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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

they approached the coast of Europe they lapsed into silence, as all eyes concentrated on combing the heavens for the tell-tale glint of German metal.

* * *

The lead group of bombers first sighted the German coast at around four o’clock. As the navigators searched for landmarks to pinpoint their position, everyone else watched the surrounding sky. It was not long before they found what they were looking for: the distant dots of fighter planes rising to meet them. As they approached the mouth of the river Elbe, at about 4.15 p.m., the first German fighters attacked, half-heartedly at first, as if they were merely testing the Americans. But gradually the Luftwaffe was appearing in greater numbers, hovering at the edges of the formations, waiting for a chance to pounce on any B-17 that strayed even slightly from the rest. ‘You always had the feeling you were in a chicken coop,’ said a veteran of those raids, ‘and the fighters out there are foxes or weasels.’ ¹²

Darrell Gust was a navigator on one of the 303rd BG’s Flying Fortresses. In his position behind the bombardier in the nose of the plane, he could see exactly what went on around the formation:

We were hit by swarms of fighters as soon as we crossed the coastline. These guys were eager! Maybe twenty to thirty miles from the target, I looked out of the window over my navigator’s table and saw an Me 109 sitting out there out of range, but apparently flying the same course we were, and maybe 200 to 300 yards below our formation. I knew that fighter pilots sometimes did this, kind of looking us over. Then they would suddenly zoom up and ahead of us, positioning themselves for a 180-degree turn and a nose-first attack on the B-17 formations.

I thought, ‘this bastard is up to no good and I’ll keep my eye on him.’ He just kept flying parallel to us, but he seemed to be getting closer. He finally edged in to what I estimated to be about 700 to 800 yards. I grabbed the 0.50-cal above my navigator’s desk and gave him about 15 to 20 rounds. I could immediately see my tracers going behind him. I corrected my aim and gave him a burst of about 30 rounds. Suddenly, there was a plume of white smoke emerging from the Me109, and he started to drop in a vertical dive. I called to S/Sgt Virgil Brown, our tail gunner, that I had nailed an Me109 and asked him to keep his eye on it. He said he saw it go straight down and crash behind us. ¹³

This was probably the first casualty of the day, an Me109 from III/JG26 (i.e. III Gruppe of Jagdgeschwade 26 – see Appendix D): it crash-landed at Stade airfield, but the pilot escaped unhurt. Two more German fighters from this Gruppealone were also forced to land with combat damage in the next few minutes. ¹⁴It was a good omen for the Americans, but there was still a long way to go.

It might not have seemed like it to the bombers in the vanguard of the mission, but the American plan was working quite well. While the skies appeared to be bristling with German fighters, there were far fewer than there might have been. The force bound for Warnemünde, which had approached northern Germany some forty minutes earlier, had succeeded in drawing many Luftwaffe planes into the air too early, and several Me109s and FW190s that might have been there to greet them were now refuelling at their airfields. The diversionary raids in France and Holland had also worked: at least two Luftwaffe Staffelnwere sent from Schiphol and Woensdrecht airfields to deal with the attacks, which might otherwise have been sent northwards to defend Hamburg. ¹⁵(A Staffelwas roughly equivalent to a British flight or an American squadron, although the comparison is slightly contrived. See Appendix D.) In fact, the only part of the American plan that had not seemed to work was the attack on Kiel. The three bomb groups in this wing had had such a hard time finding each other, and were so dispersed across the sky, that the wing leader had been forced to call off the mission. They had returned home without dropping a single bomb on German soil. Nevertheless, the other deceptions had done their job: not a single American bomber was shot down before it reached the target; and while the Blohm & Voss wing might have had to deal with German fighters, the Klöckner wing, which came in about fifteen or twenty minutes behind them, had a virtually free run into Hamburg.

However, the German fighters were only one part of the formidable Hamburg defence line: there was nothing the Americans could do to deceive the flak guns. Indeed, as they flew through the clouds of exploding shells, there was little any of them could do to avoid being hit. Ironically, the tactics they relied on to keep themselves safe from the fighters also made them vulnerable to flak. A single B-17, weaving back and forth more than five miles above the ground, would have been an impossible target for the flak gunners. A group of twenty, forced to fly relatively steadily so that they could keep together, was a much bigger target. After the failures of the previous night, the German flak gunners must have relished the opportunity to take their revenge.

