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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

lost seven planes that afternoon, six from the same squadron, the 544th, which was all but wiped out.

The reasons for this loss were simple: the low squadron of the low group was the most vulnerable place to fly in the entire formation, and was often nicknamed ‘Purple Heart Corner’ or ‘Coffin Corner’ because of the disproportionate number of planes that were shot down there. After they had come through Hamburg, 544th Squadron had been under relentless attack for forty minutes, and four of the seven planes were now struggling to keep up. They were picked off mercilessly by the German fighters. Once the squadron was down to three planes it was easy prey: the fighters came in again and again until two more had been shot down. The only plane left struggled upwards to fall behind the lead formation, but it had to suffer nine more sustained attacks before the fighters left it alone.

It goes without saying that every one of those stricken bombers went down fighting. Of the ten men in a B-17 crew, eight had guns to fire, and they did so until the bitter end. The pilot would only give the order to bail out once all hope was lost. He would switch on the automatic pilot, then he and whatever crew were still alive would don their parachutes and leap from the plane; with the automatic pilot in control, the empty plane would often fly dozens of miles further before it crashed. Some abandoned B-17s drifted as far as the Frisian Islands and the borders of Holland – seventy or eighty miles from where their crews had left them.

Sometimes the pilot would lower the landing gear before bailing out, in what was effectively a signal of surrender. At this stage in the war there was still an unofficial code of chivalry among aviators of all nations: if an American bomber lowered its wheels, the German fighters would stop firing and either escort the damaged plane to an airfield or circle it as the airmen dropped, one by one, in their parachutes. This admirable arrangement was spoiled later in the war when, according to USAAF legend, one bright spark had the idea of using the system to lure the Germans closer, then open fire on them. From that moment on, disabled American planes were given no quarter. ³³

The final B-17 to go down that afternoon was flown by Thomas Estes – one of the last surviving planes from the low squadron of the low group. The crew had been under attack for well over an hour, and had already watched several of their squadron comrades go down. They had seen at least one man drop from a stricken plane without a parachute, his arms and legs thrashing as he fell. ³⁴They had fended off so many attacks that the tail gunner and the ball-turret gunner had run out of ammunition: they had been reduced to tracking their attackers with empty guns in an attempt to make it look as if they were still firing. As the crew told the story later, the assault had been ferocious: ‘They came in pairs, attacked down, slashing along our left side… They totally disregarded our fire and pressed their attacks to within a hundred feet of our plane.’ ³⁵

By the time Estes’s plane was out over the sea he was barely able to fly it. Three of the engines had been hit, the left wing tip was shattered, and the oxygen supply to the top turret had been knocked out. When 20mm shells blasted a gaping hole in the nose the bombardier and the navigator were thrown back into the tunnel by the explosion, which ripped off their helmets and oxygen masks. Both men struggled back to their guns, but it was no use: the Flying Fortress was going down into the sea.

When this happened Staff Sergeant George Ursta was manning the ball turret, waving his guns at the attacking fighters to make believe he was still firing. He picks up the story:

I was still tracking ships when I heard an explosion and saw the number-two engine smoking. I called up the pilot and asked him if it was a good idea to get out of the ship at this time. He said I should leave the ball turret and I went up to the radio room. I saw that the gang all had ’chutes on so I put mine on… The engineer came back and told us that we didn’t need any ’chutes as we were going to ditch, so I took my harness off and threw it out of the window. The engineer started throwing out ammunition and I helped him, and we both took the right-hand gun and threw it out… After that we were told to go into the radio room and find good positions so we wouldn’t upset after we hit the water. I just sat there with my eyes closed and said a little prayer. ³⁶

As they glided inexorably downwards the bombardier, David Davis, put his head out of the escape hatch at the top of the radio room to see how close they were to the water. Unfortunately, as he was doing so six Focke-Wulf 190s came in at the plane head on, and the pilot was forced to dive to avoid them. Davis was thrown through the top hatch and only managed to prevent himself falling out of the plane by clinging to the fuselage. The others in the radio room scrambled up to the hatch and did their best to pull him back in, but there was nothing they could do. After it had fallen 5,000 feet, the plane levelled off and Davis was at last flung back into the radio room. Brute strength, and not a little luck, had prevented him being sucked out into the empty sky.

