Amiens, August 15, 1943 and Le Bourget, August 16, 1943
THE DAY AFTER the Hullar crew’s arrival at Molesworth, the Eighth resumed its attacks against major industrial targets in Germany. On August 12th the 303rd was part of a force of 330 B-17s sent to bomb Bonn and other targets in the Ruhr. The Group’s mission was to hit a synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen, and Lt. Bill McSween felt the raid was rough:
“I was a mite uncertain about the outcome of this one. The target was in the center of a valley and there was no way around anything. We flew straight through up to the Ruhr defenses, where all hell broke loose. Talk about ‘intense and accurate flak’! They made us know it. Flak rattled off the plane’s nose like hail. The target area was obscured and our bombs went wild. Focke-Wulfs attacked outside the Ruhr defenses and hit the high and lead groups. They didn’t bother us thanks to good formation flying.”
Ralph Coburn also noted that it was “Rough! Flak and fighters,” and Lt. Don Gamble felt the fighters were “very eager today…We see small white bursts behind lead squadron—can see no fighters—they must be lobbing 20mm over from behind or above.” He added: “25 Forts were lost today—one of our group.” The missing 303rd Fortress was from the 359th Squadron: Old Ironsides, B-17F 42-29640, flown by Lt. A.H. Pentz and crew.
Hullar’s crew missed this mission, and with it any risk of being lost before they unpacked. The first exposure any of them got to combat operations came a few days later, when Elmer Brown was sent with another crew on a mission against a Luftwaffe fighter field. Elmer Brown described it this way:
“August 15, 1943 (Sunday)—My first combat mission. Flew with Olsen—his first mission as first pilot. Went to Amiens, France, our secondary target. Missed Poix, our primary, due to evasive action. Excellent bombing. We were high group, high squadron. Flak moderate but very accurate. Bursting right around us—between our planes. Dropped 24-100 lb. fragmentation bombs—target an airfield. Had Spitfire escorts all the way. Only over France about 23 minutes. Didn’t even see enemy aircraft.”
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Amiens, August 15, 1943, and Le Bourget, August 16, 1943, (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Lt. Gamble’s crew also went on the raid, and Lt. McSween considered it a joyride: “Everything was lovely. No flak or fighters. We had plenty of Spitfire cover—they’re the stuff. Very unexciting mission—but it counts, too.” Thus, though Elmer Brown had one mission under his belt, the real introduction to combat for Hullar’s crew would come next day, on a trip to Le Bourget airport northeast of Paris. After the many months of working together, this was it!
George Hoyt tells how the crew’s initiation began: “On August 16th we scrambled to the briefing room for our first mission. The room was set up something like a theater, and we were briefed separately from the officers. We sat down and watched the briefing officer uncover the target map.”
“There it was, Le Bourget airfield, outside of enemy-occupied Paris. Intelligence had word of a large number of Me-109 fighters assembled on the ground awaiting distribution to coastal defense fields, and it was a rush job.”
“We were assigned to a B-17 named Flak Wolf, and we were in the lead squadron. Our group was leading the wing. I began my mission preparations. I tuned my Morse code transmitter to frequency and unlocked the two spring-loaded lock pins to my .50-caliber machine gun mount. I then slid it on its track to the center of the radio room hatch, an opening about three feet by four feet, from which I had already removed the Plexiglas hatch. The hatch was left on the floor throughout the mission.”
The rest of the crew made ready, and all were anxious for the early morning takeoff. Norman Sampson was “eager to go on my first mission. After all, that’s what we came for.”
The time arrived at last and the real beginning of the raid commenced in a sequence of sounds and sights that always came as a great thrill to George Hoyt: “The familiar voice of Bob Hullar called out from the cockpit, ‘Clear right, clear left,’ and then I heard the high-pitched whine of the Bendix starter on No. 1 engine, followed by a loud cough or two from the engine as she cranked up. There was an emission of smoke as the prop turned over and the engine caught. Then came No. 2, No. 3, and No. 4, and the whole plane vibrated with the power of those four 1200-horsepower Wright Cyclones. I could feel them right in my guts. We were on our way!
