People in other rackets, one may be sure, will never understand the amount of coordinated expenditure of effort that went into even a relatively modest mission. Still less will they ever understand that even with the most careful planning in the world, missions could and did go wrong for causes that were trivial in scale even if enormous in results. Weather not quite as briefed, a flub-up by a single inconspicuous individual, a misfortune in a lead ship could wipe out the efforts of a force that was an army in itself, and no small army, at that.
For this reason, the borderline between a good month and a bad one was narrow indeed. A month that was otherwise undistinguished could become a howling success merely through one or two good missions: not so surprising when it is considered that after knocking off about sixty percent for weather, we only managed to swing eight or nine raids a month.
October was a good month because it included two outstanding jobs: Anklam on the 9th, and Schweinfurt No. 2 on the 14th. Six raids were flown in the first two weeks, and the rest of the month was a dead loss, except for a minor job on the small town of Duren flown on the 20th, obviously flown more for the good of the force than to hurt the Hun. Other jobs were Emden on the 2nd, Frankfurt on the 4th, Bremen on the 8th and Munster on the 10th.
To cover the minor jobs first: the most noteworthy fact was that any mission to Germany could be considered minor. Emden was another experiment with Pathfinders. Our attempt to make good on the extravagant ads appearing in the home press was pretty much a flop! Full-page art jobs in TIME and LIFE proclaimed that the Fortress, in addition to its other virtues, was now equipped to carry ten tons of bombs. What an airplane: it could fly at 40,000 feet, carry ten tons, do 300 miles an hour, fly 3,000 miles. Poor Public. They were never told that it could do any one of three things, but it couldn’t do any two of them at the same time. Sure it was a fine airplane – the finest in the world, as we darn well know, but we also know its limitations, one of which was that it couldn’t get away with more than three tons in high altitude formation combat work, let alone ten. This was one of the raids on which we tried to carry 6,000 pounds internally and 2,000 more under the wings. The machines would get off the ground and even make altitude that way, but you couldn’t pull the necessary extra power without losing superchargers. It was like our ill-starred YB 40’s, those over-armed and underpowered flying battle cruisers, which had come with high expectations and gone without regret.
Like all missions this one had good features as well as bad. We discovered in our VHF radio a potent weapon of cooperation with our fighter escort. Twin-engine rocket ships were knocked off like ducks when attending P-47’s were advised of their presence and whereabouts. We lost no aircraft of the Combat Wing on this mission. From the bombing standpoint, we never knew. It was a straight pathfinder job and we were having trouble due to the difficulty of seeing flares dropped by the lead ship. On this mission, our Combat Wing never saw the flares and dropped on the enemy’s flak. If we hit Emden, as we probably did, it served him right.
The Frankfurt mission on the 4th was an unhappy affair. Losses in the Combat Wing were light for such a deep penetration: only three aircraft. Enemy rocket ships were much in evidence, but we had good fighter support most of the way and hence too much opposition. Bombing, unfortunately, was poor. Our Combat Wing had its own target in the town, but clouds and a smoke screen ganged up with a mistake made by the navigator of a preceding task force to crowd us off the briefed axis of attack and we had to select an improvised IP and make a run under bad conditions. Our bombs landed in a cemetery. Two Groups of other Combat Wings did good business on an airplane propeller factory, which was what they were really after, so the thing wasn’t a dead loss.
Bremen on the 8th was notably chiefly for the fact that our fighters, constantly extended their range, went with us right to the target. We had never believed the stories you heard about the range of our American fighters: we had heard similar stories about how far our Fortresses could go and we put all such stories on the shelf with Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. This day we had our eyes opened and by P-47 Thunderbolts at that. Lightenings and Mustangs were supposed to be the long-range jobs. If P-47’s could go to Bremen, where could the others go? That came later, we were happy to discover. Unfortunately, the discovery was not ripe on the 9th, when our Combat Wing and the 41st attacked Anklam. Even the fables about the range of the B-17 nearly came true that day. For some time, all airplanes newly arrived in the Theater were B-17G’s, which were equipped with long-range tanks in the wings, called “Tokyo Tanks”. To secure uniformity of equipment ours was the last to be equipped with them, and at this date, were the short-range boys.
