Forgotten Fifteenth Page 21

  Billy Daniel was a good one: short and slight with a perennial grin, as if he knew something was about to happen, and the troops quickly took to their pipe-smoking CO. Despite his experience, however, he had trouble getting on the score board. One of the squadron commanders, burly Captain Sam Brown, took him under his wing. He got results. Daniel bagged two Bf 109s on a late May mission, adding one each in June and July. Newly promoted to full colonel in March 1945, he made ace the hard way: downing a jet late that month.

  DECEMBER DENOUEMENT

  As the year ended, the Fifteenth’s fighters were sent on more and more ground-attack missions. The Mustang groups occasionally pulled off some spectacular strafing, as when the Checkertails claimed sixty-three “grounders” in Serbia on September 8 and thirty-seven in western Hungary on October 21.

  P-38s were flying more dive-bombing missions, leaving much of the escort work to Mustangs. The Lightning carried a good load—two thousand-pounders on occasion. Lieutenant Gale Mortensen of the Fourteenth Group said, “You wanted to start high enough to look around but you couldn’t get too steep because the P-38 accelerated pretty fast.” A high dive speed meant unpleasant G loads on pull-out—often more than six times the force of gravity. The navy’s purpose-built bombers typically dived at seventy degrees, but they had speed brakes to retard airspeed. Not until the L model did Lockheed provide dive recovery flaps.26 In dive-bombing, most misses were “short” or “long” rather than left or right, so pilots had to experiment until they found the technique that worked best for them. One flier said of dive-bombing, “Easier than I thought with no flak coming up.”27

  By mid-December 1944, the Luftwaffe was so scarce that intelligence officers were hard-pressed to cover the enemy fighter portion of mission briefings. For the strikes against the Odertal and Blechhammer refineries on the seventeenth, aircrews were told to expect “no more than fifteen single-engine aircraft in the area, flown by students from a local operational training unit.”28 Contrary to expectations, however, the Forty-ninth Wing encountered unusually heavy fighter opposition—the Luftwaffe would defend its fuel sources even if other targets were left unprotected. Flying against Odertal, the 461st Group was partly dispersed in heavy weather with just five of twenty-six planes reaching the target. South of the initial point, the main formation was struck by an estimated fifty 109s and 190s. They were from Lieutenant Colonel Walther Dahl’s JG 300, trained in all-weather flying and based in central Germany to reinforce Reich air defense where most needed.

  The timing could hardly have been worse for the Americans. Because of the distance flown, the B-24s’ ball turrets were on “standby” status to reduce drag and save fuel, rather than lowered into position ready to fight, depriving the formation of one-fifth of its defensive firepower. They also had to do without the ball turrets’ gyroscopic lead-computing sights, the most accurate available on bombers.

  In a fifteen-minute shootout, the group was subjected to 20mm fire and rockets. The intelligence officers’ dismissive briefing notwithstanding, the Germans flew “skillfully, aggressively, and persistently.” They attacked in pairs from the rear quarter with low breakaways. It was an effective tactic: with few ball turrets deployed, nine bombers were shot down and a tenth ditched in the Aegean, with nearly a hundred fliers killed or missing. The 461st gunners claimed two dozen shootdowns—probably not far off the mark—but the losses were staggering.29

  The bombers had to drop through the undercast and couldn’t see the results. As the depleted formation pulled away, Captain Marion C. Mixson checked the survivors when a German voice cackled in his earphones. Using the correct call sign, the Luftwaffe pilot taunted, “Where is the rest of your formation?” With that, he laughed and signed off.30

  The Germans’ glee was short lived. Though twenty heavies were lost to all causes during the day, the Thirty-first and Fifty-second Group Mustangs nosed through the weather to stampede all over the Sturmflieger and trample them in the Silesian dust, claiming twenty-eight destroyed while losing two. On the nearby Blechhammer mission, Fourteenth Group Lightnings bagged five for three pilots captured. In all, Jagdgeschwader 300 wrote off forty fighters with half the pilots killed and several wounded.31

  The Odertal-Blechhammer mission sustained the worst losses to enemy fighters in the post-Ploesti period. The fifteen bombers hacked down by the armored Focke-Wulfs represented more than half the Fifteenth’s casualties to interceptors for the last four months of 1944.