Many American aviators feared flak far more than they did fighters. Walter Davis, who was flying a plane in the Klöckner wing, was one: ‘You could seethe fighters. And we had gunners on our airplane. Whereas you can’t see the flak – you don’t know when it’s going to come. You can see it exploding, but you can’t dodge it… And they had so much of it over there…’ ¹⁶

The anti-aircraft fire began before they even reached the German coast: two flak ships in the Elbe estuary opened up on them. A short time afterwards, when the batteries of Cuxhaven also started to fire, the flak became accurate and intense – ‘So thick you could get out and walk on it,’ according to Davis. It carried on virtually uninterrupted for the next twenty minutes, but it was not until they reached Hamburg that it became really bad. ‘When we were going in to Hamburg it looked like there was a big black cloud over the city. Actually it was the smoke from the flak coming up.’ ¹⁷

This was far worse than anything the Americans had experienced before. The flak bursts seemed to create an impenetrable curtain before them, and they had no choice but to fly straight through it. As they approached the city they saw flashes in the air as the shells exploded – red or pink explosions, followed by small clouds of brown or black smoke, like thousands of firecrackers filling the sky. Some airmen found the sight mesmerizing. But there was never any doubt about the danger they were in. Some of the planes were thrown about by the sheer force of the exploding shells. According to the men of the 381st BG, flying in the Klöckner wing, the anti-aircraft fire was ‘the most intense we have ever seen’. ¹⁸

It took the Americans just twenty minutes to fly from the coast to the outskirts of Hamburg, but they were under fire for the whole journey. By the time they reached the city many had holes in their wings and fuselages, a handful had even lost an engine. Worse still, they were taking casualties. In the lead group of the Blohm & Voss wing, the Judy Bhad taken a vicious blow to the side of the cockpit. Lieutenant Charles Bigler, the nineteen-year-old co-pilot, remembers what happened:

It was five minutes before our bomb run over Hamburg. A Nazi fighter came in straight on my side and knocked out my oxygen. A shell glanced on the back of my seat and hit the pilot’s back. He slumped over and I tried to keep him up with one hand and hold the ship with the other. If I had let him slump I would have been unable to control the ship. We made our bomb run with me driving with one hand. ¹⁹

The pilot, Willis Carlisle, had died instantly. For five minutes, without any oxygen to sustain him, Charles Bigler held the dead man up, only calling for help once he had completed his bomb run. Over the next hour a desperate struggle ensued as the bombardier and the top turret gunner tried to get oxygen to Bigler, and at the same time remove the body of the dead pilot. Although he was under continual attack from German fighters, and falling almost 25,000 feet, Bigler somehow got the Judy Bhome – he was so exhausted by the ordeal that he had to be carried from the plane by the station medics.

This was probably the most dangerous time for the Americans. If they wanted to drop their bombs correctly they had no choice but to stay in formation and fly straight and level towards the target. Evasive manoeuvres to avoid the flak were prohibited because even a small deviation could send the bombs off course. During this critical couple of minutes, they were effectively sitting ducks. Even after the bombs had gone they were obliged to keep straight

and level until they had taken their target photographs. Only then could they follow the group leader in his gentle weave across the sky to avoid the flak.

However, that day there was another problem, one that had not been anticipated. As they approached the target it became clear that it was not only the sky that was filled with smoke, from the flak shells: there was smoke across the ground too. Some of the American airmen assumed that it must be a deliberate screen, set by the Hamburg authorities to obscure the city centre. As the 303rd BG’s group leader said to the press office when he returned home: ‘There must have been a million square miles of smoke screen.’ (In his official report he reduced this claim to about fifty square miles.) As a consequence, he went on, ‘the bomb results were unobserved’. ²⁰Others, like the ball gunner of 384th BG’s Doris Mae, thought that the Americans must have unwittingly created the screen: ‘The preceding group’s bombs had sent up a lot of smoke. If they hit the target, we did too for I followed our bombs right down into the centre of the mess.’ Unknown to this eyewitness, there had been no previous group: the 384th BG was the first to drop its bombs. ²¹

In fact, the smoke was coming from the fires started by the RAF the night before. It is ironic that the success of the British raid threatened to prevent the Americans following it up, but that was what happened. A westerly breeze was blowing thick black clouds across the target area, making it almost impossible for the Americans to see where to drop their bombs. The Blohm & Voss shipyards were on the edge of the huge smoke cloud, but the Klöckner factory was in the middle of it, so it began to look as if neither wing would find its target. In an effort to salvage the mission, two of the Klöckner groups decided to head for Blohm & Voss instead, in the hope that it might be easier to see. The third group, the 381st BG, was still too far behind the leaders to realize what they were doing and carried on with their planned route above the smoke.

