Forgotten Fifteenth Read online

  Almost immediately Fred was surrounded by a mob of angry civilians, unaccountably screaming “Jewd, Jewd!” He sank beneath a barrage of blows from fists and tools, but as a good Presbyterian he displayed a small cross. An elderly man saw the symbol and stopped the pelting. Eventually delivered to police, he was visited by a priest and entered the world of a prisoner of war. He was one of nine fighters who failed to return. In Texas his parents received the second telegram from the War Department—Raymond was already missing in China.

  LIVING THERE

  In June 1944 the Fifteenth glimpsed the shape of the future. High in the cerulean vault, P-38 pilots saw the shark-nosed jet-propelled Messerschmitt 262 entering operational evaluation at Augsburg in Bavaria. “The first sight of that plane always provoked disbelief—nothing could go that fast at that height, but there it was. It could and it did!”41

  Meanwhile, more mundane developments continued around Foggia. The First Fighter Group concluded that Italy in the summer was “(A) very hot and (B) very dusty,” with four-man tents leaving something to be desired. The area was rife with malaria, requiring a daily Atabrine (quinacrine) tablet that gave the skin a yellow cast.

  After seven months in operation, the Fifteenth got to know more Italians as individuals, concluding, “They were friendly, desperately poor, and invariably seemed to have relatives living in Boston or San Francisco or Chicago.” The Ninety-fourth Fighter Squadron at Salsola, ten miles north of Foggia, employed a paroled POW known as Gino. He made himself useful in the mess hall, where any complaints about the fare brought a referral to “Spic son of a bitch sergeant!”42

  At the same base, the Twenty-seventh Squadron adopted one of many urchins and orphans, an outgoing youngster of twelve or so. Young Antonio Castriota was fitted with a cut-down non-com’s uniform, complete with suitable patches, evolving into “Sergeant Tony.”

  BACK TO PLOESTI

  The Fifteenth resumed its strikes on Ploesti on June 23, sending two wings against Dacia. The Forty-seventh’s Liberators were turned back by weather, sparing Romana Americana another pasting. But nearly 140 Fortresses attacked Dacia, losing six bombers. The smoke screen was typically effective, limiting the damage.

  Continuing the policy of spreading out the defenders, Twining sent the Fifty-fifth Wing against Giurgia, a target of the recent shuttle mission, and the 304th returned to working on the railroad, striking a Bucharest marshalling yard.

  The Axis launched almost two hundred fighters, affording plenty of shooting for three Mustang groups, which claimed twenty-five victories. It was a costly mission for the Romanian Air Force, as two of its four fighter group commanders were killed. Captain Virgil Trandafirescu of the Seventh Group had been flying against the Russians since June 1941. He took eleven Messerschmitts against the Americans, claimed a P-51 (four were downed), then succumbed to the odds. Captain Commander Ioan Sandu of the First Group also functioned as the fighter wing commander. He led his nine IAR-180s into the bombers, possibly downed one of six B-17s destroyed, then was swarmed by the escorts. The forty-four-year-old Sandu was the senior Romanian pilot killed during World War II, allegedly strafed in his chute.

  The attrition was unsustainable: two weeks later Bucharest’s air ministry reported that operational fighters had spiraled down from 115 in early April, when U.S. operations began, to only fifty in early July, with thirty-three pilots killed. The homegrown IAR 80, clearly inferior to the P-51, was withdrawn from front-line service, replaced by Messerschmitts in the time remaining.

  The Fifty-second Group accounted for nearly half the U.S. fighter claims but reported three Italian aircraft among the dozen destroyed. There were no Macchis or Fiats, of course—just IAR 80s and Bf 109s. The next day the Checkertails tangled with Romanians and correctly identified three IARs among six confirmed kills.

  ABOVE AND BEYOND

  The Fifth Wing’s target on the twenty-third was oil storage at Giurgiu and two refineries near Ploesti. During the run to the Danube, a Ninety-seventh Group B-17 irreverently named Opissonya was rocked by flak and dropped out of formation, losing altitude. The pilot, First Lieutenant Edwin Anderson, was determined, however, to put his bombardier over the target.

  Crouched over his Norden sight was Second Lieutenant David R. Kingsley, an Oregonian three days shy of his twenty-sixth birthday. He had reported to the Ninety-seventh Group at Amendola in April. Since then he had become a veteran, logging nineteen missions in barely two months.

