Authors: Samuel W. Mitcham
Eagles of the Third Reich: Men of the Luftwaffe in WWII (Stackpole Military History Series) (52 page)
A meaningful event for the Luftwaffe occurred on September 27, when British ground forces took the excellent Italian airports in the vicinity of Foggia. Within seventy-two hours the Fifteenth U.S. Air Force had set up residence within easy range of Austria. On October 1 it resumed daylight precision bombing on the Messerschmitt factories at Wiener Neustadt with devastating accuracy. “When the Americans lay down their carpet of bombs somewhere,” Field Marshal Milch commented, “then anything beneath is pretty well matchwood.” Wiener Neustadt was struck again on the second, and Frankfurt was attacked on October 4.
6
The Eighth U.S.A.F. resumed its daylight attacks on the interior of the Reich on October 8, with raids on Bremen and Vegesack. Thirty bombers fell victim to Galland’s fighters, who were now attacking the bombers from the forward hemisphere. This method of attack was invented by Col. Egon Mayer and Maj. Georg-Peter Eder, the commanders of JG 2 “Richthofen” and II/JG 26, respectively. It required a great deal of skill and nerve, as the rate of closure was about 600 miles per hour, and there were incidents of collisions between American bombers and attacking Messerschmitts. But the new tactics, with their rapid and difficult angle of approach, kept the enemy waist and tail gunners from firing and gave the American forward gunners little time to react. Using this method, the twenty-six-year-old Mayer became the first pilot on the western front to score 100 victories. He had 102 confirmed kills when he met his death attacking a U.S. B-17 formation on March 2, 1944. The fearless Eder was luckier. Although he was shot down seventeen times and wounded twelve times, he shot down seventy-eight enemy airplanes (thirty-six of them four-engine bombers) and survived the war. He also destroyed three Sherman tanks and had eighteen unconfirmed kills.
7
Meanwhile, the American raids continued. On October 9 attacks against Marienburg, Danzig, Gdynia, and Anklam resulted in the destruction of 90 percent of the Focke-Wulf aircraft works, at a cost of twenty-eight more American bombers. On October 10, thirty more U.S. bombers were shot down in an attack against Muenster by waves of attacking FW-190s, Me-109s, Me-110s, and Ju-88s. All twelve of the U. S. 100th Bombardment Group’s B-17s were shot down. The Americans had lost eighty-eight bombers and almost nine hundred men in three days.
8
October 14, 1943, was “Black Thursday” for the United States Air Force, which resumed its offensive by sending 291 bombers against the ball-bearing plant at Schweinfurt. This time almost the entire Reich fighter defensive force of 1,100 aircraft was concentrated within eighty-five miles of their flight path. The American fighter escort peeled off at the German border and the bombers were promptly attacked by waves of single- and twin-engine fighters firing rockets, machine guns, and 20mm and 30mm cannons. The German short-range fighters were close enough to their bases to refuel and return to the battle. The American bombers continued despite their heavy casualties and dropped their loads on the ball-bearing plant. As they returned to base they were subjected to renewed and repeated attacks. One eighteen-plane bomber formation could bring 200 heavy machine guns to bear on its attackers, so Galland also suffered casualties (twenty-five aircraft); nevertheless 60 bombers were shot down and 138 others seriously damaged—a 62 percent casualty rate. The Luftwaffe only lost thirty-eight fighters. It was a major defeat for the Allied airmen, who realized now that their daylight air superiority only extended over the fringes of German airspace.
9
The Luftwaffe’s Schweinfurt victory was marred by the destruction of the ball-bearing plant. Unlike during the previous raid, the flak commander failed to turn on the smoke generators in time, because he had wanted to test them first. Goering remarked that he intended to “round up the most monumental idiots” and add them to his staff “so that by consultation with them I can get some expert idea of what this or that idiot in the field might get up to.”
10
The Luftwaffe underwent another command shake-up in the fall of 1943. General Kammhuber, who opposed the Wild Boar tactics and who had gotten Goering into trouble with Hitler again by pressing for more fighter aircraft, among other things, was sent to Norway as commander of the 5th Air Fleet. Stumpff left Oslo and took charge of the newly created Air Fleet Reich. He replaced General Weise, who was rightly held as largely responsible for the Hamburg debacle. The XII Air Corps was redesignated I Fighter Corps and placed under General Beppo Schmid, the former chief intelligence officer of the Luftwaffe. Schmid was given the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 7th Fighter Divisions, while Field Marshal Sperrle’s 3rd Air Fleet in France got II Fighter Corps (4th and 5th Fighter Divisions).
11
With this organization the Luftwaffe fought the second phase of the Battle of Berlin, which lasted from November 18, 1943, to March 24, 1944.
The first British attack was a heavy raid on Berlin, on the night of November 18, followed by similar attacks on the nights of the twenty-second and twenty-third. The raid on the twenty-second was particularly successful, as it killed 3,500 people, left another 400,000 homeless, destroyed Speer’s Armaments Ministry Building and the army’s Armaments Office. During this phase of the Allied air offensive, Berlin was attacked sixteen times (excluding harassment raids), and nineteen major attacks were conducted against other German cities. Ludwigshafen, Leverkusen, Frankfurt, Stettin, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Schweinfurt, Augsburg, Essen, and Nuremberg were all heavily bombed. In all, 20,224 sorties were flown, but 1,047 bombers were shot down by the Luftwaffe: an unacceptable casualty rate for the Allies.
