Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (30 page)

By 1944, Pitts was a wizened old man of twenty-three, and had put his political theorizing aside. He was, as he recalled in his memoirs, more interested in doing his job than in “high strategy.”

On Tuesday morning, when the crack of dawn was still hours away, Jesse Pitts and his pilot, Herschel Streit, were among those who gathered in the briefing hut at Kimbolton to watch the man on the podium reveal “the target for today.”

“Finally the screen covering the map did rise, slowly, with all eyes watching intently where the lines of red and blue wool were going to take us that day,” Pitts writes in his book
Return to Base
. “Everybody let out a little gasp, a few curses; some half got up.”

“The target for today is Halberstadt,” Colonel Louis Rohr, the group operations officer, announced.

“We sat down, taking it in,” Pitts continues. “Some were still whistling; you’d have figured they were going to Berlin or something, I thought. Self-pity. Those guys would bitch regardless of what the target was. It was not so much worry as exhibitionism…. We would think of our wives, of our mothers, of our friends. We would feel ourselves, to see if we were ready to die. Normally we were, in a resigned sort of way, willing to take the chance. Sometimes the visiting general would get up and say a few well-meant words in the heroic tradition, which would go over with the American flyers like a lead balloon, lowering our morale a bit more and making those damned buckwheat cakes heavier still in paralyzed stomachs. For a while we would be completely alone. We would have to get ourselves together, get our bitching, our despair, our anger over with quickly. What was the use; we were going. Remember, we were not eager heroes, just plow boys willing to do a job if we were given a fifty-fifty chance to come back.”

Outside, the sky was clear, and stars could still be seen, although by now there was a hint of dawn on the eastern horizon. As the trucks delivered the crews to the bombers, the ground crews were scraping frost off the wings. Takeoff for the 324th Bombardment Squadron was supposed to have been eight o’clock, but the Flying Fortresses didn’t begin rolling for almost an hour. Roaring down the runway in thirty-second intervals, the bombers were in the air by nine-fifteen and forming up to head toward the Reich.

Streit and Pitts tucked
Penny Ante
into its slot about three hundred feet below and to the left of the Flying Fortress piloted by the 379th Group’s commander, Colonel Maurice “Mo” Preston.

“The Colonel took the whole group formation through a thick cloud bank,” Pitts recalls. “For once we were in tight formation, so regardless of the reduced visibility, we could see the ship on whose wing we were flying. The risk of collisions had to be taken; when it came down to it, twenty men were not worth twenty minutes delay. We came out of the cloud bank as tight as we went in.”

Those dozen aircraft of the 379th Group were part of a total force of 289 Flying Fortresses that the 1st Bombardment Division managed to get airborne on Tuesday.

If the men of the 379th thought that Halberstadt was going to be bad,
infamous Schweinfurt was scheduled to the undivided attention of the Eighth Air Force 3rd Bombardment Division that day.

Meanwhile the 2nd Division was being sent back to their target of Sunday, Gothaer Waggonfabrik in Gotha, the second farthest Eighth Air Force target for Tuesday after Schweinfurt.

Regensburg, the most distant of the major targets, was assigned to the Fifteenth Air Force now that Spaatz had paved the way for their participation in Operation Argument missions. It would have been an understatement to say that Regensburg was an important target for the bombers of the USSTAF. In the archipelago of Messerschmitt locations, the subsidiary known as “Messerschmitt GmbH Regensburg” manufactured the preponderance of Bf 109s at sites all around the city. These included the western suburb of Prüfening, and Obertraubling on the south side.

Unlike the first two days of Big Week, the RAF had flown no maximum effort mission overnight. The only RAF planes over the Reich that night were DeHavilland Mosquitoes on reconnaissance missions to Duisburg and Stuttgart.

Consideration had also been given to a Tuesday Eighth Air Force attack on the Vereinigte Kugellagerfabriken (VKF) ball bearing works at Erkner, about sixteen miles east of downtown Berlin. However, as Fred Anderson decided and as Arthur Ferguson later explained, such a mission “would spread the forces too much and make them too vulnerable to enemy attack. Excellent results had been achieved on the two previous missions by sending the bombers and their fighter escort into enemy territory as a team, only splitting the force when the target areas were neared.”

Though bypassed on February 22, the VKF plant at Erkner, a sister factory to the VKF plant in Schweinfurt, would be high on the target lists as the Eighth Air Force began missions against Berlin in the weeks following Big Week.

