Big Week

by James Holland

  Two Ju88 twin-engine bombers now attacked from ten o’clock. Sergeant Edison in the top turret called it out.

  ‘My God, Mac, take some evasive action!’11 shouted Harry Hughes, the navigator. McLaughlin did so at the moment two rockets exploded just off their nose. Everywhere they looked were enemy fighters. The low group had now lost more than half their ships, most exploding from rockets or burning mid-air. Sergeant Van Horn now called out that Lieutenant Clough’s Fortress had been hit and was on fire; one of the wings had been blown off. And two parachutes had appeared. Now came yet another attack by Me110s in groups of four, each firing two rockets from around 600 yards. Twin streaks of black smoke were left behind as the rockets passed, but single-engine fighters were following. Those already hit and straggling had no chance at all.

  Yet the formation was not even close to the target.

  ‘Captain,’ said Peaslee over the intercom, ‘I think we’ve had it.’12

  McLaughlin barely had time to think about what their chances were; he had his hands full trying to keep the formation together and maintain some sort of slight protective position behind the low wing up ahead. Even so, he had never been more scared in his life. The Fortresses to his right and behind had been shot down and only four now remained of the sixteen up ahead. Peaslee was surely right.

  Repeatedly ordering the survivors to close up and keep a tight formation, they flew on and, by what seemed like a miracle, they were still in one piece as they finally drew near to the target. Lieutenant Ed O’Grady, the bombardier, now reminded him to turn on the Automatic Flight Control Equipment (AFCE). This allowed the bombardier to control the aircraft using the Norden bombsight as they flew the bomb run over the target. It also meant flying straight and level, with O’Grady peering straight down through the bombsight’s lens. The aim was to make only minor adjustments until they were right over the bull’s-eye. Even now, though, McLaughlin had to un-clutch the AFCE and regain control in order to take further evasive action. They had been flying for three hours. Glancing around, McLaughlin realized his group looked more like a squadron. Only twelve planes remained of the twenty-one with which they had taken off.

  They now finally began nearing the target. Flak began bursting around them, but fortunately it was not accurate, so McLaughlin switched the AFCE back on. ‘Okay, O’Grady,’ he told his bombardier.13 ‘It’s all yours.’

  On the plane flew. The sky was clear, the ground easily identifiable. Enemy fighters continued to swirl and peck at the formation, and twice Ed O’Grady saw them fly through his optics. On board no one spoke, but the gunners continued to fire, their heavy .50-calibre guns drumming away. The flak became denser, but then, suddenly, there was the target: the Kugel-Fischer ball-bearing plant. Pressing down on the bomb release, O’Grady called out, ‘Bombs away.’14

  Immediately, McLaughlin took back control and pulled the Fort into a right turn. ‘We’ve flown this far for Uncle Sam,’ he told Peaslee and the rest of the crew.15 ‘From here we fly for the U.S. – us.’

  Not far behind, the 95th Bomb Group, including Bob Hughes’s squadron from the Hundredth, were approaching the IP for the final turn towards the target. It was now 2.47 p.m. and suddenly the leader of the 95th was hit and began rapidly descending. By this time the flak had intensified and a loud burst knocked their neighbouring ship, lifting it and rolling it directly towards Nine Little Yanks and a Jerk.

  ‘Move, Bob!’16 yelled the co-pilot, Lieutenant Don Davis. With enormous skill and quick thinking, Hughes kicked hard on his left rudder, pushed the control column forward with a bit of left aileron, then pulled back again, swiftly peeling off and out of the way of the neighbouring Fortress, which was still completely out of control from the flak burst. A mid-air collision had been avoided by a whisker, but it meant that Nine Little Yanks and a Jerk was now ahead of the rest of the formation, on her own and, in effect, the lead ship. They had been due to drop their bombs following the lead bombardier’s release, but both Hughes and Dick Elliott, his bombardier, had earlier attended the Intense Target Study and so were already familiar with the primary target. Elliott also realized the target was dead ahead and reported this to Hughes. They would now be first over it in their group and bombing out of formation, something they had never done before. With increasingly intense flak up ahead and the prospect of emerging alone into the waiting clutches of swirling enemy fighters, Hughes worried about proceeding with such an action.

