.

“I’ll never forget the day that the air base in Diepholz was attacked,” writes one. “We were in the basement across from the school, which was still partly on the ground. At first it seemed like forever. The bombers were arranged in their usual formation, then suddenly broke away from a crowd of these associations, turned around and came back. Everyone ran back quickly to the basement. Immediately after the earth shook, I remember that we all stuck our heads in an old sofa, which stood in the old cellar. When the all-clear sounded, we went out to the Bahnhofstrasse, which was downright littered with shrapnel.”

Another recalls that “during the bombing, one of our teachers [taking cover with us] in the basement of the Kreissparkasse, said with a worried expression that this war can no longer be won. We never saw him again after the war ended. The Gestapo had picked him up on the same day.”

For the 384th Bombardment Group, flying out of Grafton Underwood, the primary target had been the Luftwaffe base at Werl. As historian Quentin Bland reports in the group history, “They found that all the targets in the immediate vicinity were obscured with a solid overcast, and so made a 180 degree turn when they were about fifteen miles northeast of Hamm, before returning along the same route as they had followed in, while looking for a target of opportunity. The lead group noticed quite a number of large openings in the clouds.”

The target they chose was Lingen, home to a Luftwaffe base that had been a secondary target assigned to the Liberators of the 2nd Bombardment Division.

“Fortunately the cloud cover was becoming intermittent and one could begin to see more and more of the ground area below,” William Kinney, the 384th’s lead bombardier, told Quentin Bland in the 1990s. “Suddenly a double or triple tracked railroad hove into view. I gave the pilot directions to turn left and follow the railroad track. The time of day was high noon or thereabouts, and vision was easy as there were no shadows to mislead our aiming. Thus we rode upon and into the town of Lingen.
I opened up the bomb bay doors and everyone else did likewise. As it was a target of opportunity, I could select my very own target, no doubt every bombardier’s dream, especially when he has a few hundred planes behind him. As we advanced into the town, I calmly (no fighters, no flak) selected the largest building in the town which was surrounded by a maze of railroad tracks. Everything went SOP [Standard Operating Procedure]. The Colonel was very happy of being relieved of the bomb load.”

Staff Sergeant Vernon Kaufman, a 384th ball turret gunner, had a good view and the luxury of being able to take a long, lingering look at what had happened to Lingen that day. As he explained, “I was watching a train puffing along the track. Our bombs smothered some buildings along the tracks and some of them overflowed onto the tracks, right where the train had been.”

The 351st Bombardment Group, the unit with which Archie Mathies and Wally Truemper had flown the day before, had been assigned Gütersloh as its primary on Monday. However, cloud cover in the target area compelled a diversion to the Luftwaffe base at Achmer.

Flak knocked out the two inboard engines on the 351st’s
Pistol Packin’ Mama
, and Lieutenant Al Kogelman had to pilot the aircraft away from the formation. Spotting the straggler, an Fw 190 came by to put a half dozen 20mm shells through the left wing—but Staff Sergeant Gil Dennison, the tail gunner, took out the German fighter.

Almost home over the North Sea, Kogelman lost another engine and could not hold the bomber together any longer. As noted by Peter Harris and Ken Harbour in their book
A Chronicle of the 351st Bombardment Group
, the stricken plane “clipped the top of an 18 to 20 foot swell and bounced back into the air; the second impact was tremendous with the ship coming to an abrupt stop and the tail section snapped off. [
Pistol Packin’ Mama
] immediately filled with water and sank within a minute. The crew scrambled out of the top hatch whilst the pilots escaped from their side windows as she went down.”

The survivors, including Kogelman and Dennison, were rescued.

Among the 2nd Division units that flew against Achmer that day was the 93rd Bombardment Group, still known as “Ted’s Travelling Circus,”
after Colonel Edward J. “Ted” Timberlake, who first took the group overseas in 1942. Later commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Addison Baker in August 1943, the 93rd had been part of Operation Tidal Wave, the major assault on the oil refineries at Ploiesşti on August 1, 1943, during which Baker had earned a posthumous Medal of Honor.