The tactical plan for the days work was ambitious. The long-range boys were to fly to the Polish corridor and beyond, attacking the former Polish port of Gdynia and the most important aircraft words at Marienburg in East Prussia, whence they had been removed from Bremen to escape our attentions after the persuasive job done on the Focke Wulf works there in April. All these targets were far beyond even the newly-demonstrated capabilities of the P-47’s: this was to be a no-escort job, just like in the old, dirty days before the fighter lads came over the drink. Somebody had to be the fall guy on a deal like that and our boys were elected. First to travel the long route over the North Sea and southern Denmark they were to draw the enemy fighters, exhaust them in combat, and then blaze a path for the long-range boys. And that was just the way it turned out. We had it. Our Combat Wing lost 13 out of 49 ships that several hundred Jerries that made the boys doubt if they would ever see England again. But it worked. The other task forces had little or no enemy opposition of any kind: they went through and produced bombing results at Marienburg that were classics in the air war. The amazing thing was that our decoys destroyed their own target as well, in spite of the battle they received and the losses they sustained. It was a tremendous day’s work, equaled only by what happened five days later.
Meanwhile, however, there was a short one to Munster, just north of the Ruhr. Still licking our wounds after Anklam, we could muster only 33 ships out of our three Groups and only 19 of these good job was turned in and the lads brought back some fine pictures of their bombing.
The big, bad wolf came on the 14th. We had to go back to Schweinfurt. Our Combat Wing had led the first attack in August; this time we were to ride comfortably in the rear with our reduced force, still not up to strength. But as luck had it, there was bad weather over England on the takeoff and when the time came to leave the coast, our boys were out in front with Lt. Col. Ross Milton, Air Executive of the 91st, leading the whole show. Fortunately for us, the 305th Group, which was unable to find its own gang, came along with us and flew low box on our incomplete Wing formation. This they did at their own expense: of seventeen ships that joined us at the outset, only two came back to England. But our boys were spared: we lost only three, which was as nothing on a day that cost the Eighth Air Force a total of 60 heavy bombers.
We had fighter escort almost to the Rhine. Jerry knew the exact limit of range of our P-47’s. As soon as they left, enemy fighters came up in clouds. It was a fantastic, fiendish battle, with the Hun throwing at us everything he could scrape up. In spite of the loss of bombers, it was a victory for us, for our not inconsiderable forces ploughed through to their target and bombed it in clear weather with results that left nothing to be desired. The irreplaceable ball-bearing works, severely damaged by the earlier attack, were a complete write-off after this one. There was uproar back in the States and we were grieved over the many boys who had gone down, but it was worth the price. We had to believe that, and we did, because the evidence was conclusive. We shuddered to think of the reaction had we lost 60 bombers and then missed the target.
But there was no denying that the month had cost us dear. Our Combat Wing had suffered badly on two missions: Bremen and Anklam. Others had sustained losses on Anklam and Schweinfurt. True, Jerry could ill afford the loss of Schweinfurt, but we could ill afford 60 bombers at a clip. It was all summed up by the following statement attributed sardonically to the German propaganda ministry:
“Yesterday the Americans made an attack on Southern Germany. We ‘shot down 159 heavy bombers and 37 fighters for the loss of two German machines. One of our cities is missing’”.
Due to the factor referred to, our number of accredited sorties for the month fell to 271. Our losses were 28 B-17’s. Yet it was a good month more than justified by results achieved. An index to what the boys went through is that we were credited with destroying 120 enemy aircraft, probably destroying 26 and damaging 92. We had taken the worst the Hun could offer and carried through. Our Group morale stood up under the impact. Our boys had not abandoned any attack. The future was certainly not black, even though our forces were temporarily reduced. As long as the folks at home stood behind us, we knew our boys would carry on.