Forgotten Fifteenth Page 5

  Though suited to the B-24’s characteristics, the six-box formation had unavoidable problems. It was necessarily wide, resulting in broad bomb patterns on the ground. In mid-1944, therefore, the Fifteenth adopted a diamond formation, tightening accuracy but exposing planes to more flak.7

  The Fifteenth’s bomb wings saw some technical changes as B-17G models began appearing in January. The ultimate expression of the Flying Fortress, the G featured a two-gun “chin” turret under the nose, usually operated by the bombardier. It offered a partial solution to the Fort’s most vulnerable aspect—the Luftwaffe’s head-on attacks, which B-17Fs could not adequately deflect. But it was no panacea, as the 301st Group was the first to lose a G model with four Fs during an attack on Piraeus, Greece, on January 11. Nevertheless, the F models soldiered on at least until July.

  Whatever the bomber, aircrews endured nearly identical conditions in B-17s and B-24s. Waist gunners were the most stressed, as they spent nearly the entire mission standing in place. Said one gunner, “We sat in the radio compartment for takeoff and landing, but otherwise we had to stay at our waist position, constantly looking for enemy aircraft and calling out possible collisions with other bombers. It was a little better when Plexiglas windows became available, but still you stood up for six hours or more without much to do. At the end of the mission you felt stiff and sore, but you still had to clean your own gun and one of the others as well.”8

  CASSINO

  In mid-February the Allied advance stalled when it ran into strong German defensive positions, including the ancient Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino. Ninety miles west of Foggia, it occupied a strategic position, dominating the Rapido River and Route Six leading north to Rome.

  Established in the sixth century by St. Benedict himself and the cradle of Western monasticism, Monte Cassino had been repeatedly sacked and rebuilt over the centuries. The most recent rebuilding had followed an earthquake in 1349. The German commander in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, had notified the Allies and the Vatican that the abbey was not occupied, hoping to avoid damage to the historic site. British intelligence, however, misinterpreted enemy radio intercepts, and the Allied command approved bombing of “the world’s most glorious monastery.”9

  The Americans dropped leaflets before the mission, warning local residents to evacuate. Then, on the morning of February 15, 142 Fortresses of the Second, Ninety-seventh, Ninety-ninth, and 301st Groups preceded eighty-seven medium bombers of the Twelfth Air Force.10

  Many units excused men with religious concerns from flying the mission, as was done previously when Rome was bombed. It was a consistent AAF policy, as veterans of North Africa recalled, to avoid mosques in Muslim countries. Most fliers, however, shared the opinion of the Second Bomb Group’s mission commander, twenty-five-year-old Major Bradford E. Evans, who had flown two missions to Rome and felt no reluctance in bombing Cassino, which was reported to be sheltering German troops.11 Some devout airmen flew despite their reservations. Aerial gunner Dominic Licata of the Ninety-seventh Group said, “Of all the targets we hit, the one at Monte Cassino was the one that really got to me because I am a good Catholic. When they bombed that monastery, it gave me a funny feeling, but I guess the only thing you can say . . . is that it was war.”12

  Flying unusually low and encountering no flak or fighters, the B-17s attacked from fifteen thousand to eighteen thousand feet. They hit the monastery and surrounding countryside with 387 tons of bombs, razing the huge building in minutes. But some bombing was wildly erratic, striking friend and foe alike. Watching the process, two lieutenant generals grew wary. Ira Eaker and his former ETO colleague Jacob Devers were perched on a rooftop expecting to witness precision bombing from relatively low altitude. But watching the drop, Devers asked, “Are those bombs going to land over there?” The airman glanced at the target, up at the bombers, and computed the timing. Instinct and experience kicked in: “I’m afraid not.” That stick of bombs struck well behind them, three miles short of the target.13

  Other Allied soldiers experienced far worse, including the Fifth Army’s commander, Lieutenant General Mark Clark. Far behind the lines, his command trailer was rattled by a succession of near misses.

  The abbey was further wrecked by American artillery, but weather and command inefficiency prevented exploitation of the shock effect. After the bombing, the Germans occupied the site. The stone rubble afforded excellent defensive positions for Kesselring’s tough paratroopers, trained for assault by some of the finest defensive troops on Earth.