So it was that five Bombardment Groups, instead of three, headed towards the U-boat yards on the banks of the Elbe. They still did not know whether or not they would be able to bomb it, and for a short while the mission hung in the balance. But as the bomber formations made their final approach, by a piece of great good fortune a gap opened in the smoke clouds. Blohm & Voss was still obscured but the quays and buildings of Howaldtswerke, one of Hamburg’s other shipyards, were clearly visible. As they got closer the smoke began to close over the target area once more so, without wasting any time, the 384th BG opened their bomb bay doors and unleashed 44,000 pounds of incendiaries on the dockyards. They were followed at roughly one-minute intervals by the 379th, the 303rd, the 351st and the 91st BGs, dropping wave after wave of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on to the buildings below. ²²

Meanwhile, the 381st was still struggling to keep up with the rest of the force. Unable to see what the other Klöckner groups had done, the group leader decided to cut the corner off the designated route to save time, but as he flew across the south of the city he and his group found themselves alone. From there on he stuck to the planned route, heading eastwards over the smoke, but it soon became obvious that he would never find the Klöckner factory – the smoke was too thick. With the mission looking like a lost cause, the group held on to its bombs and decided to seek out a target of opportunity on the way home. They settled on the railway marshalling yards at Heide, which they bombed at ten past five, half an hour after the other groups had got rid of their loads. Then they hurried to close up with their fellows for the hazardous journey home.

By now all six groups were looking more than a little ragged. Of the 123 Flying Fortresses that had started out this afternoon, fourteen had aborted the mission before even reaching Germany, almost half of those that remained now had flak damage of some sort or another, and many more had been hit by cannon fire from the ever-present fighters. ²³Those American planes with major damage were now in serious trouble. If an engine had been hit, or any of the vital controls, it would become more and more difficult for the pilot to keep up with the others. And stragglers knew that they would face a doubly dangerous journey home: not only would they be the first to be targeted by the German fighters, but they would have to face those attacks alone.

* * *

* * *

As the bombers struggled to stay close together the Luftwaffe appeared in force around them. Fighters from Heligoland, which had been first to contact the invading force, had refuelled and were coming in for a second attack. They were joined by others from Deelen, Husum, Jever, Nordholz and Oldenburg. ²⁴Some American groups reported seeing as many as a hundred, two hundred or even three hundred fighter planes over the next hour or so. At times they seemed to fill the sky, attacking in waves from every conceivable angle; there was nothing the Americans could do but abandon all other duties and man the guns. ²⁵

With such huge numbers of fighters coming in at them, it was only a matter of time before the Flying Fortresses started to go down. Survivors of the two Hamburg wings unanimously claimed that the German fighters were far more ferocious than usual, pressing home their attacks with terrifying determination. ²⁶The Luftwaffe had not yet learned that the best method of attack was to dive at the bombers head on, and break up the formation – but this happened anyway. The largest number of attacks came from below at the rear, and in general they were not by single fighters but by groups of three or four at a time.

The lower groups took the brunt of this ferocity, particularly the stragglers. The worst hit was the 384th BG, which by now was limping on with several disabled planes, their normally tight formation looking more and more ragged as the afternoon wore on. Some individual planes in this group were attacked more than twenty times, yet somehow, miraculously, stayed airborne. ²⁷Others could not take the punishment. Brad Summers was one of the co-pilots with 384th BG:

Before we got to the target we had one hit, knocked all the glass out of the top turret. The engineer, who managed the turret, I think his oxygen mask protected his face quite a bit. There were some little splinters in his neck and shoulders, but he went back to his gun. He couldn’t put his head out because of the wind blowing through the turret, so he huddled over down inside trying to [aim] by the tracers (the gun sight was also destroyed), which is not a very accurate way to shoot…

We proceeded on and got several other hits. I recall seeing a flash out of my window and I looked and there was a rip in the skin on the top of my wing. It must have been about eight or ten feet long, opened about four or five inches wide. The skin was peeled back where apparently a 20mm shell from a fighter plane had gone in and ripped it out. As I looked, I saw another hole open up. The only thing I could figure was, an 88mm shell had gone right through the wing without exploding. ²⁸

