Black Thursday, October 14, 1943
FOG COVERED ENGLAND the morning after Münster, and all over East Anglia the Eighth’s bomber bases were quiet—there was no mission on. The losses the Eighth had suffered during its last three raids—88 heavy bombers, plus eight Category Es—far exceeded those of any comparable period, but Hap Arnold was still focusing on what had been achieved rather than its cost. On October 11th he sent General Eaker a telegram which confidently predicted a turn of the tide:
“The employment of larger bombing forces on successive days is encouraging proof that you are putting an increasing proportion of your bombers where they will hurt the enemy. Good work. As you turn your effort away from ship-building cities and towards crippling the sources of the still-growing German fighter forces the air war is clearly moving toward our supremacy in the air. Carry on.”
This was exactly what Eaker and Anderson intended to do. The weather remained bad on October 12th, but that afternoon General Anderson and VIII Bomber Command put the finishing touches to a new plan and then briefed General Eaker on it. On the next clear day over the Continent the Eighth would return to Schweinfurt, the most heavily defended target in Hitler’s Reich.
The attack appeared to be a clear military necessity. General Eaker was aware that the Germans were putting maximum pressure on neutral Sweden for its total ball bearing output, and that they were scouring the Continent for other sources of supply. He knew too, that the damage done to Schweinfurt on August 17th had not been that great, and photoreconnaissance flights confirmed that Germany would soon have its most important ball bearing factories back up to full production.
Thus, if the Eighth was to destroy the Luftwaffe by cutting this strategic jugular, the time to do so was now, regardless of cost.
October 13th offered no opportunity. Fog continued to blanket England, and the still cloudy skies over Europe gave VIII Bomber Command only two options: Waste another day or try a PFF mission. General Anderson opted for the latter, but the effort was stillborn. Elmer Brown wrote that “we started out to bomb Emden, but it was recalled before we left England.”
That afternoon, however, the picture started to change. There was no reason to think the fog over England would lift, but the 1600 weather briefing at Pinetree showed encouraging signs: It appeared the sky over Germany would be clear the next day. And so General Anderson put out the fateful order—there was a mission tomorrow and the target was Schweinfurt.
The word went through the chain of command as on any other operation, finally being passed by teletype to the bomb groups, where the plan would be completed down to the last detail. At Molesworth, Captain Mel Schulstad was one of those playing his part as Assistant Group Operations Officer.
“I was working with the squadron operations officers, telling them how many planes we needed from each squadron, and figuring out where they would be assigned. These discussions became fierce fights and got pretty personal because so much was at stake. I’d tell one guy we needed so many airplanes and crews from his squadron, he’d say it wasn’t possible because of battle damage or whatever, and we’d go around and around till things were worked out.”
This day Major Ed Snyder was slated to lead both the 427th Squadron and the Group, flying Mr. Five by Five as part of Jake James’s crew—James, now a Captain, had taken over for Strickland’s crew when they finished their missions and went home. Lt. Carl Hokans was the lead navigator and the lead bombardier was none other than Mac McCormick, who had traded places with James’s regular bombardier, Lt. Walter Witt, for this all-important effort. Leading the Squadron’s second element was David Shelhamer (he was a Captain now, too), while Hullar’s crew flew the No. 6 position off Shelhamer’s left wing in Luscious Lady.
The 360th was high squadron, but ships and crews from the 358th helped complete its formation. Among them were Lt. Roy Sanders’s crew filling the No. 5 position in Joan of Arc, B-17F 42-29477, and Lt. Bill Fort’s crew (with Lt. Calder Wise as Instructor Pilot again) flying the No. 6 slot in Yankee Doodle Dandy. The 359th filled six of the seven low squadron slots. The No. 5 position was taken by a crew on their fifth raid, Lt. Ambrose Grant’s in the Cat O’ 9 Tails, B-17F 42-5482, while the No. 6 position was filled by Flight Officer T.J. Quinn’s crew in Wallaroo. Completing the formation in the tail-end Charlie position was Lt. Jack Hendry’s crew in their favorite Fortress, the War Bride, B-17F 42-5360.
The 427th Squadron’s Mr. Five by Five, B-17F 42-29955, GN
T, lead ship of the 303rd during Second Schweinfurt. Pictured are Capt. Jake James and some of the crew who led the Group on the mission. (Photo was taken ten days before “Black Thursday.”) Bottom row, L-R, Sgt. F. Kuehl (not on mission); Sgt. F.B. Knight, ball turret; Sgt. J.J. Scheueuer, top turret; Sgt. J.E. Tripp (not on mission); Sgt. A.J. Hamilton, right waist. Top row, L-R, Lt. Paul W. Scoggins, (not on mission); Lt. R.W. Whitcomb, (not on mission); Capt. J.M. Strickland (not on mission); Capt. J.C. James; Col. Kermit D. Stevens, 303rd CO (not on mission); and Lt. B.K. Butt (not on mission). (Photo courtesy Paul W. Scoggins.)
At the time these assignments were made, most of the men had no idea what lay ahead; only lead crews were put in the know as part of the standard mission routine. But Molesworth was alive with men in the early morning hours beginning to get the planes ready to go. It was impossible to see them going to work in the darkness and the fog, but as he toiled through the night, Captain Mel Schulstad kept an ear cocked for their first stirrings.
“When the ground crews got out to the hardstands, one of the first things they did was to start a portable gasoline engine. They used it to provide electric power to the airplane and lighting to work. You’d hear the noise as a simple ‘putt-putt-putt’ when the first engine was started, and then soon it would be joined by others and grow until you heard this ‘hummmmm’ coming in from the hardstands. To me there was always a terrible drama about it greater than the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, or the beginning of any symphony. When you heard that sound, you knew for sure that today men were going to die.”
On no day of the Eighth’s air war was this truer than “Black Thursday,” October 14, 1943.
The 303rd’s ordnance personnel bomb Vicious Virgin, B-17F 42-5341, GNQ, up for a mission. One of the 427th Squadron’s best B-17s, she later became the Hullar crew’s second regularly assigned ship. Note the portable gasoline engine just to the right of the bomb dolly beneath the Virgin’s nose. These were used to provide power at the hardstand for lighting and the aircrafts’ electrical systems. Of their noise in the mornings before a mission, Mel Schulstad recalls: “When you heard that sound, you knew for sure that today men were going to die.” (Photo courtesy Mrs. Lorraine Shelhamer.)
The bomber crews were roused at 0630 for breakfast at 0700 and then the crews filed into the officers’ and enlisted briefing rooms to get the word at the 0800 briefings. Mac McCormick already knew what the objective was, but there was no way to soften the blow which hit the other officers in Hullar’s crew when the curtain was raised.
“Schweinfurt again!” is how Hullar began his notebook entry, and Elmer Brown started his diary for the day with exactly the same words.
Klint’s reaction was visceral: “When they uncovered the map, and showed us going back to Schweinfurt again, it was like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Again, the keynote of the CO’s introductory remarks was: ‘Today’s raid, if successful, can shorten the war by six months.’”
At the enlisted briefing, Miller remembers “sitting down with the rest of the fellows and wondering what that map was going to look like when they took the cover off. A couple of officers came in and someone yelled ‘Attention.’ We stood up, then sat back down, and my heart started beating a little faster as the suspense of waiting to see where that red line went up.
“Then they peeled the cover off the map, and we were a bit startled to see the line go deep into southern Germany again—to Schweinfurt. I knew then that we were in for a bad day.”
George Hoyt recalls “being told at the briefing that the ball bearing factory at Schweinfurt, which we had knocked out on August 17th, was now back to 65 percent of production, and we were going back to destroy it again. This was not agreeable news.”
Norman Sampson remembers feeling that “this mission was going to be the roughest of them all. They knew we would be back, and would be ready for us with more planes than they had the first time.”
Intelligence estimated that the bombers would be facing 1100 German fighters, and since U.S. fighter escort couldn’t penetrate deeper than Aachen, all the B-17s had to oppose this strength was their own numbers. The plan called for a mass assault on Schweinfurt with every bomber the Eighth’s three divisions could muster: 360 B-17s and 60 B-24s.
