Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (31 page)

Meanwhile, Sergeant Horace “Hort” Quinn was the radio operator aboard
KO Katy
, which was piloted by Lieutenant Alfred Folck.

“Our last flight was going quite well for us,” Quinn reported in James Walker’s anthology entitled
The Liberandos
. “However, we watched several of our planes fall out of formation and head home with engine trouble, etc. Also saw several of them go down. Then just as I heard bombs-away from the bombardier, I felt an awful shudder and heard a loud noise. When I awoke I was in a piece of the plane aft of the bomb bay. After digging free of the debris I was tangled up in, I bailed just before hitting the ground. Eyewitnesses told us that a plane of the 515th Squadron came down on top of us and only Frank Fox and myself lived from the 20 boys aboard the two planes.”

Quinn was captured, but survived incarceration in a prisoner of war camp to tell his story.

The Luftwaffe also took a heavy toll on the Fifteenth Air Force mission to Regensburg, given that it was the only one to reach southern Germany on Tuesday. Just as they had back on August 17, 1943, Hughes and Anderson envisioned simultaneous attacks on Schweinfurt and Regensburg to compel the Luftwaffe to divide their interceptors between two large forces. However, on that mission, the best laid plans went awry, and the Luftwaffe was able to gang up on a single force.

Now, half a year later, Fifteenth Air Force crews flying both to and
from
Regensburg, had to fight their way through the
Reichsverteidigung
net thrown up by Jagdgeschwader 53, based at Vienna-Seyring in Austria. One of the aces from this unit who proved himself to be especially lethal to heavy bombers was
Oberfeldwebel
Herbert Rollwage. Sometimes credited with 102 victories, including 44 four-engine bombers, Rollwage scored his fiftieth victory, over one of the Fifteenth Air Force Liberators, on Tuesday between Altötting and Straubing in southeast Bavaria near the Austrian border.

“I remember the 15th Air Force raid on Regensburg. We lost our second echelon of eighteen airplanes in about half an hour, once past the Alps,” wrote John T. Upton, a bombardier with the 301st Bombardment Group who faced Rollwage and his
geschwader
-mates that day. Upton’s recollections came in a letter to the 301st Group’s veteran’s association that was penned almost four decades after Big Week, in May 1983.

“The fighters then moved upon our lead formation so we speeded up and formed in with the 97th [Bombardment Group] for protection,” he recalls. “We got some trouble there but it looked and felt good to be among a Group we knew and trusted and fought back like demons. The formation was so tight that it seemed that anyone could walk from one plane wingtip to another—or the waist gunner could jump out of his opening and land on the wing of the plane next to him. I’ll never forget coming back from Regensburg and seeing all those funeral pyres on the ground marking where the shot down planes hit. My plane was the only survivor of my squadron.”

In his memoir of the 301st Bombardment Group entitled
Who Fears?
Kenneth Werrell quotes a gunner who recalled that “on the return to base, I could see fires all over the Alps. The place was covered with wrecked, burning planes.”

In Glen Williamson’s characterization, the Luftwaffe was like a high wall around the vulnerable points of the German economy. On Tuesday, February 22, thanks in no small part to Addi Glunz, that wall was at its highest and most insurmountable, and it exacted a heavy toll from those who attempted to surmount it.

One of the 1st Division bombers that went down over the Netherlands was a Flying Fortress piloted by Lieutenant Charles Crook, with the 360th Bombardment Squadron of the 303rd Bombardment Group.

“We were in the open and an Fw 190 had spotted us,” recalls Crook’s fight engineer, Tech Sergeant Louis Breitenbach. “He came from below and at the rear. The rear guns were out and he was too low for the other gunners to shoot at. He gave us a burst of
machine gun fire and the shells ripped through the ship. Our pilot was doing some beautiful flying, but we were defenseless and the German came in from the left and to the rear again. We could see his whole wing light up with orange flame from his machine gun and cannon fire. We fired the best we could, but it only took a split second for him to get us in his sights and fire away. His bullets came crashing into the plane, knocking out two more engines. A cannon shell passed between the two waist gunners, missing them by inches, and blew a machine gun off its position and out into the air.”

Crook and his crew were lucky. He managed to crash-land the aircraft near Wijk Bij Duurstede, about twenty miles southeast of Utrecht.