12
In late 1943, during this battle, the Luftwaffe made operational a device that improved the Ju-88R’s night-fighting capabilities by injecting nitrous-oxide gas into its engine. This appreciably increased the R.A.F.’s casualty lists. For about a month in fact, beginning on December 20, they focused their attentions on the V-weapons launching sites in France instead of against German cities.
13
The respite was short-lived, however, because on January 11, 1944, the Americans resumed their strategic daytime assaults on German fighter factories. On that day 663 U.S. bombers attacked the factories at Halberstadt, Brunswick, Magdeburg, and Oschersleben. Most of their aircraft, however, were forced to turn back due to bad weather, allowing the defenders to concentrate against the remainder. The Eighth U.S.A.F. lost fifty-nine bombers and five fighter escorts against forty downed fighters for the Luftwaffe.
14
The United States could afford these losses, however, as American industry was producing two aircraft for every one shot down.
Map 8: Germany under the Bombs
1. Stettin
2. Rostock
3. Koenigsberg
4. Luebeck
5. Kiel
6. Hamburg
7. Bremerhaven
8. Wilhelmshaven
9. Bremen
10. Oranienburg
11. Berlin
12. Potsdam
13. Dresden
14. Chemnitz
15. Leipzig
16. Muenster
17. Magdelburg Main
18. Brunswick
19. Hanover
20. Kassel
21. Aachen
22. Cologne
23. Bonn
24. Koblenz
25. Giessen
26. Wiesbaden
27. Mainz
28. Frankfurt am
29. Darmstadt
30. Schweinfurt
31. Wursburg
32. Nuremburg
33. Trier
34. Saarbrucken
35. Mannheim
36. Karlsruhe
37. Stuttgart
38. Freiburg
39. Ulm
40. Augsburg
41. Munich
42. Regensburg
43. Innsbruck
44. Wiener-Neustadt
45. Vienna
R = The Ruhr (including Essen, Bochum, Geisenkirchen, Dortmund, Oberhausen, Munchen, Wuppertal, Elberfeld, and Dusseldorf)
The R.A.F. was back in strength on the night of January 20, dropping 2,400 tons of bombs on Berlin. The next night they shattered Magdeburg. Despite the loss of 130 bombers in three nights, they kept coming, as did the Americans.
15
The “Big Week” for Gen. Carl Spaatz’s strategic air offensive began on February 20. The strategic group included the U.S. Eighth and Fifteenth air forces, commanded by Lt. Gen. James H. Doolittle and Maj. Gen. Nathan F. Twining, respectively. (The other American air forces in Europe—the Ninth and Twelfth—were now tactical units. The Twelfth was supporting Allied ground units in Italy, while the Ninth U.S.A.F. was preparing to support the D-Day invasion.) The objective of the strategic air offensive was ambitious in the extreme: destroy the Luftwaffe’s capabilities to manufacture fighter aircraft. Between them the Eighth and Fifteenth U.S. air forces had sixteen wings of heavy bombers (1,028 Flying Fortresses and Liberators) plus 832 fighter escorts, augmented by sixteen Spitfire and Mustang squadrons on loan from the R.A.F. Their main target was the mammoth Messerschmitt complex near Leipzig, where 32 percent of all Me-109s were built, as well as eleven other targets, including the Ju-88, Ju-188, and Ju-52 plants at Bern-burg, the Me-109 plants at Wiener Neustadt, the Messerschmitt factory at Regensburg, the Me-110 plants at Brunswick and Gotha, the FW-190 plants at Tutow and Oschersleben, and the He-111 bomber complex at Rostock.
16
This time the Americans changed their tactics completely. They had with them large numbers of P-51 Mustangs, a long-range fighter capable of escorting the bombers all the way to their targets and back. The Americans were now looking for aerial battles instead of avoiding them.
On the first day, U.S. saturation bombing destroyed the Leipzig complex. By the time the Big Week ended on February 25 (five days earlier than planned, due to weather conditions), the U.S. air forces had dropped 10,000 tons of bombs on targets accounting for 90 percent of Germany’s aircraft production. An additional 9,200 tons had been dropped at night on the ball-bearing centers of Stuttgart, Steyr, Schweinfurt, and others. The Anglo-Americans lost almost 300 bombers, but several plants were 75 percent destroyed. The Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg had been completely destroyed. Three hundred fifty completed but undelivered Me-109s had been lost at Leipzig alone; 200 more were destroyed at Wiener Neustadt and 150 more at other factories. Ju-88 production was cut in half and twin-engine fighter production was temporarily reduced to zero. Unfortunately, no reports on the decline in single-engine fighter production during Big Week seem to have survived the war.
17
Still the raids continued. Galland reported: “Between January and April, 1944, our daytime fighters lost over 1,000 pilots. They included our best squad ron, Gruppe and Geschwader commanders. Each incursion of the enemy is costing us some 50 aircrew. The time has come when our weapon is in sight of collapse.
18
OKL expressly forbade the withdrawal of fighter units from the eastern front, so Galland secretly ordered every
Gruppe
in Russia and Norway to give up one
Staffel
(i.e., one-third to one-fourth of its strength) for the defense of the Reich. Apparently these transfers were not noticed by the Luftwaffe High Command.
19
Once again, however, the frontline units were weakened.