This installment tells how in May of this fateful year all previous operational records were broken as the air war rose to a new pitch of intensity, how the 398th Group started its part in the war with gorgeous flubdub and then redeemed itself by a brilliant performance that earned commendation from General Doolittle, how the Boss perpetrated a wizard prank on the Judge’s pet target and copped a bug for his Silver Star in recognition of the same, and of some important changes in personnel and other events of great interest and importance by which ye merrie month was duly enlivened.

 

First, let us tell the homely record of changes in our family, which were many. On the 5th, we were joined by 1st Lt. William L. Major, who came to us as an assistant Operations Officer after completing a tour as pilot in the 91st Group. Also the ghost walked again in the enlisted section, which Cpl. Hoffman adding a third stripe, Pfcs Hakeem and Hurst becoming Corporals, and Pvt. Joe Sroka getting his Pfc. stripe in recognition of the watchful eye he kept on our staff table in the station mess hall. The next day, our Navigator, Lt. Martin T. Honke, ended a long and dolorous sweat when his Captaincy came through. On the 11th, and 12th, having seen the 398th safely through its teething period, the Nuthampstead rangers came back to their warm bunks at Bassingbourn: Terry, Toland, Akins, Chima, Dewlen, Haberman, Dreiling and the invaluable Hays. At mid-month our old S-4 and general factotum, Lt. Otstot, departed these parts for the 92nd Group at Podington.

 

On the 17th fearful and powerful portents took their effect. Smitty (“The Mole”), our redoubtable Operations Officer, finally cashed in on the long-deferred promise of a 30-day furlough at home, and took his leave in company of Colonel Putman of the 91st, who got in on the same go-home deal. This cost us two key guys at one full swoop, for Terry the Tiger was immediately put on Temporary Duty as acting C.O. of the 91st Group. To fill the gaps, Chima was appointed acting Wing Executive Officer and McDaniel acting Operations Officer. Both were fully competent to meet the demands of office, although there were occasions when their rank was barely equal to the task of coping with other Combat Wings that proposed to plow through our area while our boys were in business of assembling to go to war. Still, the Chink and McTavish were equal to the task, and the war got fought in spite of this handicap.

 

Then, as the month rolled along, Dreiling the Fox and Villanova the Rabbit, trusty watch officers both, were authorized to turn in their gold bars for silver, thereby occasioning celebrations in due and proper form. To meet our stringent personnel situation, we were joined by two good helpers from the 381st: 1st Lt. David McCarthy, a graduate navigator, and Major Marvin D. Lord, veteran pilot, who had been one of the Nuthampstead reception committee.

 

Tactically, the month brought as always a number of minor innovations, but there were three major ones that are worthy of recording. One was that on some of our missions, the size of the Combat Wing formation was reduced from sixty to thirty-six aircraft. Another involved the correction of the center of gravity of our Forts by omitting one gunner from the crew and reducing the defensive armament of the ship. A third was a new and simplified method of assembling. The first of these changes was evolved by General Williams after many conferences with his Wing Commanders, but the other two were originally with our outfit. All seemed to contribute to our tactical efficiency.

 

The first two changes reflected some rather basic changes in the strategic air situation. If we may accept one or two rough generalizations, they symptomized Germany’s decline from a first-rate to a second-rate air power. Jerry was still standing at the entrance to the ballpark, waiting to collect his price of admission, but over the long pull the number of times we got in for nothing or at cut rates was showing a steady and encouraging increase. In the old days Jerry could attack all of the people all of the time. Now he could attack some of the people some of the time, but he couldn’t attack all of the people some of the time, nor some of the people all of the time. Only on rare occasions would he venture to tangle with our fighter escort, and as a rule the bombers would only be attacked when something happened and the fighter protection failed to materialize in the expected quantity.