  Kingsley tried to ignore the German fighters that attacked before the group reached Giurgiu and concentrated on the image in his sight. The smoke obscuring the target and the flak were so thick, said one crewman, “You could almost walk on it.”43

  Opissonya took a beating over the target. With damaged controls, Anderson and copilot William Symons eased their battered Boeing away on three engines with one fuel tank ripped loose. Quick to finish a straggler, enemy fighters pounced on the lone Fortress. The tail gunner, Sergeant Michael Sullivan, was struck by 20mm shell fragments, which also destroyed his intercom; he could not call for help.

  Barely able to crawl, Sullivan pulled himself forward to the waist position. The two gunners tried to administer first aid but his right shoulder was bleeding badly. They carried him to the radio compartment and called for Kingsley. After bombs away, the bombardier was the logical crewman to help. It was certain that the gunners would remain busy.

  Working in the confined space, Kingsley pulled off Sullivan’s damaged parachute harness and jacket, exposing the bleeding shoulder. Despite the awkward angle, the bombardier applied a tourniquet and stanched the hemorrhage, but Sullivan was approaching shock. Nearly five hundred miles from base, with one propeller feathered and eight-thousand-foot mountains ahead, it looked like a long flight to safety. Sullivan needed help—soon. For a time, two Mustangs had tagged along, guarding the vulnerable bomber, but all too soon they broke off, low on fuel.

  At that point eight Messerschmitt 109s dived out of the sun. For perhaps fifteen minutes they made repeated firing passes, holing the wings and fuselage of the undefended Boeing and wounding the ball turret gunner. There was no option but to abandon ship. Edwin Anderson rang the bailout bell.

  Kingsley helped the wounded men prepare to jump. When Sullivan’s damaged parachute harness could not be found, the bombardier, in a stunning act of sacrifice, removed his own parachute and wrestled Sullivan into it. Kingsley took Sullivan in his arms and struggled to the bomb bay, where he told Sullivan to keep his hand on the ripcord. The gunner would pull the handle when he was clear of the ship. “Then he told me to bail out,” Sullivan recalled. “Before I jumped, I looked up at him and the look he had on his face was firm and solemn. He must have known what was coming because there was no fear in his eyes at all.”44

  Crewmembers watched their bomber continue its erratic descent, then fall to Earth at the tiny village of Souhozem, Bulgaria, 150 miles south of Ploesti. Bulgarian troops told captured crewmen that Kingsley’s body was found on Opissonya’s flight deck. Apparently he had been searching for a spare parachute or vainly trying to make a crash landing. In 2004 a memorial was erected to the seven Bulgarian civilians killed on the ground and the lone American who gave his life evidently trying to spare them.

  Other airmen risked or lost their lives trying to save their friends, and many received the Medal of Honor. But David Kingsley knowingly abandoned any hope of survival when he gave away his parachute harness in a doomed aircraft. His decision was made with deliberation, with none of the impulsiveness of so many heroic acts. In the history of the aviation Medals of Honor, his action defines “above and beyond the call of duty.”

  The Forty-seventh Wing rebounded from its weather abort to revisit Romana Americana the next day, June 24. The Liberators landed more than forty hits that destroyed or damaged pipelines, canceling production for five days. But the success was costly. Some 160 planes from five Luftwaffe wings opposed the mission, including a fighter-bomber outfit with FW 190s and the frequent
ly committed training unit JG 301. The Germans’ claim of more than twenty Abschüsse was exaggerated, but the actual results were bad enough. Of 135 B-24s sent to Romana Americana, fourteen went down—a stunning 10.3-percent loss rate.

  The next day the much-abused Astra Romana refinery finally resumed partial production. It had been shut down since early April, as follow-on strikes had scrapped the defenders’ initial estimate of a two-month recovery.45

  The Second World War required industrial production on an immense scale. The inevitable combat and operational losses, like those of June 1944, had to be replaced. At month’s end the Fifteenth had lost nearly 170 bombers and eighty fighters, both records. Fighter attrition that month was nearly double the May rate, evidence of increasing air combat and the greater danger of strafing well-defended targets, especially airdromes.