Today, the B-24s of the 93rd were led by Colonel George Scratchley Brown, who had earned a Distinguished Service Cross for taking command of the 93rd’s Tidal Wave contingent when Baker was shot down during the bomb run over Ploiesşti. On this Day Two of Big Week, Brown brought the thirty-two Liberators of the 93rd home without a loss.

On Monday, only the 281 Flying Fortresses of the 3rd Bombardment Division had an industrial target on their agenda, a return visit to Muhlenbau-Industrie AG in Braunschweig.

On previous missions, the Yank bombers had defended themselves in the corridor of death with their own guns. Today they were bringing their little friends, an escorting force of 69 P-51 Mustangs. As usual, the P-47s accompanied the force as far as they could, but there were more than five hundred of them in the air that day.

Despite the fighter escort, the bombers were hammered by the
Reichsverteidigung
interceptors of Jagdgeschwader 1 and Jagdgeschwader 27, both of which were staffed by a number of aces who had claimed large numbers of four-engine bombers.

At 2:55
P.M.
, as it made its way home across the Netherlands, one 2nd Division Liberator was claimed over Hengelo by an Fw 190 flown by Jagdgeschwader 1’s
Oberleutnant
Rüdiger von Kirchmayr, who is recalled as having been particularly deadly against earlier Eighth Air Force missions. About an hour later, also over the Dutch coast, a 3rd Bombardment Division Flying Fortress became the fifty-fourth aerial victory for
Oberfeldwebel
Adolf “Addi” Glunz, a
Staffelkapitän
with Jagdgeschwader 26.

With the 3rd Division over Braunschweig on Monday was the 96th Bombardment Group, which had earned a Distinguished Unit Citation during the Regensburg mission back on August 17. Today, their 337th Squadron bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe attack. In this squadron, the crew of the Flying Fortress piloted by Lieutenant Alver Smith was on their
fourteenth mission when they were targeted in a level attack by a German fighter coming in from five o’clock. As the enemy flashed past, Bernie Monahan, the bombardier, was left dead, the number one engine had exploded into flame, and the bomber began going down.

Dan Kricke and Bill Ford, the two waist gunners, had just managed to strap a parachute on Frank Morales, a fellow crew member, when the bomber nosed over.

“I started crawling up towards the waist door with Morales behind me,” Kricke recalls in the history of the group by Robert Doherty and Geoffrey Ward, entitled
Snetterton Falcons
. “I was approximately four feet from the door when I turned for Frank. He was yelling something but I couldn’t hear it. As I turned my head back toward the door, I noticed [tail gunner] Bob Means lying face down. His legs were still in the tunnel to the tail compartment. He was not visibly injured. I never saw Bill Ford again. It must have been then that the explosion took place. I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was approximately 8,000 feet off the ground and could see three chutes below me. Pieces of the plane were coming down around me. Some were on fire and I noticed that other fragments had already ripped my chute.”

Two days later, as a prisoner of the Germans at Peppenhafen, near Hannover, Kricke learned that five of his friends had gone down with the aircraft. The others survived as POWs.

The plan for February 21 had also called for simultaneous attacks against targets in France and the Netherlands by Ninth Air Force medium bombers, but these areas were blanketed by heavy cloud cover. The partly cloudy conditions that allowed the Eighth Air Force a choice of secondary targets over Germany to which to divert did not extend to the west.

Meanwhile, Spaatz had gone to Italy overnight and had managed to work out a deal to use Fifteenth Air Force heavy bombers for missions in support of Operation Argument. However, on Monday, it was Italy’s turn to be fogged in. Indeed, even the area around typically sunny Anzio reported heavy overcast.