  Air attacks continued over the next month, with fighters strafing the rubble between bombing missions. On March 14 the Fifteenth responded to a request from the British to attack the town of Cassino before another ground assault. Following Twelfth Air Force Mitchells and Marauders, one wing each of B-17s and 24s trailed over the pockmarked battlefield. The mission was a fiasco. Loose formations, incorrect altitude, and an inexperienced lead bombardier resulted in more damage from friendly fire. This time, U.S. casualties were few, though a British general’s trailer and mess tent were ruined.

  Personally embarrassed, Eaker fired off a reprimand to Twining. He ordered that Twining or a staff member be present next time bombs were dropped near Allied troops and required the staff to have radio contact with bombers. Twining conducted his own investigation, citing poor air discipline, malfunctioning bomb racks, and smoke over the target area. Among other measures, he established a bombardier’s school for remedial training, as some units had arrived without finishing the stateside syllabus.14

  Despite their absolute air supremacy, it took forces from eight allied nations—Americans, British, French, New Zealanders, Poles, Ghurkas, Indians, and Loyalist Italians—to dislodge the Luftwaffe paratroopers from Monte Cassino. The defenders did not withdraw until mid-May.

  BIG WEEK

  Everyone recognized that 1944 would be the decisive year of the war. It would feature the Allied invasion of northern France, opening the western front demanded by the Soviets, and squeezing Germany in a geostrategic vise from three directions—the Russians from the east, the Anglo-Americans from north and south.

  U.S. Army ground commanders sometimes accused the airmen of pursuing their own agenda and preferring to attack strategic targets in the enemy homeland rather than supporting field armies. In turn, the fliers noted—correctly—that, with no Allied presence in northern Europe, the air campaign was in effect the long-sought second front.

  Spaatz, Doolittle, Eaker, and Twining knew that their time was limited. The Combined Bomber Offensive was scheduled to end around the first of April, when American strategic airpower would come under Eisenhower’s command. At that point the heavies would be sent after transportation targets to choke off German communications throughout occupied Europe. Few knew the date of D-Day, but it was obvious that it would come in late spring or early summer. The strategic air forces, consequently, had about two months to work whatever explosive magic they could. They went for the Luftwaffe’s—namely Hermann Göring’s—jugular.

  The campaign—officially named Operation Argument but known to history as Big Week—was aimed at Germany’s aviation industry. In late February the Eighth and Fifteenth sent aerial task forces numbering hundreds of bombers at a time on a six-day blitz against aircraft factories and related targets throughout Germany and Austria. Assisted by the RAF’s Bomber Command, which conducted three major night operations, their goal was to inflict debilitating and lasting damage to Luftwaffe production and operating bases.

  Doolittle and Twining had an unprecedented number of heavy bombers with growing numbers of escort fighters. But what they needed most was out of their control—a week of uninterrupted good weather.

  In late February, the Fifteenth Air Force comprised three bomb wings with twelve groups (eight B-24s) and four fighter groups (three P-38s, one P-47). When the Eighth kicked off Big Week on Sunday, February 20, however, Twining’s bombers were limited to supporting the Anzio beachhead, but the buildup c
ontinued with the arrival of the 461st Bomb Group at Torretta.

  THE DEFENDERS

  Arrayed against Twining’s formations was Luftflotte (Air Fleet) Two in Italy with seven fighter groups (six with Bf 109s) from five wings plus a Fascist Italian group flying Macchi-Castoldi 205s. Meanwhile, Fighter Division Seven near Munich deployed elements of six single-seat and two twin-engine “destroyer” wings totalling a dozen Messerschmitt groups.

  Some notable airmen led the Reich’s southern air defenses. Lieutenant General Joachim-Friedrich Huth of Fighter Division Seven had lost a leg in World War I but was determined to continue flying. He succeeded, returning to the cockpit in the 1930s. At age forty-four he earned the Knight’s Cross leading a Bf 110 wing in the Battle of Britain. Promoted to general, he commanded fighter divisions from 1942 onward. From his headquarters at Schleissheim he defended southern and central Germany with eight single-engine fighter groups and four twin-engine groups, plus fighter school units. Huth coordinated with his subordinate division to the east, in Austria.