  In Bari, Twining’s headquarters tracked the command’s losses throughout the campaign. Between early April and late June, the period of the Ploesti missions, Axis fighters shot down at least 240 bombers, and another 250 were lost to flak. Seventy-four other heavies were damaged beyond repair or written off in accidents.

  In the same ninety-day period nearly 150 Fifteenth fighters were lost on combat missions. The ratio of fighters lost to enemy aircraft represented nearly three times the figure from January through March.46

  The enemy’s stiff resistance forced a rethinking of Fifteenth policy. The fighter groups were sent on additional sweeps—gunning for trouble aloft—and airfield strikes to smash the Jagdwaffe in its nests or as close to the branches as possible. As a result, Twining’s bombers had been able to inflict growing damage on the Ploesti network, and the numbers showed results. The operating refineries’ total daily processing went up and down, dropping below 1,500 tons in mid-June and staging an impressive recovery approaching nine thousand two weeks later. But where it mattered most—gasoline exports to Germany—the numbers plummeted from 135,000 tons in December 1943 to about twenty thousand in June. Export of lubricating oils and all petroleum products reflected a tightening of the flow.47

  Ploesti was on the ropes, but the Romanian challenger had an iron jaw. There would be no single knockout punch—not Tidal Wave and certainly not the failed P-38 dive-bombing attack. Only a sustained strategic bombing campaign waged with relentless determination could succeed. And that was the goal as Italian spring turned to Balkan summer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MEDITERRANEAN SUMMER

  JULY–SEPTEMBER 1944

  July 1944 was like no month the Fifteenth Air Force had yet experienced. While the ground campaign along the Gothic Line 150 miles north of Rome remained static for most of the rest of the war, the air campaign kicked into “high blower”—a supercharged, relentless effort to wreck Hitler’s oil and aircraft industries for good.

  That summer the Luftwaffe recognized its peril. A planning assessment noted, “The greatest danger lies in the threat to the fuel supply. Here the destruction of a relatively limited number of targets would result in a complete paralysis of the Luftwaffe, all motorized units, the military and civilian means of transportation, and the Navy.”1

  Though Ploesti remained the priority, other targets attracted the unwelcome attention of the Fifteenth’s bombardiers. One of the early missions resulted in an epic encounter still the subject of discussion seventy years later.

  DUELING WITH THE DEVIL

  On July 3 Twining launched six hundred bombers against petroleum and transport targets at Bucharest and oil storage sites at Belgrade. Escorted by more than 250 fighters, the “big friends” were nearly immune to interception.

  First Lieutenant Robert J. Goebel, a twenty-one-year-old who had scored his first victory in May, led a four-plane flight of the Thirty-first Fighter Group, whose Mustangs were escorting B-24s. Responding to calls of “bogeys” over the radio, Goebel ordered his flight to drop its under-wing fuel tanks in preparation for a fight. Then he sighted “a gaggle of fifteen 109s” at twenty-six thousand feet. The lead pair of Messerschmitts already was close, just off his nose. “I think the leader saw my flight at about the same time,” he wrote years later. “He had balls, I’ll say that for him. The two 109s started down to attack the bombers below, or the four of us. It was a rash act, indeed.”2

  When the German leader entered a loop, he lost contact with his three partners, who accelerated down on the bombers. Goebel and his wingman followed the leader while his second section split to bracket the enemy. Whichever way the 109 pilot broke, he would be boxed in.

  Goebel lined up the Messerschmitt and pressed the trigger. He was still out of range. The German was maneuvering hard, possibly using negative G, bunting the nose down. Goebel fired at least twice more without hits. “I remember being puzzled and frustrated at my inability to hit him with a solid burst.” Goebel shoved his throttle forward, closing the range, but his opponent timed his breaks artfully, each time returning to the same heading—apparently for home.

  Once within effective range—inside one thousand feet—Goebel finessed the controls and put his aiming dot on the 109’s tail. “I fired again and was rewarded with strikes quick-flashing around the fuselage and wing roots. Then his prop wash threw me off him momentarily.”