“We were going down and we were too low for all of us to jump in safety,” Breitenbach continues, writing in his story “The Last Flight of a Flying Fortress,” which is excerpted in Harry Gobrecht’s anthology
Might in Flight
, “Things happened so fast, it is hard to say what really happened. We were all crouched down and waiting for the first bounce. It came and plenty hard. We bounced up into the air, came down again with a loud crash, and were sliding along the ground, taking fences and everything along with us. Things were flying all around inside the ship: ammunition, radio sets, flares, and boxes of all kinds. A thousand thoughts passed before me. Will the plane catch fire and blow up? Will we crash into a house? The feelings of terror and suspense that gripped us can’t be put on paper.”

The fact that only one Eighth Air Force division was over northern Germany on Tuesday, as opposed to three on Sunday and Monday, gave the Luftwaffe a much higher attacker-to-defender ratio, thus increasing their effectiveness. Indeed, it was a good day for the Luftwaffe and Big Week’s worst day of losses for the Eighth Air Force.

Of the 430 bombers credited with bombing a target, 41 were shot down—mostly from among the 1st Bombardment Division—for a loss rate of nearly 10 percent. Over Regensburg, meanwhile, the Fifteenth Air Force lost 14 of its aircraft, a loss rate of 12 percent. The escort force, meanwhile, lost three Mustangs and eight Thunderbolts, while claiming approximately 60 Luftwaffe aircraft.

As Anderson, Williamson, and Hughes studied Tuesday’s results that night, the reconnaissance photos brought further disappointment. The Junkers Flugzeug-und-Motorenwerke facilities at Aschersleben were seen as having been 50 percent destroyed, while the facilities of the Junkers suppliers at Bernburg were perceived as having been more than 70 percent destroyed. However, elsewhere, the Eighth Air Force had little to show
for Tuesday’s efforts, nor had the Fifteenth Air Force made a serious impact at Regensburg.

The men of the 379th Bombardment Group, who had dropped 110 tons of bombs on Wernigerode, which looked a bit like a storybook village as they flew over, felt a little queasy.

“Later, back at the base, they would tell us that the town of Wernigerode was a [rest and recuperation] home for the Luftwaffe, so we might have taken out some experienced German pilots in what appeared to some of us as a senseless killing of civilians,” Jesse Pitts recalls. “We suspected, though, that this was a story put out by our PR officers to alleviate our guilt. On our last few missions, many of us had lost our sensitivity about targets. As I had experienced on my last pass, when the Germans bombed London, they made no pretense of going for strategic targets, so why should we?”

His group had lost four aircraft that day, leaving forty empty bunks in Kimbolton. Colonel Mo Preston’s aircraft had been hit and he was wounded badly enough to be bunking in a hospital at Diddington that night.

The Eighth Air Force lost more than 400 men on Tuesday. There were 35 who were known to have been killed in action and 397 who were missing and presumed dead or captured. Charles Crook would make it out alive and get home, but he was one of a handful.

There was a lot of gnashing of teeth that night at Park House.

“After the third day of successive operations, General Doolittle, from the Eighth Air Force, began to protest violently,” Hughes recalls. “His crews were getting more and more tired, and subsisting primarily on an alternate diet of Benzedrine and sleeping pills. Still Fred Anderson drove them on. Whenever Jimmy Doolittle’s phone calls came through, I’d stand near Fred Anderson’s shoulder as he answered the telephone, and, morally supported by me, he would daily tell Jimmy to ‘shut up’ and carry out his orders.”

On Tuesday night, all across East Anglia, as the crews who had survived the day ate their dinners and staggered back to their quarters, the operation people were on the horn to the engineering people tasked with processing the damaged aircraft.

“How many can you get ready to fly tomorrow?” the operations staff asked the engineers in a conversation paraphrased by Derwyn Robb of the 379th Bombardment Group in his memoirs.

“Tomorrow!” replied the engineering supervisor, standing in a cold and drafty open hangar staring at Flying Fortresses with holes chopped in them. He had just put out three days of maximum efforts and his airplanes were getting badly beaten up. “What the hell, you kiddin’?”

“No,” replied the operations man from the comfort of a heated, soundproof building. “How many can you get ready to fly?”

“Let’s see—nine engine changes, five wings, tires…”

“I don’t give a damn what’s wrong with them, all I want to know is how many will fly tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s what I’m trying to tell you if you’ll just hold your fire.”