A few minutes later the B-17 hit the water. Even now the fighters continued to attack: as the shaken crew clambered out of the sinking plane 20mm shells continued to burst on the wings and the water around it. One of the fighters doubled back to make another pass, but when the pilot saw the life-rafts self-inflating he turned for home. That was the last any of the crew saw of the battle of Hamburg.

After the sharp dive, many of the crew believed that their pilot, Thomas Estes, had been killed. In fact, he was dazed but alive – he was the last to get out of the plane before it sank. The ball-turret gunner saw him crawl out of the side window of the cockpit and hauled him on to the life raft.

Miraculously all ten crew men had survived the ditching. They spent two nights trying to keep their dinghies afloat, which had been peppered with holes by exploding flak fragments, and were picked up eventually by a Danish fishing-vessel and brought back to the English coast. Against the odds, they had lived to fight another day.

* * *

German fighters carried on harassing the American planes halfway across the North Sea. Some, such as the Focke-Wulfs of I/JG I from Husum airfield, were on their third sortie that afternoon. As the Americans flew further out to sea they were eventually attacked by night fighters too – a group of twin-engined Me110s from Leeuwarden. That German fighter controllers would send these cumbersome night fighters into battle shows how committed they were to finishing off as many B-17s as they could. Night-fighter crews were not properly trained to attack formations of Flying Fortresses, and their machines were not nearly so able to zip away, should they be caught in the overlapping fields of American fire.

The radar operator of a night fighter explains what he saw as his pilot steered the Me110 towards the American formation:

It was the first time I had seen Boeings from the air. From five or six kilometres away, they looked like a great heap, like a great swarm of birds. You couldn’t see individual planes, only those at the front. We had been told that the Americans were very dangerous, that each plane had eighteen guns. We only had these little slow night fighters. When we saw a bomber at night, there was a feeling of joy but, in the day, it was a strange feeling because you knew that, instead of shooting at only one bomber, many bombers would now be shooting at us. ³⁷

Nobody expected night fighters to attack a full formation of B-17s, but their controllers had explicitly instructed them to keep a look-out for American stragglers. ³⁸Their only real advantage was that of surprise: if they headed out in front of the formation they would be hidden by the brightness of the evening sun, which by now was shining right into the American gunners’ eyes. Eventually they spotted a B-17 in the high squadron of 303rd BG that was lagging slightly behind the others and came in to attack.

Their tactics worked, but only to a degree. It was common for some of the gunners to rest easy around this time – they would take off their oxygen masks for a smoke or a few bites of the Hershey chocolate bars they kept among their flying rations. The Americans were indeed caught off-guard – their official reports refer to this last combat of the day as a ‘sneak attack’ – but their superior fire power was enough to keep the Me110s at bay. Indeed, they even managed to shoot down one of the German fighters – flown by Leutnant Eberhard Gardiewski and his radar operator Friedrich Abromeit. Both of the Me110’s engines were hit, and it crashed into the sea some twenty miles off the Dutch coast. The crew were eventually picked up by a British motor torpedo boat and brought back to England. It was the final encounter of the day: with their fuel running low, the other German fighters were recalled to their airfields in Germany.

* * *

The Flying Fortresses did not get back to their various bases until after seven thirty that evening, more than six hours after they had taken off. Battered and short of fuel, many had difficult landings – the final challenge in a mission beset with problems. Several planes were so short of fuel that they had to land at alternative airfields. Even those who made it back to their own did not have an easy time. One of 303rd BG’s planes, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, almost crashed at Molesworth airbase. The pilot found himself caught in

the prop wash of another B-17 while he was coming in to land, and the sudden turbulence tossed the plane around in the air until one of its engines ran out of fuel. As it plummeted towards the ground disaster was averted when the engineer, Stan Backiel, had the presence of mind to raise the landing gear, giving the pilot just enough lift to pull the plane back up again. ³⁹ Yankee Doodle Dandycame round again and this time landed perfectly.

A few minutes later the last of the B-17s joined it on the ground. Their hazardous mission, the seventy-sixth in the history of VIII Bomber Command, was now officially over.