  ‘Dick,’ he said over the intercom, ‘I do not have the right to commit a man to this course of action against his will.17 It would have to be 100 per cent volunteer.’

  Elliott now carried out a quick vote. All agreed they should go for it; they had to hope the flak would not open up on one lone bomber around the target for fear of revealing the ball-bearing plant. Also, by not opening the bomb bays until the very last moment, Hughes and Elliott hoped to dupe the enemy flak gunners below into thinking they were a lone and stricken bomber that had lost its way.

  They were now almost upon the target and still in one piece, so the bomb bays were finally opened and at 2.54 p.m. Elliott called out, ‘Pickle barrel!’ The bombs were away and all in the mean point of impact (MPI). That was a good job done, but it was still a long way back home. Key to survival would be helping the struggling Fortresses of the 95th get back into close formation, and to get into that formation themselves as soon as they possibly could.

  Meanwhile, McLaughlin’s crew on Fame’s Favored Few had been attacked the moment they turned for home, but then, miraculously, had been left alone for more than ten minutes. Clearly the enemy aircraft had been forced to return to base to refuel and rearm. They all knew it was only a matter of time, however, before more fighters appeared. McLaughlin reckoned about half their bomber force had now gone, which made those that remained more vulnerable than ever. Sure enough, enemy fighters soon returned, making yet more frontal attacks from above, and diving down and past them at enormous speed. Sergeant Foley asked how long it would be before the Little Friends rejoined them.

  ‘An hour and thirty-eight minutes,’ replied Harry Hughes.18 McLaughlin could sense the inward groans, although no one made a sound. On they went, the gunners firing relentlessly as the fighters continued to pounce and fire on them, but despite being clattered by bullets, no one was hit and the sturdy Fortress continued flying. Eventually, over France, the enemy fighters broke off. Of the Little Friends, there was no sign. This was because a fog blanketing England had grounded them. In truth, it made little difference, because the enemy fighter force had attacked the bombers out of their range in any case, and it certainly hadn’t prevented even more bombers from being shot down on the return leg than on the way out. Three more had gone from the 92nd BG. But not Fame’s Favored Few. ‘From there on,’ noted McLaughlin, ‘we had a sort of awed peace as we momentarily looked back, the view broken only by a few negligible bursts of flak against the white clouds below.19 The evening sun was bright in a clear blue sky, but we were not quite up to enjoying it.’

  Eventually, they reached the Channel, but they were certainly not out of the danger zone, because now they faced the same thick, ten-tenths cloud they had left all those hours earlier. It was bad enough flying up out of this at the start of an operation, but worse at the end of a long, terrifying and stressful mission, by which time everyone was utterly spent. They had been airborne for seven hours and on oxygen for six. Now, 12,000 feet of cloud seemed to mock the thought of landing.

  After McLaughlin had ordered his crew to unload their guns and come out of the turrets, they then moved forward up towards the cockpit and opened a can of pineapple, which they passed around. The sweet, succulent taste was like nectar at that moment.

  Then, a miracle: a hole in the cloud large enough to guide the formation through. As they descended, a weather report came in: they could expect a cloud ceiling of 1,000–2,000 feet and visibility of 2 miles. That was something, and certainly enough in which to land, although as they flew lower and lower condi
tions worsened again. Rain pelted them and not until they were dangerously low, at just 500 feet, could they see the dark patchwork of fields and patterns of villages and towns. Using radio fixes, they managed to find Podington. Their wingman, pilot Lieutenant ‘Smoke’ McKennon, had a badly damaged ship, so, after leading them in, McLaughlin pulled up again and allowed the stricken Fort to land first. Finally, after leading two more Fortresses in, McLaughlin brought his own aircraft down. ‘A long, tough, soul-searching day,’ he noted, ‘I’ll not soon forget.’20

  A little while after, Bob Hughes and the crew of Nine Little Yanks and a Jerk also touched down safely. A few days earlier, just one Fortress had made it back from Münster, but this time, miraculously, all eight from the Hundredth had safely reached home at Thorpe Abbotts. It was a lottery, but that day a number of other bomb groups had been decimated. The 305th had lost thirteen crews out of sixteen; the 306th ten out of eighteen; the 92nd, 379th and 384th Bomb Groups all lost six crews. In all, sixty Fortresses were lost and 594 men killed or captured, with a further forty wounded. Seven more aircraft had to be written off and 138 were damaged to varying degrees.

