Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  FOGGIA

  Barely 150 miles east-southeast of Rome and twenty miles inland, Foggia was an obvious choice for concentrating the new air force. The locale placed heavy bombers within reach of every likely target in the theater: Zagreb was 230 miles away, Sofia barely four hundred. Budapest, Vienna, Athens, and Munich lay within a five-hundred-mile arc; Regensburg, Bucharest, Ploesti, and Prague within six hundred miles; Blechhammer within 670; Marseilles within 730; and Berlin within nine hundred. The German capital remained out of the Fifteenth’s range almost until the end of the war, but the most vital target—Romania’s rich oil fields—was within reach. Hundreds of American bombers would crash in the Balkans before the war was won.

  On October 30, two days before establishing the Fifteenth, Doolittle attended the Ninety-ninth Bomb Group’s hundredth mission barbeque and beer party at Oudna Airfield just outside Tunis. The group had made its record in only seven months, and rain failed to dampen the fliers’ enthusiasm. Good spirits always trailed in “General Jimmy’s” slipstream.

  Doolittle knew that his time in Tunis would be brief. He was to move his headquarters to Italy in thirty days—no small task given the complexity of the move. His staff included Major Bruce Johnson, a longtime aide who had attached himself to Doolittle’s command by volunteering to deliver priority mail to Twelfth Air Force headquarters in Algiers. Once there he announced his intention to stay.

  Jimmy Doolittle appreciated that kind of nerve. In the mid-1930s he had gamed the system by convincing the army and Shell Oil that each supported developing high-cost, high-octane fuel when neither would have done so independently. In 1942 he employed a left-hand, right-hand strategy to gain approval from General “Hap” Arnold and his chief of staff to lead the Tokyo mission. Neither officer realized he had been conned until too late to change.

  Doolittle wanted the move from Tunisia to Italy—430 miles—accomplished in one day to sustain the pace of air operations. Bruce Johnson was up to the task. He flew to Italy to scout locations around Foggia.

  The British had captured the Foggia airfields in October, displacing the Italian Loyalists and German forces. Johnson’s reconnaissance was not encouraging, however, as the Allies had been bombing for months. “There wasn’t one damn thing left in Foggia that wasn’t blown to hell or too small,” he reported.7

  Looking farther afield, the intrepid Johnson struck pay dirt in Bari, seventy miles down the coast from Foggia. He was impressed with the headquarters of the Italian Air Force, now largely aligned with the Allies and occupied by the British. The building was “large and plush and was ideal for our purposes.” Johnson practiced international relations by pulling Doolittle’s rank on the Brits while charming the Italian general, who was delighted to share space with so famous an aviator. But before the Americans arrived, their new allies ransacked the building, swiping almost anything worth keeping. That did it: Johnson decided that the locals were more trouble than they were worth and bodily ejected them. He never saw the Italian general again.8

  Dating from the third century BC with a population of two hundred thousand, Bari was a mixture of antiquity and Mussolini. “Il Duce” had rewarded the city with an arena called “Bambino Stadium” for delivering the most babies (and future soldati) of any Italian city in a prescribed period.9

  Heavily bombed during the Italians’ and Germans’ tenancy, Bari’s facilities received priority treatment for reconstruction. Aviation engineer battalions immediately moved in to repair and improve runways and buildings.

  Besides Foggia itself, twenty other fields surrounded the area. Some were exclusively for bombers and some for fighters, but some served both types of aircraft throughout the Fifteenth’s existence. Additionally, fighter and medium bomber groups of the Twelfth Air Force lived cheek by jowl with some Fifteenth units.

  The original Fifteenth Air Force staff was large by 1943 standards, with more than two hundred officers, some fifty civilian experts, and hundreds of enlisted men. Cramming fifteen or more subordinate offices into the building was like working a three-dimensional puzzle, but Johnson and company did it.