It was around this time that the tail gunner had a direct hit on his turret. The concussion from the explosion lifted and threw him into the body of the plane, but he crawled back to see if the tail guns were intact. One was still working, so he went back to firing it until a second direct hit blasted him through the doorway again. This time his guns had been blown out of the back of the aircraft. With no top turret, and most of the back of the plane blown away, Summers’s Flying Fortress had become an easy target for the fighters. First an aileron went. Then some hits in the tail knocked out the trim tabs so that Summers had to lean forward on the stick to hold down the nose of the plane. Finally the stabilizer was blown away, leaving the two pilots powerless to fly the plane. There was nothing to do but bail out. Summers continues:

I hooked my parachute on and I got my hat. I put that on, then I decided, well, heck, I’d probably lose it anyhow, so I threw it away and got a bail-out oxygen bottle… I don’t know why all these silly thoughts went through my head, like wanting to get my hat, but anyway, I was beginning to feel the effects of the lack of oxygen – anoxia, we called it – getting a bit lightheaded… I decided I’d better get out of there right away. I just did a somersault right out the door and down I went. ²⁹

Summers fell several thousand feet before he pulled the ripcord of his parachute, and only did so when he thought he might pass out. One of the waist gunners was not so lucky – he was killed in his position by flak. And Kenny Harland, the valiant gunner who had carried on shooting despite having his top turret blown apart, died when he hit the ground. Everyone else survived to become prisoners-of-war. That they did, and that they had so much time to bail out, is testament to the sheer strength of the B-17 Flying Fortress under punishment.

Some of the planes from the other groups were having just as tough a time. Philip Dreiseszun was a navigator in 381st BG when the full force of the German fighter formations attacked:

The enemy swarmed at us from all directions. Our gunners, Houck [the bombardier] and myself were all firing; new belts of ammunition were hurriedly installed as rounds were expelled… Our plane lurched, shuddering heavily as 20mm shells tore through the fuselage and Plexiglas windows. Houck spun around from his front firing stance, sinking to our little deck in a sitting position. I was slammed against the worktable but felt no pain. The attack ended, and I turned my attention to Houck. Above his chest-pack parachute was a gaping hole which spurted blood… I prayed for some sign of life; there was none. ³⁰

When the bail-out order came, Dreiseszun agonized over whether he should push his dead comrade out of the plane with his parachute on so that he could be recovered for burial once he reached the ground. But, reasoning that the parachute might get caught on the tailplanes and endanger the rest of the crew, he decided eventually to leave him where he was. He pulled the cord on the emergency hatch, kicked open the door and leaped through it into 27,000 feet of cold space and nothingness.

I let myself fall free in the awesome quiet. I estimated about 2000 feet and then pulled the ripcord. The ’chute jerked violently as it unfurled, buffeted by the strong wind at that altitude. The leg straps tightened painfully in the groin area. On seeing the ’chute unfold, I knew I was a goner! It was full of large holes, small holes and many tears. How it kept me afloat… I’ll never know. During the attack, a 20mm shell had evidently made a direct hit on my parachute… The final 6000–7000 feet were like a free fall. I hit the ground with such a jarring impact, it felt like every bone in my body had shattered. I lost consciousness. ³¹

When he came to a German soldier was sitting on him, searching him for weapons. He was lucky. Two of his crewmates who had landed nearby were killed by a mob of angry civilians. The tail gunner went down with the plane. The other five members of the crew survived to become prisoners-of-war.

A pattern was emerging in the Luftwaffe’s attacks. First the fighters picked off the stragglers – those planes that were already crippled by flak and earlier fighter attacks. Then they concentrated on the planes at the back of the formation – most of the B-17s lost had started off at the back. And, finally, once one or two of the smaller formations were under strength (and therefore had fewer guns with which to defend themselves), the fighters came in to finish off the rest.

It was this last point that proved particularly devastating. While some bomb groups made it home relatively untroubled, others suffered attack after attack all the way across Germany and most of the way across the North Sea. Of the three bombardment groups in the Klöckner wing, for example, two only lost a single plane on the way home. The third, which had been severely depleted from the outset when seven of its planes had aborted their mission, received the full brunt of the German storm. This group, the 381st, lost three planes on the way home – and all three were in the same squadron, Dreiseszun’s 532nd.

The story was the same for the Blohm & Voss wing. The twenty-one planes in the lead group suffered just fifteen attacks and lost two planes, both stragglers. The high group was attacked nineteen times, and lost one plane out of twenty – again, a straggler. The low group (the 384th BG) was attacked eightytimes – more than twice the number of the other two groups put together. ³²It

Attacks on 384th BG, 25 July