The First Division was designated the first air task force and was to send its three combat wings—the 40th Wing leading, followed by the 1st and 41st Wings—on a more-or-less direct route to the target running just north of Aachen. The Third Division’s three wings formed a second air task force. They would follow the First to Aachen at a 10-minute interval, taking a parallel track 30 miles to the south. During this time the two forces were to fly with division formations as near to line abreast as possible, creating a gigantic wedge going into Germany.
303rd Bomb Group Mission Route(s): Schweinfurt, October 14, 1943. (Map courtesy Waters Design Associates, Inc.)
Beyond Aachen the First Division was to continue along its original track while the Third cut sharply south, flying along the Belgian-German border. The First Division was to draw off most enemy fighters as it flew to a point north of Frankfurt am Main, where it would take a southeasterly course to its IP west of Würtzburg and southwest of Schweinfurt. The Third Division would continue south just inside the German border halfway down Luxembourg, where it would swing on a course due west to its IP northwest of Würtzburg, following the First Division into Schweinfurt.
Meanwhile, the 60 B-24s of the Second Division, constituting a third air task force, would use their faster cruising speed and greater fuel endurance on a more extended route to the south. They were to arrive over Schweinfurt shortly after the Third Division dropped its bombs.
After the plan was outlined, John Doherty remembers that “the officer who gave us the briefing said, ‘Gentlemen, look to your right. That man won’t be coming back.’”
George Hoyt “did not see anybody flinching,” but in the officers’ briefing, David Shelhamer’s keen eye took in a correlation between the length of the tape going out to the target and another, human line.
“Our Catholic Chaplain, Father Ed Skoner, would wait at the end of the briefing hut to pray over any crewmen who wanted a blessing before a mission. The longer the ribbon, the more crew were back there kneeling in front of the priest. On the day of Second Schweinfurt, the men who had been unfortunate enough to go on the first Schweinfurt mission lined right up like a British queue. It was really something to see.”
The bomber crews arrived at their aircraft around 0935, an hour and ten minutes before takeoff. Once there, Hullar, Klint, and Rice conferred with the Lady’s ground crew and went through their preflight routines. Miller and the other gunners “checked all our equipment, our guns, and everything we could so we could feel a little bit better, a little bit safer.”
As Norman Sampson explains, “Each gun on our plane meant the life of our crew.”
Extra ammunition was especially important. The Lady had two extra ammunition boxes installed in the tail gunner’s compartment, which were filled to overflowing, but more vital still was the extra ammo secreted aboard in portable boxes. On First Schweinfurt the Lady had about 12,000 .50-caliber rounds aboard; today she was crammed with over 14,000 rounds.
Other crews followed suit. David Shelhamer remembers that “On Second Schweinfurt I loaded about half a ton of extra ammunition aboard because, having had the pleasure of going on the first mission, I knew quite well what to expect”.
John Doherty likewise explains that “We had been on the first Schweinfurt mission and most of us took new gun barrels and extra ammunition, a considerable amount more than we normally carried, which was a real lucky thing because we had used it all up by the time we got back.”
Ed Snyder would have intervened, had he known. Weight loading for this mission was especially tight. Elmer Brown wrote that “This time we had a bomb bay tank on the left side. The bomb load was three 1000-lb. bombs and three 100-lb. incendiaries.”
And yet, as Snyder recalls: “The gunners, everyone who fired a gun for that matter, tried to take additional ammo. It was done in an emotional, unscientific way. They didn’t ask, ‘Will this airplane fly with this much weight on board?’ The airplanes were overloaded with fuel and bombs as it was, so we had to go out and take ammunition off because many guys would have creamed themselves otherwise. It made a lot of them real unhappy but they would have stalled out on takeoff and never gotten off the ground. The old B-17 did all kinds of things they said it couldn’t, so they figured it always would. But there was a limit.”
Hullar’s and Shelhamer’s crews escaped their Squadron Commander’s notice, and there finally came a point where all the preparations, good and bad, ended in the foggy stillness. As on August 17th, the crews were left to wait for the word—to go or not to go.
In Luscious Lady, Bud Klint put his thoughts down on paper: “The fog still hangs on, and we’re still trying to get a raid off. Today we’re scheduled to go back to Schweinfurt. With 1100 fighters in range of our course, and 56 flak guns over the target alone, it promises to be rough.* If we get it off. Our first trip to that target was the roughest one I have been on to date. Maybe we’ll hit a new high today. My only prayer is that we come through as well as we did then.”
In Yankee Doodle Dandy, Lt. Bill Fort was similarly preoccupied: “we were scheduled to go to Schweinfurt, which had a reputation for being a real tough target. The weather was terrible, and I never thought we’d get off the ground, figuring they would scrub it most any time. But they put us in the air anyway.”
This decision was made after a weather report was passed to VIII Bomber Command from a British Mosquito reconnoitering over Germany. The sky was crystal clear. General Anderson put out the fateful, final order: “Let the bombers take off.”
All over East Anglia the Eighth’s bomber bases now rang with the noise of radial engines as Wright Cyclones and Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasps coughed and came to life on more than 400 B-17s and B-24s. They taxied from their hardstands and waddled to their runways, turning onto them and disappearing into the foggy air one by one.
At Molesworth, Major Ed Snyder and Captain Jake James’s crew was first, speeding down the main east-west runway in Mr. Five by Five and climbing aloft right on time at 1045. Three bombers later, Captain David Shelhamer got Vicious Virgin up at 1047. The timing of these takeoffs is all the more remarkable when one learns how they were done. David Shelhamer describes the procedure:
“The airdrome was fogbound, and the ceiling was zero. When we taxied to the takeoff end of the runway there was a jeep there that would get ahead of the aircraft about 100 to 150 feet. It would then start right down the center of the runway at about 15 to 20 mph, while the aircraft followed directly behind it. We established a direct course down the center of the runway, locked the tailwheel, and set the gyrocompass to ‘zero it out.’ The gyrocompass was extremely sensitive and would react immediately to any change in course. The jeep then pulled away from the aircraft and we went on full power.”
At 1048 Bob Hullar got a signal that the runway was clear and Luscious Lady began her run. As the overloaded Lady lifted off, the crew encountered the first of the mission’s many hazards. George Hoyt remembers that “we were violently buffeted about by the propwash of the plane that took off seconds before us. I always sweated this out, since it took place only 30 to 50 feet off the end of the runway, with treetops and rooftops whipping by just under our wing.”
The Group takeoffs continued until 1057, when Lt. Jack Hendry got the War Bride in the air, the Group’s 20th and last ship. Now the 303rd faced the difficult task of assembling above the cloud cover and joining up with the 379th and 384th Groups to complete the Wing. Captain James’s Group Leader’s Report describes this phase:
“We climbed to 6,500 feet before breaking out of the lower overcast. Then we continued our climb through a cloud-free space of about 700 feet, at which time we began to climb through another cloud layer, which we broke out of at 9,000 feet. Our assembly was made at 11,500 feet and we left the base on course for Eyebrook on time. On leaving the base we had spotted the other two Groups of the Combat Wing. We got into Combat Wing Formation slowly en route to Eyebrook. We experienced a lot of high cloud around the English Coast and gained and lost altitude intermittently to avoid this cloud. We left the English Coast about seven minutes late, probably due to turning south to go around a very heavy cloud layer at the intended point of departure from the English Coast.”
Though assembly went reasonably well for the 41st Wing, the same cannot be said for the First Division’s other two wings. The 40th CBW was to head the Division, but when its three groups and those of the 1st CBW sorted themselves out in mid-Channel, the latter was in the lead with the 305th Group of the 40th CBW flying an unorthodox “double high” position in its formation—the two remaining groups of the 40th Wing, the 92nd and 306th, were trailing behind. The First Division was flying into battle in disarray, its lead wings in poor condition to meet the German onslaught.
The Third Division’s assembly went more smoothly; its seven groups crossed the English coast in proper order on track 10 miles to the south of the First Division. In contrast, the B-24s of the Second Division never assembled at all—of the 60 Liberators scheduled for the raid, only 29 came together above the cloud cover. This paltry force was ordered to abandon the main effort, and instead was fated to conduct an ineffectual feint towards Emden.
