Big Week

by James Holland

  At 22,000 feet Knoke noticed the contrails from their aircraft and saw his breath freeze on the oxygen mask he wore; he had to slap his legs to keep himself warm. Soon after, they spotted the enemy bombers. As many as four hundred, Knoke reckoned. The Jagdgeschwader now turned towards the American planes and a few minutes later they were tearing into them, flying head-on, guns blazing and tracer arcing across the sky. Knoke aimed for a B-24 Liberator, opened fire when he had come as close as he dared, then involuntarily ducked as he sped past, beneath the nose and right through the formation, before pulling back on the stick and climbing up in a left-hand turn. Watching his Liberator, he saw it pull away from the rest of the formation, exposing itself. Knoke turned towards it, flying beneath it, then pulling back and letting rip at its belly. Moments later it was gushing flames and eight men jumped, parachutes mushrooming. He now drew up alongside, less than 100 feet away, and saw the great holes torn by his cannons. Then suddenly the dorsal turret flashed and bullets were hitting him. Knoke could scarcely believe it – how could anyone still be alive in that burning crate? And yet someone was, and now his own aircraft was on fire.

  Once again, he had to bail out, dropping clear of the stricken Messerschmitt, his parachute blossoming. Below were several others. ‘This is one time,’ he noted later, ‘the Americans and I go bathing together.’3 Hitting the water, he was stunned by how cold it was and, after releasing his harness, he was immediately hit by a wave that knocked him backwards and left him gasping. Fortunately, he was able both to inflate his life jacket and grab his half-inflated dinghy and scramble into it, despite the swell. Catching his breath, he emptied his packet of dye and watched it spread across the water around him creating a patch of yellowish-green. Much of the North Sea was dominated and controlled by the Royal Navy, but fortunately he had come down in German waters and fairly near the coast.

  Certain that his comrades had seen him float down, Knoke was confident he would be rescued, and so he was. Not long after, a Focke-Wulf seaplane flew over. He waved like mad and saw the crew circle low, then wave and drop a larger, more sturdy rubber dinghy. It was no easy matter either reaching it or clambering from one to the other, especially with the relentless waves crashing around him, but eventually he made it, slumping down in exhaustion. For perhaps two hours more, he lay there, bobbing up and down on the swell, until finally a launch approached and he was pulled aboard. He had survived yet again.

  Those first ten days of October saw three big raids deep into Germany by the Eighth Air Force. On the 8th, their target was Bremen. Inevitably, Knoke was in action that day too, only four days after being rescued from the North Sea, and managed to shoot down a Fortress without harm to his own aircraft. Two days later, on Sunday, 10 October – the same day that Bob Johnson became the fifth pilot in the Mighty Eighth to become an ace – Knoke was in action yet again. ‘The Yanks do not leave us alone,’ he scribbled in his diary.4 ‘Today they attack Münster in strength.’ Knoke and his Staffel were about to dive down on the Fortresses when they were attacked by Thunderbolts, very possibly including those of the 56th Fighter Group. He was soon caught up in a swirling dogfight, but then spotted an Me110 fire four rockets, two of which hit the enemy bombers. As they exploded, several Thunderbolts tore after the Me110. Knoke, along with Barran and Führmann from his Staffel, went after the Thunderbolts. Knoke opened fire at close range and saw one of the American fighters blow up, while Führmann shot down a second. Suddenly, an entire pack of P-47s descended on them; in rapid succession, the attacker became the attacked. ‘It is all we can do to shake them off,’ Knoke recorded later.5 ‘I try every trick I know, and put on quite a display of aerobatics.’ Eventually he managed to escape by executing a corkscrew climb, a trick he knew the Thunderbolt could not perform as well.

  Knoke might have been safe, but he could see that Barran and Führmann were not, with as many as a dozen Thunderbolts still on their tails. Choosing what he hoped was the best moment, he dived down again, shooting wildly to distract the enemy, but was hit badly across the tail and left wing. Flipping over, the Messerschmitt began diving downwards out of control. On his dashboard, the altimeter circled backwards. Desperately, Knoke tried to bring it under control. Breaking out into a cold sweat, he thought this time he really was done for. At just 3,000 feet off the ground, the stick was still jammed stuck. He now took his feet off the rudder pedals, pushed hard against the stick and at last felt a violent jolt, knocking his head hard, and as if by magic the Gustav was suddenly flying straight and level.

  The nearest airfield was Twente in Holland and so, nursing his plane carefully, he swooped in low, only to discover one of his undercarriage wheels had been destroyed. That meant a belly-land. With a grinding and screeching of metal, he hit the deck, sliding and slewing to a halt. Miraculously, he was still in one piece. Clambering out, he saw half his tail plane had been shot away.

  Soon after, a crippled Focke-Wulf came in, also with a broken undercarriage, but this time the pilot tried landing on one wheel. It didn’t work. The fighter overturned and burst into flames. The pilot, trapped in the cockpit, was burned to death right in front of Knoke. ‘I am powerless to help,’ he wrote later.6 ‘I have to watch him being slowly cremated alive in the wreck. I am trembling at the knees.’ A few minutes later, several heavy bombers flew over and pasted the airfield with bombs.