At each airfield, the station commander and his staff stood out in the dying evening sunshine and anxiously counted the planes in, just as they had counted them out six hours ago. They were not the only ones waiting to welcome the men home. The ground crews, who were particularly attached to the aeroplanes and the crews, were anxious to see that both had returned safely. Most had a long night’s work ahead, trying to patch up the aircraft so that they could be used again in the morning. Intelligence officers were also standing by, ready to debrief the men and note down what had happened on today’s troublesome mission. Those airmen who had not flown were eager to find out what they had missed. And at one or two of the airfields newspaper men from Associated Press and United Press were ready to record the immediate impressions of the exhausted crews as they climbed out of their battered B-17s.

However, the station medics were first on the scene. There were casualties in many of the planes that had returned. For example, the radio operator of Yankee Doodle Dandyhad run out of oxygen while manning the ball turret, but the battle had been so frantic that no one had been able to come to his aid for over half an hour. By the time they got him back to base he had swallowed his tongue, his eyes were frozen shut, and he was virtually blue from lack of oxygen. The co-pilot was also injured: as he was coming back to help his crewmate, the base of the top turret had revolved violently, crushing his foot in the mounting. Both men would be nursed back to health over the coming days and weeks, and the radio operator, Richard Grimm, went on to earn a DFC later in the war. ⁴⁰

The crew of the Judy Bwere in even worse trouble when their plane came to a halt at Kimbolton airfield. Their pilot was dead, their co-pilot badly disabled after his ordeal in the air, and two other crewmen were almost unconscious from lack of oxygen. At Ridgewell, the home of 381st BG, there were two more cases of severe anoxia, and two men from 384th BG had to be hospitalized at Grafton Underwood because of wounds they had received.

They were the lucky ones. Of the 123 crews that had started out that afternoon, fifteen had failed to return. As the survivors were driven back across the airfield to the debriefing rooms they could see for themselves how many planes were missing. Later, when they gathered for a meal, the empty seats spoke far more eloquently than any statistics. At Grafton Underwood the atmosphere was particularly sombre: seventy faces had vanished from the mess hall during the course of an afternoon.

That night most of the men went to bed early, too exhausted to consider anything but sleep. Some were issued rations of whisky to calm their nerves, and perhaps cheer them a little. Others were offered sleeping pills to help them shut off the effects of adrenaline. ⁴¹They were emotionally and physically worn out.

They needed their sleep. Every one of those bomber groups was scheduled for another maximum effort tomorrow, and most of the men would be up before sunrise to repeat the performance.

13. The Americans Again

They know that if a flaming bullet comes through their gasoline tank it immediately becomes a burning torch and they are gone. They know that if a wing is torn off there is the same result. They know that a dozen fatal things may happen any time, and that if they fall two hundred or twenty thousand feet, existence is at an end…

Billy Mitchell ¹

While the men of VIII Bomber Command slept, American intelligence officers worked late into the night analysing the information they had gathered during the various debriefing sessions. The statistics did not look good. ²To start with, fourteen of the planes bound for Hamburg had abandoned their mission before they had reached the German coast. That represented more than 11 per cent of the total force: an unacceptable figure. In the case of the wing that had been supposed to bomb Kiel the entiremission had been called off because they had been unable to assemble into a safe formation. If the average is taken for all the American forces bombing that day, more than a quarter of the B-17s had turned back before reaching Germany. Something had to be done about this problem, and soon: every plane that aborted its mission merely increased the risk of failure, and worse, for those who carried on.

The loss rate was even more worrying. Fifteen planes out of 123 had been shot down: that was 12 per cent of the total force detailed for Hamburg, and nearly 14 per cent of those who flew over the city. Losses like those were unsustainable. Half a dozen similar missions, and the entire American bomber force would be wiped out.

Another concern was the number of planes returning home damaged. Sixty-seven planes had been shot up, nine so badly that they could barely fly. To make things worse, twenty-three planes had been damaged by their own squadron companions. This was probably inevitable – the Americans flew in such close formations that it was sometimes difficult not to fire at each other – but, nevertheless, the loss rate was bad enough without adding to it by friendly fire.

Over the coming weeks the USAAF would do their best to overcome these problems. They would introduce ‘Splasher’ radio beacons to help their bomb groups find each other before they left the English coast – that way there would be less chance of them having to abandon their mission because of an inability to assemble properly. They would insist on ever-tighter formation flying to reduce the risks of being attacked by German fighters. But in the end nothing they suggested could hide the fact that they were outclassed in the skies over Germany. No matter how formidable a group of Flying Fortresses was, it was no match for the combined forces of heavy flak and swarms of Me109s.