  Yet another threat emerged on the return leg. The 485th Group overflew the “oil triangle” in southwestern Hungary, about 120 miles south of Vienna. Upon return to Venosa, Lieutenant Colonel John T. Atkinson told debriefers that six Liberators were damaged by exploding “rockets” fired from the ground while the formation cruised at twelve thousand feet. Ten days later a Second Group gunner, Sergeant Melvin McGuire, observed something similar over Wiener Neustadt. A guided surface-to-air missile (SAM) drew a bead on his B-17 but veered away, apparently after losing tracking.32

  Both incidents might have involved the Wasserfall (waterfall) missile, arguably the only one of Germany’s experimental high-altitude SAMs that might have been operational. Twenty-six feet long and weighing four tons at launch, Wasserfall was propelled by a binary fuel to 1,700 miles per hour. With radio and radar guidance, its 520-pound warhead was expected to destroy or damage multiple bombers in a formation. However, the Luftwaffe abandoned its SAM program in early 1945 to concentrate on the proved Me 262 fighter and the low-tech He 162 jet interceptor.33

  Acknowledging the growing threat, the AAF dispatched two new Lockheed fighters to Italy: sleek, futuristic P-80 Shooting Stars. Supported by Lockheed technicians, the Wright Field test pilots arrived in December 1944, flying their jets against First Group P-38s at Lesina to perfect tactics of prop fighters against Me 262s. The Shooting Stars cost about $110,000—big money in 1945 but not much more than a P-38.

  With few enemy fighters coming within shooting range of bombers, many groups began flying with one waist gunner instead of two. The nine-man crew exposed fewer airmen to the routine dangers of wartime flying than the ten-man crew did, but it saved only about 200 pounds—an inconsequential weight compared with the twenty-eight tons of a loaded Liberator.

  The crew reduction was unpopular with gunners. The change not only broke up close-knit teams, with the waist gunners alternating missions, but it extended the period to complete a combat tour. Aerial gunners arriving in Italy that summer expected to finish their tours in as little as three months, but after the change it could take five or more, depending on the targets assigned. The elimination of double credit for Romanian missions also contributed to the extension.

  Yet most crews remained tight, despite the inevitable differences in backgrounds. A 461st Group navigator had been a master brewer, studying in France and Germany before the war. When drafted, he was earning a fabulous salary: $25,000 per year (the equivalent of about $330,000 in 2013). In the same crew a waist gunner had been head of a garment workers’ union and refused a commission, preferring to maintain solidarity with the proletariat.34

  Enlisted men could not complain that officers avoided danger. Four of the ten men in a heavy bomber crew were officers. About half of the AAF personnel exposed to death or capture, including fighter pilots, were therefore officers. The historian Stephen Ambrose computed that more than twice as many air force officers were killed than in the rest of the army combined.35

  LIVING THERE

  Most of the Foggia complex had been subjected to heavy bombing when occupied by Italian and German forces. But American engineers had moved in and, with Yankee know-how, had transformed the rubble into useable facilities with astonishing speed and efficiency. Conditions steadily improved, and by the fall of 1944 the muddy, semi-primitive airfields of late 1943 had been transformed. Tents were heated with an avgas-fueled barrel. Then wood frames with a tent top replaced all-canvas enclosures, with four men per tent.

  The Americans ate more bread and past
a, and enlisted men who spoke Italian engaged in weekly trading with civilians.

  Most bases boasted baseball, basketball, and volleyball teams. Though providing diversion and an outlet for youthful energy, athletics could inflict casualties. Lieutenant Gale Mortensen, a Fourteenth Group P-38 pilot, caught a hot grounder that broke the tip of one finger.

