Fox On The Rhine

by Douglas Niles

  Others of the speedy American fighters were above him, and they dove like buzzing bees, anxious to give combat. A quick glance showed him at least sixty, maybe even eighty or more Mustangs, all diving toward Geschwader 51. With a tight smile, the Oberst in the jet with the painted nose knew that he could ignore these pests. His throttle fully open, he felt his powerful fighter pull away from the enemy escorts, and he laughed out loud at the thought of the enemy fighter pilots’ consternation.

  His Me-262 raced in the lead, diving toward a B-17, closing at an impossible velocity, a combined speed that must have exceeded one thousand kph. Together with all the rest of his pilots, he had practiced this head-on approach. At these speeds, they had to aim quickly. At the same time, the hope was that the speeding jets would be virtually impossible to target by the U.S. gunners.

  The American formation was flying directly into the heart of the Reich, and Krueger led his wing of fighters to stop them, a storm of defending interceptors breaking on the massive bulwark of heavy bombers. He was acutely conscious of this epic confrontation indeed, surely God Himself would have held His breath, except that it all happened too fast. Tracers from the bombers’ turrets and nose guns flared outward, falling short or veering wide of Krueger’s shrieking aircraft.

  Swiftly aligning his gunsight, the kommodore drew a bead on the leading bomber and released a short burst from the four cannons mounted in the Schwalbe’s nose. His aim was true, and he saw the B-17’s cockpit glass shatter in a series of small explosions. Immediately the Flying Fortress lurched out of formation, canting to the side and tumbling earthward in a spiral of doom.

  By then, Krueger was into the midst of the formation. He snapped off a shot at another bomber above him, and the massive aircraft disappeared in a blossom of smoke and flame as its bomb load ignited. Unconsciously yelling in his exultation, the German pilot flew his jet through the fireball and found himself racing away from the bomber formation. Around him the other jets of the Geschwader were also breaking into the open, leaving a number of burning, smoking, and lumbering B-17s in their wake. Once more those tracers reached, like striking, venomous snakes, for the fighters... but again they fell short.

  Krueger led the jets through a long arc, still ignoring the fighters that dove toward them only to vanish in the rear as the Me-262s curled around for their next attack. He looked to the right, to the left, and behind... good, most of his men were still with him. Acutely conscious of the fuel burning up in his tanks, he banked, dove toward the bombers again, knowing that they had to attack quickly.

  This time they came against the bombers from the starboard quarter, and the closer relative speeds of the two formations allowed him to take a more deliberate aim. He fixed his sights on the base of a Fortress’s wing, and sent an extended burst into the joint with deadly accuracy. He saw the wing crumple away, and the aircraft plummeted from the skies, twisting in a spiral so tight that the centrifugal force held the crew in place. There would be no parachutes from this one.

  More of the big bombers were blowing up on all sides, as they were beset by a greater number of fighters than they had ever before encountered. Nearby Me-109s screamed past, with Mustangs in close pursuit. Elsewhere, Fw-190s pulverized the four-engined American aircraft with their lethal cannons. Here and there a German fighter spiraled downward, trailing flame and smoke, but for the first time in a long time, perhaps forever, the invading bombers were suffering appalling losses. Equally important, their escorts were overmatched in their desperate efforts to protect their charges.

  Krueger found himself coming up behind a formation of B-24 Liberators. Ugly planes, he thought, as he blasted the twin-ruddered stern of the nearest, leaving the plane to cartwheel chaotically, spinning downward in its last descent. He noticed that his fuel was low, and though he snapped off another salvo he couldn’t stay to determine the effects of his rounds. Instead, he arced away, leading his pilots toward the replenishment offered by their giant airbase.

  Minutes later, on a course for home, he flew through a wheeling dogfight between Mustangs and Me-109s, and though he took a quick shot at one of the Americans his speed was so great that he knew he had little chance of scoring a hit. He saw another jet fly clear of the combat, but then a blossom of flame trickled along the wing of the Me-262 as the engine overheated and caught fire. Immediately the fighter tucked into a dive, but before the pilot could open the cockpit the inferno had spread to the fuselage. Krueger shook his head, imagining the sheet of flame covering the pilot, consuming him in fire, and shuddered. He couldn’t think of a worse way to die.