 

Parenthetically, it should be noted that the statistics didn’t even begin to tell the story. The statisticians loved to prattle about the percentage of aircraft lost out of total sorties against operational targets. But we who were in the racket knew that the percentages didn’t tell any part of the truth. The question was, how many rough, tough missions could your force afford to fly during a given month. Naturally, the rule that forced Jerry to keep out of our way during these days of our ascendancy applied to us as well, except that now it was working for us instead of against us. That rule is that the first commandment for an air commander is to keep his force in being. An air force that doesn’t want to fight is still a military asset, but no air force at all is a cipher.

 

Now, in this month of May, our own little Combat Wing went to Berlin four times, had six other missions to various targets in central Germany and flew on hegira all the way to Poland. Our Wing, by this time, represented only one-twentieth part of the heavy bombers striking force of the Eighth Air Force. Eight others were flown to targets in the occupied countries. Our loss ratio was 1.6%, against a loss ratio of 10.4% for October of 1943. Even the bald ratio shows a substantial improvement, but if the figures are weighted for number and quality of the missions flown, the contrast is startling. First, there were only seven missions flown in October, as against nineteen in May. Three of October’s seven were hit and run affairs, or at least would be so considered today. Only four could be considered as deep or even moderately deep penetrations: Frankfurt, Bremen, Anklam and Schweinfurt, and of these only Anklam was a long mission by current standards. These four missions alone cost our Wing 27 aircraft, or roughly one-third of our force. It is obvious that had we attempted in October the eleven deep penetrations we flew in May, our force would have been wiped out before it reached the end of the month. Consequently, if our percentages are duly weighted for number and quality of missions, our loss ratio actually dropped from 100% or more to 1.6% in eight months.

 

Roughly speaking, a defensive air force can do about four things. It can deny the home air to the enemy. It can restrict the enemy’s operations by exacting a toll he can’t afford. It can exact losses without seriously impeding operations. Or it can, in effect, abandon the fight in order to conserve its forces. The outcome of pure air war is reflected to a large extent by the capabilities of the defending force measured in the above terms.

 

Speaking solely of the daylight battle of Germany, the Eighth Air Force has driven the Luftwaffe from each of these defensive standards in turn. At the outset, we could not afford to attack Germany at all: The GAF was supreme in its own air. Then we attacked German targets, but on a very modest scale. Then we became bolder, but for the first few months paid a heavy price for our ventures, and still we had not achieved anything like freedom of action. Now, in May, we had clearly entered the third phase: the high command never had to withhold an attack on any German target, for economic reasons. Whatever price Jerry could exact we could afford; he could not succeed in limiting our operations either in frequency or in depth. And even that price showed a steady if somewhat fluctuating decrease. If the trend continued, phase four, the virtual abandonment of defense, would inevitably come, although its appearance would be so gradual that it would probably become visible only in retrospect.

 

Parenthetically, it should be recorded that as the German fighter dwindled in effectiveness we began to pay more attention to flak. It may be doubted whether our flak losses showed an absolute increase, but the relative increase as against fighter losses was reflected in the attitude of the combat crews, who were far more flak-conscious than in the early days. A good analogy would be the increase in the percentage of deaths from cancer and heart disease as the medicos conquered other fatal diseases one by one. Even so, flak did not bulk large in the strategic picture. It gave us some tactical headaches, and we did lose crews to it, but it never succeeded in hampering our operations in any significant sense.

 

Against the foregoing background, our tactical changes during May will be better understood. First, we started to reconsider the loading of our aircraft. We knew in a general way that the B-17 was in the habit of going to war with too much weight in the tail. But in the early days and, in fact, until we entered the current phase of the strategic picture, proper weight distribution was a luxury we couldn’t afford. It was a truism that any airplane that survived more than a few months of combat rapidly became a ragtag assortment of flying afterthoughts. A good basic design was merely a foundation on which to superimpose modifications as the exigencies of combat required, and the B-17 was no exception. It had never flown with nine. The tail gun was a feature of the later models and the same was true of the ball turret and many other features. Then, with the emergency of the long-running battle with the enemy fighters, the ships had to be loaded with enough ammunition to last out the battle whether they flew properly or not.