  Despite the type of mass production that the United States alone ever perfected, few aircraft were identical beneath the paint. Two bombers in the same squadron with sequential serial numbers could have different “personalities.” One might be down for a variety of reasons so often that it became a “hangar queen,” eventually cannibalized for parts. The other might fly fifty or even a hundred missions without an abort, one of the cherished “up birds” that carried more than its share of the load. Some units routinely flew more sorties than the others. The Ninety-ninth Group at Tortorella had four of the five “flyingest” B-17s—three with more than 120 missions each.36

  Such records were due to the slavish devotion of ground crews. Mechanics and other technical specialists took enormous pride in their work, often approaching the obsessive-compulsive. The opportunity to work on so exotic a machine as a four-engine bomber or a racy fighter seemed too good to be true. For some crews, the flying creatures of steel, aluminum, and rubber could take on the characteristics of a beloved pet. A 450th Group pilot recalled that he “never went out to the flight line at any hour of the day or night that the mechanics were not out there working. These mechanics were the most dedicated people I ever saw. They’d break down and cry when their plane went down. It always seemed they thought there was something else they could have done to make the plane more airworthy.”37

  A rough sampling of aircraft mechanics revealed that many—perhaps most—grew up with a love of engines. No country but the United States, where automobiles were an established way of life by the 1930s, could have produced such a vast pool of talent. George McGovern praised the crews: “We couldn’t have kept anything as complicated as a Liberator functioning very long without their superb attention.”38

  Relying on decades of experience, the AAF organized its maintenance crews in a pyramidal structure. A squadron’s topkick NCO was the line chief, a career professional who usually worked equally well with human and mechanical material. His subordinates were flight chiefs, usually master sergeants, responsible for three flights of three bombers. In turn, each aircraft had its own maintenance squad, a crew chief normally with three mechanics and technicians under him. The best depiction of a flight mechanic was Harry Carey’s performance as Master Sergeant Robbie White in the wartime movie Air Force, which followed the adventures of a B-17 crew in the Pacific. Vastly experienced, all knowing, alternately tough and cajoling, the character represented the generation of men who kept ’em flying.39

  The four squadrons in each bomb group were expected to meet or exceed the unit’s quota of aircraft for each day’s flying—twenty-eight to thirty-six bombers, more or less evenly divided among the squadrons, on a typical mission. When the word descended through channels from Bari headquarters to the bomb wings down to the groups at the operating bases, everyone turned to. The term “maximum effort” implied an extraordinary undertaking, but most missions probably required the maximum number of bombers airborne to put as much ordnance on target as possible.

  With an unrelenting work schedule, something had to give. Men on the flight line might work round the clock without rest, and sometimes the best opportunity for some sack time was during a mission. The six to eight hours that the bombers were airborne could be precious to bone-weary men too tired to drag themselves back to their tents. Many just slumped where they were out of the way, unconcerned about noise, traffic, or hunger.

  Then they got up and started over again.

  Personnel drove operations as much as available aircraft, with attrition and replacement vying for superiority. Throughout 1944 the Fifteenth’s ratio of bomber crews lost in combat or accidents to those completing their tours was at near parity: about 1,500 each. After the Ploesti campaign, however, the Fifteenth continued growing at a steady pace. August was the first month in which more crews rotated out than were killed or captured, and from September to year’s end the ratio was 1.6 crews “retired” to each crew lost. Even better, from September to December the Fifteenth saw a net gain of six hundred bomber crews. By the end of 1944, therefore, with a steady flow of replacements, Twining finally had enough aircrews to maintain the desired mission schedule. That month the Bari personnel office counted two crews for each bomber.40

  Sometimes a bomber returned to base without a full crew. On December 13, for example, a Blechhammer mission inflicted thirteen losses, the heaviest toll that target ever extracted from the Fifteenth, with three missing that day from the 464th Group.