Aborts reduced the weight of American numbers further as the B-17s crossed the Channel. The Third Division lost 18 out of 160 aircraft. The First Division’s ranks were cut from 164 to 149. In the 41st Wing, the 384th lost two of 19 Forts, the 379th pressed on with 17 ships, and the 303rd had two of 20 B-17s return.
Of the cross-Channel flight, Elmer Brown wrote: “We switched the gasoline over and dropped the [bomb bay] tank before we reached Holland. We had P-38 escorts at first, and then P-47s.”
George Hoyt and Merlin Miller also saw the twin-boomed fighters, which were from a new unit in the ETO, the 55th Fighter Group. The Lightnings had been ordered to escort the Fortresses as far as Flushing, Holland, but their mission was canceled at the last moment because of problems the big fighters still had operating in the ETO’s frigid air. From what Hullar’s crew observed, however, some of these eager fighter pilots either “didn’t get the word” or chose to ignore it. Unhappily, George Hoyt recalls that “little if any enemy fighters were spotted during the P-38 escort time.”
The primary defense would remain the Fortresses’ firepower, and readying this defense was the final prebattle ritual. In the Lady, Norman Sampson had long since gotten into the ball turret.
“When we got off the ground, the turret was locked into place with the guns pointed towards the tail. As soon as possible I entered the turret through the door, put the safety belt on my back, and locked the door from the inside with two handles. I decided to wear a chest-type parachute. It made for close quarters, but I felt more comfortable with it. If something happened I could just roll back, unfasten the safety belt, open the door, and roll out. I put the power on, and was free to move the turret all around to protect the bottom on the plane.”
Dale Rice got into the top turret, perched on its “bicycle seat,” turned on its electrohydraulic power drives, and was soon rotating his twin .50s to protect the top of Luscious Lady fore and aft. Merlin Miller also took to his bicycle seat in the tail, and prepared himself to protect her rear with his flexible twin guns:
“Crossing the Channel we had fighter escort, but I knew they couldn’t stay very long, and it was going to be a long fight in and out if the last Schweinfurt mission was any indication. So I sat there, anticipating things, wondering what was going to happen, how the mission was going to go, and I got a little tense.
“Then all of a sudden I realized the battle was going to start pretty soon, and I said to myself, ‘Merlin, get mad, get angry.’ I started thinking about the Germans, what they were trying to do to us, what I was going to do to them, anything to stir up my blood and get anger coursing through my system, anything to take away from that feeling of fear I otherwise would have had. By this time I had figured out that it was difficult for a person to feel two emotions at the same time. In combat I thought I was better off being angry than afraid.
“Pretty soon I heard a call on the interphone. It was Hullar saying, ‘Crew, check your guns.’ So I hand-charged each machine gun and fired a short burst from each one, and said, ‘Tail guns okay.”’
The process was repeated all the way up to the Lady’s nose as each man at a machine gun tested it and reported in. Hullar’s crew was as ready as they would ever be for the fight which lay ahead.
At the head of the First Division, the 1st CBW crossed the Dutch coast at 1250 in the company of P-47 escorts from the 353rd Fighter Group. At 1311, the 41st CBW also crossed the enemy coast, and Elmer Brown wrote that “P-47s took us into just south of ‘Happy Valley,’ or rather the town of Bonn. We saw several dogfights.”
The Thunderbolts stayed with the Fortresses approximately 25 minutes, but even as they did, B-17s were leaving the 41st Wing from the 384th Group. Four of their Fortresses turned back due to various problems over enemy territory. Their loss left the 384th terribly exposed. It now had only three B-17s in its high squadron, four in its lead, and six in its low.
While this was occurring, Captain David Shelhamer had a few brief moments to observe events in the wings ahead.
“The visibility was unbelievably beautiful. You could see the Swiss Alps about 200 miles to the south. I was personally aware of at least four B-17s swinging out of formations from other groups heading right straight down to the Alps. With the fighter opposition that was only moments away from us, it is very questionable whether they were able to make it to Switzerland.”
A short time later, Lt. Bill Fort saw what Shelhamer was talking about: “There was a wing ahead of us about a couple of miles. They seemed to be hit real hard. We saw a number of planes explode, and others going down.”
Meanwhile, George Hoyt saw “a lone Me-109 paralleling our course on our starboard side about four o’clock high. I swung my flexible .50-caliber to frame him in my ring sight. He appeared to be 800 yards or better out, and I hesitated to see if he would turn to attack. In a split second he did, and I hosed him with two good short bursts, giving a good allowance for the trajectory drop at this range. Much to my surprise, he appeared to be hit. He abruptly broke off his attack by throwing one wing up and made a long dive out of my field of vision. I breathed a sigh of relief.”
This single encounter was like a raindrop before a cloudburst; after the P-47s left, the storm struck with indescribable fury, progressively engulfing each wing of the First Division as it flew to meet the enemy.
The first two combat wings were decimated. The 1st CBW and its tagalong, the 305th Group, lost 13 of 55 aircraft. Twelve of these came from the 305th, leaving it with three ships. The 40th CBW fared even worse. On the way to Schweinfurt its 92nd Group lost five of 19 and the 306th Group 10 of 18.
The story of the 41 CBW’s ordeal is less well known. What happened to the Hell’s Angels and to the other groups in the Wing is a tale worth telling, for on Black Thursday no part of the sky was still.
Elmer Brown’s diary sets the tone for what took place around 1345, just east of Aachen: “We had fighter attacks from that time to the target and deep in France. We were fighting for over two and a half hours constantly.” They came, quite literally, in the hundreds: FW-190S, Me-109s, Me-110s, Me-410s, Ju-88s, Do-217s, and “at least 3 FW-189s,” a twin-engine, twin-tailed reconnaissance plane whose presence shows how completely the Germans were pulling out the stops.
Official 303rd reports describe it this way: “At least 300 E/A were seen. Generally speaking the E/A seemed to have tried just about everything…The attacks by E/A were made from all around the clock generally from the high and level positions. Most of the T/E [twin-engine] fighters attacked from the side—chiefly on the nine o’clock side. FW-190s attacked from the nose. The E/A carrying rockets made their attacks from the tail. Several T/E fighters slow-rolled through the formation to break it up. The rocket carrying E/A attacked in trail usually three at a time…The attacks are reported as particularly vicious and the pilots gave every indication of being experienced and clever. The Yellow Nose FW-190s were particularly effective in their attacks.”
Up to this point in the Eighth’s air war, Major Ed Snyder felt that he had pretty much seen it all. Though he missed First Schweinfurt, he had flown so many other missions that they had almost become routine. Now he realized he was in the center of something truly exceptional.
“There was a tremendous amount of aerial combat activity going on the whole time. On all the missions I had been on before, there always seemed to be goodly periods when nothing was really happening. You just anticipated the enemy being there. On this mission there was always something going on, flak or fighters all the way in, and all the way out.”
The impression was the same from front and rear. In the War Bride’s tail, John Doherty remembers that “going in, we’d be picked up by a group of fighters. When they got to where their fuel supply was getting low, they’d go down and you could see another bunch coming up. It was kind of a comical situation in one way; the one bunch would leave you, and the other bunch would start coming up at about 10,000 feet. That’s the way they kept us all the way into the target.
“You could also see these flak guns shooting, because you were looking right down into the barrels when they’d shoot and you could see the fire. And then you would sit there and say to yourself, ‘Well, I wonder where that one’s gonna hit? I wonder how close that one’s gonna be?’ You could see them all along in different places like that.”
Ed Snyder continues: “You could see fires all over the place, and parachutes dropping all over the place. You can’t believe the number of aircraft that were being shot down, the number attacked, and the different kinds of aircraft that were involved. The Germans came at us with just about everything in their inventory. On one occasion I saw a German fighter come through our formation that was badly hit. The pilot must have been wounded or killed because he jammed the controls. As he went past under our wing his left wing was where his nose should have been. He just skidded through the formation sideways.”
