Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

11. The Americans Join the Fray

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but,

boys, it is all hell

General Sherman ¹

The people of Hamburg did not have to wait long for the second strike. The Allies had been talking about ‘round-the-clock bombing’ ever since the Casablanca Conference in January: now, for the first time, it was to become reality. Even as the British bombers were arriving home, American planes were being prepared for a follow-up attack. Hamburg would be given just fifteen hours to recover before the bombs fell again.

There were lots of sound reasons as to why the Americans were keen to attack the city again so soon. For a start, the staff at the USAAF bomber headquarters knew that the RAF had jammed German radar the night before, and they hoped that the chaos this had caused would give American crews a better chance of getting in and out alive. More importantly, they hoped their bombers would do greater damage by attacking immediately: a sudden daylight bombing would keep the city in disarray and cause even more damage when it was least able to cope. Hamburg’s firefighters could not be in two places at once: while they were putting out fires in the west, US bombers would drop their bombs in the south, in Hamburg’s harbour district.

The man who made the decision to bomb Hamburg that day was Brigadier-General Frederick L. Anderson, Jr, the head of the Eighth Air Force’s VIII Bomber Command. Anderson was one of Hap Arnold’s ‘wonderboys’, an energetic thirty-seven-year-old who had seen rapid promotion over the past few months. In mid-May he had been given command of 4th Bombardment Wing, but was only there for six weeks before he was promoted to his present job. By all accounts he was an enthusiast for long-range strategic bombing and when, later in the war, it looked as though precision bombing might be failing, he was not averse to the idea of area bombing instead. ²He was certainly interested in the way the British were conducting their bomber war: that night he would board an RAF plane bound for Essen to see for himself what area bombing looked like. ³

Anderson regularly attended Sir Arthur Harris’s planning sessions. RAF Bomber Command Headquarters was only a ten-minute drive from his own headquarters at Wycombe Abbey, and it seemed prudent to learn at first-hand what his British partners would do that night before he planned his follow-up for the next day. So, when Harris had placed his finger on the map at Hamburg on 24 July, Anderson was present. Later that morning he had held a meeting with his own staff officers at which he, too, chose Hamburg as his target. Unlike Harris, however, Anderson specified exactly which buildings they were to aim for. Out of all the possible targets in the city, he picked two: the Blohm & Voss shipyards, in the south of the city, and the Klöckner aero-engine factory, in the south-east. According to the latest directive from the Combined Chiefs of Staff, they were two of the highest priority targets in Germany. ⁴

Anderson’s staff knew that this mission would be their toughest yet. The USAAF had tried to attack the city only once before, exactly a month ago, and that mission had ended in disaster. The Germans had jammed their navigational aids, and the weather had been so cloudy that most of the American planes had been unable to find each other, let alone the target. They had only got as far as the German coast before the Luftwaffe had arrived in such numbers that they had been forced to turn back. Eighteen planes had been shot down. As the 303rd Bombardment Group’s group leader had said in his official report afterwards, the mission had been ‘futile’. ⁵

The American planners were determined not to let the same thing happen again. First, they checked the weather: there was no point in attempting an attack on Hamburg if the target was covered with cloud. The forecast was for clear skies – but to make sure, a reconnaissance flight was sent to Heligoland early on the day of the attack. When it returned with reports of perfect conditions, the raid was given the go-ahead. ⁶

The air-force staff then devised a plan to confuse the Germans, and give their own crews the best possible chance of reaching the target and getting back safely. Hamburg was not the only city they would bomb, so it was important to co-ordinate all the different attacks to make sure they complemented each other. It was also important to conceal their true targets until the last possible moment: once the Germans knew where they were heading they would be able to lie in ambush.

Three separate forces would fly. The first was bound for the Heinkel aircraft factory at Warnemünde, on the Baltic coast. This wing would fly out towards Germany, but while it was still over the sea it would suddenly turn northwards, as if it were heading for Denmark. The idea was to draw the German fighters out of their airfields too early, so that by the time the Americans actually crossed the coast they would be forced to return to their bases to refuel.