The 427th Squadron’s Flak Wolf, B-17F 42-3131, GN
U. Flak Wolf was the B-17 that Hullar’s crew flew on their first mission. Note the twin .50-cal machine guns barely visible in the nose. The individuals in the photo have been partially identified as follows. L-R, Top Row: Lts, Jack Rolfson, LeFrevre, Abbott Smith, Charles Herman, and Flt. Surgeon Maj. Laird, L-R, Bottom Row: Sgts. Robert Sink, Delyn Smith, unk., unk., William Fleming, Joseph Serpa, Emery Knotts, and Joseph Gray. (Photo Courtesy National Archives [USAF Photo].)
“As we taxied out to become part of a long procession of B-17s waddling along the taxi strip, I stood up on an ammo box to let my head get above the radio room roof. I saw a long, ambling line of Forts proceeding like huge, drab prehistoric birds that made screeching cries as the brakes were constantly applied to keep them on the taxi strip. It was an otherworldly scene in the dim light just at sunrise.”
Bud Klint picks up the narrative from the copilot seat: “It was 0705 hours and the first streaks of daylight were just beginning to filter through the layer of broken clouds which hung over England’s Midlands as the Forts began to roll down the runway. We were the second ship to take off and as we slid into place on the right wing of the lead ship, the Command Pilot began to circle the home field in order to wait for the other 19 planes to get off the ground and into their positions in the formation. It was inspiring to watch the 20 planes from our group take up their positions and to see the other two groups that completed our 60-ship combat wing join the formation. It was an added thrill as the tight formation climbed to altitude and headed out across the English Channel toward the French Coast. The sight of the other combat wings assembling and falling in trail gave me a sense of security.
“As we crossed the enemy coast, our escorting Spitfires turned back for their English bases and the Germans introduced us, very informally, to their heavy antiaircraft defenses. The billowing black puffs of smoke, which was all we saw of the defenses, looked perfectly harmless. As they boiled up throughout the formation it was hard to realize they had centers of steel and were scattering fragments of sudden death in all directions.
“As we went deeper into enemy territory, the interphone gurgled with excitement. Everyone on the ship was eager to get a crack at the German fighter planes, which the briefing officer had promised we would meet. Sgt. Rice in the top turret saw them first: ‘Six fighters at three o’clock’ came over the interphone. ‘They are moving around toward the nose,’ someone else added, and by then, I’m sure, every eye in our ship was watching them as they climbed a little above our level and continued around toward the front of the formation.
“‘Bandit at one o’clock!’ the bombardier blurted and, simultaneously, the .50-caliber machine guns in the nose, the top, and the ball turrets began to chatter and tracers began to snake their way toward the attacking fighters from every ship in the formation.”
“It was inspiring to watch 20 planes of our group take up their positions and to see the other two groups that completed our 60-ship combat wing join the formation.” For protection against fighter attack, Eighth Air Force B-17 groups flew this standard bomb group combat box formation of 20 aircraft in August 1943 as part of a larger 60-ship combat wing. The group “combat box” was 380 yards wide, 210 yards deep, and 300 yards high. The formation positions of the vulnerable No. 7 “diamond” or “tail-end Charlie” ships varied widely. The three-group “combat wing” was 950 yards wide, 425 yards deep, and 900 yards in height, and if the tail view of the group shown in the diagram is considered the lead group, the high group would trail the lead above and to the left, and the low group would trail below and to the right. See the photograph on p. 75 for a good view of a high group in flight and its relationship to the aircraft of a lead group. The low squadron in the low group of a combat wing was called “Purple Heart Corner” because of its susceptibility to fighter attack. (Diagram courtesy of Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
What combat really meant now struck Hullar’s crew in radically different ways. Bud Klint saw the fighters come “in trail, with an interval of three or four hundred yards between them. Even when the leading edges of those FW-190s began to light up like neon signs, I was far more interested than frightened. But when a string of little white smoke puffs appeared across the right wing of our plane, about ten feet from the cockpit, and I recognized them as bursting 20mm shells, the Focke-Wulfs lost most of their fascination for me, as I began to realize that the air around us was filled with flying lead.”