  Taking cover, Knoke felt he had had more than enough for one day.

  No matter how desperate the situation may have seemed to Heinz Knoke, and regardless of how short they were of fuel, well-trained new pilots and other vital resources, the Luftwaffe remained a highly dangerous and potent force and a major thorn in the Allies’ side. The issue for the Allies in late 1943 was no longer the outcome of the war against Nazi Germany but, rather, the time it would take to achieve total victory over an enemy whose leadership still had complete control over its people and seemed determined to keep fighting for as long as humanly possible. A generation earlier, Germany had ended the First World War because it had reached a point where it had run out of money and resources and could no longer win. Those conditions had long been reached by Nazi Germany – even as early as November 1941, when Operation BARBAROSSA, the invasion of the Soviet Union, had unravelled with Germany still a long way from victory – but Hitler had always viewed the future of the Third Reich as being one of two dramatically opposite outcomes: the war would lead either to a thousand-year Reich or to Armageddon. Armageddon had not yet been reached by the second half of 1943; so long as Hitler remained in power, Germany would continue fighting until the bitter end.

  From the Allies’ perspective, the aim was a swift end with minimum casualties, but how to achieve that was a matter of debate. Central to the Anglo-American strategy was a cross-Channel invasion of the continent. Immediately after the United States had entered the war in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the US Chiefs of Staff had confirmed an earlier agreement with the British that destroying Nazi Germany would be the first priority, above the defeat of Imperial Japan. The re-invasion of Europe had been the cornerstone of that joint strategy, and especially that of the Americans.

  What followed had been the start of preparations for that cross-Channel attack, with the build-up in Britain not only of American troops but also of air forces. The Eighth Air Force had been formed in July 1942 and its first daylight bombing raid had taken place in August that year. Some still believed, a year on, that Nazi Germany could be brought to its knees by air power alone – General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, the first commander of the Eighth Air Force, for one, and Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, commander of RAF Bomber Command, for another. These men, passionate believers in the efficacy of air power, were, however, in a minority, and both the American and British war leaders accepted that the war could be won only by putting boots on the ground. Operation OVERLORD, as the Allied cross-Channel invasion had been code-named, was planned for May 1944 – that is, in seven months’ time. By then, they had to be ready. Any longer, a
nd the war could easily drag on and on, with the deaths of yet more of their countries’ young men. On the other hand, to launch OVERLORD and for it to fail was unthinkable.

  The Allied leadership might doubt that air power alone could win the war, but all accepted it held the key to a successful re-invasion of the continent. Control over the skies – not just of the immediate invasion area but of much of France and northern Europe – was an absolute prerequisite. To achieve that, the Luftwaffe had to be defeated first, or, at the very least, considerably reduced and driven deep into Germany, away from the skies over western Europe. The problem was, for all the growth of the Allied air forces by the autumn of 1943, and for all the many troubles facing Germany, the defeat of the Luftwaffe was still a long way off.

  CHAPTER 3

  Black Thursday

  THURSDAY, 14 OCTOBER 1943. Another cold, damp and hazy morning at Thorpe Abbotts, a village lying a few miles east of the quiet country town of Diss in Norfolk and home to the 100th Bomb Group. The airfield had been laid down the previous year on requisitioned farmland and brought up to heavy bomber standard with the construction of three concrete runways laid out like a giant ‘A’, with the long main runway running west–east. The mass of fighter and bomber airfields in England needed to be as close to the continent as possible. What a huge advantage it was that, by a quirk of geography, the flattest part of this otherwise largely hilly and mountainous island should be in the east of the country.

  Although the control tower at Thorpe Abbotts stood two-thirds of the way along on the northern side, the main base was to the south. Anyone entering the control tower could easily have been deceived about this, however, because although the airfield and runways were big enough, in terms of acreage they accounted for only about half the space of the entire base. To the south, hidden by Billingford and Thorpe Woods, a large village had emerged – one made up of rows of Nissen huts, looking like long cylindrical tubes of corrugated iron sliced down the middle. There were also hastily constructed brick buildings – two messes, one for officers and one for other ranks, as well as headquarters buildings, sick quarters and ammunition dumps. Newly metalled roads had been built, sometimes on old farm lanes and others completely new. The hamlet of Upper Street had been transformed and dwarfed. The speed of the development had been extraordinary: just over a year earlier, this had been a quiet, peaceful rural community, but now it was a large American heavy bomber base of thousands. Like all these hastily built airfields – thirty-nine were currently occupied by the Eighth Air Force, with more to follow – it had no perimeter fence of razor wire. For local schoolboys from the nearby villages of Thorpe Abbotts, Dickleburgh and Thelveton, their proximity to the base could hardly be more thrilling. Watching these giants fly off or land back down again was exciting, but the place was also full of friendly Americans, who, more often than not, were only too willing to share their supplies of chocolate, chewing gum and other luxuries rare to the average British schoolchild during the war.