  Commanding the air defense center in Vienna was an exceptional man, Colonel Gotthard Handrick. Born in 1908, he joined the Luftwaffe and excelled at sports. He won the gold medal in the pentathlon at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and a year later was leading a fighter group in Spain, where he shot down five Republican aircraft. He continued flying combat in World War II, commanding a group of Jagdgeschwader 26 until June 1940, when, as a major, he assumed command of the wing, remaining until August at the height of the Battle of Britain. Later he commanded two other fighter wings, and in early 1944 he was a vigorous thirty-six-year-old colonel serving as Jagdfliegerführer Ostmark. His domain was the airspace over all but western Austria.

  An illustrious name headed Air Fleet Two in northern Italy. General Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of Germany’s greatest World War I ace, had earned a doctorate in aeronautics in the 1920s. Having served in combat in Spain, Western Europe, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and Russia, he combined enormous experience with an icy intellect. He deployed elements of five Luftwaffe fighter wings plus the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, still loyal to Mussolini.15

  Among the Italians, motivation varied. Some airmen sought to defend national honor, some reveled in continuing to fly, most probably stuck to their friends. In any case, the newly operational Aeronautica Nazionale Repubblicana showed some of the late Regia’s fiery competence. On January 3, defending targets in the Turin area, the First Group’s Macchi-Castoldi 205s taught the Fourteenth Fighter Group a hard lesson, downing three Lightnings and probably another from the U.S. First Group without losses.

  If some Italians approached aerial combat as a sport, many Allied airmen did not. P-38 pilots were likely to shoot parachuting enemies, the Republican Air Force reported. An Aeronautica Nazionale fighter pilot was murdered in his chute on March 11, and another met the same fate seven days later. Both times this “barbarity” was perpetrated by Lightning pilots “from close range,” eliminating any doubt that it was intentional.16

  BIG WEEK TUESDAY

  On February 20, Argument’s opening day, the Mighty Eighth put up a thousand bombers for the first time, but the Fifteenth was grounded by weather. The next day Doolittle launched some 850 heavies while Twining awaited events.

  Then on Tuesday, the twenty-second, weather largely skunked Doolittle’s plans (fewer than a hundred heavies reached their primary targets), but Twining sent B-17s to the Petershausen rail marshalling yard and B-24s against Regensburg’s factories and an air depot at Zagreb. The first two represented a landmark: the Fifteenth’s first penetration of German airspace.

  The Forty-seventh Wing went to Regensburg, 550 miles from Foggia. The Eighth had been operating in homeland skies for a full year, but to aircrews of the Ninety-eighth, 376th, 449th, and 450th Bomb Groups, it was a major event. And inevitably, it drew opposition.

  The 449th Group Liberator flown by First Lieutenant Wilson Jones took damage to an engine en route to the target. Jones then had to shut down another engine on the right side. According to his copilot, Otis Mitchell, “We realized number three was going to have to run as long as it could.”17

  Limping along with barely half power, the Liberator fell astern of the formation. In war’s grim logic, it was better to sacrifice one plane than to lose others in a vain effort to protect it. Jones formed up with three other stragglers but took little consolation. They were even worse off and gradually lost altitude and drifted off.

  With two healthy engines and the erratic number three, Jones’s ship cleared the Alps. Though the mountains were no serious impediment to aircraft of the era, a bomber pilot called them “perilous territory to cross when losing altitude.”18 Jones and Mitchell decided to veer eastward, avoiding likely interception over northern Italy, and proceeded down the Yugoslavian coast. All the while the blessed number three engine kept running, despite leaking oil for several hours. Multi-engine pilots were trained to handle an engine out on both wings, but two engines on the same side could be unmanageable. Mitchell explained, “Jones and I decided that we were staying with the ship but agreed it was best to give the remainder of the crew the option of bailing out. All decided to take their chances with the ship. It was a good choice as the number three engine continued to run all the way across the Adriatic.”19

  Thanks to good judgment and Pratt & Whitney, Jones and Mitchell reached Italy and plunked down at the first field they found—a P-38 base. Examining their Liberator, they found holes ranging in size from a half-inch to a washtub. Somehow the 449th did not receive word from wing headquarters, and by the time Jones and company returned to base, their clothes had been packed for shipment home and another crew had occupied their tent. “They were not happy to see us return,” Mitchell recalled.