“OK but hurry up, I don’t have all night,” the operations man replied impatiently. He had generals at High Wycombe breathing down his neck
for this information, and
they
had generals at Bushy Park breathing down their necks. “Well look, let’s leave it this way. We need 42 planes [from your group alone] to go out….”

“Forty-two planes. You’re crazy in the head. We couldn’t get that many kites in the air tomorrow, let alone planes. Who do you think we have working out here—supermen? Forty-two planes. Of all the crazy ideas. Why, we’ve got more planes to patch up than…”

“Look, Mac, don’t tell me your troubles, I’ve got plenty of my own. Give me a call back in a little while and let me know the score, will ya’?”

“OK, But 42 planes. Of all the… ideas.”

“Let ’em chew on that awhile,” the operations man said to his colleague, who was sitting nearby.

“You shouldn’t be so rough on those guys,” he replied.

“Well, somebody has to keep those guys on the ball or they’d forget there’s a war on.”

The obvious irony in this yarn was that everyone in those hangars, like everyone who had spent ten of the longest hours of his life in the bombers that day,
knew
that there was a war on. They had seen it and felt it, or they had seen and felt the effects of flak and fighter.

The exhausted men whom Jimmy Doolittle colorfully described as “subsisting primarily on an alternate diet of Benzedrine and sleeping pills” knew very well that there was a war on. They could close their eyes and see it just as vividly as they had seen it over Hitler’s
Festung Europa
for the past three days.

On Wednesday, though, Jimmy Doolittle got his wish.

There would be a day of rest for his exhausted crews. The high pressure area that had prevailed for a rare three straight days was gone, and Anderson ordered the Eighth Air Force to stand down. Dr. Irving Krick promised that good weather would return on Thursday, but for the moment, most of the bombers stood silently in their hardstands. As on the previous night, the RAF also stood down its great bomber fleet, sending out only a handful of Mosquito flights over the Reich.

For the Fifteenth Air Force, and its commander, General Nathan Twining, however, Wednesday was not to be a day of rest. For them, Wednesday brought 102 of their bombers to the Steyr Walzlagerwerke,
the anti-friction bearing works in the industrial city of Steyr—which had been in central Austria until the 1938 Anschluss had merged Austria into greater Germany.

As noted in the postwar report on anti-friction bearings issued by the Strategic Bombing Survey, the site was then gearing up to produce up to 15 percent of the bearings needed by German industry. The location was one of the beneficiaries of the dispersal of the bearing industry that took place after the October 14 Schweinfurt attack.

“Well before we reached the target it became apparent that this was not to be a milk run,” Tech Sergeant Max Rasmussen, the top turret gunner on the Liberator
Harry the Horse
, piloted by Lieutenant Marvin Grice, recalls in James Walker’s 376th Bombardment Group anthology. “Bombers that had preceded us to the target were returning and they approached us head on at lower altitudes. Their condition was noticeably critical. Formations were almost nonexistent and many planes were on fire. As we approached the target, German fighters, mainly Bf 109s, began attacking the formations. The entire formations in front and to the right of us disappeared within a short time and it was then that we were attacked.

“Gunners Hermann and Root called in to report fighters climbing and coming up fast at three o’clock. I watched them as they hit the eleven planes in the high flight formation. They were attacking with about seven to ten fighters in succession and in their first pass downed Tail-end Charlie. In about ten minutes they had wiped out the high element, attacking from every hour of the clock. Then they hit our element and we fought them into the target. That battle into the target probably lasted 30 minutes.”

The Luftwaffe was up in force against the Fifteenth that day. Lieutenant Ben Konsynski, a section leader with the 376th “Liberandos” Bombardment Group remembers that “the mission seemed routine except that it was very cold and two of the 513th [Bombardment Squadron] planes turned back because of perceived mechanical difficulties, leaving six planes from the 513th and an unknown number from the [515th] squadron flying with us in our section. About 20 minutes from the target our formations were attacked by 75 to 100 German aircraft, there were Bf 109s, Bf 110s and Fw 190s. We lacked air cover at this point. When we saw the enemy
planes attacking the high boxes it took a few minutes to tighten up our section and to move in close to the ‘A’ and ‘B’ sections of our formation.