Forgotten Fifteenth

by Barrett Tillman

  The end came far from Foggia. In the wee hours of the seventh, the Western Allies accepted Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender in a school in Reims, France. The formal announcement came from London that evening, and the surrender took effect on Tuesday, the eighth. The Second World War in Europe was ended.

  The Mediterranean edition of Stars and Stripes headlined, “It’s All Over Over Here!”50

  Most groups observed V-E Day in the air and on the ground. Speeches were delivered by squadron and group commanders amid “a lot of hell raising going on.” Twining approved “Victory Flights” around Italy, an order the fliers were delighted to obey as they indulged in aerial revelry high and low. Remarkably enough, no accidents were recorded from the authorized buzz jobs.

  At Bari the weather scouts noted, “VE night is marked with volley after volley of rifle fire from camps nearby. (That was a clever move to take up all our guns yesterday!) British searchlights fanned the sky with piercing blue pencils of light and nearby Yugoslav troops splash the blue-black sky with red, green, and yellow flares. . . .”51

  Marking the occasion, Nathan Twining issued a message to the 78,550 men of his command. “The cost to us, in men and materiel, has not been small, but with that indomitable American spirit and know-how, we have surmounted all obstacles to accomplish our mission. Many of our comrades are not here to share in this final victory, but to those gallant airmen and to the ground personnel who contributed so heavily to this record, I want to say, yours is a job well done.”52

  And so it was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LEGACY

  MAY 1945 AND BEYOND

  The war was over but the flying was not.

  The Foggia complex still hummed with activity—proficiency flying, a few recon flights, and preparing for possible deployment to the Pacific.

  But losses continued. In the Thirty-first Fighter Group alone in May and June, three pilots were killed, an enlisted man died in a vehicle accident, and two other Mustangs were damaged.1 The Eighty-second Group wrote off three Lightnings in late May, as did the Fourteenth. When the AAF was losing nearly two hundred planes and 220 fliers a month in the continental United States, overseas losses simply represented the grim cost of doing business.2

  Many airmen spent their leisure time counting points to determine their eligibility for rotation home, while others anticipated the return of friends from captivity. It was the Fifteenth’s urgent mission to get supplies to Allied personnel held in prison camps throughout the theater. Lieutenant John Panas, a radar navigator in the 461st Group, described the satisfaction of dropping something other than bombs: “On May 10 we flew over Spittal, Austria, and dropped food and medical supplies to the American POWs who had been held there. It was a great feeling, flying low over enemy territory and knowing that the guns on the ground had been silenced forever! The Air Force had responsibility to keep our soldiers in good health until the Army Ground Forces could reach them.” The Liberators—whose name was especially fitting for the mission—flew low enough to see ex-Kriegies scrambling for parcels and waving their thanks. Panas added, “When we emptied our precious cargo, Colonel [Charles] Gregory gave them a little show by buzzing their barracks at rooftop level.”3

  WAITING TO GO HOME

  On V-E Day Twining’s command numbered 12,468 officers and 66,082 men: 78,550 total.4 Most had one overriding ambition, described in contemporary doggerel:

  Those who want to be a hero

  They number almost zero.

  But those who want to be civilians,

  Jesus! They number in the millions!

  The same sentiment applied to families waiting at home, and the AAF wasted little time dismantling the Fifteenth. On May 9 the 485th Bomb Group started leaving Venosa, followed by four other Liberator units through month’s end.

  The Fifth Wing’s B-17 groups were retained longer than the others. Three were assigned to the Occupation Air Force for several months, while two made up the “Homebound Task Force,” ferrying troops to the United States. The other, the 301st, departed for “Uncle Sugar” in July. Eleven Liberator groups were slated for reassignment or demobilization in the States, while four were transferred to Air Transport Command, deployed as far afield as Morocco, Brazil, and Trinidad. The fighter groups returned to ConUS by the end of November, as did the recon units.

  The last of the Fifteenth to depart was the veteran Second Bomb Group, which bade farewell to Foggia at the end of February 1946. On May 26, 1945, Nathan Twining departed the theater to lead Air Materiel Command. He turned the Fifteenth over to Brigadier General James A. Mollison, previously chief of XV Service Command. In August, Twining became commander of the Twentieth Air Force in the Pacific.