 

But conditions had basically changed. The 398th Group in its entire first month of operations fired fewer rounds of ammo than a single ship formerly fired on a single mission. So we made some studies on the center of gravity of the bombardment airplanes, model B-17G. We found that we had the C.G. a whole foot aft of where the good book said it should be. That meant a lot of trouble: mushing at high altitudes and with heavy loads, increased engine and crew strain, higher abortions, increased gas consumption, formation trouble, etc., etc. So we took steps, now that we could afford them. We dumped ammunition from the rear end of the ship. The C.G. moved up to within five inches of the right place, which was about all we could do without moving the wings. It was a big improvement and one that cost no aircraft, although it would have upped our losses only a few months before.

 

Then came the 36-ship Wing, composed of 12 ship Groups. This had many advantages, provided we could dispense with the massed fire power of the larger formation. It was easier to fly, more maneuverable, less vulnerable to flak. Tightening of the formation tended to compensate for the reduction in bombing power by securing a more concentrated pattern. The loss in bombing power was apparent, not real, for in practice we flew more Wings. On occasion we were able to put up four complete 36-ers. Naturally, we tried this out gingerly at first, but as it showed good results and didn’t increase the losses, we pushed it. As we go to press, our Group Commanders have indicated their willingness to go to Berlin with 36-ers. Which is how things usually developed in this amazingly democratic air force of ours.

 

Then, there was the assembly the Boss invented. Perhaps the strategic implications weren’t world-shaking, but it meant a lot to us just the same, and it did succeed in stretching our range of bettering our margin of safety, depending on how you looked at it. At the beginning, we put our formations together the way it was written in the book. You assembled flights, then Squadrons, then Groups, and finally you put the Groups together into Wings. Each process, however, took time. One by one, these things had dropped out until we came to the point where Groups were assembling by individual aircraft, with the leader circling the home base with his wheels down and the others just scrambling in and forming on him as best they could. It looked confusing to the outsider, but the boys managed to crawl into the right slots and the saving in time was no sneezing matter. The new idea was merely a logical extension of what had gone before, as every new idea must be. We kept the old Group assemblies as they were, but had the Group leaders position on one another before the pack came barreling in. Each Group leader took station circling over a single buncher beacon, with the Wing leader at a prescribed altitude and the other leaders 1,000 feet above and below respectively. Then the three rat races took place, one above the other, and when the rat race was resolved, Bingo! The Wing was formed. As simple as that. Would they ever apply this idea to the Division Assembly? It didn’t sound very probable, but one lesson you learn in this business is not to be any easy victim for surprise.

 

Operationally, the month was a new record. March had astounded us with 16 missions, while April had convinced us by tying March. In May we reached the seemingly incredible figure of nineteen, of which seventeen were flown after an opening week of comparative inaction that witnessed only two. In reality, our volume of business enjoyed a two-fold increase, for with the 398th Group fully operational, we were able to fly two full combat Wing formations on a number of the more important targets. To be exact, ten of the nineteen were double missions so that our Wing actually flew twenty-nine missions in a 31-day month. That was the “coming of age” of the air war, in a big way.

 

The month opened on the first with a mission to Troyes, in Eastern France. Then on the 6th, they threw a Crossbow mission – the old “military objectives in northern France” – and that gave us a fine opportunity to blood the 398th, which by that time was chomping at the bit after three weeks of intensive training by Terry & Co. It was a priceless illustration of the complexity of our operations, of how every little thing had to dovetail in order to get the ships off the ground, properly briefed, properly loaded with bombs, with the crews properly fed and equipped. With our old, well-seasoned stations both functioning like greased clockwork, we were something inclined to forget. What happened at Nuthampstead was a very little thing: the duty officer in the operations room forgot to alert the kitchen. Briefing time arrived in the wee hours of the morning and the crews hadn’t been fed. From that point forward, the miscarriages mounted like a snowball. Briefing was late and hurried. There was a traffic jam in the equipment room. The bombs didn’t all get loaded. The crews didn’t have time to coordinate their signals and all the other information needed before going to their ships. Then the truck transportation to the dispersal areas broke down, with crew members wandering around the airdrome like lost souls in the blackout looking in vain for their ships. But what the routine had muffed, the spirit of the outfit nearly made good. Somehow, the ships got off; some only partly loaded, some with makeshift crews, some late – too late for proper assembly. In spite of everything, the 398th Group went to war. Some of the ships assembled on each other. Some tagged on to any outfit they could find. By ones and twos and sevens and eights, they went to fight the war, and they all came back.

