Nantes, September 16, 1943
THE EIGHTH’S INABILITY to strike Germany after the Stuttgart debacle did not deflect it from targets closer to home. On September 7th the Eighth returned to the offensive, bombing Luftwaffe fields in Belgium and France. The 303rd hit Evere airdrome outside Brussels with good bombing results and no ships lost. Two days later, the Group was sent to hit the Vitry-en-Artois airdrome at Douai, France. Again bombing results were good and all ships returned safely.
A five-day hiatus in operations followed, and then a target of real strategic significance was found. The French Underground reported that the Kertosono, a German supply ship carrying crucial U-boat replacement parts, had snuck up the River Loire from the Bay of Biscay. She was under repair in a floating drydock at the inland port of Nantes, where she lay, according to Elmer Brown’s diary, “near the fork of two rivers” in the harbor area.
She was, Lt. Darrell Gust felt, “a bombardier’s dream target,” and David Shelhamer believed “she must have been one hell of a ship because we sent about 140 B-17s down there.” In fact, the 303rd was leading eight groups of the First Bomb Division (the new designation of the First Bomb Wing) with the express mission of destroying her.
General Travis led the mission, taking off at 1141 in Satan’s Workshop with a lead crew that included Major Kirk Mitchell and Lt. Paul Scoggins. Scoggins wrote that “There was another navigator with me—just to check each other, but we led the entire works.” Hullar’s crew was back with Luscious Lady in the lead squadron’s No. 5 slot off Lt. David Shelhamer’s right wing; he was second element lead in Mr. Five by Five, B-17F 42-29955. The high squadron was led by Lt. Claude Campbell with Sgt. Gene Hernan in the top turret, while down below, at the head of the low squadron, Lt. John Lemmon was with Lt. Darrell Gust in Jersey Bounce Jr. Behind them were Lts. Don Gamble and Bill McSween as second element lead of the low squadron in Star Dust, B-17F 42-3064.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Nantes, September 16, 1943. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Lt. Gamble wrote that the Group had a “Good assembly,” and Lt. Bill McSween noted that “The haul was not too bad.” But aboard the Lady there were problems.
“This was the mission where Hullar forgot to take his parachute pack with him,” Merlin Miller recalls. “He had his parachute harness, but somehow or other he left the pack on the ground.”
And while there was an opportunity to return to base after George Hoyt discovered that one of their port engines was leaving a thin trail of white smoke, when he informed Hullar, “Bob said, ‘Our instruments show no trouble. We’ll go on in.’”
The Group had P-47s for much of the journey over enemy territory, and Elmer Brown noted “a couple of dogfights.” But the action got heavy as soon as the P-47 escort left. As Brown put it, “Enemy fighters were very aggressive. They were mostly FW-190s. They made nine head-on (nose) attacks and eleven at the tail.”
Bud Klint felt the Luftwaffe gave a good account of itself, too: “Enemy fighters were comparatively scarce—we met only about 20 on the round trip—but those we did meet were unusually eager. They pressed their attacks vigorously.
“On one particular occasion two FW-190s came in abreast from eleven o’clock high, skidded their ships, and sprayed the formation with more 20mm bursts than I had ever before seen at one time. How they avoided knocking at least one Fortress out of the formation I’ll never understand, but they didn’t, and as they broke away some gunner sent one of them down in flames.”
The Germans went after the bombers for over a half an hour, and while no 303rd ships were lost Lt. McSween noted that the fighters “knocked down several B-17’s.” Two fell from the low 384th Group, while four went down from the high 379th Group.
Lt. John V Lemmon’s crew before Jersey Bounce Jr., B-17F 42-29664, VK
C. Bottom row, L-R, Sgt. C. Zeller, Sgt. V, Brown; Sgt. C. Bagwell; Sgt. W. Briggs; Sgt. A. Berzansky; Sgt. A. Beavers, Top row, L-R, Lt. Lemmon, pilot; Lt. Darrell D. Gust, navigator; Lt. W. Latshaw (not a regular crewmember); Lt. E.E. Stone, bombardier; Lt. E.E. Clark, copilot. For the fate of Jersey Bounce Jr., see Chapter 25. (Photo courtesy of Brian S. McGuire.)
Then, as the 303rd’s formation drew near the aiming point, the fighters were replaced by flak that Elmer Brown felt was “light and inaccurate all the way,” and which Lt. McSween wrote up as “medium and inaccurate”—though it was close enough for Lt. Gamble to write: “Hear the flak go ‘Woof!’” But the flak didn’t cause any casualties, and since there were only small patches of clouds over the city and a heavy but ineffective smoke screen, it seemed that nothing could stop the Group from getting that U-boat supply ship.
The men didn’t reckon with fate, for events were soon to make the “bombardier’s dream target” a nightmare. The story Darrell Gust heard in the immediate aftermath of the mission has remained with him to this day:
“A brand-new bombardier somehow got thrust into the lead aircraft. During the bomb run he put the bombsight on ‘extended vision’ to see up ahead and forgot to turn it back. When the indices on the bombsight came together, it was good-bye bombs, early or not. We dropped our bomb loads right into the heart of Nantes. It was a horrible fiasco.”
David Shelhamer tells the same story, and the tale is plausible since the lead bombardier was always under great pressure to steady up on course during the bomb run and lock in a bombing solution on the famous Norden bombsight. The sight had an “extended vision” knob that provided a view up to 20 miles down the bombing track so the bombardier could acquire the target and set up on it. As he got closer to the target, he was supposed to shift the eyepiece to the “normal mode,” synchronize the sight’s longitudinal and horizontal crosshairs on the target, and as the bombsight “locked on” and generated a solution, let it automatically drop the bombs at the calculated release point. Since the rest of the bomb group would drop their loads as soon as they saw them leave the lead ship, the entire mission depended on a single man.