  While awaiting transport home many men enjoyed extended leave. Some special operations airmen returned “exuberant over the beauties of Switzerland and, incidentally, les femmes fatales.”5

  Meanwhile, some Fourteenth Fighter Group pilots unofficially availed themselves of a B-25 parked at Triolo after V-E Day. Since no one seemed concerned, the Lightning pilots tried it out. After finding they could taxi it—the Mitchell had a nose wheel like the Lightning—some of the fliers decided on a grand tour. They hit Athens, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. In most places they circled the tourist spots: “We got a good look at the Pyramids,” said Gale Mortensen. A devout Mormon, he was particularly interested in seeing the Holy Land. Ordinarily such antics would incur official displeasure, but when the miscreants finally returned their borrowed bomber, they resumed their routine, awaiting a trip home and discharge.6

  Upon release some young veterans were addressed by an officer who intoned, “You boys had a nice war so go home and have a nice life.”7 The Fifteenth Air Force was inactivated on September 15, 1945. It was reactivated at Colorado Springs in March 1946 and joined the new Strategic Air Command. After SAC was disbanded in 1992, the Fifteenth became an air mobility task force, standing down in March 2012. Today the Fifteenth Air Force remains on inactive status.

  RECKONING

  Global war on an industrial scale consumed enormous quantities of men and material. The Fifteenth stood up in November 1943 with an initial cadre of 3,564 combat aircrewmen. Over the next eighteen months, those men were replaced four times, for a total 67,441. From start to finish, aircrew casualties totaled 19,529: nearly 30 percent. Today a sustained loss rate of 3 percent might shut down an air campaign as too expensive to maintain.

  As of May 20, 1945, the Fifteenth’s combat casualties comprised 2,703 known dead, 8,007 missing, 2,553 wounded, and 4,352 POWs or internees, totaling 17,615. The 1,900-man discrepancy between the two totals is likely due to noncombat losses.8

  The most dangerous territory for the airmen of the Fifteenth was Austria, where almost one-quarter of their casualties occurred. Next was Italy (18 percent), Germany (14 percent), and Yugoslavia (13 percent). The Fifteenth was busiest, on the other hand, over Italy, where it dropped 30 percent of its ordnance, followed by Austria (24 percent) and Germany (12 percent). The airmen were able to drop more ordnance with fewer casualties over Italy thanks to the lower threat level in Italian skies.

  Throughout its existence, 26 percent of the Fifteenth’s enlisted men and 19 percent of its officers spent more than two years in the Mediterranean Theater. Non-flying personnel did not rotate home following completion of fifty credit missions, so they remained in the theater longer.

  In eighteen months the Fifteenth owned 6,858 aircraft, of which 5,090 were lost or written off—nearly 75 percent. Fighters sustained the heaviest losses and recon planes by far the lightest.9 The cost of replacement aircraft was substantial. A B-24 cost around $215,500 and a P-51 $51,500—$2.8 million and $684,000, respectively, in 2014 dollars. Planes have become vastly more expensive, however. A B-2 stealth bomber costs $1.15 billion and an F-15E Strike Eagle $31 million.10

  The Fifteenth lost some 2,110 bombers, and those that survived the war did not last long after the Mediterranean warriors were dispersed. The last B-17 unit, th
e Fifth Bomb Group, flew Fortresses in the Philippines through 1948. Other units kept the Boeings as reconnaissance and special-mission aircraft through 1950.

  The last B-24s in service as bombers apparently were based at Castle Field, California, into 1946, before the Ninety-third Group converted to B-29s.

  Mustangs went to war again as F-51s, flying with the U.S. Air Force and Australian, South African, and South Korean units to 1953 and beyond. Thunderbolts and Lightnings were not retained after World War II.

  FIGHTER SCOREBOARD

  The 325th Checkertail Clan finished at the top of the Fifteenth Air Force with 406 victories in Thunderbolts and Mustangs, followed by the Thirty-first with 383 and the Fifty-second with 259, both flying P-51s. The Mustang was masterkill in the Fifteenth, though the three P-38 groups’ opportunities had been diminished from August onward, when they were heavily committed to dive-bombing and ground attack. In the last nine months of hostilities, the First and Eighty-second groups claimed only four kills each; the Fourteenth claimed twenty-two. In that same period, the Thirty-first got eighty-two and the 325th eighty-nine. The hardy little horse from North American had the legs and the mission to continue scoring in the air.