 

We were gratified by the reaction. After the uproar and the confusion had died down, Colonel Hunter, the Group C.O., assembled his air and ground staffs. He patiently tracked down the cause of every miscarriage and set it right. Promptly, the new Group settled down, its organizational mistakes all made and done with. And it was a mercy that the bugs had been worked out on a short one, for the very next day came another mission to Berlin, when a little thing like not waking the cooks would have cost ships and lives. Everything went like a breeze. Breakfast was on time and well prepared. Somehow, that symbolized a Group that had found itself. Briefing was punctual and good. There were no snarls in the Equipment room or on the field. The ships were bombed and serviced. Takeoff and assembly were as the doctor ordered. The 398th flew the mission without losses.

 

This was a portent of good things. Terry and Co. had slightly red faces at the month’s end, though in a good cause. For fairly obvious reasons, we had tried to prepare the boys of the 398th for the losses our experience had taught us to expect. As we delivered our indoctrination lectures, we adverted in passing every now and then to some of the unfortunate experiences of the past. At times we told the boys with some bluntness that this was the big league, where they played for keeps and where Jerry was always standing at the entrance to the ballpark making sure that every customer paid the price of admission in ships and crews. But when the end of the month rolled around, the 398th had flown a total of 450 sorties on eighteen missions for a loss of only four aircraft, or less than one percent. These missions included four to Berlin, six others deep into Germany and one all the way to Poland. It was an amazing record: there wasn’t another Group in the Theater that could begin to touch it.

 

The four Berlin missions were good jobs. They came on the 7th, the 8th, the 9th, and the 24th. The strategy of the high command was pretty plain to us. When the weather over Germany was CAVU, we went for precision targets. When the weather was overcast, but good enough for flying and assembly, then we would hit the big “B:, using our Pathfinder technique, which was getting pretty good. The improvement was due in part to better equipment, seasoning of the operators, and partly due to the fact that we now had a full time Pathfinder squadron in the 91st Group under Lt. Col. Dick Weitzenfeld. There was a big difference between bringing in strangers to lead the blind missions, as had formerly been the practice, and having guys who really belonged to our outfit and lived on the station where the Wing and the Group Commanders could directly supervise their work. Jerry didn’t know the reasons, but he could see the results and he didn’t like them. Old Doc Goebbels had a habit of playing on the tragic sentimentality that seemed to overcome the Hun in his sniveling mood. He honored our attacks during May by turning on the Lohengren music and announcing that Berlin had been “sentenced to death”. Such music must have been sweet in the ears of the inhabitants of Warsaw and Rotterdam!

 

When so many missions are flown, you don’t remember individual jobs as a rule. To those of us that have been here from the start, the missions of October and November of 1942 are still more vivid than the ones flown last week. But the missions to Dessau on the 30th are one that stands out. This was a juicy target that had been crying for our attentions for months: the parent factory and experimental shops of the Junkers monster, the nest that spawned the Stuka and the Ju-88 and the workhorse known as the Ju-52 and the high altitude Ju-86 and many other airplanes too numerous to mention. There it stood, a monument to the basic lack of understanding of Germany’s foremost air exponents, for they evidently never dreamed that this source of airpower could itself be attacked by air power. Buildings and workshops crammed and packed together in a compact site, with never a thought of dispersal. Our G-2’s had spotted this prize months before, lovingly marked it on their situation map, and suggested it as a target of opportunity whenever the briefed route passed that way. But the opportunity had never presented itself.