As it was, Anderson did divide his force, adding a diversionary strike by some elements of the 1st Bombardment Division against the much removed Luftwaffe base at Aalborg in the northern tip of Denmark. A big part of the reason for this attack, like the northern flight of the 3rd Division on Monday, was to draw Luftwaffe assets far to the north in order to keep them away from the main force.

Any fighters that the Luftwaffe sent north from bases within Germany would have to land to refuel on their way back. The theory was that if they were recalled as the bomber force moved into Germany, they would not be able to return and refuel in time to attack the Americans before they were within the protective range of the huge force of P-47s.

Forces beyond Anderson’s control soon conspired to divide his armada even further. The 3rd Bombardment Division, tasked with the all-important Schweinfurt mission, ran into trouble as soon as they took off. Despite clear skies over the target, heavy cloud cover over England proved to be the undoing of the division on Tuesday morning. There were 333 Flying Fortresses reported to have been launched, but a series of mistakes led to confusion and vice versa, and then to a series of air-to-air collisions in the poor visibility. Finally, Curtis LeMay, the division commander, ordered the entire Schweinfurt mission to be aborted.

This was merely the harbinger of further difficulties. The 177 Liberators of the 2nd Bombardment Division, bound for Gotha, also ran into trouble forming up over England. Their formations were hopelessly scattered as they began to make their way across the North Sea toward Germany against strong winds. As they crossed over the coastline of
Festung Europa
, the decision was made to abort the mission and release bombs on targets of opportunity inside the Netherlands. These included Arnhem, Deventer, Enschede, and Nijmegen.

After two days, the Luftwaffe had figured out that this was Big Week, and they were scheming ways of confronting this series of maximum efforts. The typical Luftwaffe approach had been to attack the bombers in the target area, when they would tenaciously avoid evasive action in order to stay on their bomb run, or after they exited the target area, a time when stragglers were likely to appear, drifting away from their formations.

On Tuesday, however, the Luftwaffe struck the Eighth Air Force early in the mission, attempting to catch the bombers when they least expected it and before their fighter escorts had formed up with the bombers.

In turn, the Luftwaffe continued to attack the bomber streams in what amounted to a running gun battle across northern Germany. As the primary targets were found to be under cloud cover, the large formations broke up, with aircraft diverting to secondaries and targets of opportunity,
and the Luftwaffe seized on the opportunity to attack small clusters and strays.

As the bomber streams passed through the airspace of that narrow gateway to the Reich north of Münster, they were clobbered especially hard by the fighter aces of Jagdgeschwader 26. No man in the Luftwaffe proved himself to be a greater scourge to the bombers of the 1st Bombardment Division on Tuesday than
Oberfeldwebel
Addi Glunz, who had downed a 3rd Division Flying Fortress just the day before.

For three hours in the early part of the afternoon, he single-handedly mauled the bomber force, downing five, and possibly six, B-17s over the Rhineland and Westphalia, as well as a P-47 escort fighter over Geilenkirchen.

It was near Münster, early on Tuesday afternoon, that Jagdgeschwader 26 jumped the 384th Bombardment Group. Major George Harris, commander of the group’s 546th Bombardment Squadron said that “they were on us before we knew it. They came at us out of the sun and we couldn’t see them until they were right in our formation. The sun was bright and it was as clear as hell. They gave us the works.”

“They came at us a dozen at a time, then they would wheel around and attack us from the rear,” reported Tech Sergeant Jack Shattuck, a navigator aboard a 384th Bombardment Group Flying Fortress, of an encounter near Münster. “Suddenly four P-51s jumped in and the result was amazing. Their mere presence seemed to carry a terrifying effect for the German pilots because they just turned tail and ran—about 40 or 50 of them. I doubt if a shot was fired by those Mustangs because the Jerries cleared out in such a hurry.”

However, the “rescue” was short-lived. Harris later had occasion to complain about the sloppiness of the fighter escort that day. The P-47s had been with his squadron for less than half an hour, and the four Mustangs that showed up had abandoned the Flying Fortresses as they entered the target area.