  As Goebel lined up for another shot, the 109’s canopy came off. The pilot followed, quickly opening his parachute. “I could plainly see him suspended beneath it,” Goebel recalled. “A dark, toy-like figure, swaying gently as he floated down.”3

  Recognizing a rare opportunity, Goebel turned his armament switch to the “camera and sight” position, tracked the German in his gun sight, pressed the trigger to active his camera, and was rewarded with proof of his victory. Goebel then passed close by, raised a hand in a chivalrous gesture, and broke off to regroup his flight for the trip home.

  It cannot be known for certain, but Bob Goebel had likely defeated the world’s third-ranked fighter ace. Erich Hartmann, a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant in JG 52, was leading eight Messerschmitt 109s that day. With two and a half years of combat, he was credited with more than 260 aerial victories, nearly all against Soviet pilots. Known as “The Black Devil of the Ukraine” for the nose markings on his aircraft, he had fought Mustangs before, and while he respected them, he did not fear them.

  A 1970 biography of Hartmann claims that he ran out of fuel and was forced to jump with Mustangs on his tail. His chute had barely opened when he heard a high-performance engine. He looked around and saw a Mustang descending toward him in an apparent gunnery pass. Hartmann’s guts turned to ice—both sides occasionally fired on parachutes. He saw his fiancée’s face. The Mustang flashed past, very close. Hartmann glimpsed a gloved hand raised in salute. He registered “an ugly face,” then the American was gone.

  Erich Hartmann survived, returned to combat, and ended the war with 352 credited kills—the highest score in the history of aerial combat. He endured a brutal decade of Soviet captivity after war before returning to Germany and to flying. He died in 1993, widely admired in the West.

  Despite the Mustang escort, ten B-24s went down, including five from the 376th Group attacking Giurgiu. A radio operator, Sergeant Bill Giambrone, recalled,

  We were near the target when it happened. All of a sudden five or six fighters came at us from about 12:00 out of the sun. It all happened so fast, we really didn’t have any time to react. I had just left the radio compartment for the waist. They shot us up real quick and number four was smoking badly. All of a sudden the plane was in a dive. I don’t have any idea what happened up front. I grabbed my chute and crawled up the floor pulling myself to the hatch. [Sergeant J. L.] Morgan had just opened it so he could take pictures at the target and hadn’t even had time to mount the camera in place. I got to the hatch and started to pull myself out when all of a sudden I was sucked out and it was real quiet. I finished hooking my parachute and pulled the ripcord. I didn’t know if anyone else was out until I hit the ground.

  I was captured immediately. George Morrison was there and he had
broken his ankle. They took me over to the crash site awhile later. The plane didn’t burn when it hit. The others were all laid out in a row and I really couldn’t look. I didn’t have any shoes on so I did take someone’s though I’m not sure who, as I couldn’t recognize them. I figured he wouldn’t mind, as I needed them. It was tough to figure these were my buddies only a little while before.4

  BLECHHAMMER

  In June 1944 AAF targeteers focused their sights on the enemy’s synthetic fuel industry. Germany’s own petroleum sources could supply less than 10 percent of the Wehrmacht’s requirements, so the Reich had to turn to conquered nations like France and to allies in the oil-rich Balkans.

  The best source of synthetic fuel was bituminous coal. While most synthesized fuel was inferior to that refined from crude oil, fuel derived from bituminous coal was suitable for aviation. For automotive gasoline, brown coal was adequate. The Luftwaffe required huge quantities of high-octane fuel, and from at least 1938, Germany began producing greater amounts of synthetically derived gasoline. The output was considerable, more than tripling in the next five years.5

  British and American intelligence identified the main synthetic oil plants at Blechhammer and Odertal (both in Silesia, now part of Poland), Brux (Czechoslovakia), and Ruhland (near Dresden). These plants accounted for 70 percent of all the synthesized fuel and nearly all the aviation gas produced within the Fifteenth’s range.

  Blechhammer (“sheet metal hammer”) was a two-part industrial complex in the eastern region of Silesia. Blechhammer North and Blechhammer South were similar sized facilities less than two miles apart. Each measured roughly one and three-quarter miles long by three-quarters wide, or 1.3 square miles—ample targets for heavy bombers. The complex was operated largely by slave labor under SS jurisdiction. Dozens of labor camps dotted the area, supporting the chemical and petroleum industries and repairing the near-constant bomb damage. Prisoners considered unable to work usually were sent nearly fifty miles away for extermination at Auschwitz.