The second force was smaller – just three bomb groups, or about sixty planes – and was bound for the U-boat yards at Kiel. It would fly across the North Sea with the Warnemünde wing, and also turn northwards, then suddenly switch back on itself. Again, this was designed to confuse the Germans, conceal the true aim and draw out the Luftwaffe fighters too early.

About forty minutes behind those forces there were two combat wings, bound for Hamburg. The first was to bomb the Blohm & Voss shipyards, while the second was to attack the Klöckner aero-engine factory. By this time, so the planners thought, the Luftwaffe would be back at their airfields refuelling, thus giving the Hamburg force time to get to the target relatively unmolested. After the city had been bombed, both combat wings would join up with the Kiel force, and they would fly home together. By now the Luftwaffe would be back in the air, and it was safer to fly

in larger numbers. The Hamburg and Kiel wings would look out for each other on the way home.

The final piece of the jigsaw was a pair of diversionary flights, well to the south. A small force of fighters and light bombers would attack occupied Holland and northern France, making believe that they were the main danger. The idea was to hold down German fighters in these areas, and prevent them reinforcing the defences in northern Germany. ⁷

It was an ambitious plan, fraught with danger. If the various diversions did not work, the planes bound for Hamburg would find themselves the focus of all the combined fighter defences of Germany, Holland and northern France. If either the Warnemünde or the Kiel force aborted its mission the Hamburg force would be isolated, and if the Hamburg and Kiel forces failed to meet up on the way home they would be more vulnerable to attack. The USAAF was taking a huge gamble in splitting up its force into four smaller units: unless the plan worked perfectly, any one of them might end up facing the full force of the Luftwaffe alone.

That the Americans believed they could attack a target as strong as Hamburg with a divided force, in broad daylight, without fighter cover, was perhaps an indication of how green they were. It is important to remember that, for them, this was still early in the air war, and they had not yet had a chance to learn from their mistakes. General Anderson had been at his post for a mere three weeks, and his staff had planned only a handful of missions to Germany on this scale before. The bomber groups were just as inexperienced. None of the six groups that took off for Hamburg that afternoon had even existed when America joined the war, and four had been in England for a matter of weeks. ⁸In the past eight months they had been created, trained, transported across the Atlantic, accommodated in a foreign country and thrown into the thick of the air war. By any standards, this was a baptism of fire.

It is easy to criticize the naïvety of their plans, but they had not yet had the opportunity to accrue long years of experience as the British had. That they were able to bomb Germany at all in the summer of 1943 is little short of a miracle.

* * *

The RAF watched the Americans plan their missions with a degree of curiosity. Despite superficial similarities, it had become obvious by now that the USAAF was a very different air force from the RAF. The contrasts existed at every level – strategic, tactical, even down to the design of the aeroplanes. In the end it boiled down to one basic difference: the British bombed by night, but the Americans bombed by day.

I have already touched on some of the practical and ethical reasons why the USAAF was determined to fly bombing missions in daylight, but that they believed they could succeed in this hazardous enterprise, at which the British, and the Germans before them, had been forced to give up, was down to the quality of their planes. While the British and Germans had tried to fly through swarms of enemy fighters in outdated, poorly equipped bombers, the Americans had something much more suited to the job: the Boeing B-17 – easily the best daylight heavy bomber of the Second World War.

The B-17 was not nicknamed the ‘Flying Fortress’ for nothing. It was equipped with bullet-proof windows round the rear gunner’s position, armour plating throughout, and it bristled with machine-guns. The B-17F, the model in operation during July 1943, had up to sixteen 50-calibre Browning machine-guns: four in the nose, two in the tail, four on the roof, two in the belly, and two on either side in the waist. When it was under attack, every member of the ten-man crew, except the two pilots, had something to shoot with. And, most importantly, unlike the bombers of other nations, the B-17F had no blind spots.