  Outside Bari, the new air force took shape. As Arnold had proposed, the new command consolidated the heavy bomb groups of Doolittle’s Twelfth Air Force and Louis H. Brereton’s Ninth, which was moving to Britain as a tactical air force. The Fifteenth thus received parts of two bomb wings and three fighter groups totaling 930 aircraft and twenty thousand men. There were originally 210 B-17s and ninety B-24s, but that ratio would be reversed in the coming year.10

  BOMBERS

  Originally, the Fifteenth nominally comprised two medium bomb wings with five groups of B-25s or B-26s, which almost immediately returned to XII Bomber Command. In fact, two of the B-25 groups never flew a mission in the Fifteenth, while the others reverted to the Twelfth in January. Considering their brief tenure, the medium bombers probably were assigned to provide Doolittle with experienced wing organizations.11

  Until the Foggia bases were available, the Fifteenth continued operating from Tunisia. The first three bomb groups—one with Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and two with Consolidated B-24 Liberators—landed in Italy during November, followed by three more Fortress groups and a Liberator outfit in December.

  Brigadier General Joseph H. Atkinson’s Fifth Bomb Wing was the Fifteenth’s only B-17 unit, eventually comprising six groups. Of those, the Second was by far the most senior. It had received the first Flying Fortresses in 1937 and worked hard at exorcising the many gremlins from the new bomber’s silvery art-deco airframe. The Second made headlines with a series of long-distance flights, including the spectacular interception of an Italian cruise liner nearly eight hundred miles off the east coast in 1938. The lead navigator had been an up-and-coming airman named Curtis LeMay. By November 1943 the group had logged some eighty missions.

  Brigadier General Carlyle H. Ridenour’s Forty-seventh Wing introduced the B-24 to the Fifteenth, originally with the Ninety-eighth, 376th, and 450th Groups. The first two—the “Pyramiders” and “Liberandos”—were seasoned, having accomplished the spectacular low-level mission against the oil fields of Ploesti, Romania, in August 1943. The 376th would become known for a bomber that disappeared in April 1943 and was discovered in the Sahara in 1958—the Lady Be Good. The 450th subsequently went by the name “Cottontails” for its white rudder markings.

  There was a healthy and approximately friendly rivalry between B-17 and B-24 crews. Both carried similar bomb loads with ten-man crews. The “Lib” cruised 30 mph faster than the “Fort” and had marginally better range. The Boeing, however, was easier to fly. It was said that you could recognize a B-24 pilot by his overdeveloped left bicep because he often flew with his right hand on the throttles.

  The ’17 took more punishment and could fly higher but seldom did. It took a lot of fuel to get to thirty-five thousand feet, and most Fortresses flew between twenty-five and twenty-seven thousand. Liberator crews called the Fortress “the Hollywood bomber” (Clark Gable had flown one in 1938’s Test Pilot), while B-17 men said the Liberator was the crate the Fortress came in.

  Conventional wisdom held that there were only four things wrong with a B-17—its Wright “Cyclone” engines. When pilots shut down after landing, sure as gravity, oil would start pooling beneath each one. Actually, there was nothing inherently wrong with the engines, but in the frantic industrial rush to expand the military, quality control inevitably slipped. Aircraft engines were built by automobile manufacturers unaccustomed to aviation tolerances.

  Aficionados insisted they could tell an engine’s quality by its sound. That was true up to a point. The Liberator’s Pratt & Whitneys ran with a feline purr while the Fort motored along with the distinctive Wright rattle. Both power plants performed well—each was rated at 1,200 horsepower—but Wrights never acquired the P&W mystique.

  A fully loaded B-24J weighed fifty-five thousand pounds at takeoff with 2,750 gallons of high-octane gasoline—eight and a half tons of fuel—to deliver tw
o and a half tons of ordnance. A typical bomb load was ten five-hundred-pounders or five thousand-pounders. To put bombs on target, each Liberator or Fortress required two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier, a flight engineer, a radioman, and four or five gunners.

  The B-24’s production success was largely the fruit of a management genius named Charles E. Sorensen. The main Liberator factory was Ford’s plant at Willow Run, Michigan. The 3.5-million-square-foot factory employed thirty thousand men and women, who delivered the first bomber in May 1942. Thirty-seven months later, in June 1945, the plant’s 8,685th B-24 rolled off the assembly line: 47 percent of all Liberators produced, including components for other factories. With three shifts, that was 234 bombers a month; eight a day. It took three hours to build a 36,500-pound, four-engine airplane.12

  Ford became so efficient that an aircraft of 1,250,000 parts (including 313,000 rivets) was produced in 17,350 man hours—down from 201,826 man hours before the war. The comparable figure was 24,800 hours at Consolidated’s San Diego plant, or 36 percent more.13

  North American and Douglas also built Liberators. Their 1,763 aircraft amounted to less than 10 percent of the total. From 1943, Boeing was increasingly committed to the huge B-29 Superfortress, relying on subcontractors to deliver sufficient B-17s. Thus, Douglas and Lockheed-Vega produced 5,750 Fortresses—nearly half the total.