  The question, though, was whether this huge sacrifice had been worth it, because the harsh reality was that, in seven days of bombing operations, the US Eighth Air Force had lost 148 heavy bombers. That was not sustainable.

  ‘Black Thursday’, as it would soon be called, had brought the Combined Bomber Offensive to crisis point.

  CHAPTER 4

  America’s Bomber Men

  GENERAL IRA EAKER, the commander of the US Eighth Air Force, had followed the progress of Mission 115 with General Fred Anderson at VIII Bomber Command Headquarters at High Wycombe, code-named PINETREE, some 40 miles west of London. A large, sprawling Gothic mansion in 250 acres of grounds, Wycombe Abbey had been rebuilt 150 years earlier and, since 1896, had been a boarding school for girls. However, with the girls and school evacuated away from perceived danger, it had been requisitioned and handed over to the Americans. Not only did it have the space to house a large headquarters, it was also only down the road from RAF High Wycombe, the headquarters of RAF Bomber Command. Collaboration and cooperation had always been seen as a key part of the Combined Bomber Offensive. Old panelled schoolrooms had been converted into a war room, with maps covering the walls from floor to ceiling, and an operations room, complete with yet more maps, telephones and the means to plot and follow the progress of any mission.

  Following the Schweinfurt raid must have been a chilling experience, yet both Eaker and Anderson had known it would be costly. The key issue was whether the gains would outweigh the sacrifice, so both men had remained there waiting for intelligence reports and after-action reports, plus the all-important photographic evidence, to start pouring in. Bob Hughes’s strike photos, for example, had proved their bombs had, indeed, hit their mark.

  Nor were Hughes’s photos the only ones to indicate serious damage to the plant. Subsequent intelligence reports confirmed this, and the following day, Friday, 15 October 1943, Eaker was able to cable his chief, General Hap Arnold in Washington, to report that all three Kugel-Fischer factories had been destroyed. There was no hiding the bomber losses, however, although Eaker was quick to add that the horrific mauling did not ‘represent disaster’.1 He asked Arnold to rush through more crews and aircraft, and more fighters too – a minimum of 250 bombers and crews a month. Eighth Air Force, he wrote, had to become bigger, not smaller. ‘We must show the enemy we can replace our losses,’ he wrote to Arnold.2 ‘He knows he cannot replace his. We must continue the battle with unrelenting fury. This we shall do. There is no discouragement here. We are convinced that when the totals are struck yesterday’s losses will be far outweighed by the value of the enemy material destroyed.’

  Arnold responded to this news by announcing to the world that Schweinfurt had been completely destroyed. This, however, was not the case; despite the accuracy of the bombing, only 482 tons of bombs had been dropped and inevitably a large part of that had failed to hit the Kugel-Fischer plant. Output fell by 67 per cent, which was no small amount, but already dispersal of factories had begun and, in any case, the Luftwaffe was moving away from bombers to fighters, and fighters required far fewer ball bearings. In other words, the damage caused had been significant but was still a way off from proving decisive. Eaker had said there was no discouragement, but that was palpably not the case.

  Arnold then followed up his comments on Schweinfurt II by telling the press that losses as high as 25 per cent on some missions might be expected and could be accepted. Even Eaker, always so loyal to Arnold, had to protest at these comments. In the context of the wider war such losses were not especially high, but in the context of the structure and base organization of the Eighth Air Force they were absolutely not sustainable. Certainly there was no question of going back into Germany any time soon – the week’s efforts had been far too damaging and the losses too great for that, and yet only by sustained bombing could more decisive results be achieved.