  And finally his guns were empty, and his fuel tanks nearly the same. Only with the greatest reluctance did he lead his fighters back toward Lager-Lechfeld, and when he looked behind he saw, for as far as his vision could carry, a sky that was filled with blotches of smoke, bursts of violent explosion, the detritus of dying bombers, and everywhere glorious plumes of fire.

  Finally, the broad runway beckoned, and as he nursed his jet through a low-power landing he saw ground crewmen running forth, fuel carts rumbling and ammunition wagons already in place. They would refuel, rearm, and once again take this fight to the American bombers. With luck, the Geschwader could hit the attackers perhaps twice more before the battered survivors finally made it to the safety of their bases back in England.

  578 Squadron Base, Wendling, Norfolk, England

  UNSENT LETTER FOUND IN “DIGGER” O'DELL’S FOOT-LOCKER

  November 20, 1944

  Dear Mama,

  You won’t get to read this letter until after the war is over or earlier if I don’t make it home. I don’t want to send it now because it would just make you worry even more and there’s nothing I can do about it anyway. But I need to write down what happened today and then put it away.

  Harry Glass, the other waist gunner, is dead, and I saw him get shot and killed. Ford’s Folly is full of holes; Lieutenant Sollars, the bombardier, and Sergeant Wagner, the upper turret gunner, and I are all in the hospital, and I’m lucky to be alive and I’m not hurt too badly. A lot of other B-24 crews aren’t so lucky. Over 700 bombers, B-24s and B-17s, are down. Planes have gone down in our bomb group before, but never so many. It’s so bad that for the time being, there won’t be any more raids. Can’t say that bothers me a whole lot, to tell the truth.

  I want to write down all the details of the raid while it’s still fresh in my mind.

  Fry, our nose turret gunner, had washed out of navigation school, so he was the assistant navigator on our crew in case our navigator was hit or killed, and he always went to the navigation briefings. So one of my duties was to go to the gun shack and clean and oil his guns as well as my gun and it was also my duty to pre-flight his turret to make sure everything was in working order. But we had all gotten away from that sort of thing, which was really stupid because in large measure our lives depend on how well we do every part of our job. I guess part of it is laziness and another is just being fateful and maybe showing how brave and nonchalant you are when you really aren’t that brave at all, you’re just being stupid.

  In any event, I put his guns in the turret and didn’t turn on any electricity and didn’t check anything at all. As a matter of fact, I took me a blanket and went out and laid it in a wheat field that grew right up to the edge of the runway and laid down and took a nap.

  It was finally time to take off, and Lieutenant Russ said, “All right boys, let’s go!” I always get on board through the camera hatch, which is about a three-by-five hole in the bottom of the airplane with a door over it that a camera can fit in and take pictures. For some reason, I dropped back out of the camera hatch and scrubbed my feet on the ground once or twice before going back in. So we took off.

  While we were forming the group, Fry got into his turret and started checking it out. He called me and asked if I had preflighted his turret, and I, of course, said I had, because the lieutenant could hear everything on the interphone. He said, “Well, the reticule in the sight do
esn’t work. The bulb doesn’t light.” I told him to take the bulb out of the trouble light, which is a light on a flexible kind of fixture that you could shine and move around like a portable flashlight in the turret. He said there was no bulb in the trouble light. So he had no sight whatever in his guns, which could have been real trouble, but I don’t remember any attacks coming from the nose, in any event. See, that’s the trouble with flying an airplane that had got washed out on a raid; there was lots of stuff wrong with it and we’re still finding it all out.

  While Fry was telling me what kind of bad shape his gun was in, I began getting my gun ready. The ammo box, which carried five hundred rounds, was on the side of the airplane and a flexible metal chute came up from the box and hooked onto the side of the fifty-caliber machine gun that I fire. There was no hook on the metal chute, but I had a roll of safety wire in my parachute bag and I wired the ammo chute to my gun and got it firing. Harry Glass’s ammo chute fit onto his gun, but the apparatus that holds the gun steady while it’s firing came off in his hand. Now, I’d managed to scrounge me the first spool of very strong nylon cord I ever had, and it was on a wooden spool. I took my knife and I cut the nylon cord off the spool and we jammed it in the apparatus that held his gun out the window so it would fire. But I lost my nylon cord.