Just behind Snyder in Vicious Virgin, David Shelhamer had a different kind of head-on encounter: “I very vividly recall this one FW-190 who obviously was attempting a head-on ram on my aircraft. He was not firing at all when he was well within his own range. Our rate of closure had to be about 400 to 450 mph, and I eased the aircraft down, realizing full well that he was attempting a ram. It required split-second timing, but my timing was good. I pulled the aircraft up and he went about 50 feet under me. I will never forget the green scarf that German pilot had around his neck.”
Frightening as these experiences were, many veterans, particularly the pilots, say that they were simply “too busy to be scared.” As Ed Snyder explains, “I was concerned about my own safety, but that had to take its place at the back of my mind as long as we were not on fire, or incapable of flying. I was too busy trying to make everything in the formation work properly to get too concerned. I don’t mean this to sound macho or anything. That’s just the way it was. There was just too damn much going on.”
Every crew was now locked in the ultimate test of teamwork. Hullar’s fought with hardly a moment’s pause. Lt. Witt was at the Lady’s single .50-caliber in the nose; while he fired at fighters making head-on attacks, Elmer Brown was “crouching behind him looking to see which way they would break. I would jump to either the left or right cheek gun and try to get a few rounds off.” In his diary, Brown also wrote that “Jerry would cue up at about one-thirty [o’clock’] time and again and attack our lead group.”
In the cockpit, Hullar and Klint were consumed by the twin tasks of staying in formation and taking evasive action. At debriefing they complained of “too much variation in airspeed over enemy territory. Varied from 130 to 170 mph.” Their job was made doubly hard by the need to take evasive action, as Bud Klint explains:
“We were tucked away in the No. 6 position of the lead squadron, and while this offered a definite advantage from the standpoint of enemy fighters, we were hemmed in on all sides by other B-17s. The Forts were packed in a tight defensive formation, and everyone was using violent evasive action, which was an added hazard. Bob and I were trying to get the most evasive action possible without ramming one of our own planes.
“Evasive action was largely a psychological thing. Probably our chances of kicking the airplane into the path of enemy shells were almost as good as kicking it out of their path. In addition, those violent gyrations certainly made an unstable platform for our gunners, and disrupted their aim. In spite of this, it was a tremendous psychological boost for everybody on the airplane, and it was virtually impossible for Bob and me to sit in the cockpit and hold the airplane straight and level while we were under attack by enemy fighters. We just felt that we had to do something.
“We both were on the controls almost constantly doing evasive action. The sky was literally filled with aircraft, and we were trying to hold as tight a defensive formation as possible. Bob was responsible for aircraft to our left and I was responsible for those to our right. When he would kick the plane to the right it was up to me to kick it back when we got too close to some other aircraft. There was no method or plan to the evasive action we took. We just did whatever we felt was necessary—kick the rudder, drop a wing, pull the nose down, anything that occurred to us that we could do in the limited airspace we occupied.
“The B-17 had no boosters on the controls. It was a very stable airplane and easy to fly on a straight-and-level path. But when you did strenuous evasive action it really required a lot of muscle and a lot of perspiration. Evasive action would wear one pilot out in a very short period of time.”
Bob Hullar offered a more succinct explanation of these efforts in his notebook, where he wrote that “Bill and I worked like Hell on evasive action.”
Amazingly, however, Hullar found time for humor during the worst of all this. In his diary, Elmer Brown noted that “They were firing a lot of rockets at us. We sure took plenty of evasive action. In the midst of the battle the flying got a little rough, and on the interphone Hullar said, ‘Oh, my aching back,’ just as innocent as he could be. Rice said, ‘Is someone calling the engineer?’”
“Bill and I worked like Hell on evasive action,” Interior of a B-17F cockpit. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Jean J. Hullar.)
When he wasn’t trading quips from the top turret, Dale Rice was firing nonstop at enemy fighters, and using his position’s superior visibility to call them out to the other gunners. Merlin Miller vividly recalls Rice’s help with some Me-110s making head-on attacks:
“I heard Rice call out, ‘Fighter over the top!’ Then a 110 came over the top of our tail upside-down. He seemed to hang there for a moment and I could see the pilot so clearly that if he hadn’t been wearing an oxygen mask I could have recognized him on the street. But the plane was going too fast for me to react.
“So I called to Dale and said, ‘Rice, one of those fighters comes over the top again, tell me where and when and maybe I can take a crack at him too.’ Rice said okay and the next time an Me-110 came over I was ready. My guns were pointed up, and when I saw the German I held the triggers down. He flew through the bullets, and pieces flew off of his airplane.”
It wasn’t all give for Rice, however, as George Hoyt explains: “At one point Dale ducked down out of his Plexiglas dome in the top turret to get some reload belts of ammo on the floor. While he was down a couple of slugs went through the Plexiglas right where his head would have been.” Rice fought the rest of the mission with the wind screaming through the splintered dome.
For Hoyt, the big shock was the large number of rocket attacks from the rear:
“I kept thinking, ‘How can the Jerries have so many rocket-firing Me-110s?!’ They would hang out beyond the effective range of our .50-calibers and fire their rockets into our formation.
“As soon as I saw the flashes when they fired, I would call to Hullar to ‘Kick it around!’ You could track the rockets as they came in. It always seemed to me that Hullar would dive out of the way just as the rockets zoomed over the top of the radio room.
“After rocketing us the Jerries would bear in with guns blazing, and that was when Dale, Merlin, and I really zeroed in on these boys. Through all of this it was very hard to hold one’s fire to short bursts to keep from burning out the machine gun barrel.”
The first encounter with rocket-firing fighters also took Merlin Miller by surprise: “I looked up and saw two Ju-88s sitting in the back wingtip-to-wingtip. I wondered ‘What are those bastards up to?’ because they didn’t seem to be closing in. They just sat there. All of a sudden I saw big smoke puffs from under the wings of both planes, like they’d been hit. Then, to my dismay, I saw four ‘gizmos’ coming at us which looked like black softballs. I pushed down on my mike button and yelled to Hullar, ‘Kick it, kick it!’ He bounced the airplane around and the four rockets exploded above us.
“I got used to it after this, and would tell Hullar to get ready to either climb or dive when the rocket ships lined up. When I said ‘Kick it!’ he would abruptly maneuver up or down, depending on which way he was heading at the time. As things turned out, none of the rockets actually exploded too close to us.”
While all this was going on, George Hoyt “could feel through the soles of my flying boots Norman down in the ball turret firing away at Jerry. He had a lonely and detached station down there with his Sperry computing gunsight.” The Lady’s evasive action didn’t make his job any easier, as Sampson himself explains:
“The gunsight was a frame which had two lines, with one on each end of a box. You turned handles to ‘frame’ an enemy fighter between the lines as it came in. When you had the fighter framed, you shot at him by pushing the firing buttons, which were on top of the handles. I searched mostly to the sides and the tail because there was a lot of blocked-out area up front from the body of the plane and the propellers. The turret had stops that wouldn’t let you fire there. Also, the head-on attacks came too fast for the sight.
“I didn’t have any trouble spotting the enemy fighters. You could see them way off like vultures before they came in. But shooting them down was another thing. Just about the time I got a good frame on one of them, someone would call out for evasive action.”
Back in the waist, Marson and Fullem were busy at their hand-held guns, and the image of them in action is something George Hoyt will always carry with him:
“Through the open radio room door I caught glimpses of Chuck and Pete firing away at their right and left flexible guns. Chuck Marson was a bit superstitious about the door, and insisted that I keep it open despite the slipstream that blasted back through my open upper hatch. But seeing him and Pete at their guns gave me a great feeling of confidence. Our tracer ammunition had been eliminated before this mission, since the powers that be had decided that it threw our aim off in aerial combat. So all of us at the flexible guns were on our toes to use our sights to the best of our ability. You had to be good to hit anything with these guns, and both of them were.
“Through the open radio room door I caught glimpses of Chuck and Pete firing away at their right and left flexible guns.” The interior of a B-17F waist looking forward toward the open radio room door. In the center is the frame and upper portion of the ball turret. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Jean J. Hullar.)