  The crews of both bombers had much in common. Both the B-17 and B-24 waist positions were unnecessarily cramped because the original designs placed the left and right gunners back to back. Only in late production blocks were the waist windows offset, alleviating the crowding.

  Crews scoured the interiors of new aircraft, looking for penciled notes from female workers, “Rosie the Riveters,” giving their name, address, and, sometimes, bra size. Experienced fliers learned to look under control panels. “It sure worked because a lot of guys wrote to them,” recalled one flier. “To this day I don’t know if any marriages occurred, but there were lots of letters anyhow.”14

  FROM THE GROUND UP

  An air force is built from the ground up, and the Fifteenth was no exception. With its level terrain and nearby rock quarries for runway construction, the Foggia plain appeared well suited for a complex of airfields, but logistic support lagged. The aviation engineer units had to wait their turn for badly strained shipping space, and sometimes personnel arrived without all their heavy equipment. The thousand men in an engineer battalion needed a wide assortment of gear: trucks, bulldozers, rock crushers, compacters, and much more.

  As the official Army Air Forces chronicle notes, however, “The job had been underestimated . . . by higher commanders who were eager to get the strategic air force over Germany by the southern route.” Because of “the unexpectedly vile weather” and the pressing schedule, the early bases were composed of pierced steel matting rather than cement for proper all-weather runways. Foggia, in fact, absorbed most of the pierced steel planking in the Mediterranean. The original deadline for completion of October 31 proved overly optimistic. The combined efforts of the Twenty-first Engineer Aviation Regiment and two independent battalions were required to get five bomber bases and a fighter base marginally operational, but they could not receive bombers until December.15

  While Foggia’s winter wheat germinated in the moist earth, most of the area became a quagmire. At Lecce, for instance, the loose soil became saturated with rain, and available drainage prevented the field’s use until February. By the time the early Foggia runways were finished, other construction was three months behind schedule.

  One group history notes, “It was soon discovered that Italy is no more immune to winter rains than North Africa, and the field at Foggia Main was a semi-quagmire. But this condition was of no aid in digging foxholes, for a few inches beneath the mud was a layer of rock that defied penetration. To add to the disconcertion, the field was overcrowded with all types of allied aircraft.”16

  Meanwhile, the underappreciated, overworked engineers toiled prodigiously, fighting shortages of personnel, equipment, and supplies and Foggia’s cloying, clogging clay. The AAF’s official history records, “The winter of 1943–44 in the Heel was a nightmare of buckling runways, frenzied repairs, mud, water—and neglect of other construction.”17 That neglect meant “dismal” living conditions for the engineers until they caught up on airfield construction. Only then did they turn their attention to improving their own facilities.18

  Another group history describes Foggia weather as “very harsh. The summers were hot and dusty. The winters were cold and wet. Buildings were few, and airplane maintenance crews worked in the open. The men lived in tents using homemade gasoline stoves for heat. The men constantly had to struggle through mud and water, snow and ice, or choking dust, depending on the season.”19

  Living in the mud of Italy’s farmland was rugged. Aircrews slept in tents and often ate their chow outdoors. Sick call brought bouts of coughing from colds and stomach upsets stemming from nerves. Jim Peters Sr., a flight engineer, had transferred from the infantry to the AAF and recalled his flying days with the Ninety-ninth Bomb Group at Tortarella: “On the north end of the runway our pilots had to clear a fifteen-foot dirt railroad embankment and some telephone poles. With a full load of fuel and bombs we held our breath as our B-17s struggled to get off the steel plank runway. One morning after a particularly nasty crack up I heard the engineers blowing up the left over bombs.”20

  THE AIR CAMPAIGN

  The Army Air Forces was part of the U.S. Army. Unlike Britain, Germany, Italy, and a few other nations, the United States kept its main air arm subordinate to the army. An independent air force remained a cherished goal for American airmen, but it would have to await the postwar political battles on the Potomac front.