  Anyway, we had taken off and formed the group and hit the enemy coast and crossed into Germany up in the Ardennes on our way to Dummer Lake, which is a rather prominent landmark in northern Germany, and was used for an IP, that is an Initial Point, from which to start a bomb run. Our target was Regensburg.

  We had some flak after a while. I put on my flak helmet while that was going on and just stood there and watched it. After a few minutes, the flak stopped. I took the helmet off and laid it on the ammo chute and was just sitting on the ammo box on the floor looking out the window at the scenery when all of a sudden I could hear guns firing.

  We were in the low left squadron, and the only thing we were leading was Tail-End Charlie, which is the farthest man from the front of the group and we were just in front of him. I looked up when the firing started and about the same moment someone in our airplane--and I don’t know who it was--yelled “Fighters!” and I looked up and it looked as though the sky was black with them.

  I know how to recognize most German fighters, especially Me-109s, but these were different. Swept-back wings, kind of shark-line ... and no propellers! They were actual jet fighters. I had heard about them but never seen them and I didn’t know the Nazis had any and I think that the generals on our side probably didn’t know either, or if they did they sure didn’t know how many. There must have been forty to fifty of them, and they were moving faster than anything I’d ever seen before in my life. I just stood there for a minute looking at them as they were closing on the group.

  “Digger! They’re coming up on your side!” yelled Harry Glass, who was looking around over my shoulder, and that broke my concentration and I started firing at one fighter and he broke away right under us. He came in right under my waist window and he obviously didn’t want to end up on the tail because the tail gunner had the best shot at any fighter. He just lays the sight on the nose and fires away. So fighters usually try to break away under you before they end up on the tail. This fellow broke away so close I could see the pilot sitting in the cockpit. Of course the fighter pilot didn’t know that the tail turret was out of commission. I fired at another fighter that trailed black smoke but there were no flames except from that jet exhaust, so I have no idea if I hit him or not

  Harry Glass was now shooting on his side, because the jet fighters had to throttle back as they got near so they wouldn’t close too fast on us, and then after they shot they’d break away and give it all the power they had so they could break away fast. I saw one of the fighters explode in midair, and Harry got him.

  Now the next fighter I fired at, I thought I had really hit him, because he was burning in the nose, but as he got in closer, I could see that the fire I was looking at was the flames from his guns. This fighter had designs painted all up the sides, and I’m guessing he was some sort of group leader. A 20-mm shell hit my gun and it exploded. One piece hit me squarely between my eyes and cut my goggle frame in two. A couple of other pieces hit me in the chest. I started bleeding and had trouble seeing but I never went totally unconscious. I do remember Harry Glass saying, “Digger’s been hit!” I must have looked a lot worse off than I really was. Booker, the navigator, yelled, “Glass, get off the damn interphone, there’s a lot cooking up here.”

  I could hear Sollars telling Lieutenant Russ that he’d better salvo the bombs to lighten the aircraft, and I heard that number-three engine was windmilling and burning, and then I heard the command to abort the mission, we were hit and going home.

  I was able to wipe some of the blood out of my eyes and saw Glass explode another fighter but the fighter was firing too and then I saw Harry fall back and then slump down. I was able to crawl over to him and I tried to get out a bandage over a very large hole in his head but he never said anything or even opened his eyes, so I think the chances are he never knew what hit him.

  In the meantime, with number three burning and windmilling, I was afraid the airplane was going to explode, so I started taking off my flak suit and put on my parachute. But finally the fire went out and they feathered the prop, and we were on the way home. I crawled back over to Harry Glass but he was dead. I found out later that the lieutenant thought I was dead, too, and he was surprised when we landed and they found me alive. I ended up in the hospital, of course, and with a few pieces of flak picked out of me, but all in all my damage was pretty light and I’ll be back in action in a couple of weeks. I’m getting a Purple Heart for this, though that was the one medal I never did particularly care to see.