“Marson was a real pro in every way. The .50-caliber had a recoil plunger and spring device which impacted against the metal discs that were on the backplate. Marson had taken the gun’s backplate off and he added some coins to the discs to make the plunger and spring go faster. This upped the rate of fire, but it also increased the danger of the gun ‘blowing’ or the barrel burning out unless you stayed down to very short bursts. Marson knew just how to handle it. With him at the gun I knew I had nothing to worry about.
“Pete didn’t have the familiarity with guns that Chuck had, but he was a quiet, tenacious gunner who never complained or backed down in any way. Bob Hullar always showed complete confidence in him, and that was good enough for me. Pete was a great guy.”
In the Lady’s tail, Merlin Miller was performing his one and only real duty: “My job was to protect the airplane. The fun really started after our fighter escort left. I looked back and saw maybe six to eight enemy fighters behind us, so I called to the crew, ‘Fighters, six o’clock.’ I watched them as they strung out one behind the other, and started in. Then I called, ‘Bandits, six o’clock.’
“When they got to within 500 to 700 yards I fired a couple of short bursts to discourage them from coming in closer. But they came in hard, and fast, and that’s when I started to get really angry, because the closer they got, the more dangerous they were. From here on in it was just a matter of shooting and calling the fighters out to the other gunners as they came in and went past.
“We all had to work together. I relied on Sammy to see below and behind us, and on Rice to see above and behind us. Marson and Fullem would keep me posted too, and I would call out any fighters I saw, particularly when more than one was coming in at the tail so that Bob Hullar could skid the plane sideways a bit and maybe give one of the other gunners another shot. We worked together that way all the time. It was the only way we could survive.”
So it went all during the flight from east of Aachen to the IP between 1345 and 1437, each crew doing their utmost to stay alive. In the low squadron, Lt. Jack Hendry moved to the No. 6 slot from tail-end Charlie after another bomber aborted, but the Group’s records show him waltzing the War Bride with Wallaroo all through the fighter-filled sky that day. A formation diagram note says: “Ship #029 and #360 flew Nos. 3 and 6 position alternately due to intense enemy opposition.”
It was near the IP that enemy opposition reached its greatest intensity, for the Germans knew this was their last chance to stop the 41st Wing. Their all-out assault finally bore fruit against the low 384th Group. Three B-17s went down—at 1425, at 1430, and at 1431. Shortly thereafter, Bud Klint witnessed other losses from German rockets.
“As we began our bomb run, I saw three ‘17s from the Wing ahead completely disintegrate and fall earthward in flaming shreds. This served as my introduction to the ‘rocket gun,’ which played an ever-increasing part in the European air war.”
This happened as the Wing’s three groups shifted out of the combat box into a line-astern formation in order to begin individual runs on the target—the Kugelfischer ball bearing plant in the center of Schweinfurt. The 379th went first, the 384th second, and the 303rd last.
Captain James wrote in his Group Leader’s Narrative that “At the IP we made a left hand turn and made our run on the target on a magnetic heading of 40 degrees at 24,000 feet using AFCE…Flak in the target area was moderate and accurate. Enemy fighter attacks began on us before we reached the IP and continued to the target.” In another report, he added: “I have never seen the like of those fighters in my life.”
Ed Snyder recalls these moments well: “As we got into the target area and got onto the IP, we were attacked very heavily by twin-engine German fighters. One of them put a cannon shell or two into our radio room and blew a good portion of the radios up. But it didn’t disturb the bomb run.
“Back in the tail I had a pilot, Lt. John Barker, riding as an observer to help me with the formation. He was going crazy because there were these 109s, 110s, 210s, and 410s back there shooting at us. He kept screaming, and I finally did have to cut him off. I can remember Mac very calmly saying, ‘Please tell him we can’t do anything now. I’m on the bomb run.’ There was only one thing on Mac’s mind, and that was to put those bombs on the target.”
Lt. Barker later offered this assessment: “It was a hell of a day. I’ll bet there were over 300 enemy planes.”
The twin-engine fighter that hit Mr. Five by Five’s radio room may well have been an Me-410 that attacked at 1438. It came in from about four o’clock level to about 400 yards and the right waist gunner, Sgt. Daniel Harmes, fired about 100 rounds in two bursts. He told the interrogator: “He went down out of control—parachuted out about 1000 feet below, and plane was observed to crash.” Sgt. Harmes got credit for a kill.
The 303rd’s mission file contains so many combat reports from this phase of the fight that a chronological account of what took place would be meaningless. But the experiences of individual crews, as reflected in the records and their own words, do provide one way of sensing what Black Thursday was really like. What follows is a selected chronology, set against the larger backdrop of events in the Wing, showing part of what happened to six of the 303rd’s crews: Bob Hullar’s, Lt. Bill Fort’s, Lt. Ambrose Grant’s, Lt. Jack Hendry’s, Captain Lake James’s, and Captain David Shelhamer’s.
At 1442, a Do-217 went after Luscious Lady. Dale Rice told the interrogator: “He came in from seven o’clock high. He was about 1200 yards away. I kept firing as he came in. At approximately 700 yards he began to smoke. He burst into flames—two men bailed out of E/A. Plane went down.” Rice got a “probable.”
At 1445, the 379th dropped its bombs on Schweinfurt. Just after they went, two of its Forts were lost. Moments later the 384th Group dropped its bombs. Three of its B-17s were shot down, but the action was so hectic they weren’t seen leaving the formation.
Just before the 303rd dropped at 1446, calamity struck Lt. Ambrose Grant’s crew in the Cat O’ 9 Tails. The crew’s engineer, Robert Jaouen, tells what happened:
“For some reason that I do not remember, I was a waist gunner that day. Just before the target, I turned to yell something to Woodrow [Woody] Greenlee, who was on the other waist gun, and there was a bright flash between us. Woody was hit in the right side of his face by an exploding 20mm shell. Ed Sexton, the Radio Operator, came back and bandaged Woody’s face and eye. We didn’t have much time for Woody, as we had to keep shooting in hopes the fighters couldn’t tell one of our crew had been hit.
“They threw everything at us, and the fighters swarmed down in wave after wave. It was a chaotic time for the entire crew, both in trying to protect the plane and in keeping it flying. The Cat O’ 9 Tails was like a sieve. Someone stated there were around 200 holes of various sizes. Ed Sexton, being a devout Catholic, often signed himself. I had seen him do this before, and it hadn’t bothered me. However, things being as they were this day, it scared the hell out of me. I thought that maybe he knew something that I didn’t, and that things were even worse than they appeared.”
In the same seconds before the 303rd’s bombs dropped, a Ju-88 went after Luscious Lady. From the left waist, Pete Fullem saw it coming in “from about seven-thirty o’clock, slightly high, but almost level.”
He said later: “I started firing at him at 600 to 700 yards. Fired several bursts at him as he was coming in. At 200 yards he began smoking, burst into flames, and went down.”
Fullem was credited with a damaged fighter, but the Lady was hit, too. George Hoyt recalls that “Pete threw four .50-caliber slugs from his left waist gun into the leading edge of our left horizontal stabilizer. The armor-piercing bullets ripped through the inner tail structure and came out through the rear, tearing away a section of the elevator some three feet in diameter, and leaving a gaping hole with shreds flapping in the slipstream. I can remember Merlin calling Bob Hullar, saying ‘Hey, we got a hole in the tail right beside me big enough to crawl through.’”
Miller remembers the incident as well and says, “It didn’t seem funny at the time, though we joked with Pete about it later. It was an easy thing to do in the heat of battle.”
Meanwhile, it was Mac McCormick’s moment at Mr. Five by Five’s bombsight. As Ed Snyder recalls, “Mac laid the bombs right on the target.”
Bud Klint later learned that “The bomb run was perfect. Strike photos showed our bombs completely blanketed the target area.”* The 303rd then made a sharp right turn off of the target, returning to its high slot in the wing formation.
“The bomb run was perfect. Strike photos showed our bombs completely blanketed the target area.” 303rd strike photo, October 14, 1943. (Photo courtesy Mrs. Lorraine Shelhamer.)