  At Podington, for example, Kemp McLaughlin and a number of others in his squadron were sent for a week of rest and recuperation at Stanbridge Earls, a large manor house near Southampton. At Thorpe Abbotts, meanwhile, the bomber base had seemed like a ghost town for a while. It was the same across the board in VIII Bomber Command. Captain James Good Brown had the unenviable task of being chaplain to the 381st Bomb Group based at Ridgewell, to the east of Cambridge. Like other bases, Ridgewell sprawled well beyond the limits of the airfield itself. Brown’s office lay at one end of a hastily constructed brick and metal-frame-roofed hall, the main part of which was used as the base cinema. It was Brown’s job to offer solace, moral support and spiritual guidance, but it could be hard to convince 18- and 20-year-olds of God’s wisdom and mercy when they had just seen friends atomized in mid-air, or returned to confront rows of empty beds. Youthful confidence went only so far; bomber crews were increasingly coming to understand their chances of making it through a twenty-five-mission tour unscathed were very slight. The 381st had got off comparatively lightly at Schweinfurt, but had suffered over Bremen and Anklam earlier that week, when ten planes had been lost. The shock had been enormous, because many of those crews had been the original members of the 381st. ‘Therefore it took all the hope out of any man left,’ noted Brown, ‘the hope of finishing twenty-five missions.3 The possibility of reaching twenty-five missions seemed gone … when they saw that the men who had eighteen to twenty raids did not return, all said, “What hope is there for us of ever coming through?” The truth is, there was little hope.’

  A few days after the Schweinfurt mission, Brown sat next to the chaplain of the 305th BG at a division chaplains’ meeting.

  ‘How did you fare on the Schweinfurt II raid?’4 he asked.

  ‘Let’s not talk about it,’ came the reply.

  But Eaker had to talk about it. He was the one sending these young men to their deaths and, at that moment, he was following a doctrine and a strategy that were clearly failing.

  Eaker was a good and decent man, but suddenly trapped in a situation where immediate solutions seemed to be in short supply. In October 1943 he was forty-seven years old, balding but with a handsome face. Square-jawed, he had piercing dark eyes and an air of resolve that was entirely in keeping with his character. The son of poor farmers from Texas, he had managed to break free of rural poverty by proving an excellent student. This had helped him win a commission as an officer soon after joining the army. In November 1917, while he was on the parade ground of the 64th Infantry at El Paso, an aeroplane had got into trouble and landed nearby. At the time, Eaker had never seen a plane before, and as the nearest officer on the scene he had hurried over. The pilot’s problem, Eaker spotted almost immediately, was a loose spark plug. Putting it back in and reconnecting the lead did the trick and the engine whirred back into life.

  ‘You ought to come into the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps,’ the pilot told him.5

  ‘How do
I do it?’ Eaker asked.

  The pilot reached into his pocket and produced a form. ‘Fill this out,’ he said, ‘and send it in and you’ll probably get a call to fly.’ Eaker did exactly that and five months later he was transferred, learning to fly and becoming a skilled pilot. His rise up the ranks was slow, as it was for most in the small US armed forces of the interwar years. However, he also proved a talented writer, in 1933 gaining a degree in journalism from the University of Southern California and becoming the unofficial public relations man for the Air Corps. He also attended the Air Corps Tactical School as well as the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, a sure sign that he was being marked out for higher command. In between, he still found time to fly and in 1936, along with his friend Major Bill Kepner, became the first pilot to fly across the United States ‘blind’ – on instruments only and with a black-out hood over his cockpit.

  By the outbreak of war in 1939, Eaker was in Washington as executive officer to Major-General Hap Arnold, the Chief of the Air Corps, and with Brigadier-General Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz as Air Corps Chief of Staff. This made Eaker effectively Number 3 behind Arnold and Spaatz. He even collaborated with Arnold to write three books on air power, of which the last, Winged Warfare, became something of a standard text. In the summer of 1941, Eaker was in Britain as an observer and met many of the leading commanders of the RAF, not least Charles Portal, soon to become Chief of the Air Staff. He even got to fly a Spitfire and learn about RAF fighter tactics from Bob Stanford-Tuck, one of the RAF’s leading aces.