  The lieutenant came to see me. Harry Glass was dead, Wagner, the upper turret gunner, was badly wounded and probably wouldn’t return to action, and Lieutenant Sollars had been hit but not too badly. Number-three engine would have to be replaced, but otherwise Ford’s Folly was fine except for some guns and electrical work needing replacement. “We’ll make that war bond tour yet,” he said. I told him only twenty to go and number thirteen was behind us now, and he laughed a little bit.

  He told me that this was the worst raid we’d ever had. Those jet fighters were everywhere, backed up by the usual Me-109s and Fw-190s that the Germans normally flew. The jets were Me-262s, which the Germans had had for a while but never put into action. “Hitler didn’t want them,” Russ said.

  “Then for once I’m sorry the old S.O.B. got killed,” I said.

  The Germans shot down nearly a third of what we’d sent up, and that’s not counting the planes like ours that got shot up but didn’t go down. We were lucky.

  The word is that we won’t be flying any raids for a while, until they figure out what to do about the jets. Also, because it’s getting into winter and the weather is turning bad, there was going to be some falloff in raids anyway, so we’ll have time to recover and patch everything up. The men are starting to call the mission Operation Bloody Hell, which in my opinion it was.

  But I have to tell you, Mama, it looks kind of bad right now.

  As I wrote, you won’t see this letter until after the war except if I don’t come home, so I want you to know I love you and I miss you and I’m all right at the moment.

  Love,

  Your Son

  Digger

  Fortress Metz, France, 21 November 1944, 1101 hours GMT

  Combat Command A made its camp in a series of narrow valleys on the west bank of the Moselle. The battalions were broken into task forces for the upcoming assault. Task Force White would lead the way, so Dennis White’s tank company, armored infantry company, and supporting platoons occupied a town and several farms right on the riverbank. Task Force Ballard was in a nearby valley, while Task Force Miller--commanded by the senior company commander in CCA--filled the clearings around a village another mile away up the river. The
headquarters company and Diaz’s artillery battalion were downriver, but within easy distance of the bridge.

  The men slept close to their vehicles, knowing that orders to move could come at any time. Colonel Pulaski took over a small farmhouse as a temporary headquarters, and Sergeant Dawson established a radio room in the kitchen. Pulaski and Lieutenant Colonel Ballard paced anxiously around the yard. Occasionally they rushed into the house when they heard the crackle of the radio. On those instances, Pulaski was pleased to note that his tank commander, who still limped on his wounded leg, was able to move with considerable alacrity when the situation demanded. Dennis White, meanwhile, was as imperturbable as ever, puffing on his pipe, finally drawing Diaz into a game of chess.

  Pulaski stayed close to his command post, following the developing battle through the radio reports. The weather was overcast, with fog and occasional drizzle. Though air support was available and the clouds broke apart every once in a while, for the most part this would be a ground battle.

  The first news was encouraging, as Bob Jackson’s Combat Command B pushed through the initial ring of German fortifications and raced out of the compacted bridgehead. The fight was savage--Pulaski learned that in the early going eight tanks were destroyed assaulting a single pillbox. Eventually the strongpoint was reduced by a plastering of artillery, and the armored spearhead moved on.

  Listening to disjointed reports, hearing from messengers that periodically passed through the HQ, Pulaski tried to form a picture of the action. In a few minutes Jackson’s tanks encountered a lone Tiger blocking a crossroads. The crackling voices over the radio reported a window in the clouds and called for air support, but the overcast closed in before the tactical bombers got to the scene--and in any event, the panzer was taking advantage of an overhanging ridge wall as protection from the ground support aircraft. Accurate artillery fire flushed the leviathan out of its lair, and then cheers erupted from many American throats when a pair of Shermans equipped with the high-powered 76-mm gun blew up the Tiger with a series of flank and rear shots. In the CCA headquarters, -Sergeant Dawson broke into a broad grin, then settled back to his stoic vigil.