  Another 464th Liberator took a serious hit as First Lieutenant David R. Epley’s crew had one gunner killed and two wounded. Though Epley and copilot Noel A. Wood landed their damaged Liberator at Pantanella, the ball turret gunner was absent. The radioman, Sergeant Darwin Carlson, reported, “After the ship received a direct hit through the left side, I started to open the escape hatch near the tail turret. Sgt. Davis was to my right while I was trying to open the hatch. After realizing the ship was not going down, I looked around, and Sgt. Davis was not present. The lapse of time from when I started to open the hatch, and saw that Sgt. Davis was missing, was fifteen seconds at the most. It is my believe [sic] that Sgt. Davis, thinking the ship was on its way down, did bail out through the hole blown on the left side of the ship.” Sergeant Robert R. Davis was later reported to have died of wounds.41

  The Fifteenth attacked Blechhammer at least ten times between mid-October and the end of the year. The AAF dropped more than seven thousand tons of bombs on the two facilities, and the wrecking job was largely complete at the end of 1944. By then the Fifteenth’s influence was felt far beyond the Mediterranean Theater.

  On December 16, nearly eight hundred miles north of Foggia, two hundred thousand Germans supported by six hundred tanks and 1,600 artillery tubes smashed into a quiet American sector in the Ardennes Forest of France and Belgium. Seeking to divide the Allies and drive to Antwerp, the critical Anglo-American supply port, three German armies began a four-week slugfest impelled by their desperate need for fuel.

  At the end of the Battle of the Bulge—Hitler’s desperate last effort in the West—hundreds of German vehicles were abandoned. Relatively few had been destroyed or damaged; most had run out of gasoline. In the grim ledger of war, the Fifteenth’s Ploesti missions, and the petroleum bombing generally, had paid a major dividend.

  HOLIDAY SEASON IN ITALY

  On Christmas Day, 1944, the airmen were rousted from their bunks with a routine, “Everyone out! Briefing at 3:00, breakfast at 4:00.” On the day of peace on earth and goodwill toward men, Liberators and Fortresses took off from Foggia that morning with full bomb loads. (The Fifteenth had flown on Christmas Day, 1943, though in far smaller numbers.)

  More than 250 heavies struck the synthetic refinery at Brux, Czechoslovakia, and the marshalling yard at Weis, Austria, while 145 others strewed ordnance across rail targets in Austria and Germany. The defenders were equally willing to continue hostilities that Wednesday, as flak over Brux came up “heavy, intense, and accurate.” Five B-17s went down, including the one hundredth loss for the Second Group.42

  Five Liberators were shot out of the sky near Innsbruck, including a 376th Group aircraft. Sergeant Bill Barton followed his friends out the exit and experienced an eerie contrast to the noisy, flaming violence he had just left. Upon parachuting onto the snow-covered ground he was approached by an elderly man with two children. Satisfied that the unarmed American was no threat, the Austrian motioned, “Kommen, kommen.”

  The trio led Barton to a house where he was offered a chair and a shot of schnapps. The Frau provided a bowl of Christmas cookies followed by soup and meat. “We tried to converse with an English-German dictionary,” Ba
rton recalled, “but about then the police arrived from the town below.” As the guards led him out, the lady of the house asked, “You Catlic?” Barton said he was, to which she replied, “Dominus vobiscum.” “The Lord be with you” could not have been a more appropriate wish.43

  Many units experienced both war and Christmas. The 451st bombed the Wels marshalling yard southwest of Linz without loss while the base chaplain held a Christmas service that morning. The First Fighter Group not only served turkey and trimmings, but ice cream for desert. For sweet-starved airmen it was “Manna from heaven.”44

  New Year’s Eve 1944 was observed in various ways at various bases. Undoubtedly the most raucous celebration was at Foggia Eleven (Vincenzo), where two fighter squadron commanders “proceeded to most thoroughly shoot up the camp.” That was bad enough, but the miscreants put .45 caliber rounds through the Eighty-second Group commander’s tent. Colonel Richard A. Legg’s “roommate” was Lockheed tech rep Richard “Stumpy” Hollinger, who allowed that he “just about bought one.”

  Dick Legg was somewhere between tolerant and indulgent toward his COs. He issued reprimands to Majors Thomas C. Kelly and Robert M. Wray, prompting Kelly to quip that he expected the paper to ruin his prospects for making general. The army bureaucracy had its own priorities, however, and Kelly’s promotion to light colonel arrived hours later as a New Year’s Day present. His unindicted co-conspirator, Bob Wray, also pinned on silver oak leaves before long.45