  Seventy-four fighter pilots downed five or more enemy aircraft to become Fifteenth Air Force aces. Forty-six of them scored all their kills in Mustangs, led by John Voll of the Thirty-first (twenty-one victories), Sully Varnell of the Fifty-second (seventeen), and Sam Brown of the Thirty-first (fifteen and a half). Herky Green was unique in achieving acedom in both the Thunderbolt and the Mustang, for a total of fifteen victories, in addition to three he had won previously in Twelfth Air Force P-40s.

  Six Checkertails logged their victories in P-47s, while three others downed five with the P-47 and P-51 combined. Eighteen Lightning pilots made ace, nearly all in June and July 1944. They were led by Mike Brezas of the Fourteenth Group with a dozen kills.

  Whatever they flew—Mustang, Lightning, or Thunderbolt—the Fifteenth’s fighter pilots owned the skies of southern Europe, from France to the Balkans.

  THE TUSKEGEE MYTH AND LEGEND

  By far the most publicized unit of the Army Air Forces in World War II is the 332nd Fighter Group. In fact, the Tuskegee Airmen have received more coverage than any five groups in the Fifteenth Air Force combined.11

  The Red Tails’ reputation assumed mythic proportions in the 1980s, but few of the claims made for them withstand scrutiny. Despite having four squadrons rather than the standard three, the 332nd was last in aerial victories. It is true that most other groups had a head start, but even with the extra squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen ranked a distant last in kills per month in combat—one quarter of the top average. The 332nd produced no aces, whereas the other six groups averaged thirteen. It’s been said that Colonel Davis did not want any stars on his team, but an examination of individual pilots’ records shows that none made claims for five destroyed.

  Without a unified policy from Twining, fighter groups were largely free to determine their own escort methods. In the Fifteenth, all but the 332nd adopted aggressive methods intent on breaking up German formations before they closed with the bombers. It was sound doctrine, as the Luftwaffe had learned at considerable expense in the Battle of Britain. Furthermore, Doolittle had scrapped Eaker’s similar policy upon taking over the Eighth in early 1944. Doolittle’s decision to loose the fighters, combined with growing numbers of Mustangs, cut the number of bombers lost to enemy aircraft nearly in half from January to June 1944.12 Twining’s bomb groups liked seeing nearby fighters, as had Eaker’s Eighth Air Force crews. But Doolittle realized almost intuitively that close escort ceded the advantage to enemy fighters, and eventually Twining came to the same conclusion.

  The legend that the Tuskegee Airmen never lost a bomber to enemy fighters was widely if naively accepted. But in 2006, air force historians pored over every 332nd mission report and found that the Red Tails lost twenty-seven bombers. We have no comparable figures for other fighter groups, but going by the average of bomber losses during the Tuskegee Airmen’s time with the Fifteenth, the 332nd escort record appears good to excellent.

  The reasons for the Red Tails’ low bomber losses were twofold. The 332nd shot down relatively few enemy aircraft because it saw fewer than the other groups, which intercepted the Jagdgruppen farther afield. The Germans who penetrated the screens of the other six groups, therefore, often encountered the 332nd near the heavies.

  What is poorly understood is that the strategic goal was not simply to reduce bomber losses but to gain air superiority (accomplishing the mission with acceptable losses). With the attainment of outright air supremacy—uncontested control of enemy airspace—Fifteenth bomber losses to fighters plummeted to nearly zero in the final months of the war. The question of close or roving escort, therefore, was not an either-or question. The use of both methods provided a binary that was devastatingly effective.

  Admirers have claimed that the 332nd shot down more German jets than any other fighter group. In truth, the Red Tails were credited with three Me 262s while the top Fifteenth Air Force jet score was seven by the Thirty-first Group. The overall record was held by the 357th Group of the Eighth Air Force, with seventeen.

  The Tuskegee Airmen might reasonably have concluded that they were not morally obliged to serve a government that discriminated against them on so many levels. But they recognized that America, imperfect as it was, represented a vastly better future for humanity than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. Eighty Tuskegee pilots died overseas, proving that all blood runs red. Their legacy requires no exaggeration. When it counted most, they volunteered and showed up.