A single American bomber was therefore a pretty formidable opponent for any fighter. However, unlike the British at this stage of the war, the Americans did not fly one by one but in groups of twenty or so, in close formation. Each group of twenty would be accompanied by two others: one group would fly in the lead, the next slightly higher and to one side, and the last slightly lower and to the other side. Any German fighter pilot who dived through the middle of a formation like this was either extremely brave or extremely foolhardy: with anything up to a hundred guns firing at him, there was little chance that he could have escaped unscathed.

To protect it from flak, the B-17 had been built to fly at heights of 30,000 feet and higher. This was 5–6,000 feet higher than a pilot of heavy bombers in the RAF could dream of. It flew at speeds of just under 300 m.p.h., which, again, was considerably faster than any RAF heavy bomber. True, it could carry less than half the bomb load of a Lancaster, but the Americans reasoned that they did not need to carry such huge numbers of bombs. Their philosophy was built on dropping a few accurately placed bombs on specific targets – not, as with the RAF, on plastering the whole area with bombs. They were happy to sacrifice their bomb capacity for the ability to fly higher, faster and more safely than any other air force in the world.

The only problem with the theories was that they didn’t quite work – at least, not yet. No matter how high or fast the American bombers flew, they were no match for the German fighters, and probably would not be until the introduction of long-range American fighter escorts later in the war. The USAAF was certainly not strong enough to commit to several targets at once, and seriously underestimated the strength of the Luftwaffe. Their British counterparts warned the Americans of what they would face and could not understand why they refused to listen. To the British, it looked as though the USAAF was determined to repeat the mistakes they themselves had made.

The late Pierre Clostermann, one of the Allies’ greatest fighter aces in the Second World War, once described to me the first time he ever saw a USAAF officer: he was wearing a cowboy hat, a revolver on his hip and ‘swaggering like he had just stepped out of the Wild West’. ⁹The American air force at that time was brash, confident in its abilities to the point of arrogance, and determined to live by its own rules. Eventually the brashness would be vindicated – indeed, many have argued that it was only by forcing the Germans into a long-term, daylight gun battle that the Allies finally gained air superiority – but in the meantime some harsh lessons had to be learned.

* * *

If there were close links between the RAF and the USAAF at command level, there were fewer between the airmen. The Americans had separate air bases, and rarely had the opportunity to meet their British counterparts. When they did meet, however, there was a strong mutual respect between them. Walter Davis, of 91st BG, remembers a conversation he had in the summer of 1943 with an RAF man he met in a London pub. The British airman insisted on buying him a drink with the words, ‘You wouldn’t catch me going over Germany in daylight!’ In reply, Davis simply said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t catch me going over there in the dark!’ ¹⁰

To a certain degree, Davis was being generous to his RAF drinking partner. Of the two air forces, the RAF men unquestionably had the better deal – at least at that stage of the war. Of course, the Americans did not have to take off or land in the dark, they had their squadron colleagues around them as they flew, and they could see danger coming. But without the cover of darkness they were little better than sitting ducks, and their rigid adherence to formation flying meant that when the guns started firing they could not take evasive action. As one US veteran cogently put it, ‘We were ordered to fly in an aluminum crate, carrying two thousand gallons plus of 100-octane gasoline, with a six-to-eight-thousand-pound bomb load, in tight formation, straight and level, while people shot at us.’ ¹¹

With tactics like that, life expectancy in the US Eighth Air Force was not high. The airmen knew this – it was one of the first things they learned when they got to Britain. For example, Samuel Fleming was told as soon as he arrived at Molesworth air base that there was no way he would get through his tour alive: ‘What it boiled down to, according to the guys keeping score, was this. In 1943 and 1944, the average life span of an Eighth Air Force bomber and crew was fifteen missions. The assigned tour of duty for crew members, however, was initially twenty-five missions, and later increased to thirty and finally to thirty-five missions… One did not have to be a brain surgeon to figure out one’s odds of finishing a combat tour.’ ¹²