“As we came out to the south,” Ed Snyder continues, “you could see the fires from the aircraft that had been downed, and the smoke plumes going up. And, of course, we were still under fire.”
The next minute was Merlin Miller’s. At 1447 an Me-109 with a 30mm cannon slung under each wing came in from five o’clock high. These large-caliber guns were truly lethal; three hits, on average, were all it took to kill a B-17.
Not surprisingly, the 109 was, Miller remembers, “one of those fighters you saw every once in a while who was determined to add a B-17 to his score. He came in straight and level with our tail. He throttled back, and I could see his prop slow down. I could see him fishtail as he started to aim at us.
“There wasn’t much doubt who he was going to shoot at, but to put it bluntly, I sneezed first, before he could pull the trigger. I hit his plane just at the base of the left wing where it joins the fuselage, and it blew the wing completely off the airplane. He immediately flipped upside down and spun away. I didn’t have time to see whether or not the pilot bailed out.” Miller got credit for a kill.
At 1449 the Germans claimed the first 303rd Fortress. It was Joan of Arc, flown by Lt. Roy Sanders’s crew. To her left in Yankee Doodle Dandy, Lt. Bill Fort saw the events leading up to Joan of Arc’s demise.
“The sky was covered with quite a number of planes, and debris from planes that had exploded. It was real tough, close fighting. We were being hit from all sides. The slower German fighters were hitting us from the back with 20mm cannon shells and rockets. The Me-110s kept picking on this one plane off our right wing. They knocked all the fabric off its elevator and rudder, and eventually set it on fire, but apparently this didn’t slow the plane down much, since they stayed with us another five to ten minutes.
“Then this German plane came back of us and under us, in a vertical bank that almost cut our wing off, and set the plane on fire again. It was mostly smoke, coming from the bomb bay, and then it flared up. We tried to move over to get out of the way of this plane, and shortly after I looked around and it was gone.” Others in Lt. Fort’s crew reported Joan of Arc being hit in the tail by an Me-110 rocket and going down on fire. Ten chutes were observed.
At 1450, the 379th lost another Fort. An Me-109 collided head-on with the second element leader of the Group’s lead squadron, destroying the 109 and cutting 15 feet off the B-17’s right wing. The Fort dropped out of formation; five chutes were seen.
While this was occurring, Lt. Grant’s Cat O’ 9 Tails was being assailed by FW-190s. Two with yellow noses came in at six o’clock level and Sgt. Francis Anderson opened up on them 600 to 700 yards away from the Cat’s tail. One FW broke away but the other kept coming in, and at 300 to 400 yards Anderson’s fire took effect. The 190 nosed up and seemed to stop in midair. It went into a spin and as it spiraled down, the pilot bailed out. Sgt. Anderson got credit for a kill.
Another yellow-nosed FW-190 attacked Luscious Lady at 1452. From the right waist, Chuck Marson took aim as it came in from five o’clock high. He later told the interrogator:
“I opened fire at 400 to 500 yards, bullets going into engine—Parts of engine began falling off—He began to smoke—His prop stopped completely—Then he rolled on his back and fell down.”
Miller, Hoyt, and Rice were all certain the FW-190’s engine was knocked out and Marson got a “damaged.”
In the 14 minutes between 1453 and 1507 there were no less than 15 recorded attacks on the 303rd. One occurred at 1500, when an FW-190 came in to attack the War Bride from “six-thirty o’clock high to about 100 yards.” In the top turret, Sgt. Loran Biddle “gave him 200 rounds. E/A started to smoke—rolled over on his back and pilot bailed out.” Sgt. John Doherty confirmed from the tail and Biddle got a kill.
Germans weren’t the only ones hitting the silk. The 379th Group lost a ship “at 1510 hrs, with No. 2 engine out and a large hole in the wing, going down under control. Five chutes seen.” A short time later another B-17 was seen “with No. 3 engine feathered, dropping out of the formation.”
And, in the most telling observation of all, the 379th’s Group Leader, Lt. Colonel Louis M. “Rip” Rohr, stated: “There were reports of other B-17’s going down, but action at that time was so intense crews could not keep track of them. As many as 10 to 15 B-17s were seen going down at one time.”
It was sometime during this phase of the fight that Merlin Miller accounted for another Me-109. Neither he nor George Hoyt reported it, but both remember the incident.
As Hoyt describes it: “An Me-109 flew up our tail so close that I was afraid his prop would chew it off. The vertical stabilizer was in my way, so I could not safely shoot at him. But Merlin let go with a burst from his twin tail guns that riveted the pilot back in his cockpit seat just as he was releasing his canopy and starting to push himself up to bail out.”
Miller remembers it differently. “An Me-109 came in at six o’clock, at just about our altitude. I fired at him, and I think I hit him a couple of times. Pieces of his canopy flew off and he stopped shooting. But he kept coming in, closer and closer, nearer than any other fighter had ever come to us before. I just sat and watched, wondering what was going on. He was wobbling around, about 20 to 30 feet below us.
“Then all of a sudden I got this terrible sinking feeling. I realized all he had to do was pull back on his stick and hit his firing button, and I’d be a dead duck and the rest of my crew with me. So I put about 20 rounds into the cockpit, pounding it in on top of him. I remember the canopy flying off, but I don’t remember the pilot trying to get out. My only thought was, ‘He won’t do it to us now!’ After that he just continued on, wobbling away below us.”
This fighter didn’t get the Lady’s tail gunner, but another almost did. Miller recounts that “I was back there with my head on a swivel, looking right to left, left to right, up and down, all the time. My head was never still for a moment watching for fighters. The tail position had windows to the left and the right, and it had a thick, flat bulletproof window in the back I looked through to see my post and ring sight. You could see quite well.
“Suddenly, out of the corner of my right eye, I caught a twinkling, like a flickering neon sign. I leaned back and turned my head to see what it was, and the next thing I knew I was lying on one of the ammo boxes, half on it and half on the floor wondering what the hell happened. My face didn’t feel right. I rubbed it and realized that my oxygen mask was half off, so I put the mask back on. My right shoulder tingled and I had a sore spot above my right ear.
“I was still trying to figure it all out when I saw that my side windows were gone. The twinkling had to be a fighter sliding in at nine o’clock. He blew out my windows, and almost blew my head off. The lump on my head had to be from bouncing off the ammo box. I worked my right arm a bit, checked my shoulder, and found no holes in my uniform, so I must have been hit by flying Plexiglas from the windows.
“I really got angry at this point, because I was now getting a blast of cold air. I wanted that fighter to make another run so I could take a crack at him. It was a futile wish, but I hoped someone else would set him on fire.”
Other crews in the Group continued to score. One of the victors was Sgt. Howard Zeitner in Yankee Doodle Dandy’s ball turret. At 1515 an FW-190 passed to the rear of the high squadron 600 yards out. Zeitner started firing at six-thirty o’clock, and at five thirty o’clock the 190 went into a spin and exploded, with the tail and rear fuselage breaking off.
Sgt. Zeitner said afterwards, “He turned his back to me as he banked around and made a perfect target. I let him have a long burst and he tumbled down and blew up.”
In the same minute an Me-110 made a tail attack on Vicious Virgin. The German came in at six o’clock level, firing rockets from 300 yards out. In the Virgin’s tail, Sgt. Robert Humphries opened fire, hitting the 110 at the same time its rockets exploded under the B-17. The 110 went straight down with its left wing and engine on fire. Sgt. Humphries got credit for the crew’s second “damaged” fighter.
It was also at 1515 that the Cat O’ 9 Tails got still another Me-110. Sgt. Anthony Kujawa told the interrogator:
“I was in the right waist gun position firing the guns. My regular place is top turret, but it was out of commission and I had gone to the waist guns because [the] waist gunner had been wounded. I was firing his gun.
“An Me-110 was out around four o’clock. He was just standing there shooting at us when I came to the waist gun position. I turned the gun on him and began firing away. He was very near. I kept firing. Then he began smoking and he burst into flames. He began to spin towards the ground. He was disintegrating in midair.” Kujawa got credit for a kill.
