Münster, October 10, 1943
DESPITE THE LOSS of 58 heavy bombers on October 8th and 9th, the Eighth’s leaders saw no reason to reduce the tempo of attacks. Telling blows had been struck against important strategic targets—in addition to the damage at Anklam, the Focke-Wulf plant at Marienburg was all but annihilated—and General Arnold was clamoring for more.
Eaker and Anderson were ready to oblige; the planners at Pinetree were putting together another maximum effort for October 10th. The target was Münster, a “Major rail center” in the Ruhr. The Aiming Point was Münster’s 1000-year-old cathedral and the reason for this choice was, quite literally, to hit the city’s railway workers where they lived. It was hoped that a heavy bombing of the residential districts around the cathedral would kill many workers, disrupting the morale and efficiency of the survivors.
The Third Division was leading the mission, followed by the First, while the Second Division was to stage yet another feint over the North Sea. The Third Division’s seven groups were arrayed in three combat wings, or “CBWs,” making up a total force of 133 Fortresses.
Flying 15 minutes behind were the nine groups of the First Division, 141 B-17s strong in three combat wings. The 41st CBW was last, with the 384th Group as lead, the 379th Group high, and the 303rd low. At the very end, in the No. 7 slot of the low squadron of the low group in this final combat wing, flew Hullar’s crew in Luscious Lady.
Hullar’s men were well aware of their vulnerability to fighters in this position. “We were tail-end Charlie in the low squadron, low group (Purple Heart Corner),” noted Elmer Brown.
But enemy fighters were not the source of the crew’s woes this day. When it was over, Bud Klint recorded that “We had fighter escort all the way and they did a very good job of keeping the enemy ‘peashooters’ away from us.”
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Münster, October 10, 1943. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Instead, Elmer Brown wrote, with good reason, that “the most outstanding thing on this raid was the flak.” For on this mission the 303rd would run a fiery gantlet of flak eclipsing anything the Group had experienced before.
The key to avoiding trouble among the flak batteries lay in good mission planning and navigation. The staff officers setting up mission routes at Division and Wing Headquarters took care to plot tracks that would avoid the worst flak areas, and the lead navigator was responsible for keeping on course both to get to the target and to minimize exposure to antiaircraft fire.
In the air as on the ground, however, the road to Hell is often paved with good intentions.
The 303rd sent 20 B-17s off between 1130 and 1142 under Major Kirk Mitchell and Captain Merle Hungerford in Jersey Bounce Jr. The bombers included Hell’s Angels, flown by Lts. Calder Wise and Bill Fort; Shelhamer’s crew in Vicious Virgin, as second element lead of the low squadron; and Lt. “Woodie” Woddrop in Flak Wolf, to Shelhamer’s left in the No. 6 squadron slot. The launches were made into fog. Elmer Brown wrote that “We had to make an instrument takeoff and landing as the ceiling was about 500 feet and fog—visibility about 1,000 yards. The top of clouds was about 4,000 feet.”
From the very beginning, the mission showed every sign of being a bad one, because the 384th Group was Wing lead and had far less experience and depth than the 303rd. Major Mitchell’s frustration with the early flight comes through quite clearly in his Group Leader’s Narrative:
“The Combat Wing completed its assembly on line Molesworth-Eyebrook, climbed on course cutting one turn about five minutes short for no apparent reason. This put us approximately five minutes ahead of schedule at bombing altitude. The Combat Wing S-ed for about 15 minutes, crossing the Channel to lose time.
“The 384th Group had a ‘bunch’ of airplanes rather than a ‘Group formation.’ There was a three-ship low squadron of airplanes in the 384th Group which shoved us out of formation twice. An A/C out of the high squadron of the 384th Group aborted about two-thirds of the way across the Channel and dumped his bombs over our formation, barely missing some of our A/C.”
One of the ships the bombs barely missed was Hell’s Angels, just behind Major Mitchell in the No. 4 lead squadron slot. As Bill Fort recalls, “Somebody cut loose a 1000-pound bomb above us coming through the formation, and it almost took all of us with it.”