The final piece of the intelligence picture was perhaps the most discouraging. After all the losses they had suffered, it seemed that only 60 per cent of the planes had bombed anywhere near the target. Seventy-three crews had dropped their loads on or near the docks in Hamburg, another thirteen had bombed the railway marshalling yards at Heide; the rest had been either shot down, had aborted, or dropped their bombs elsewhere. Of all the statistics, this one had to improve most urgently. If the bombers were not hitting their targets there was little point in flying to Germany in the first place.

Needless to say, these figures were highly confidential, and did not become public knowledge until long after the war. There was, however, one set of numbers that was advertised as widely as possible: the statistics for how many German fighters had been shot down. American claims for the day were huge: thirty-eight destroyed, six probably destroyed, twenty-seven damaged. ³Some bomb groups had suffered terrible casualties, but with scores like those they could at least console themselves with the thought that they were giving as good as they got.

The only problem with the figures was that they were fiction. It is understandable that the American airmen believed themselves so successful: any German fighter that dived through a formation might have ten B-17s firing on it at the same time, and if it went down every one of those B-17 crews would claim the victory. In the end, however, it was still only one fighter shot down, not ten. German records give an idea of how inflated American claims could be. They suggest that only six fighters were shot down by B-17s in totalthat afternoon, and a handful damaged. ⁴That is less than a sixth of the number claimed by the USAAF. American intelligence officials suspected this, but they let the numbers stand because they served as a much-needed morale boost to their men. At this stage in the war they needed it.

* * *

As morning dawned on 26 July, the USAAF crews assembled once again for a briefing on the day’s target. They did not know it yet, but they were at the beginning of a seven-day rollercoaster that would come to be known as ‘Blitz Week’: almost two thousand sorties on twenty-three towns and cities across northern Europe. ⁵Today was the third maximum effort in a row.

The Americans had a policy of resting one squadron in every group for each raid, so only a few of the men flying on the twenty-sixth would have been on all three of those missions. However, two-thirds of that day’s force had been through yesterday’s ordeal. Those men had had only five hours’ sleep, and were still recovering from the battering they had received over Hamburg; it goes without saying that they were hoping for an easier target now. They were to be sorely disappointed. Not only were they going back to Germany, but their mission was the same as the one that had just decimated them. Their exact targets would also be the same: the Klöckner factory and the Blohm & Voss shipyards.

It is impossible to imagine the dismay, not to mention the sense of déjà vu, that some of the men must have felt as the curtain opened on the target map. However, there were some major differences from the briefing yesterday. For a start, the wing that was to fly on the shipyards today was the one that had been detailed for Klöckner yesterday, and vice versa. The wings themselves would be organized differently too: today the 381st BG would lead the Blohm & Voss wing (with the 351st and 91st BGs in the high and low positions); and the 303rd BG would lead the Klöckner wing (with the 379th and 384th BGs in the high and low positions). It was important to spread the responsibility so that the newer groups would have an opportunity to prove themselves and the established groups would get a rest. They would be flying a route similar to yesterday’s, with the difference that they would turn southwards after hitting the target, rather than northwards, and head for the North Sea by flying between Bremen and Oldenburg.

That day’s Hamburg raid was, again, just one part of a bigger plan involving several attacks on German territory. Three other combat wings would attack a rubber factory in Hanover and, just as on the previous day, one was supposed to fly a feint off the German coast to draw the fighters from their airfields prematurely. There would again be a series of diversions over northern France and the Low Countries by a force of light bombers under fighter escort. Each of the various combat wings and diversionary forces would aim to cross into Europe simultaneously, but at different points, in the hope of splitting German defences.

The American planners had done all they could to protect their forces. Now it was up to the individual crews. It was a tired and apprehensive group of men who left their various briefings and made their way to their planes. Unlike the day before, they now knew exactlywhat was waiting for them in the skies over Germany. Some were plainly demoralized, which might have influenced events later that morning.

* * *

The two Hamburg wings took off at around 9.00 a.m. into the hazy sunshine of another warm summer’s day. They were in trouble almost immediately. While one wing managed to assemble without too much difficulty, the other was a shambles from the start.