The truth came home to George Hoyt in much the same way: “From my field of vision out of the radio room hatch, I could see from three o’clock around past six o’clock to nine o’clock level, on up to an unlimited high. Flying behind and just slightly above us was our group’s high squadron at about five-thirty o’clock. No sooner had the warning about the fighters hit my ears than I saw bright strike flashes on the leading edge of the wing of the No. 3 ship, to the high squadron leader’s left. It was from attacking fighters coming through the front of our group formation! Then I saw an FW-190 flash by, diving for the deck at four o’clock. My adrenaline began pumping and I thought, ‘This is real stuff. They’re shooting to kill!’ The escorting P-47s which I saw crisscrossing high above earlier were nowhere around now. I got real alert at my .50-caliber.”
As the battle progressed, Elmer Brown observed “several Forts go down, especially in the low group.” But he never lost his sense of detachment from the scene. “I know it sounds strange to say, but I gave no thought to danger. Peggyann had promised to pray for me every day, and I never imagined that anything would happen to me or my crew. The whole business remained something of an adventure.”
In the tail, Merlin Miller had a similar reaction: “Even when I saw a B-17 get hit and go down it was a little unreal, like watching a movie.”
For Norman Sampson in the ball turret, it wasn’t that way at all: “After seeing a couple of Forts go down, it came real hard to me, at that very moment, that they wanted to destroy us. It scared the lard out of me!”
The fighters continued their attacks until the Group entered the flak defenses at the target. Brown felt that bombing accuracy was “excellent,” and as the Group turned away from the target Bud Klint observed “a large column of smoke rising from the airfield.”
Enemy fighters pursued the bomber formation after the target, but Hoyt considered the encounter with them brief: “We did not have any chances for good shots at them, and Spitfires met us coming out through occupied France. They crisscrossed over us rather close, but they were careful not to point their noses our way. As they passed by, they threw up that distinctive elliptical Spitfire wing. I waved at several of the pilots in their cockpits as they flew over the radio room hatch. It was a comforting feeling to see them giving us cover.”
A view from the radio room. This scene of 303 Fortresses in formation illustrates very well what George Hoyt observed out of Flak Wolf’s radio room hatch just before German fighters attacked during the crew’s first mission to Le Bourget airport near Paris on August 16, 1943. The photograph can be dated to the summer of 1943 by the red-bordered national insignia visible on the lower right wing of the nearest B-17; this style of national marking was only approved from June through August 1943. In June 1943 VIII Bomber Command also adopted a series of geometric shapes and letters to identify the different bomb groups from the air. A “triangle C” was the 303rd’s identifier; this symbol on the tail of the nearest B-17 unmistakably shows her to be one of the Hell’s Angels. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Lorraine Shelhamer.)
Other views of the mission are offered by Lts. Bill McSween, Don Gamble, and David Shelhamer. All three were rather blase about the raid. McSween felt it was “a nice early one.” Gamble was equally laid back: “Another easy target… Lots of fighters attack low planes. The boys get some good shots in.” Shelhamer believed “it wasn’t too bad. Moderate flak. A few fighters got a little eager, but all ships returned okay, and we had good bombing.”
It all depended on one’s position, however. Eddie Deerfield’s crew had been flying one of those “low planes,” Lady Luck, B-17F 42-5434, in the No. 5 slot of the low squadron, and while they made it back safely, Deerfield’s damage notes speak for themselves: “20 mm exploded in bomb bay damaging several bombs. Vacuum system and four oxygen bottles smashed by another 20 mm shell. Flak holes in right wing.”
So passed the Hullar crew’s first mission. They had been “blooded” in combat, and had stood the test well. That evening, Bob Hullar proudly wrote in his notebook, “Crew swell. Shot up a storm!”
But there was also some disquiet in the barracks. Merlin Miller thought about what he had witnessed and “realized that B-17 I saw go down could have been us. And then the seriousness of the thing really soaked in.”
There would be more than disquiet next day when the crew learned about the mission then being ordered at “Pinetree,” VIII Bomber Command Headquarters at High Wycombe, near London. The targets were a massive Me-109 factory located outside the ancient Bavarian city of Regensburg and the ball-bearing plants situated in the center of the small Bavarian town called Schweinfurt.