Much worse was to come. The briefed mission route had the 41st Wing entering Occupied Europe south of Rotterdam and flying a course almost due east to the town of Haltern—the IP from which it was to fly northeast on the bomb run into Münster. But just before the IP, the 384th Group turned almost due north on a track towards Coesfeld, 20 miles west and slightly north of Münster.
According to Major Mitchell, this erroneous course took the bombers “over Hüls, subjecting us to the fire of approximately 100 flak guns. The fire was extremely accurate for altitude and deflection and was tracking type. The lead Group took no evasive action.” He later commented, “It’s the first time in my life that I’ve really been scared. That flak was the roughest I’ve ever seen.”
Elmer Brown wrote: “We went along the north edge of the Ruhr Valley (‘Happy Valley’) for about 20 minutes and we were in a solid cloud of flak explosions for the full time.”
As the run began, Norman Sampson looked out of the large circular glass of the Lady’s ball turret and saw that “the flak was both barrage-type and tracking. Very close stuff. It was so thick I remember saying to myself, ‘We will never get through this.’”
Merlin Miller recalls that “the black smoke from the antiaircraft fire up there was so thick the sky was hazy. I could hear the fragments from the flak shells hitting the plane like someone throwing rocks at it. You had a feeling of helplessness, frustration, and anger. You had to just sit there and take it.”
George Hoyt felt “the flak just filled the sky, and it became quite frustrating not being able to answer the German fire directly.”
The frustration finally got to Sampson, whose battle station left him more exposed than anyone. Miller remembers that “it got so bad Sammy pointed his ball turret guns straight down and fired a couple of bursts in the general direction the antiaircraft fire was coming from,” and Sampson admits today that “it’s entirely possible I did. You do some funny things to get rid of the tensions.”
Up forward, the Lady’s officers weren’t faring any better. Elmer Brown wrote that “Mac said he looked out once and I had my head down studying my maps very hard about that time. Also about that time I saw some fighters, so I called ‘Enemy fighters at 10 o’clock’ in a very calm voice, I knew damn well they would not attack us with all that flak around us, but we were all so scared I just wanted to see if I could still talk.”
That evening Bob Hullar admitted his fears, too, confiding to his notebook that he “saw the light on flak. We hit the north end of ‘Happy Valley.’ The flak was thick enough to walk on. It really scared me today.”
Bud Klint felt the flak was “so thick we were almost on instruments. It was, without a doubt, the worst flak I ever saw. At the time, I held little hope of ever seeing those White Cliffs of Dover again. One burst nearly saw to it as it shattered my windshield.”
Off to the Lady’s left, in Flak Wolf, a shell came a lot closer to the cockpit than this. Elmer Brown recorded that “Woddrop had a 155mm shell come through the hatchway below him, then between him and the copilot, and out the top between the copilot and the top turret. They were very lucky it didn’t explode.”
Not surprisingly, the whole base was abuzz with talk of the incident that evening, and David Shelhamer was one of those who spoke directly with Woddrop about it. As he recalls, “At this particular period of time I was aware of bursts of continuous tracking flak that were occurring immediately in front of us. The Group lead was taking no evasive action whatsoever, so I pulled the flight out of the main formation. Woodie decided not to follow but stayed with the main Group, and that’s when he got that thing through his ship.
“When we got back to the ground, Woodie came to me and mentioned what happened and showed me a hunk of something, a piece of fabric that he had behind his seat when the shell came through, and it was quite shredded. The shell came immediately behind his seat up through the top center of the fuselage, immediately in front of the top turret. And Woodie said to me, in so many words, something like ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’”
George Hoyt also heard all about it that evening from Sgt. Bill Watts, the man in the top turret: “I remember Bill telling me Woddrop called to him on the interphone, ‘Watts, what is that cold draft behind me blowing on my ass?’ Bill said, ‘I don’t know sir, but I’ll check on it.’ He came down out of his turret, saw a hole in the bottom of the airplane with the ground showing through, then looked up and saw a similar sized hole in the roof of the cockpit. He called to Woddrop, ‘Sir there’s a hole in the floor behind your seat and one in the ceiling. It looks like we got a direct hit from a flak shell but it didn’t explode.’ Woodie replied, ‘Well, cram something in the hole. It’s freezing my ass!’”