But is this really what happened over Nantes that day? Paul Scoggins doesn’t think so: “Although I was in that lead ship, I do not remember ever hearing the story about the lead bombardier. As I remember it, the bombardier was from another squadron, not the 427th, and I did not really know him. The General was in our ship, too.”
Further mystery is added by what Gene Hernan recalls: “Our bom-bardier, Boutelle, told Campbell that no one was on the correct bomb run. We made a bomb run of our own and got a near miss on the target. I think it was the closest anyone came.”
Hernan’s account is matched by a report Lt. Boutelle made, which is in the Group’s mission file: “BOMB. Held bombs 15-20 seconds after other bombs went. Ball turret said main bursts were in town and a small concentration was on the river bank with one falling across river, causing large explosion.”
Perhaps the lead bombardier did drop early, or a junior bombardier “practicing” accidentally let his bombs go with the rest of the Group dropping when they saw them go. Whatever the reason, Lt. McSween noted that “The bombs hit on both sides of the river.”
Bud Klint realized “Our Group missed the target completely—in fact, no one in our Group scored a direct hit.”
And Lt. Don Gamble came closest to the mark by writing: “See several hits around the target when we drop the 12X500-pound bombs. We probably killed a lot of Frenchmen.”
The Group assuredly did. The word David Shelhamer later got was that “We dropped 223 500-pound general-purpose bombs right smack in the far end of a public park and into an apartment complex. It was figured we eliminated about 500 Frenchmen rather than one ship.” The next day German radio, quoting reports from Paris, said that more than 850 Frenchmen had been killed, more than 150 were still buried under the debris of wrecked buildings, and that the injured numbered more than 1000, 300 of whom were seriously hurt.
And no one got the Kertosono. When the day was done and all groups had dropped, the closest anyone came was: “A single direct hit in the SW corner of the floating dry dock” together with “four near misses which will cause some damage to the dry dock and ship.” The “single direct hit” might well have come from Lt. Campbell’s ship, but no one will ever know for sure.*
Immediately after the 303rd dropped, Lt. Campbell’s crew found themselves in serious trouble. As Gene Hernan recalls, “A piece of 88 severed the oil line to the No. 3 engine. The oil got pumped out of our supply tank before we realized it and we couldn’t feather the prop. Consequently, the reduction gears broke and the prop started windmilling, due to the pistons seizing up. We went for the water, ambling out over the Bay of Biscay just above it so no fighters could get under us. The going was slow, about 120 mph indicated, with everyone else in the Group wondering what was wrong but Campbell not wanting to break radio silence to tell them. Fortunately, our Squadron stayed with us or we would probably not have made it back.”
The entire Group actually got down close to the water on the return trip. Elmer Brown wrote that “We left the target on an SSW heading and came back entirely over water over approximately 400 miles. For over 250 miles we were from 500 to 1000 feet off the water due to a lower ceiling. The whole object was to stay clear of France by 40 or 50 miles so we had to go way around the Brest peninsula.”
Lt. Don Gamble also wrote of a “Let-down to about 600 feet over water to get under clouds. The boys shoot at birds over the water.”
Some of the Group’s gunners shot at more than birds. Lt. Bill McSween recorded that “Our Group ran into several Me-110s and one or two were shot down by B-17s.” One of those shooting was Sgt. Hernan, who by this time was really beginning to sweat things out:
“When the Me-110s did come out to attack, it was the only time that I can remember my hands being warm, and when I was firing I can remember having a cigarette in my lips. We did manage to get two of them before they gave up.”
His tally is confirmed by the Group’s records. At 1625, one of the 110s “burst into flames” and “Was last seen spinning towards the water.” At 1630 another “burned and hit water.”
For Hullar’s crew there was a preoccupation even more important than the Me-110s nipping at the formation’s heels. Bob Hullar wrote that it was “Our first raid since ditching. The entire crew really sweated out our gas supply.”
Elmer Brown noted: “We kept a very close check on the fuel consumption.”
Bud Klint felt “The part of the mission our particular crew disliked the most was the long trip home over water. We were over water for nearly two hours, and after the dunking we had experienced just ten days before, that ‘deep blue’ looked not in the least inviting. The English coast and, an hour and one half later, our home base, were particularly welcome sights that day.”
Luscious Lady landed at 1847, ending a mission that lasted over seven hours. Elmer Brown noted that “everyone in our Group got back OK.” But the operation had a bitter postmortem, especially for the bombardier who had erred.
Darrell Gust believed, “They almost court-martialed him,” though he is somewhat wide of the mark on this point.
As Ed Snyder recalls, “There was no real thought of a court-martial, but you can believe that bombardier had his tail between his legs when he got back and that he was given a bad time. Still, this wasn’t the first time something like this happened, and it wasn’t the last. In war, under pressure, you have to expect this sort of thing.”
There is a postscript to this story well told by Mel Schulstad, who stayed to see the war through from beginning to end. After the Eighth dropped its last bomb in the Spring of 1945, it launched hundreds of bombers filled with food on mercy missions to the Continent. During these flights there were men in the Group who remembered what had happened at Nantes so many months before, and a decision was made to send some food-laden Fortresses to the city to make amends.
“We decided to do this,” Schulstad recalls, “even though we had real questions about the reception we would get after what we had done to that place. I was in one of the B-17s that went over, and I’ll never forget the sight that greeted us as we pulled into the landing pattern and set down.
“There were literally thousands of Frenchmen there to greet us, and they all raced onto the field even as we were landing, arms raised high above their heads holding bottles of champagne, cognac, and wine. They crowded around our planes and had the bottles uncorked even before our props stopped turning. You can just imagine how we all felt.”