The crews headed to Halberstadt also felt the wrath of the Focke-Wulfs of Jagdgeschwader 26. The fighters came in, firing rockets from the five o’clock position. In
Penny Ante
, Herschel Streit and Jesse Pitts watched a rocket explode about twenty yards ahead of the bomber next to
theirs. For a moment, nothing seemed to be amiss, but then Pitts started seeing “plumes of gasoline set afire by exhaust fumes starting to eat the trailing edge of his right wing…. Streit and I decided to get out of his way in case he should explode. I felt cowardly to leave my friend like that. Here his wing was burning and I was leaving him as if he had leprosy. Our leaving him could only mean that he was condemned, and I was ashamed. Later he might reproach me for it, but what could I do? If he exploded in our faces we were done for.”

They passed through a wall of flak over Münster, and saw another Flying Fortress in trouble, this time above them. As Pitts explains, there were “small tongues of fire flitting through the closed bomb-bay doors; fire in the bomb bay with all the gas lines interconnecting there—that was bad! All those hose connections were not as tight as they should have been; there were small leaks, and the fire attached itself to these leaks like a bloodsucker.”

As they watched, they could see the bomb bay doors open, and crewmen climb into the bomb bay to try to extinguish the conflagration, “emptying fire extinguishers on the fire and trying to beat down the flames with empty B-4 bags, while trying to keep their hands from getting burned. One of them must have been on the narrow catwalk, with no parachute and the ground 21,000 feet below. For a minute, it seemed that the fire was losing out to the efforts of the crew. But it was only for a minute. Bombs kept falling one by one. The fire grew, though still limited to the bomb bay. Time went by; how long before the final explosion?”

The question was answered shortly after the stricken plane left the formation, and as the crew was preparing to bail out.

Below them, Streit and Pitts watched as people near whom they had been seated at the briefing that morning were thrown from the exploding wreckage. Pitts saw the mangled body of his friend Tex Robins tumbling through the air and hoped that he was already dead.

As the formation reached its Initial Point at a few minutes before 2
P.M.
, and turned into its bomb run, it came over a blanket of cloud cover that completely obscured the section of Halberstadt where the factories were.

Passing over Halberstadt with a tailwind pushing their speed to 300
mph, the bomber crews could see a break in the clouds, and through that break they could see the Holtemme River and, on the nearby slopes of the Harz Mountains, the snow-covered tile roofs of the picturesque hill town of Wernigerode, their “target of opportunity.”

The aircrews of the 1st Bombardment Division found both Oschersleben and Halberstadt under overcast, and most, like the 379th, diverted to secondary targets or targets of opportunity. Thinking they could see something under the fringes of the cloud bank, eighteen bombers dropped on Halberstadt, while forty-seven bombed the targets at Bernberg and thirty-four attacked Aschersleben. The remainder diverted to targets of opportunity, but of the nearly three hundred bombers that launched with the 1st Division Tuesday morning, only three in five were able to attack any target.

Tech Sergeant Jack Shattuck, the navigator who reported on his impressions of the effect Mustangs had on the Luftwaffe, spoke glowingly of the success of the 84th Bombardment Group at Aschersleben. After the mission, he said simply that the Junkers facility in the city “doesn’t exist any more. Our bombs made a beautiful bull’s eye smack on that plant, smoke reached upward in terrific amounts and I could still see it mounting when we were miles away, as we had excellent visibility. We had a clear shot at target and the bombardiers certainly made the most of it.”

In the south, 118 Fifteenth Air Force bombers were able to attack the Messerschmitt facilities at Regensburg, but the city was heavily defended by antiaircraft batteries. The 376th Bombardment Group, the “Liberandos,” who had earned a Distinguished Unit Citation during the Operation Tidal Wave assault on Ploesşti in August 1943, took a hard hit from the flak over Regensburg. Indeed, two flak-damaged Liberando Liberators collided over the city.

“About two or three minutes off the target I saw ship No. 99 ram No. 53 (
KO Katy
) from above and between the waist windows, breaking the ship in two,” Staff Sergeant John A. Masiewics recalled at his debriefing that night. “One man fell out of the tail section of the plane and his chute opened. Three men fell out from the main body of the tail and it appeared to me that they didn’t have chutes on. I followed the two crashed ships down. I didn’t see any more chutes. Ship No. 99 slowly started to break
up and disintegrate in mid-air. Ship No. 53 finally blew up and it seemed that the man with the open chute went limp about that time and that’s the last look I took because there were fighter planes amongst us. The weather over the target was clear. Our altitude at the time of the accident was 20,000 feet and the ships that crashed were at about 20,500 feet.”