  The Fifteenth claimed forty enemy planes downed at a cost of sixteen bombers and two fighters. The losses could have been far worse. The tallies of downed German planes, however, were typically optimistic. The Jagdwaffe wrote off only fifteen fighters.20

  BIG WEEK WEDNESDAY

  The next day, weather again forced a stand-down in Britain, but for once the Italian climate afforded partially clear skies. Though several formations were thwarted by local weather, 102 bombers got to Steyr, the massive Austrian industrial complex that included a major ball bearing factory and a Messerschmitt airframe and engine plant that shipped components to Wiener Neustadt and Regensburg for final assembly.

  The target complex was huge—170 acres and thirty thousand employees. Navigators and bombardiers were carefully briefed on landmarks and checkpoints leading to the target area, especially the river bends northeast of the city. From there, individual groups would find their assigned targets.

  The P-38 escorts’ fuel capacity required them to return before completing the northbound leg of the journey. Luftwaffe controllers, aware of the situation, concentrated an estimated one hundred fighters against the Libs. Bf 110s of Destroyer Wing One gauged the distance nicely, firing their underwing rockets from a thousand yards astern of the bombers, then closed in with their four 20mm cannon. They were repelled only when withdrawal-support Lightnings appeared.

  Waist gunner Sergeant Harry Pribyla of the 454th Group likened the encounter to a stop-action movie as 109s flashed across his field of view. A Messerschmitt fired a lethal burst into a nearby bomber’s left wing. “The B-24 went into a slow, lazy roll, and kept going. Nobody got out.”21

  The 449th, recently arrived at Grottaglie, in the Italian heel, had lost its original commander, Colonel Darr H. Alkire, on January 31 when he was shot down over Aviano. Eight of the crew had parachuted onto a Luftwaffe airdrome, where one was scooped up by a cheerful German speaking superb English; he had lived in Houston for seven years.22 The 449th’s new CO was thirty-three-year-old Colonel Thomas J. Gent Jr., only three weeks into his command. A lead-from-the-front airman, he would log forty-six missions until relieved.

  One Liberator crashed on takeoff, killing all ten men onboard. Another fell to fighters
near the target, as recalled by a gunner who reckoned Steyr “my most awesome raid: 24s, 17s, 109s, FWs, 110s, black flak, red flak, white flak, everything mixed and planes going down all around.”23

  Steyr cost seventeen bombers. The 376th and 450th Groups were especially hard hit, each losing eight Liberators. The bombing was excellent, however. Post-strike assessment indicated the destruction of one-fifth of the factory that delivered up to 15 percent of Germany’s ball bearings.

  BIG WEEK THURSDAY

  On Thursday, February 24, the Eighth targeted ball bearing and aircraft factories at Steyr in weather that limited enemy response, but the Fifteenth had no such luck against a Bf 110 factory beyond the range of Twining’s fighters. Gotthard Handrick’s radar controllers concentrated three groups for large, aggressive attacks on the small force of eighty-seven Fortresses over Schweinfurt and Gotha. Unimpeded, four to six interceptors at a time swept in while some fired long-range rockets and even dropped aerial bombs. Then, from the west, Huth’s Fighter Division Seven contributed a Bf 109 and a 110 group that slammed into the B-17s over the target.

  Swarmed by perhaps 120 fighters, the Second Bomb Group was chopped to pieces, losing fourteen planes, including the entire trailing squadron. Four other B-17s and a P-38 also went down. The Fortresses were heavily outnumbered by enemy interceptors, but the group maintained its formation and bombed the target, receiving a Distinguished Unit Citation for the performance. The Ninety-ninth Group also bombed accurately, though crews counted thirty-one planes with flak holes upon return to Tortorella.