It is certainly ironic that on the same day—in February, no less—that southern Italy was covered by clouds, there were clear skies over at least
parts
of northern Germany. Weatherman Irving Krick was either very skilled or very lucky—or both. Tooey Spaatz and Fred Anderson and everyone associated with the Eighth Air Force effort were just lucky.

However, the spotty overcast encountered over northern Germany led to spotty results. Reading the teletypes and examining the reconnaissance photographs that night, Anderson and Doolittle were not nearly as positive about the day’s outcome as they had been on Sunday.

There were bright spots, though. As General Fred Anderson reported in a phone call that night to General Orvil Anderson, late of Hap Arnold’s staff and now chairman of the ETO Combined Operational Planning Committee, many of the Luftwaffe bases, especially the large complex at Diepholz, were “severely and accurately bombed.”

However, he added that the cloud cover over Braunschweig had compelled bombardiers to switch to H2S radar-blind bombing, using Pathfinders, and the bombs did little damage to the intended targets.

Losses were in line with those of Sunday. Including write-offs, the Eighth Air Force lost 19 out of 617 Flying Fortresses launched, and 4 of 244 Liberators, while claiming 19 Luftwaffe fighters shot down.

Among the escorting fighters, two P-47 Thunderbolts and three P-51 Mustangs were shot down, while one P-38 and two P-47s were damaged beyond repair. However, the American fighter pilots took a lopsided toll against the Luftwaffe. Of particular note is the relative effectiveness of the newly arrived Mustangs. The 68 Mustangs that were deployed claimed 14 enemy aircraft, while 542 Thunderbolts claimed 10 German fighters.

The results of Day Two of Big Week on Monday paled by those of the previous day, but Tuesday looked more promising, at least as far as the weather was concerned. Indeed, the anomalous stationary high pressure system was still holding in place—as Irving Krick had correctly predicted.

On Tuesday, there were even indications that it was expanding southward, opening up the skies over Regensburg and Schweinfurt, the two targets that planners such as Dick Hughes and commanders such as Fred Anderson most desired to strike.

Overnight, Hughes brought Anderson a target list that included these two cities most coveted, as well as a series of other targets.

By the plan, the Eighth Air Force 1st Division was assigned the Junkers Ju 88 factories and subcontractors at Halberstadt and Bernburg, as well as the nearby Saxon cities of Oschersleben and Aschersleben. At Oschersleben, the specific target was AGO (Apparatebau GmbH Oschersleben) Flugzeugwerke, which had become a major manufacturer of Focke-Wulf Fw 190A fighters. As such, it was a critically important target on the Argument roster.

Most of the crews focused mainly on the location and the defenses of the targets, however, rather than on the reasons for
why
they were targets. They were there just to do their jobs—and survive.

“We were not very interested in high strategy,” recalls Jesse Richard Pitts, the copilot of the 379th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress named
Penny Ante
. “We just did our job.”

It has long since become axiomatic that the men of the Eighth Air Force, like any similar American organization of that scale in World War II, were a cross-section of American life. There were young men such as Archie Mathies, who had enlisted out of high school. Then too there were men such as Jesse Richard Pitts, who had enlisted after having graduated magna cum laude in sociology from Harvard. You might be tempted to say that Pitts was atypical of the average bomber crewman, but there was no such thing as “typical.” At twenty-three, he was a year older than Mathies and a year younger than Bill Lawley, so in that respect, he was as typical as anyone.

While most of the men in the Eighth Air Force had never seen continental Europe until they were looking at it from twenty thousand feet, Jesse had mostly grown up in France. After his veterinarian father from Ohio separated from the woman he had met and married in France during World War I, she went home and took her young son. As a teenager, Pitts became a coffeehouse socialist and dabbled in various causes. He was dogmatically anti-fascist and even flirted with the notion of fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. When the United States entered World War II shortly after he graduated from Harvard, he enlisted to fight the fascists—which brought him to the 524th Bombardment Squadron of the 379th Group.