Woddrop’s copilot, Grover C. Henderson, Jr., completes the story of the close call with an account still fresh after 45 years:
“We had just dropped the bombs and our leader had made a turn as soon as we did to try to get out of the flak. We were in a steep bank to the left and a large flak shell—from the hole it made we assumed it was a 155 mm—went through the bottom of the B-17 and came up through the floorboards squarely between my seat and Woodie’s seat.
“Bill Watts was right behind us in the top turret and the shell centered the three of us. It passed through the only open space in the airplane and went out the top of the cockpit, taking the overhead radio equipment with it. It was amazing. We were in this 45-degree bank, and the shell must have been almost spent, going at the same angle at the end of its trajectory.
“The shell damaged Woddrop’s parachute and he also had a canteen of water on the floor. It tore that up and spattered the water all over him. Woodie joked about it later on, saying he felt under his arm and it was all wet up there and he thought, ‘Oh hell, they finally got me.’ Then he realized it was water and not his own blood.
“When the shell came through it sounded like somebody hit the bottom of the airplane with a sledgehammer, or like an automobile crash. It scared the hell out of me. Then there was this terrific whistling sound from the air rushing up through the hole in the top of the cockpit, and Woodie told Bill Watts to cram something up there to stop it. Watts had on one of the big, heavy fleece-lined jackets, which was the winter-type jacket we used. It was a real heavy jacket. He pulled the jacket off, doubled it over, and crammed it in the hole in the ceiling, which was about 12 inches in diameter. But the wind sucked it right on through, and we had to fly all the way back with the wind whistling through that hole and coming up through the floorboards.”
Miraculously, not a single 303rd ship was lost, though 14 suffered flak damage to varying degrees. And for all this, the Wing failed to get its bomb loads anywhere near the real target. Major Mitchell reported that “we took interval for the target. The 384th Group turned back to the left, which put the 303rd between them and the primary target. We turned left to get behind the 384th Group again and they bombed a little town, believed to be Coesfeld, Germany.”
Bud Klint recorded that “We headed for Münster, but something else went awry. The lead bombardier of our Group synchronized on a small town to the northwest of the city—Coesfeld. He may have hit it, but most of the other ships in the Group were in a turn at the time of release, and it is hard to say where their bombs may have landed.”
Elmer Brown described the fiasco best of all by writing: “The Wing got all screwed up before the target and the bombs were dropped everywhere.”
The B-17s now turned for England, and as they did Bud Klint glanced out the Lady’s right cockpit window, where “the town of Münster was plainly in sight. It was plainly evident, too, that someone had hit the target, for there was a terrific column of smoke rising from the center of town.”
Not until the 303rd got home under the protective wings of its P-47 escort, however, would the men learn how terrible a price had been paid for that “terrific column of smoke.” When he found out, Elmer Brown wrote pensively: “Over 30 B-17s were lost. Only one plane came back out of one group.”
Hullar fingered the unfortunate unit when he noted: “The 100th Group was wiped out by fighters in seven minutes.”
The day had been a disaster for the Third Division, whose lead Wing—the 13th CBW—suffered 13 aborts en route to the target. Then its fighter escort failed to show—the 355th Fighter Group, given the critical leg over the target, never got off the ground due to fog. Finally, there was a snafu in the Second Division’s North Sea diversion. The lead B-24 lost all electrical power, and with it the ability to communicate by radio. Despite frantic hand signals and flares, the rest of the Division followed the lead ship home when it aborted.
Thus, when the 13th CBW got to Münster, over 350 German fighters were waiting. They zeroed in on the low 100th Group—known as “The Bloody 100th” forever after—shooting down 12 of 14 ships. They next took on the high 390th Group, destroying eight out of 18 B-17s. They turned to the lead 95th Group, knocking down five of 17 Forts. Four other Third Division bombers fell, plus another one from the First Division. Total losses were 30, plus three Category Es.
The price of daylight precision bombing was becoming prohibitive, but there was one more mission to go before “Black Week” would be over. The First Division would occupy the eye of the storm on this one, in what many consider the fiercest aerial battle of all time.