Joseph Mutz was similarly demoralized when he arrived in Britain. He had been slightly delayed on his journey across the Atlantic, and got to his base a few days after most of the men with whom he had trained. One of the first things he did was to look up a friend, only to find that he had already been shot down. It was impossible not to come to the conclusion that the same fate awaited him. ‘I had a rock in my stomach, and I just knew that we were never going to make it. Just couldn’tmake it. I even went as far as writing my brother. I told him what to do with my insurance money.’ ¹³

This was not what these men had signed up for. Most had joined the air force because they thought it would be better than serving in the infantry – they had been warned about the dangers of the trenches by their parents, some of whom had experienced the horrors of the First World War. But it was now beginning to look as though they had made the wrong choice. While the bulk of the infantry were still safe at home, and would not see action for almost another year, ¹⁴American airmen were dying in droves. Nor were they safe from some of the more gruesome aspects of war, as anyone who experienced a direct hit on his plane soon discovered. Scott Buist, a USAAF gunner from New Brunswick, remembers having to pull the remains of his crewmate from the ball turret after it had received a direct hit. ‘We had to pull him out, an arm, a leg, pieces, his head; I put his head in the basket… This was a kid that I slept next to.’ ¹⁵

Perhaps the operative word there is ‘kid’. Almost all the men who flew B-17s during the Second World War were in their late teens and early twenties. Most had never been outside the United States before, yet now they were thousands of miles from home, fighting a foreign war for the sake of a noble principle. Many were lonely, and desperately missed their friends and family at home. They were all, to some degree, scared of the task that lay ahead. But they were determined to do their best, if only for the sake of their pride.

Those were the men who would bomb Hamburg during the afternoon of 25 July 1943. They faced the combined dangers of flak, fighters, mechanical malfunction, extreme cold and lack of oxygen. More than 1,200 would take off. A hundred and fifty would not return.

12. The Luftwaffe Strikes Back

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Field-Marshal Helmuth von Moltke ¹

When the crews turned up for briefing on the morning of 25 July none knew what lay in store. For weeks now, unpredictable banks of cloud over northern Europe had prevented the USAAF planning any missions to Germany, and most of the men hoped it would stay that way – at least until they had finished their tours. Over the past month they had concentrated on targets in France and the Low Countries, mostly airfields and aircraft factories. Raids like this were the ‘milk runs’ that every airman hoped for when he attended a briefing: a relatively short trip across the English Channel, often with fighter escorts to keep him safe.

However, there were signs that things were about to change. A week ago some had been detailed to attack a synthetic-rubber factory in Hanover – a mission that had been called off at the last moment due to bad weather. Then, on the previous day, they had made their first trip to Norway – easily the furthest any of them had flown on a mission. There had been little or no opposition along the way, but that was not the point: the men were getting the message that nowhere in Europe was beyond them. So, as they gathered in the briefing rooms at their various bases that morning, there was tension in the air. They knew that it was only a matter of time before they were sent somewhere truly dangerous.

The ritual at briefing was pretty much the same as it was for the RAF. There was the same blackening of windows and locking of doors, and the same false bravado as the young men talked or joked away their nerves. And, just as in RAF briefings, all eyes were drawn to the large board at the end of the room, hidden behind a curtain. It showed the information they were all eager to receive: a map of Europe marked with a ribbon showing their route to the target and back.

When the men had taken their seats, and the windows had been covered, the briefing officer stepped on to the platform, and the room descended into an uneasy silence. Without ceremony, he pulled aside the curtains on the target map. Philip Dreiseszun, who attended the 381st BG briefing in Ridgewell, remembers this moment with particular clarity. ‘Then came the moment of revelation! The board cover was removed as we heard the words, “Gentlemen, the target for today is Hamburg!” A stunned silence gave way to utterances of dismay and alarm.’ ²

Nobody liked flying to targets in Germany, but today the crews had real cause for concern. They knew that Hamburg was one of the best-defended cities in Germany – they had been told so a month ago at their last briefing on that target. Those who had flown on that unfortunate mission knew what could go wrong – especially the men of the 379th BG, who had lost six crews that day. Even those who had not been around at the time had probably heard about it: it had been one of the USAAF’s most disastrous missions to date.