  BOMBING NORTH AND SOUTH

  The Combined Bombing Offensive was a tripartite endeavor involving the U.S. Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces and the RAF Bomber Command. They squeezed Nazi industry, transport, and petroleum production in a giant geographic vise, day and night, for years. There has never been a similar strategic achievement, before or since.

  The contrasts between the northern and southern bombing offensives were most evident in targeting. Whereas the Eighth dropped one-third of its bombs on transport targets, the Fifteenth’s share was nearly half, a difference that reflects the Fifteenth’s access to vulnerable Axis communications, especially in northern Italy and the Balkans.13 Well within range of southern Germany and Austria, the Fifteenth aimed forty-two thousand tons at the Reich’s aviation industry, compared with forty-seven thousand for the Eighth and twenty-nine thousand for the RAF.

  Despite the AAF’s heavy emphasis on industrial plants, however, the war turned on oil: Germany continued producing large numbers of aircraft and vehicles but ran out of fuel for them. The Fifteenth was responsible for 58 percent of USSTAF’s oil campaign sorties; fourteen of the sixty-six petroleum plants targeted were in Romania.

  The enormous statistical evidence compiled after the war confirmed that the AAF effort (north and south) overwhelmed the RAF’s contribution, with nearly 350 American attacks on petroleum targets (mostly 1943–1945) versus barely 150 British attacks throughout the war.14 In the last twelve months of hostilities, however, the RAF finally devoted more attention to the Oil Plan. Bomber Command dropped ninety-three thousand tons on petroleum targets, compared with sixty-six thousand tons by the Eighth and forty-eight thousand tons by the Fifteenth. Analysts later concluded that nearly 20 percent of British bombs on oil targets were duds, as were 12 percent of AAF ordnance.15

  How critical was oil? At its height, the German army was perhaps 80-percent horse- and mule-drawn; at any given moment, the Wehrmacht maintained an average of 1,100,000 animals. Near the end, new Luftwaffe pilots entered combat with about one-third the flight time of their opponents—an impossible situation.16

  The most formidable target was the Vienna area, a transport, oil, and production hub that extracted a steady toll, topping three hundred planes at war’s end. Said one bomber crewman, “You weren’t really in the Fifteenth unless you’d been to Vienna.” One major
arrived at Panatanella in 1944 talking incessantly about the perils of the Pacific: the weather, the flak, the fighters. He even expressed a condescending opinion of the Mediterranean Theater. Flying as an observer with the 464th Group approaching Vienna, he looked ahead at a darkened sky, declaring, “Looks like a hell of a thunderstorm up ahead.” The command pilot, Captain Chester Schmidt, replied, “That isn’t weather—it’s flak.” The visitor blanched, grabbed a helmet, and regurgitated his breakfast therein. Schmidt was none too pleased when he clamped a helmet on his head during the bomb run—the one just used by the Pacific veteran.17

  After Ploesti, the Fifteenth’s third-toughest target was Munich, where at least 101 aircraft were downed. Wiener Neustadt, Regensburg, Blechhammer, Steyr, and Budapest all accounted for fifty or more planes.

  Sixty years later, “Black Hammer” still had airmen’s respect. A 460th veteran recalled, “The names Blechhammer, The Lost City of Atlantis, and Shangri-La all share the quality of mysticism. Blechhammer, however, was real, not fantasy. Like Atlantis and Shangri-La, you cannot find it on a map; it was not a city, or a location that is identified by that name today. Some of the ruins of Blechhammer North and South are still there, and the power plant at Blechhammer South has been rebuilt, and is in operation. While we remember Blechhammer as a synthetic oil plant, it was in reality much more than that.” The 460th knew it well, with nine missions to Blechhammer South and two to the North complex between June and December, costing an average of one Liberator per trip.18

  PLOESTI IN RETROSPECT

  In January 1944, three months before the Fifteenth launched against Ploesti, the Committee of Operations Analysts predicted that the Wehrmacht (all the German armed forces) had six months of fuel stockpiled and that a focused attack on refineries would cut production by 2.75 million tons, producing “curtailment but not collapse.”19