 

Now Dessau had worked its way to the top of the priority list. It was assigned to us on the 28th, but cloud over the target prevented an attack and our boys divided their attentions between the town proper, an airfield at Leipzig, and the Frankfurt marshalling yard on the way home. On the 30th it came up again. This time, the Boss’s turn to lead came up and we were leading the Division, so he took over, flying with Captain Sandman of the 381st. We made him a mission folder, which he studied carefully with a flashlight in the car going to Ridgewell. Just before takeoff, he took his folder and spread it out on the bonnet of his car, and then and there he personally briefed his lead crew to a fare-thee-well, pointing out exactly what he was going to do at each stage of the trip and the landmarks he expected them to pick up at the IP and on the bombing run. They stayed briefed. As our two Wings went over the target, bursts of smoke and flame showed that for once Jerry’s pickle barrels were in the right place. Group after Group dumped right on their assigned MPI’S. Final results were assessed by the RAF Interpretation Unit in these words: “Further photographs show considerable additional heavy damage caused by the U.S.A.A.F. attack on 30 May. In the Junkers aero engine factory, of many buildings which were on fire at the time of the earlier photographs, it can now be been that eight of the ten main buildings have been damaged in varying degree, the two large workshops being almost completely destroyed.

 

The Junkers’ gas heating apparatus works adjoining the aero engine factory has also been severely affected and the two main buildings half destroyed.

 

In the Junker’s airframe factory to the east of the airfield, nine of our 12 main buildings, comprising of workshops, assembly shops, machine shops, stores buildings and hangars have received varying degrees of damage, most of it severe.

 

The railway line from Kothen to Dessau, which passes between the airframe factory and the aero engine works has been out in at least fifteen places and there are some fresh craters on the airfield where one twin-engine aircraft has been damaged.”

 

It was really a wizard prang, as the RAF say. Colonel Gross received an oak leaf cluster to his Silver Star within a matter of hours, and the boys who were on his team also received awards, as did Lt. Col. Ross Milton of the 91st who led the “B” Combat Wing to the target in spite of the fact that his Wing never attained adequate strength for the trip. His Wing was to consist of two of our own Groups plus a Group from the 40th Combat Wing. The latter, however, never took off due to fog over its base. However, some skillful jockeying by both Colonel Milton and Col. Gross enabled the under-sized Wing to obtain position support, thus enabling the “B” Wing to complete the mission. This was doubly fortunate, because the job was no piece of cake. Somehow, the area fighter support, which was to take care of our ships in the target zone never managed to give our boys cover, with the result that our ships were jumped on the bombing run, with a loss of five aircraft of both Wings. The fact that these attacks did not impair the accuracy of our bombing in the slightest was duly noted in the citations that were awarded.

 

Other missions for the month included a highly effective attack on St. Dizier/Robinson airfield on the 9th, railway targets in the Luxemburg area on the 11th, a synthetic oil plant at Lutskendorf near Leipzig, on the 12th, Stralsund and Stettin on the Baltic Sea on the 13th, our old friend the Villacoublay airdrome near Paris on the 20th, Kiel on the 22nd, targets in the Sear Valley on the 23rd, Nancy/Essey airfield in Alsace on the 25th, Mannheim/Ludwigshaven on the 27th, a long drag to Posen in Poland on the 29th, and targets along the France/Belgian frontier on the 31st.

 

How did we stack up? In bombing we didn’t quite show the way, but we were right up with the leaders, trailing the two leading Combat Wings by a small fraction. Again, we led the Division in keeping our abortives down, with only 2.6% of our aircraft returning early against a Division average of 4.8%. Our loss rate was only 1.6%, against a Division average of 2.1%. The increase in our sorties reflected our additional Group as well as the increase in the number of missions: we flew 1,440 individual sorties, as against 822 for the preceding month. We had 90.2% of our aircraft attacking targets, against a Division average of 89.4%