  A palpable sense of gloom had settled over Thorpe Abbotts this October week, however. Around the perimeter of the airfield itself, most of the standing B-17 Flying Fortresses showed battle damage. Some had a row of bullet holes, others had huge tears and gaping rents. One Fortress had an entire wing shredded, while two others had whole engines ripped off. These B-17s had witnessed and somehow survived an intense battle in the skies.

  In fact, the Hundredth had been in three consecutive days of battle, the last of which, the mission to Münster on the 10th, had been the worst. Already badly depleted after operations on the 8th and 9th, the Hundredth had been able to put up only thirteen Forts. Just one had returned, and that against the odds with two engines missing. In these three operations, the group had lost almost one hundred men. Four months earlier, it had reached England with 140 officers; now only three of those were still fit to fly. In the past fortnight, two squadron commanders had gone, four lead crews and three operations officers. The Hundredth had been decimated.

  Now, in the early dawn of this Thursday in the middle of October, the Hundredth was preparing for yet another mission, the fourth in a week and a particularly difficult one: Schweinfurt, far into central Germany. The city had been identified as important by the American Committee of Operation Analysts (COA), which had been set up by General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the commander-in-chief of the United States Army Air Forces, late the previous year. The COA had made their first report back in March and had recommended enemy fighter aircraft production as their number-one target priority, and ball bearings as the second. These latter were crucial anti-friction bearings used not just in aircraft – although German aircraft factories alone needed more than two million a month – but also in tanks, vehicles, guns and other equipment. Ball bearings were therefore a vital resource and, as the COA pointed out, their manufacture was particularly suited to a knock-out blow because production was largely limited to six cities and because almost half of all German production was based at one single factory in Schweinfurt. There was no doubt that if the ball-bearing plant there could be destroyed completely, the German war effort would take a massive blow.

  The Eighth had first hit Schweinfurt on 17 August with 315 heavy bombers in a joint attack that also targeted the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg. This was one of the first big tests of the Eighth Air Force and the American pre-war belief that a B-17’s robust construction and heavy armament of thirteen .50-calibre machine guns would be enough, when they flew in close formation, to see off any attacks by enemy fighters. Operations thus far had shown that it was far better to have fighters escort the bomber force, but Schweinfurt was well beyond the range of fighter cover and so it was accepted that on this occasion the heavies would have to fend for themselves. But those pre-war beliefs had been badly tested that day, as a slaughter had unfurled. A staggering sixty bombers – 19 per cent of the attacking force – had been shot down, thirty-six of them from the force targeting Schweinfurt. The attack on Regensburg had been accurate and had caused considerable damage, but nothing like as much as Major-General Fred Anderson, the commander of the Eighth’s VIII Bomber Command, had claimed that day. In his diary he had noted that his bombers had destroyed the capacity of the Regensburg factories to build 2,400 Me109s a year.1 This, he wrote, meant there would be no need to repeat the attack. In fact, nearly 300 tons of bombs of varying weight and size had hit the plant, destroying a number of newly built aircraft, killing 400 and causing widespread damage. However, the large assembly shop, the most important building of all, had not been hit, and the majority of the all-important machine tools were undamaged. The reality was that aircraft production was barely affected at all.

  The bombing of the Kugel-Fischer ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt had been even less successful. Luftwaffe fighters had badly mauled the attacking force before they even reached the city, but the navigators of those that did had struggled to spot the target because it had been hidden by fog generators. Just 424 tons were dropped, of which only 35 tons of high explosives and 6 tons of incendiaries actually struck the ball-bearing works; the rest mostly landed on residential areas. Production was reduced by 34 per cent for a short while, but there was enough spare capacity and the damage was quickly righted.

  Aircrews had also made claims that amounted to 228 enemy fighter planes shot down on the raid, which would have been a notable aerial victory. In the confusion and the melee of swirling fighters, over-claiming was both inevitable and understandable, but in truth Luftwaffe pilot casualties had been just seventeen dead and fourteen wounded, around a tenth of what had been claimed.

  In other words, the results had not matched the effort and cost, especially since the aim had been to stop production altogether for between three and six months. Not only had the Eighth lost 60 bombers and 600 aircrew, but a further 11 bombers had later been scrapped and 164 were damaged, some badly so. In all, a third of the total attacking force had had to be written off. It had been a crushing blow, to put it mildly, and called into q
uestion whether daylight precision bombing, as strenuously advocated by America’s air chiefs, could be either precise enough or even sustainable without finding some better way to protect the bombers all the way to the target.

  Both Lieutenant-General Ira Eaker, who in December 1942 had taken over from Spaatz as commander of the Eighth, and Major-General Anderson had gradually learned from a combination of photo-reconnaissance and other intelligence sources – not least decrypts of German Enigma code traffic – that the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid had fallen some way short of their initial aims. Both had accepted that before very long they would have to send their boys back into the heart of Germany. The trouble was, the horrific losses had set them back. The Eighth Air Force was still growing, but first of all had to make good the losses of Schweinfurt–Regensburg, then build up strength even further. Nor had the weather helped; it had not been good in the late summer of 1943. Together, these concerns meant that not until early October had the Eighth felt ready to have another crack at enemy targets beyond fighter range.