Bremen, October 8, 1943
WHILE THE EIGHTH was rebuilding in the wake of the September 6th Stuttgart raid, the Luftwaffe’s leaders were not idle. Recognizing the threat daylight bombing posed to targets such as Schweinfurt and the inability of their day fighter forces to prevent future attacks, they undertook a major reshuffling of defensive strength. They stripped the Russian and Mediterranean fronts of single-engine fighters, and nearly doubled their twin-engine “destroyer” strength, adding Me-110s and newer Me-410s (known to the bomber crews as “Me-210s”).* They kept their night fighter force constantly on call, adding Ju-88s, Do-217s, and other more exotic types. And, finally, they centralized their forces for defense in depth along the approaches to the Ruhr and other critical objectives.
To this day, estimates of total German strength in the West vary—some sources put the number at nearly 800 fighters, others at over twice that figure—but there is no doubt the bomber crews now faced greatly increased odds. At VIII Bomber Command, General Eaker and the others knew of these developments, but felt the offensive had to go forward.
They really had no choice. There was a war to be won.
The first clear weather raid of the month took place on October 4th, when the First Division sent 155 B-17s against various targets around the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden. The Third Division sent 168 Forts to attack in the Saar region near the French border. Thirty-eight B-24s of the Second Bomb Division flew a diversion. The 303rd sent 21 ships to attack a plant that assembled aircraft components in the Frankfurt suburb of Hiddernheim.
Strike photos showed “much destruction by demolition bombs” and the Group’s war diary stated that a “heavy concentration of incendiary bombs fell in the target area and many fires were started.” However, the Group encountered “moderate but intense flak,” and the guns got B-17F 42-29846, flown by Lt. V.J. Loughnan’s crew, from the 359th Squadron. Lt. Loughnan was on his 20th mission, and most of his men were one mission behind him. The Eighth as a whole lost 16 bombers.
There was a three-day pause in operations, and then the bombers were off again. Between the 8th and 14th of October 1943, the Eighth Air Force would fly four raids in which the greatest number of B-17s ever would be lost. It was the seven-day period now known to history as “Black Week.”
The first mission was mounted against a target Hullar’s crew would visit many times during their tour—the German port of Bremen. The Eighth dispatched 344 B-17s from the First and Third Divisions to various targets in the city, while the Second Division sent 55 B-24s against the U-boat yard in the Baltic town of Vegesack.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Bremen, October 8, 1943. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
The 303rd’s mission looked like a rough one. The target was a submarine shipyard located in the heart of the port area three miles northwest of the city center. Bud Klint wrote that “The S-2 officer told us at briefing we would be in range of nearly 600 enemy fighters, and, at the target, nearly 300 flak guns.”
This was the Hullar crew’s ninth raid, and their sixth in Luscious Lady. Bob Hullar was beginning to describe her as “Old 081” in his notebook, and by this time the whole crew was happy about another mission in “their” Flying Fortress.
George Hoyt “always felt secure in her, even though she had the obsolete ‘constant-flow’ type of oxygen system with the rubber bladder that could freeze at altitude. She made up for it by being fast.”
Merlin Miller remembers her as “one of the earlier type B-17s, but she was lighter than some of the later models, and she was a bit faster. She got good gas mileage, too. We were all quite delighted with her.”
The crew’s hopes for another smooth trip in the Lady were soon to be dashed. Elmer Brown recorded that “On this day we started out in plane 081 (Luscious Lady) and had to abort because of a gasoline leak. We were in the No. 6 position of the high squadron at the time. We came back to the field and got plane No. 221. We caught the formation at Splasher No. 6 and filled in at the No. 7 position in the low squadron, high group.”
While it all sounds rather matter-of-fact, Merlin Miller was angry: “We didn’t like changing planes. We didn’t like changing anything after a mission was set up. Once you got familiar with your airplane, you were comfortable. You knew how the guns were aligned in it, how far out the bullets were set to converge, and where everything was. Each plane was a little different, and you didn’t have time to check the new aircraft out or get comfortable in it. You just grabbed it and went. It made me mad.”
The switch also touched a nerve in Norman Sampson: “The changing of planes and of our position in the formation disturbed me very much. When we aborted, we should not have had to go again. You never did when you aborted! Catching up put us in a bad position in the formation, and I didn’t know anything about this plane or the guns in it. Everything was going wrong, and I was afraid things would continue to go wrong over enemy territory. This was ‘not a good start.’ It gave me an empty feeling.”
The flak was rough over the target, but the crew’s reactions varied. Elmer Brown noted: “We were over 27,000 feet and my windows were so frosted up I could not see out. The flak was predicted fire barrage type, and didn’t bother us too badly.”
Bud Klint felt more threatened. “I was certain every one of those 300 flak guns was trained on us as we made our bomb run. Those black puffs were as thick as flies before a rain and the gun crews really had the range. We could hear the bark of the exploding shells on all sides and the fragments peppering the metal fuselage sounded like hail on a tin roof. The ground gunners carved quite a few notches on the smoking barrels of their 88s and 105s that day. One of the ships in our wing must have taken a direct hit among its control cables—it did a perfect slow roll, fell off into a spin, and then very shortly broke up completely.”