So it went, interminably. To Merlin Miller the return flight was “a constant battle, back and forth, fighters from all directions, lots of head-on attacks, and lots of attacks from the tail. I checked my ammo and realized that all I had left was in my auxiliary boxes behind the main boxes. So I called Marson, and told him to bring me back some ammo.
“When he came back, I told him to put the ammo in the boxes with the bullet points out, because that’s how the belts feed into both guns. He made an appropriate remark, because that was like telling someone to put sod down with the green side up.”
Chuck Marson came back at least two more times with extra boxes of ammo, and George Hoyt did too. “Later during this grueling dogfight, Merlin ran low on ammunition. I grabbed a wooden box full of .50-caliber belts, clipped on a portable oxygen bottle, and headed back to the tail with it. After I crawled past the tailwheel, he greeted me with a big wave of his hand. I gave Merlin the spare ammo, and felt relieved, as I knew he was the most capable defender of our most attacked point on the plane, the tail.”
Hullar’s crew stuck it out, joking to ease the tension, but finding themselves slowly worn down by the sights, sounds, and emotions of endless combat. Miller’s other memories evoke “the way it was” better than any work of fiction:
“I remember hearing from Rice in the top turret. He was getting a blast of cold air just like I was. It didn’t help his temper any more than mine, but he stayed pretty calm, and joked with the fellows.
“During a crew check I said, ‘Everything’s okay except the sons of bitches are trying to freeze me back here. They shot my windows out.’
“Rice said, ‘Yes, I got a hole up here. They’re trying to freeze me, too.’
“Marson piped up with, ‘I don’t know what the hell you fellows are griping about. Me and Pete don’t have any windows at all—never did.’
“It was quiet for a moment, then Rice said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, Merlin. He’s just mad because we’re having all the fun.’ And we were all still shooting at fighters as they came in.”
“It was really cold up there. I was uncomfortable. All of a sudden I wanted a drink—drink of water, drink of beer, drink of whiskey, a drink of anything, I didn’t care, I was thirsty. Why did I get so thirsty when I couldn’t drink? Then I thought about smoking a cigar, but I knew I couldn’t do that either. I tried it once at altitude, but when Hullar found out how I lit the thing with my oxygen mask on he threatened to kill me if I ever tried it again. He could smell the smoke through the oxygen system all the way up in the nose. All I could do was shoot.
“Off to my right I saw a B-17 flying alongside us. He got hit. His outboard engine on his left wing, No. 1, caught fire, burning back through the wing. I started yelling to myself, ‘Come on, you guys, get out of there, get out of that plane!’ It started down in a shallow dive, burning more all the time, and I counted the chutes as they came out. I felt a big relief when I saw the tenth chute pop out, because now at least they’d have a chance. A few seconds after that, the burning wing folded over the top, the plane went into a steep dive, and blew up. But I’d seen that happen before, so it wasn’t that much of a shock.
“I was getting more and more uncomfortable. My nose itched and I couldn’t scratch it. My oxygen mask felt like a dull knife gouging at my cheekbones. My shoulder still ached a bit, and I felt generally bad all over. I’d been in this one position too long, and I was hoping this would get over soon.
“I was still shooting at German fighters, which were coming in with pretty fair regularity. They were shooting down a lot of bombers. They weren’t hurting our Group so much for some reason, but I could see others all around going down.
“Off to my right I noticed a Ju-88 pull up under a bomber and hang there, shooting into the bottom of the bomber. The ball turret gunner was shooting back. I could see both his guns flashing. They got each other. I saw the German burning, and cannon shells exploding inside the ball turret, flashes inside, so I know the fighter got him.
“The bomber peeled off, burning badly. As it peeled away below me I could see a glow behind the pilot and copilot from flames inside, and I could also see flames coming out the top of the radio room. The plane was burning from behind the cockpit clear through the bomb bay and out through the top. I started thinking, ‘Get the hell out of there,’ like I did on the one a while earlier, but before I could even think it the plane cleared the formation and blew all to pieces. Outside of what looked like the four engines dropping, there was nothing left.
“I took a deep breath, was glad it wasn’t me, and continued watching for fighters, shooting at them when they came in, worrying about my ammunition, and wanting to get this raid over with. It began to seem like it was lasting forever when I heard Brownie say we were about 20 minutes from the French coast.”
Each bomber crew has a similar story of courage and teamwork, a tale that must be told. The War Bride lost her No. 3 engine and Lt. Hendry could not feather the prop. She fell out of formation and was trailing below the Group, a prime target for fighters. John Doherty offers this account of her fight:
“Of that second Schweinfurt mission, what can be said? That raid will stand out in my mind for as long as I live. By all dimensions we should have gone down, but we made it back with a tremendous effort by every man on the crew.
“You couldn’t single anybody out, but the pilot that day went far beyond what most pilots would do. I remember one time the call came over the intercom, ‘Prepare to bail out!’
“I called back and I said, ‘Don’t give up!’ That, I remember. The plane was vibrating so badly, at any minute a wing could have fallen off. But it didn’t. Nobody did more for any group of people than Hendry did that day. That’s why we all put him in for the Silver Star when we got back.
“I started to run out of ammunition. I called for the waist gunner to bring me back more. And the action kept going but it never seemed to get there. So I called on the intercom again and I told them I was leaving the tail. I was out of ammunition.
“Jim Brown, our radioman, called back and said, ‘Stay where you are, I’m coming.’ So Brown got me ammunition back there. But I had one gun, the left one, that was completely out [of ammunition]. The ammunition was all used up in the belts. The other gun had eight or ten or twelve rounds left. When we put a new box of ammunition in, we used to like to string it into the old bandolier. We took one shell out and put one from the new one in and it was just like a chain, it kept going.
“But I had this left gun completely out, so I had to get down on my back and crawl down in there where the gun was to get this new ammunition in. It didn’t take too long, and as I was crawling back out I thought I would kind of roll over to the other side and link up my other box while I was at it. But something told me I had better check up and see what’s happening, and as I looked up there was a plane coming in on us.
“This guy had got in there in our blind spot, and nobody had seen him. He had a kill—he knew he had a kill. He was getting right up to where he was going to give it to us with ‘both barrels,’ and there wouldn’t be a question. He’d have us dead to rights.
“He was close enough to where I could see the silhouette of his face. I grabbed both them guns and shot right into the windshield. Never aimed, just grabbed them and shot. The windshield splattered, and I must have hit the pilot right in the face. The plane tipped, went into a dive, the wing broke off or something, and I forget the rest of it.”
“The rest of it” is revealed in a 1602 combat report. The fighter was an Me-109 that had closed to 50 yards. Sgt. Doherty “gave him 200 rounds” and the 109 “went into a spin and then went over and over. Pieces of plane came off and it seemed to break. John Doherty got a “probable.”
By this time, the War Bride’s No. 3 propeller had broken off its shaft and she had fallen completely away from the formation.
“We were using the clouds as much as possible for cover from the fighters,” Doherty remembers. “And our navigator, Lt. McNamara, done a tremendous job of getting us out of there. We were by ourselves, and he got us out of enemy territory as best he could, directly.”
The remainder of the 41st Wing crossed the French coast at 1655, south of Bologne. Now the bomber crews had to get back to England and land safely with damaged aircraft in weather conditions that rivaled the morning’s. At 1720 the Wing crossed the English coast between Beachy Head and Dover flying at about 18,000 feet.
Captain James reported that “From the English coast to the base, we worked our way through the clouds and landed at the base at 1758 hours.”
In his diary, Elmer Brown described this return with unintended poignancy: “This was another foggy day when even the birds were not flying, but we made another instrument takeoff and landing.”
Bill Fort remembers that “Eventually we got back to England in about the same kind of weather that we left in. Luckily, we got down OK, along with a number of other planes. We were very fortunate not to get a bullet hole. Others were landing in any field they could find that was open.”
There was one 303rd bomber that didn’t land at all—Lt. Grant’s Cat O’ 9 Tails. On the return flight, the Cat had also strayed from the Group due to damaged engines, and she was little more than a flying wreck by the time she arrived over England. Robert Jaouen describes her last moments:
“We were struggling along, trying to keep the engines going. Several passes were made over the field, but we couldn’t see the landing lights. Either the fog obliterated them or they weren’t turned on, as there were reports the Germans might try to follow planes in.