  There was a lot of feuding between the ground forces and the air force, much of it over personnel. By necessity the air force was heavy with officers: one for every six noncommissioned officers and enlisted men. An infantry or armored division, by contrast, typically had one officer for twenty-three men. Small wonder, then, that the army chief of staff, George C. Marshall, and others were concerned about the dramatic expansion of the AAF. Every heavy bomber crew contained four potential platoon leaders (often one company commander) and six squad leaders—not counting the enormous maintenance and support force essential to keep aircraft flying.

  Before the war, the air force’s strategic doctrine had assumed the successful deployment of long-range, self-defending bombers capable of precision accuracy. By the time the Fifteenth went operational in November 1943, that optimistic theory had been battered into bloody reality. The AAF had pinned its hopes on the ability of bombers to defend themselves because there were no long-range fighters. The technological tail, in other words, was wagging the doctrinal dog. A series of Eighth Air Force missions deep into Germany came perilously close to ending daylight bombing when, on August 17, 1943, sixty bombers were lost attacking Schweinfurt and Regensburg, a 16-percent loss rate. That disaster was followed in October by “Schweinfurt II,” with 20-percent losses. Luftwaffe defenses were so effective that, with an average loss per mission of 4 percent, it was statistically impossible for a heavy bomber crew to survive a tour of twenty-five missions.

  Originally faced with a less lethal defense, the southern air campaign suffered far fewer losses. But on the same day as the disastrous double strike in Germany—also the day that Sicily fell—American air units in the Mediterranean Theater lost sixteen planes operationally and five in combat.21 Regardless of the locale, as long as the bombers penetrated hostile airspace, a price would be paid.

  The Army Air Forces badly needed to prove itself, while learning its trade as it went along. Even when the “heavies” reached their targets in sufficient numbers, bombing accuracy often was poor. For twelve months in 1942–1943, the Eighth pounded German submarine bases in France and Germany, losing some 120 bombers—nearly a 5-percent attrition—with almost nothing to show for it. Yet the AAF continued bombing massive U-boat pe
ns of reinforced concrete for months after conceding that the targets could not be destroyed. The Fifteenth launched a few missions against sub pens in Marseille without notable effect. Clearly heavy bombardment needed to knock out some vital targets if the enormous effort, expense, and losses were to be justified.

  EARLY MISSIONS

  On the day that Doolittle formed the Fifteenth, his B-17s bombed the harbor of La Spezia in northwestern Italy and a bridge at Vezzano, almost on the Austrian border. Meanwhile, B-25 Mitchells went after rail yards at Ancona and Rimini, 180 to 230 miles up the coast. No heavy bombers were lost—a good start but no reason for optimism.

  The second day of operations brought the Fifteenth’s first strategic mission: bombing the Messerschmitt fighter factory at Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna. It was an important target, producing one-third of all Bf 109s delivered that year. Ninth Air Force B-24s had attacked the plant five times since August with indifferent results. But on November 2, four B-17 groups staging through incomplete Italian bases were joined by Liberators of the Ninety-eighth and 376th Groups—139 bombers in all. The Ninety-eighth was temporarily under Lieutenant Colonel Julian Bleyer (who the day before had succeeded the legendary John R. “Killer” Kane of Ploesti fame), while the experienced Colonel Keith Compton led the 376th.

  It was a long mission from Tunisia, one of the longest yet. The B-24s flew some 850 miles to the target, about half that distance over the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Seas.

  During the outbound leg, a 376th Liberator lost the use of three superchargers, forcing Lieutenant Benjamin Konsynski’s Flame McGoon to lose formation. Nevertheless, the crew pressed ahead and bombed solo, being harassed by Bf 109s defending their Austrian nest. Coming off the target, the pilots shoved up the power and nudged the nose down, accelerating away from the continuing threat. But in the fast, shallow descent, the big bomber gained speed rapidly. By the time Flame McGoon caught up with the other “Liberandos,” it was steaming along like the proverbial bat out of hell. As Konsynski recalled, “We caught our formation and we were going so fast we flew right through it and out in front, so we had to cut our throttles all the way back to get back into formation.” On the emergency field at Bari, British mechanics counted nearly 180 holes in the Liberator’s tough hide.22