George Hoyt considered it “very heavy flak,” and Group records describe it as “intense and accurate.” Nine Group ships were damaged, and a combination of flak, cloud cover, and industrial haze caused the Group’s bombing to be off. The 303rd’s war diary states that “bombs fell somewhat to the east of the Aiming Point.”
Luckily, the Group was largely unmolested by the large number of fighters the enemy had about. “We had just a few fighter attacks,” wrote Elmer Brown, and Bud Klint concurred:
“The fighters were out in force. They didn’t bother our wing very much, but I could see them crawling all over wings that were flying lower than the 27,000 feet which was our assigned cruising level. They were taking their toll too—I counted ten chutes at scattered points within three minutes after we were out of range of the ground defenses and after the fighters had begun their attacks.”
These impressions were shared by Lt. William C. Fort, Jr., a taciturn 26-year-old from Ft. Meade, Florida, whose crew had reported to the 358th Squadron in September. Fort was flying under Lt. Calder L. Wise, his “Instructor Pilot.” He remembers that “Being this was my first mission, I didn’t know what to expect. There seemed to be a tremendous amount of flak when we got to the target area. We weaved in and out, and it didn’t look like a fly could get through, but we made it some way or other. On the way back, I saw two or three of our planes shot down right close by. Other than that, nothing out of the ordinary happened.”
By the time all the bombers had gotten back to England, their ranks had been thoroughly riddled. Despite good escort coverage, 27 B-17s from the First and Third Divisions were missing and three B-24s from the Second Division didn’t return. It was the beginning of a very long week.
The second raid got underway October 9th as the Eighth launched 378 heavy bombers against targets in central Germany, East Prussia, and Poland. The Third Division sent five groups against the Focke-Wulf factory at Marienburg, a city on the western border of the “Polish Corridor” in East Prussia. Seven more groups—two from the Third Division, three from the First Division, and two from the Second—were sent to attack the port area of Gdynia, Poland.
Two other groups from the Second Division were assigned to strike the U-boat yard at Danzig. Meanwhile, six groups from the First Division were sent to strike the Arado aircraft factory at Anklam, on the Baltic coast of central Germany, in what was termed a “diversion” to mask the deeper penetrations to the east.
The 303rd led this force under General Travis, and it met the roughest opposition. German fighters intercepted the B-17s en route to Anklam, but they were not strong enough to disrupt the strike. The 303rd snuck in at 13,000 feet and bombed the target “with good results.” The return trip was far different; 100 to 125 enemy fighters were encountered and Lt. Bill Fort found it very rough:
“I saw more different types of German fighters on that mission—Ju-88s, Me-210s, FW-190s, Me-109s—than on any other raid I went on. I can remember one FW-190 that made a diving attack out of the sun. His tracers hit the tail of a B-17 behind us in the Group, and it fell back out of the formation. They tried to get back in the formation, and managed to rejoin it for a while, but they could only fly sort of sideways because of the damage to their tail. They fell back again and the German fighters went after them. The plane headed down and I saw four or five chutes.
“I also saw an Me-210 get another B-17 in our Wing by making an attack from under the tail. He pulled up and put a lot of shells into the Fortress and set it on fire. There was so much flame I thought the German was on fire too, but when the B-17 started down, I saw it wasn’t. We wasted a lot of ammo on a Ju-88 that was hanging around, but we managed to hit an Me-210 pretty badly that came in and lobbed a few shells at us. My tail gunner also managed to shoot out the engine of a B-17 that was flying behind us, and they weren’t very happy about it back at the base.
“After this mission I still didn’t know too much about what to expect. But my attitude was ‘Take it as it comes and hope for the best.’”
The Anklam raid was Sgt. Gene Hernan’s last, and he ended his tour on a positive note. He flew with General Travis and was personally credited by the General with the destruction of a Ju-88. It was one of 12 fighters claimed by the 303rd for one of its B-17s.
However, the total score for the Anklam attack was much more disheartening. By the time the fighters were finished with the Anklam force, 18 B-17s had fallen—15 percent of those sent and the equivalent of an entire group. The other bomber forces came home minus ten ships, so that 28 heavy bombers were lost for the day.
The missing 303rd ship was flown by Lt. B.J. Clifford’s crew from the 427th Squadron. Their ship “was seen to go down after persistent attacks by E/A.” It was last observed beginning a long glide into the clouds near the Danish coast with its wheels down, and an engine on the left wing smoking. Three chutes were seen to emerge, two of which opened. Lt. Clifford’s crew was on their fourth mission, and they were never anything other than strangers to Hullar’s men, even though they were in the same squadron.
As Merlin Miller explains: “By this time we weren’t interested in getting to know new crews. The people in our own barracks, the guys on Woddrop’s crew, and a few others who we associated with were our only friends. If we got to know new crews, it only meant that we would wind up losing more friends when they were shot down, and we didn’t want that to happen. It was better if they stayed strangers.”
As Bud Klint puts it, “Losses just came to be accepted as a way of life in the ETO.”
Despite these harsh realities, Hullar’s crew couldn’t help but know the plane that was lost on the Anklam mission. It was Son, B-17F 42-5221, the same No. 221 they had flown to Bremen just the day before.