“During these landing attempts, as we were circling, a break came in the clouds. We saw we were passing by a church steeple, and the pilot struggled to gain more altitude. Besides the crippled engines, we were running low on fuel, our control cables had been damaged, and keeping up altitude was near impossible, as was landing. Finally, after once again struggling to gain altitude, Lt. Grant ordered the crew to bail out.”
“First out was Woody. Being semi-conscious, he was ejected with a static line, and I was ordered to follow him down. After leaving the chaotic conditions of the plane and the mission, I never have experienced such silence, before or since, as floating down through the clouds.
“I watched Woody disappear into the fog and was certain I knew where he was. After landing in a cow pasture, I started looking for him in the opposite direction from where he landed and I never did find him. He landed, apparently revitalized by the cold air, not knowing if he was in Germany or England. He was found by a farmer trying to read his compass. The farmer took him to a nearby air base on the back of a tractor. He was sent to an English Hospital and when well enough was sent to the States, where he underwent extensive plastic surgery.
“My landing was my first good break of the day, as I hit the mud near a gate where the cows had been standing. Thus, I couldn’t have had a softer landing, except for the inconvenience of a little manure on my clothes. When I arrived at a farmhouse, Chester Petrosky [the ball turret gunner] had entered a few minutes earlier. The people were very nice, but stayed a long ways away from me. I finally deduced it was from the ‘cow perfume’ I’d picked up in landing. Eventually a constable picked us up and took us to a Canadian Air Force base, where we were hospitalized for the night, given sedatives, etc.”
Lt. Grant’s crew all landed within a four-mile radius, not far from the Cat’s point of impact near Riseley, a small English village 10 miles south of Molesworth. Her end made an indelible impression on a young English boy named John Gell, for the Cat came down in his family’s backyard:
“I was a young lad nearly six years old, just old enough to be aware of what was going on. We lived in one of a gathering of cottages, my parents, myself, my two baby brothers, and my grandma. We had been watching the Forts come home that miserable evening, when we heard this particular B-17 making a lot of popping noises. I remember going to the front door as it passed over our group of cottages. A very loud crash was heard soon after it passed over, and on looking through a back window a cloud of dust was visible, with a large metal object nearly 80 yards away.
“The Cat came down in our back garden. She broke up on hitting an oak tree, which ripped off the starboard wing. The port wing separated from the fuselage when it chopped an elm tree off eight feet above the ground. The fuselage finished in two pieces 150 yards away in an adjoining field.
“My father was a special policeman who was involved with many plane crashes in the area. He and the wife of a neighbor went—holding hands—to the wrecked fuselage, not knowing what they would find inside. To their amazement, nobody was in it. My father put out a small electrical fire, and gathered up some used dressings. Soon the MPs arrived and darkness fell.
The wreck of the 359th Squadron’s Cat O’ 9 Tails, B-17F 42-5482, BNW. (Photo courtesy John T. Gell.)
“The wreck was taken away two days later, on October 16th. Some days after, my father noticed something lodged in the crook of the oak. It was one of the Cat’s propeller blades. I still live in that cottage today, and I still have that prop blade.”
The Cat was not the only 41st Wing bomber abandoned over England. The 384th Group lost three in this way, plus six shot down over enemy territory. Three of its bombers landed away from its home base, and only the Group’s lead ship returned to Grafton Underwood! The event had an enormous impact on the 384th’s ground echelon that is well recalled by John F. Bell, a Lieutenant then serving as Assistant Squadron Engineering Officer in the Group’s 547th Squadron:
“Our ground crews were waiting and waiting at their hardstands. And nothing was coming back. It was a pretty sad looking sight. These people had worked their butts off preparing these aircraft over a long series of missions that summer. They really thought of themselves as part of a team with the flight crews. And when the other half of the team didn’t come back, it was a hard thing to take.”
The 379th Group paid a high price, too. Six of its ships were lost and one landed away, Lt. Colonel Rohr summed up the day’s events as well as anyone when he reported: “This, in my opinion, was an extremely rough mission.”
At Molesworth, the mood that evening was far more upbeat. The Hell’s Angels had come through the roughest mission ever with minimal losses and much to be proud about. Thanks to McCormick, the Group’s bombing had been superb, and the prolonged aerial combat yielded a bumper crop of fighter claims. When all the crew interrogations were completed, the 303rd sought credit for 20 fighters destroyed, four probables, and 13 damaged.
There were other, more personal reasons for celebration as well. Lt. Carl Hokans and Lt. Walter Witt had both beaten the long odds against completing a 25-mission tour. Elmer Brown wrote that “The boys took Hokans’ pants off and he was running around without any at interrogation.” Two other Group crews also marked this mission as their last. There were, of course, others in the Group affected by the loss of the one 303rd crew. That evening Lt. Ralph Coburn wrote, “Sanders went down. Good boys, we’ll miss them.”*
For Hullar’s crew, the feelings were mixed. McCormick took satisfaction in his accomplishment, saying afterwards: “I think we did the job right today.”
Norman Sampson summed his opinion up in a word—“Rough!”—and Bob Hullar was equally taciturn when he wrote: “Rough do this trip.”
Bud Klint thought about the losses: “I saw what seemed to be a fabulous number of planes go down, and later I found out how right I was.”
Elmer Brown remembers that he was “very impressed by the number of planes going down. It was just terrible to see all those B-17s on fire and to know our people were being killed. It really hit home that the high command thought we were expendable. All we could do was fight the Germans as best we could.” In his diary he noted: “Our plane shot down five enemy fighters and we shot up more ammo than any other plane in our squadron.”
Merlin Miller recalls thinking at the time, “‘The raid’s over. We’ve done it again. We’re all still alive.’ It was something I wouldn’t have bet on a few hours earlier. We shot up all our ammo. Even the spare boxes in the radio room were empty. There were less than 150 rounds left in the whole plane. I must have fired at least 1000 rounds from each tail gun, and Rice reloaded his guns a number of times too. When I came out of the tail to the waist the brass was knee-deep. We figured we shot down at least five German fighters, and though we really didn’t keep count, some of the other crews tried to give us credit for a few more. We used up more ammo than any other plane in the Group.”
Pete Fullem took some ribbing about the holes he shot in the Lady’s tail and was rather sheepish about the incident. He felt even worse about the duel between the Ju-88 and the ball turret gunner, which he had seen just as Merlin Miller had. Miller remembers that “Pete was sitting on his bunk comparing notes with me. He talked about wanting to shoot at that Ju-88, but not being able to. I know he felt bad about it, but that was just the way it went sometimes.”
Hoyt didn’t want to think about any of it. “I wasn’t shaky, but I was badly fatigued, thoroughly zapped. I wanted to forget it all, to wash it out completely. So when someone said we should go to the ‘NAAFI,’ I was all for it. NAAFI stood for the British ‘Navy, Army, Air Force Institute,’ but it really meant the enlisted bar on our base, the ‘NAAFI Club,’ which the British kept open for us. As I recollect, all the enlisted men went, and we had quite a time. They had a kind of potato beer there—you had to watch for the sediment in it—and they later broke out some Canadian ale. By the time the evening was done I had washed a lot of the day out.”
The “someone” who suggested the NAAFI was Merlin Miller. “I went to eat my evening meal with the rest of the crew, and a bit later on in the barracks I said to Rice, ‘Let’s go over to the NAAFI and have a couple of beers.’
“He said, ‘That’s a damn good idea. Only I’m going to have more than a couple! He really liked the mild and bitters that they served warm. So we wandered over there and drank a few beers, and we had some cookies too. And after a while we all headed back to the barracks.
“Rice looked at me and kind of grinned, and he said: ‘Merlin, you better get a good night’s sleep, ‘cause you know, we might have to do this all over again tomorrow.’”
The following days brought a sober reassessment at all levels of the Eighth. The losses had simply been too great. Second Schweinfurt was to prove a true turning point in the daylight bombing campaign.