As the men shifted uncomfortably in their seats, the briefing officer outlined the strategy behind the day’s mission. The target for 379th, 303rd and 384th BGs was Blohm & Voss, the most important U-boat manufacturer in Germany. For the 91st, 351st and 381st BGs, the target was the Klöckner aero-engine factory. The Luftwaffe had been stepping up production of fighter planes in recent months, and it was imperative that the Allies should stop them – the lives of American airmen depended on it. ³

After his opening statement, the briefing officer outlined the specifics of the mission: the route they would be taking, the sort of weather they could expect and so on. But the information every man in the room was waiting to hear was what sort of opposition they should anticipate. Of course, when it came, the news was only what they expected. Fighter opposition would be fierce, so it was essential that all groups did their utmost to stay in tight formation. And the flak would be almost continuous from the moment they crossed the coast. The briefing officer was particularly clear on that, and told the men that Hamburg alone would have ninety-eight heavy AA guns trained on them. (As formidable as this sounded, there were actually at least three times more than that.) He advised the men to take evasive action wherever possible: ‘If you are able to observe the flashes of the AA guns,’ he said, ‘it will take the shell twenty to thirty seconds to reach you.’ That was the moment for the whole formation immediately to shift height and direction. ⁴

The men listened in silence, trying to take in the statistics and instructions. As one veteran from 384th BG remembers the dread in the room was almost palpable: ‘There was definitely an air of apprehension about this briefing. It’s always stuck in my mind that, after the target had been revealed, every navigator in the group prepared a course for the nearest friendly country. Sweden, I think it was, on this day.’ ⁵

What Philip Dreiseszun remembers most clearly is the reactions of his crewmates. Some were downright despondent, but once they had all had time to digest the news, the main emotion seemed to be grim determination:

Our bombardier, James H. Houck, gloomily expressed feelings of foreboding. The rest of us, I believe, were in a state of numb awe, of mixed feelings of fear and wonder, and facing unknown qualities in ourselves. How would we react in confrontation with the might of the German Luftwaffe and the formidable anti-aircraft fire we surely would meet? The bonds, fortunately, that held a crew together were a subconscious factor in helping us set individual concerns aside long enough to concentrate on the tasks that lay ahead. ⁶

* * *

After lunch the crews went to get their gear: rations, escape kits, flight clothing, parachutes. Just as the RAF had done the evening before, they milled around nervously, some cracking jokes, others communing silently with themselves as they waited for the personnel carriers to take them out to their planes. The only difference was that this was not taking place at twilight but in the hazy sunshine of a hot summer’s day. By the time the trucks came, everyone was overheating, particularly the gunners in their heavy, wool-lined suits. Out at dispersal they would busy themselves inside the plane, but once everything was ready they would shelter in the shade of the wings, leaving off their flight jackets until the last possible moment as they waited for the signal that it was time to go.

It was not until after one o’clock that they climbed on board and the B-17s’ engines roared into life. Edward Piech flew as a bombardier with the 351st BG during this time, and remembers the thrill he always felt as the line of bombers prepared to leave the ground: ‘There was a green flare and then the first, the lead ship would take off. And then a few seconds after that each one, one by one, lined up in a column… I will never forget the sound of those B-17s taking off. They just sort of leave a thrill up and down my spine: no matter where I am and I hear those sounds, I can’t escape from it. It is actually, to me, a beautiful sound.’ ⁷

As the planes took to the air, the first task was to gain height and assemble into formation. This sounds simple, but in fact it was one of the day’s most problematic tasks. Slotting each plane into its correct position in the formation was time-consuming – it could take an hour or longer to get it right. ⁸Veteran Donald Hillenmayer explains:

These airplanes climbed at the rate of five hundred feet a minute when they are fully loaded so to get up to, say, twelve thousand feet to form, that’s pretty close to half an hour just to get there… So, the lead crew, he’s up there, starts to circle and here comes the second plane and he cuts him off and gets into formation. Here comes the third one, he cuts them off, he gets into position. Now, you do that, say, eight or ten times… It took us an hour and a half to form. ⁹

This was only the start of the problem. Once each individual group had arranged themselves into the proper formation they had to find each other so that they could fly together across the sea. The combat wing bound for Blohm & Voss assembled without much trouble, but the Klöckner wing had major problems. The 91st BG, which was supposed to be leading two of the other groups, was unable at first to find either in the haze. In desperation, the lead plane made the whole group circle back over England, firing flares to attract attention to themselves. In this way they eventually picked up the low group in their formation (the 351st BG), but the high group (the 381st BG) was still nowhere to be seen. It was only after the formation leader gave up and set course for Germany that they spotted the 381st BG ahead. This group doubled back to fall in behind the leaders thus losing more time. ¹⁰After all the delays the wing was in a woefully ragged formation, and it was still struggling to close up two hours later as it crossed the German coast.

While all these complicated manoeuvres were going on, there was little that the crews could do but sit and wait. Conditions inside the B-17s were far from comfortable, especially for those in the extremities of the plane. They were climbing to an altitude of between 26,000 and 30,000 feet: at these heights the temperature regularly drops to less than –40° C, and despite wool-lined boots and electrically heated suits it was not uncommon for airmen to come home with frostbite. ‘The warmest I ever flew on a mission was thirty below zero,’ says Albert Porter Jr, who served as a ball-turret gunner later in the war, ‘and the coldest was close to sixty below. When we finished the mission, the whole front of our outfit was solid ice from the condensation of your breath.’ ¹¹

Flying at any altitude above 10,000 feet meant they were all reliant on oxygen, for which they plugged their face masks into one of the plane’s central outlets, but spare bottles were stowed throughout the plane in case of emergency. These could make the difference between life and death. If the crew’s air supplies were cut off, a lack of oxygen to the brain (anoxia) would lead eventually to unconsciousness. It was important to react to any cut in oxygen immediately – after a minute or two, the airmen would be unable to perform even the simplest task. The worst thing about anoxia was that those affected often did not realize it. As their reactions slowed they often believed they were behaving normally, and by the time they were fumbling with the oxygen bottles it was too late – they were incapable of saving themselves. Experienced airmen kept a constant watch on their fellow crew members to make sure that everyone was conscious.

Of all the members of the crew, those who were under the most constant stress were the pilot and co-pilot. They might not suffer the cold, like the gunners at the back, because the cockpits were heated, but the pressure of holding the bomber in close formation with twenty other aircraft for several hours on end was physically and mentally exhausting. The other members of the crew – the navigator, the wireless operator, the bombardier – were also obliged to undergo prolonged periods of intense concentration. They had to keep a constant log of their position in case anything went wrong, and all crewmen were supposed to keep a look-out for fighters whenever they were not otherwise engaged.

Of the 123 planes that took off for Hamburg that afternoon fourteen were forced to turn back, mostly because of mechanical malfunctions. Unlike the British night bombers, who often got away with flying to a target and back on just three engines, many B-17 crews were understandably reluctant to fly over German territory in anything but a fully functioning machine. After the fourteen had returned to base, the remainder of the force continued their climb. It was imperative that they attained their bombing altitude before they reached the European coast.

As they rose through the haze they found themselves flying in the deep azure of the infinite sky. Soon even the haze melted away, and they were left with the perfect flying conditions they knew as CAVU – ‘ceiling and visibility unlimited’. For a short while the heavens seemed a peaceful place: there were no enemy fighters to worry about just yet, and nothing broke the eternal blue but the vapour trails of a hundred Flying Fortresses. Perhaps some of the crew took a few moments to sit back and admire the view. Others swapped jokes and teased each other over the intercom in voices that were just a little too loud or too merry, but as